Mother Jones

Two months ago, a coalition of aid groups warned that Israel’s war on Gaza—and restrictions on food entering the strip—would cause mass starvation in Gaza imminently. Now, it has arrived, according to officials and aid groups.

On Wednesday, more than 100 aid groups issued a statement outlining just how dire the situation has become for Palestinians as doctors report record rates of malnutrition as a result of Israel’s aid blockade. “As the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families,” the letter states. “[H]umanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.”

The signatories of the letter—which include Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam International, and Save the Children—urged governments to “open all land crossings; restore the full flow of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel through a principled, UN-led mechanism; end the siege, and agree to a ceasefire now.”

As of Tuesday, more than a dozen children and adults had died from hunger within 24 hours, according to the UN, which cited reports from local health authorities. The World Food Program (WFP) says that nearly one in three people is going days without eating in Gaza and that 90,000 women and children need urgent malnutrition treatment.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq dropped from 9 to 6 kilograms and struggles to survive in a tent in Gaza City, where milk, food, and other basic necessities are lacking.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

The latest developments come two months after the launch of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed Israeli aid distribution system that aid groups have decried as inefficient and dangerous. They say the four distribution sites, all under the control of the Israeli military, are difficult to access and do not distribute enough food. Israeli officials have claimed the system is necessary to prevent Hamas from interfering with food distribution, though officials have not provided evidence that this was ever happening in a coordinated way.

Gazans who do make it to the distribution sites often fear death. Harrowing reports have emerged of hordes of Palestinians being gunned down and killed at the sites. On Sunday, the WFP reported that a crowd of people seeking food from its convoy in northern Gaza were shot and killed by “Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire.” The organization’s director of emergencies called the incident “one of the greatest tragedies we’ve seen for our operations in Gaza and elsewhere while we’re trying to work.” Subsequent reports suggested that at least 80 Palestinians were killed in that incident and at least 95 people injured, and that 40 others were killed in other attacks near aid points in Rafah and Khan Younis over the weekend.

Injured people and bodies were brought to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians who were waiting for humanitarian aid in north Gaza on Sunday.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

This week, the Untied Nations reported that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since the new aid system debuted, nearly 800 of whom were killed near the US-backed aid sites, and the rest of whom were killed near UN and other humanitarian groups’ aid convoys.

Spokespeople for the Israeli Defense Forces did not immediately respond to questions Thursday from Mother Jones. President Donald Trump, who previously floated taking over Gaza and driving Palestinians off the land to an unspecified “permanent place,” has so far been silent on the latest details about the starvation in Gaza; his most recent comments appear to be from May, when he acknowledged “a lot of people are starving.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Thursday.

The US has funded Israel’s war broadly. A report from Brown University, published last fall, states that the US government had spent at least $18 billion on Israel’s military operations in Gaza since the war began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed approximately 1,200 people and led to more than 250 being taken as hostages, 50 of whom reportedly remain in captivity.

Abdul Jawad Al-Ghalban, 14, died from severe malnutrition at Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis. He is pictured on Tuesday.Moaz Abu Taha/APA/ZUMA

Aid groups say that they have supplies to support those in need, but that Israeli forces are preventing them from entering Gaza. Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, said in a post on X on Thursday that the UN agency has “equivalent of 6,000 loaded trucks of food & medical supplies in Jordan and Egypt,” and called for “unrestricted & uninterrupted humanitarian assistance.” He quoted a colleague in Gaza who he said told him, “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.”

“When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food & care disappears, famine silently begins to unfold,” he wrote. “Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak & at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need.”

“Parents are too hungry to care for their children,” Lazzarini continued. “Those who reach UNRWA clinics don’t have the energy, food, or means to follow medical advice. Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened.”

Lazzarini added that the agency’s health workers “are surviving on one small meal a day, often just lentils, if at all,” and “increasingly fainting from hunger while at work.”

“When caretakers cannot find enough to eat,” he added, “the entire humanitarian system is collapsing.”

A charity organization distributes hot meals to Palestinians in Gaza City on Thursday.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

News organizations have also warned that the few journalists left in Gaza are also facing starvation. On Thursday, Agence France-Presse (AFP), the Associated Press, BBC News, and Reuters issued a joint statement saying they are “desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” Earlier this week, a group of AFP journalists issued a statement outlining the dire conditions facing the ten who remain in Gaza: “We watch their situation worsen. They are young and losing strength. Most no longer have physical capacity to travel the enclave and do their jobs,” says the statement, translated from its original French.

The statement quotes a post the group’s photographer, Bashar, 30, put on Facebook over the weekend: “I no longer have the strength to work in media. My body is weak and I cannot work.” His brother died of hunger over the weekend, the statement says.

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

Employees of the crucial scientific research arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been left with more questions than answers as the agency moves to officially wind down the office following months of back-and-forth.

On Friday evening, the EPA issued a press release announcing a reduction in force at the Office of Research and Development, citing the move as part of a larger effort to save a purported $749 million. On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in the agency, began receiving emails saying that they’d been assigned new positions within the EPA.

“Please note, this is not an offer, but a notice of reassignment,” says a letter sent to an employee and viewed by WIRED. The employee had previously applied to positions within the agency, as ORD employees were instructed to do in May. “There is no action you need to take to accept the reassignment, and there is no option to decline.”

On a call with ORD administrators and staff held Monday afternoon, audio of which was obtained by WIRED, leadership—including ORD acting administrator Maureen Gwinn—was unable to answer basic questions from employees, including a timeline for when the agency planned to permanently end ORD, how many employees would be transferred to other offices, and how many would lose their jobs.

Employees at ORD who spoke with WIRED say that Friday’s public-facing email was the first concrete news they had heard about their organization’s future. One worker told WIRED that employees often learned more from news outlets, including WIRED, “than we do from our management.”

“We wish we had more information for you,” Gwinn told staff on the call. “I’ll speak for myself, I wish we weren’t at this point today.”

An EPA spokesperson, who declined to give their name, wrote in response to a series of questions from WIRED that the agency is currently offering its third voluntary resignation period, known as a DRP, which ends on July 25. “The [reduction in force] process entails a number of specific procedures in accordance with OPM regulations,” they said. “The next step in this process is to issue intent to RIF notices to individual employees.”

That number “won’t be clear,” they said, until after the DRP process was over.

“If you’re going to end up rolling back air quality regulations…you’re going to see excess cases of death and illness.”

“This is not an elimination of science and research,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are confident EPA has the resources needed to accomplish the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, fulfill all statutory obligations, and make the best-informed decisions based on the gold standard of science.”

At the start of the year, ORD was composed of between 1,000 and 2,000 scientists at labs spread across the country as well as in Washington, DC. The branch’s work provides much of the science that underpins the policy formed in the agency, from research on chemicals’ impacts on human health and the environment to air quality and climate change to planning for emergencies and responding to contamination in air, soil, and water. The office contains many groups and initiatives that are crucial to protecting the environment and human health, including a team that studies human health risks from chemicals.

Several EPA scientists stressed to WIRED that ORD’s current structure, which allows research to happen independent of the policy-making that occurs in other parts of the agency, is crucial to producing quality work. One told WIRED that they worked in a scientific role in an EPA policy office under the first Trump administration. There, they felt that their job was to “try and mine the science to support a policy decision that had already been made.” The structure at ORD, they said, provides a layer of insulation between decisionmakers and the scientific process.

ORD was heavily singled out in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership document, the policy blueprint that has closely anticipated the Trump administration’s moves in office. It described the branch as “precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”

The plan did not, however, propose doing away with the organization. But in March, documents presented to the White House by agency leadership proposed dissolving ORD, resulting in backlash from Democrats in Congress.

In early May, the EPA announced it would be reorganizing its structure, which administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a Newsweek op-ed would “improve” the agency by “integrating scientific staff directly into our program offices.” The agency said that it would create a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions, which would sit under the Office of the Administrator.

Putting much of ORD’s scientific work in policy offices, the scientist who previously worked in a policy office told WIRED, means that “we’re going to end up seeing science that has been unduly influenced by policy interests. I don’t think that’s going to result in policy decisions that are empirically supportable.”

Following May’s reorganization announcement, ORD employees were encouraged to apply for jobs within other parts of the agency. Multiple workers who spoke with WIRED say the job postings for these new positions were bare-bones, with little description of what the work would actually entail. One job posting seen by WIRED labels the role simply as “Interdisciplinary Scientific & Engineering Positions,” with no information about the topic area, team, or scientific expertise required.

The EPA’s reorganization efforts were temporarily stalled by lawsuits. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court paused a preliminary injunction blocking further mass reductions in force at 17 federal agencies, including the EPA.

There was one bright spot on Monday’s call: ORD leadership told employees that all of the ORD-affiliated labs would be kept open, a piece of news that ran contrary to some previous reports. Still, workers say that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do science at the EPA. More than 325 ORD workers—around a fifth of ORD’s ranks—had taken voluntary retirements since the start of the year, according to the EPA spokesperson.

A scientist told WIRED that while they usually would have had a small team helping with their field work, they’ve been left to handle everything alone, including “washing dishes and labeling bottles.” Cumbersome new financial approval processes, they said, have also resulted in chemicals that they ordered being delayed for months and expensive equipment sitting without any repairs.

Since taking office, Zeldin has made it clear that he intends to relax environmental regulations, especially those affecting business. Last week, he authored an op-ed in Fox News advertising how the agency would essentially erase the Clean Air Act permitting process for power plants and data centers in order to “make America the AI capital of the world.” ORD scientists fear that the dissolution of their office will only make this pro-business mission easier.

“If you’re going to end up rolling back air quality regulations—and we know, conclusively at this point, that ozone pollution is causing premature mortality and chronic effects—if you roll back the rules, you’re going to see excess cases of death and illness,” one scientist tells WIRED. “My guess is that [EPA leadership] don’t want to know the answer to the question of how bad it is going to be.”

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It’s a difficult period for disability rights: Landmark legal protections have come under attack by the Trump administration, the right is at war with the Department of Education, Medicaid is being gutted to finance tax cuts for the rich, and the President of the United States openly espouses eugenicist ideas—as do some of his top advisors.

It’s also Disability Pride Month, commemorating in part the July 1990 signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act and lifting up disability culture and visibility—which goes far beyond the right’s blitz against disabled people’s legal, medical, and economic rights.

In celebration of Disability Pride Month, Iinterviewed three disabled Americans about what brings them joy and hope in a challenging time: Kara Ayers, an assistant professor in pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati; AJ Link, the director of policy at New Disabled South; and dancer and advocate Marisa Hamamoto, founder of Infinite Flow Dance.

Kara Ayers, associate director of the University of Cincinnati Center for Excellence in Developmental DisabilitiesCourtesy of Kara Ayers

Kara Ayers

Ayers, who has osteogenesis imperfecta, says teaching her kids about disability history and culture brings her joy.

For our family, which is led by my husband and me—we’re both full-time wheelchair users and we’re both little people—it was important to us that we get out in front of the narrative that society would teach our kids about disability. We wanted them to be taught about disability by us, in our home, and through our connections to the disability community. So we’ve taught them about disability figures that have contributed to history, whether to disability rights or just to history, because I think that’s an important lesson—that disabled people don’t only contribute to disabled things or rights.

My husband and I both have forms of dwarfism and identify as little people, and our son, who’s the oldest of three, has achondroplasia, which is the most common form of dwarfism. He’s been especially interested in figures in history with dwarfism, as have his sisters. We’ve talked about Benjamin Lay, an abolitionist, who was a little person. Sometimes, people put an artificial threshold on how big or well-known a person needs to be [in order to be] a historical figure, and I think that maybe holds us back sometimes. They know Rebecca Cokley, who’s a little person who worked in the Obama White House, or Greta Thunberg—we’ve looked at how she can command an audience, [the] big crowds she’s spoken to.

We like to read perspectives from people who have ideas around your body [being] your body—[that] people don’t have the right to touch it without your consent or ask you for personal information without your consent. With my eight-year-old daughter, I don’t use the word eugenics, but we’ve talked honestly and openly about the idea that some people think that people with disabilities should not be parents.

I really like seeing my son’s excitement and pride develop as both as a little person, and that he also openly and proudly identifies as somebody with ADHD and learns about historical figures who likely had what we now call ADHD or neurodivergence. It’s really cool to see him as a young person figuring out who he is and realizing that there have always been disabled people contributing to history, and just to see him integrate that into who he is.

“Space law has taught me that there are lots of avenues for a special interest,” says AJ Link.Courtesy of AJ Link

AJ Link

Link, who is autistic, works at the nonprofit New Disabled South and teaches space law—which he says brings him joy—at Howard University in Washington, DC; he is one of the co-founders of the Palestine Space Institute and a member of the board of Black in Astro, among other organizations.

I’m someone who’s always loved space. Wanted to be an astronaut, watched all the nerdy space things—and I couldn’t do space in that way. I wanted to be an astrophysicist, and that didn’t work out. I wanted to be an astronaut, that didn’t work out. So having an opportunity to get to be part of the space community and do space work was something that was really appealing. I was happy that there was this opportunity that I didn’t even know existed.

I’m really drawn to space law because of the opportunity—thinking about the future of space law and governance is a way for us to reflect on some of the flaws of how we govern ourselves now, on Earth; how we construct our governments and governance structures. Space law is a tool and potentially a mirror, where we think about designing new systems, learning from the flaws of our current systems, and hopefully making those new systems better.

Hope is there because the systems aren’t as entrenched. Humanity doesn’t live on the moon yet. Humanity doesn’t live on Mars. Humanity doesn’t permanently live in space. There’s still hope that we can change the future.

We always need more people who have different perspectives than the traditional entrance perspectives of space capitalism, space militarism, and space surveillance. I think having people who love and care about space, and [envision] a different future for space than people like Elon Musk, is really important to fight those [interests].

Military companies and weapons manufacturers who are traditionally space companies, or traditionally operate in the space sector, are the ones who are building the bombs and the technology to kill Palestinians in Gaza, but also the surveillance technology in the West Bank. So when you think about companies like Boeing or Lockheed, they’re major players in the defense industry, but also major players in the space industry, because the defense industry in the space industry have been tied since the beginning. And when you think about the surveillance technology, that the Israel Defense Forces use in order to select their targets. All of those are operating within the realm of space and space activity, and so those technologies are used to [facilitate the] genocide of Palestinians.

Space law has taught me that there are lots of avenues for a special interest. We don’t always know that there are different ways that we can be involved with the things we love most and care about the most, beyond just traditional pathways.

Marisa Hamamoto’s Infinite Flow Dance company includes both disabled and non-disabled dancers.Samantha Tokita

Marisa Hamamoto

Hamamoto is a spinal stroke survivor who is autistic, and the founder of Infinite Flow Dance, a dance company and nonprofit based in Southern California.

I grew up in Irvine, California, during the ’80s and ’90s. Irvine, at that time, was a predominantly white city, so my family, being Japanese American, was a minority. I got picked on at school for looking different, and I quickly learned that our differences can divide us. My happy place was a weekly ballet class after school, where, even though I was the only dancer of color, moving my body to music made me feel like I belonged.

During my teenage years, I aspired to become a professional ballerina, but I was constantly told that my body wasn’t right for dance, and that included my ethnicity as an Asian American. I started to live in this duality where I knew in my gut that dance is a universal language that belongs to everyone—yet the world was saying that dance was only accessible to a few. I never made it as a ballerina, but I didn’t give up on my career. During my college years in Japan, when I went to Keio University in Tokyo, I was pursuing a dance career outside of school.

In 2006, I was a senior college student taking a contemporary dance class late at night off campus, and I was having a really good dance day. I felt my elbows tingle and momentarily fell to the ground. My arms couldn’t move. My legs. I found myself completely paralyzed from the neck down. I was carried to the hospital, diagnosed with spinal cord infarction, also known as a spinal stroke, and was told by the doctor that I may never be able to walk or dance again. And in that moment, I really thought that this was kind of the end of my life, because to me at that time, dance was everything, and what was there to life without dance? I kind of miraculously walked out of the hospital a couple of months later. I was really scared to dance because the stroke had kind of triggered a lot of trauma. There was also a fear that if I went and took a dance class again, the stroke might happen again.

So this one thing, dance, that brought me so much joy and so much happiness, suddenly became something that I feared to do. For about three and a half years, I didn’t really dance. I was scared to dance, and I was scared to live. I feared that the stroke was going to happen again, and I had also socially isolated myself.

About three and a half years after the stroke, there was a holiday business party I attended in the middle of Tokyo. In the middle of this corporate party was a salsa dance performance. Afterward, they called everybody onto the dance floor and taught us this basic salsa step. Us Japanese people are pretty reserved in general, but I’ll tell you that I had never seen so many Japanese people just light up. Whether they were doing the salsa step correctly or incorrectly, it didn’t matter. Everybody was just having fun.

I was in the middle of that, having my own fun—and as I was stepping that basic salsa step, that was when I was brought back into my body, and that was when I realized that my life mattered, and it wasn’t my time to go yet. Dance is for fun, for joy, for expression, for freedom. It was all of that. The moment I had made a decision to aspire to become a professional ballerina, I kind of lost the joy of dance. Then I had a stroke that literally stopped me from dancing. I thought my dance career was over. But in that Tokyo holiday party, I was brought back to the joy of dance and love of dance as well.

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In a case squarely aimed at breathing new life into the federal Comstock Act—and at thwarting the efforts of abortion-friendly states to protect providers and patients—a Texas man has sued a California doctor for allegedly mailing abortion pills to his girlfriend and is asking the court to prevent the woman, who is currently pregnant, from having another abortion.

In a wrongful death lawsuit filed Sunday, Texas residentJerry Rodriguez is accusing California-based Dr. Rémy Coeytaux of violating numerous Texas abortion laws, as well as the Comstock Act—an 1873 anti-obscenity law that is still on the books**—**by providing the abortion pills that were used to terminate two of his girlfriend’s previous pregnancies.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Galveston, Texas, by former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of some of the most radical and punitive abortion laws in the country. Mitchell is a leading proponent of using so-called “zombie” laws—pre-Roe v. Wade abortion bans that were unenforceable for almost half a century—to outlaw abortion post-Dobbs. The most potentially sweeping of these zombie laws is the Comstock Act, the long-defunct sexual purity law that prohibits the mailing or receiving of anything used to perform or obtain an abortion.Mitchell argues that Comstock is still the law of the land—and, if fully implemented, would amount to a de facto national abortion ban. But first, he has to get the courts to go along.

Now, he’s asking a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas to take the Comstock baitby issuing an injunction that stops Coeytaux from“distributing abortion-inducing drugs in violation of state or federal law.” And the sole federal judge in the Galveston division happens to be a Trump appointee with a history of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.

The case is the first known test of whether abortion opponents can use federal court lawsuits to circumvent state shield laws aimed at protecting providers—a major escalation of attacks on abortion-friendly states. “The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court,” says Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California-Davis, “both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”

“The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court, both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”

The federal court could choose to evade the Comstock claim and base its rulings solely on Texas’s wrongful death and abortion laws—but Mitchell has something bigger in mind. “What Mitchell would like, if he won, would be a court to say, yeah, this [doctor] is violating [both] Texas law and the Comstock Act,” Ziegler says. Mitchell’s ultimate goal, she adds, is “to somehow get that question appealed all the way up” to the US Supreme Court, where ultra-conservative justices have shown signs of being receptive to the Comstock claims.

In another alarming twist, Mitchell is seeking to certify the case as a class action on behalf of “all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States.” That language “seeks to confer rights on the unborn,” says Rachel Rebouché, dean at Temple University’s law school, “embedding fetal personhood in arguments around abortion pills as a national matter, and not just in states with personhood laws.”

Mother Jones reached out to Mitchell for comment, but he did not respond.

The facts of the case are exceptionally messy. According to the complaint, Rodriguez began dating his girlfriend last summer, while she was legally separated but still married to her estranged husband, Adam Garza of Galveston County. When she became pregnant in July 2024, the suit alleges, Garza was “displeased” and “ordered abortion-inducing drugs online from Coeytaux,” paying $150 via Venmo. The woman took the pills and terminated the pregnancy in September.

She became pregnant again a few weeks later, the lawsuit says, and Rodriguez claims she saidshe intended to keep the pregnancy. But, according to the complaint, Garza again obtained abortion pills from Coeytaux and terminated the pregnancy this past January.

She became pregnant a third time in May, Rodriguez says. In his filing, he tells the court, “There is a substantial risk that Adam Garza will obtain abortion pills illegally from Coeytaux and provide those” to her.

Coeytaux is a Stanford-trained licensed physician and a former medical school faculty member at Wake Forest University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina. In November 2024, NBC News cited him as a representative of A Safe Choice, a network of doctors prescribing abortion pills by mail, mostly to patients in states with abortion restrictions. He recently acquired an office in Sonoma County, California. His website advertises $150 15-minute consultations.

Coeytaux is also the brother of Francine Coeytaux, an abortion rights activist and public health expert who for years has played a leading role promoting access to family-planning medications. At the Population Council in the 1980s and ’90s, Francine worked on the public introduction of the abortion medication mifepristone in France and helped bring the morning-after pill, Plan B, to market in the United States. Years later, in 2015, with other reproductive health experts and activists, she co-founded Plan C, a campaign to promote the provision of abortion pills by mail. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Plan C’s online information hub about medication abortion—with listings of clinics and services willing to mail abortion pills into all 50 states—became a popular resource for patients in states with abortion bans.

A man answering the phone at the number listed on Rémy Coeytaux’s website told Mother Jones, “No comment is being made at this time. I appreciate your interest, and I hope you can do a good job with the story, but there is no comment.” Francine Coeytaux did not return a request for comment.

Elisa Wells, another cofounder of Plan C, emphasizes that clinicians who provide abortion by telehealth are operating legally under the laws of their states. “Providers that are doing this are serving a real need,” she says. “The fact that there are these efforts to criminalize them or bring civil suits against them is outrageous.”

Now, Rémy Coeytaux is in the crosshairs of Mitchell, who—among other things—pioneered the “bounty hunter” laws giving individuals the right to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with potential damages of $10,000 per violation. This has made it significantly harder for abortion-rights advocates to challenge some extreme restrictions.

Recently, Mitchell has been helping men use the Texas bounty hunter law to retaliate against people who helped the men’s partners obtain abortion care. As Abortion Every Day’s Jessica Valenti has reported:

He’s represented at least three other men who’ve sued over women’s abortions—including Marcus Silva, who sued his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get abortion pills. That case was eventually dropped, but not before it came out that Silva tried to use the lawsuit to blackmail his ex into having sex with him.

Since then, Mitchell and other anti-abortion activists have been cozying up to men’s rights groups, “abortion recovery” ministries, and crisis pregnancy centers—on the lookout for more angry men eager to sue their partners or exes for ending a pregnancy.

Mitchell has also been pushing legislation and filing court cases aimed atreviving the Comstock Act, named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it. The law made it a federal crime to send or receive any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” writings, or “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Over the years, courts greatly narrowed the statute’s scope, and in 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraceptives. But Congress never formally repealed the statute’s abortion-related provisions, even after the Roe decision in 1973 rendered them moot.

President Donald Trump has so far resisted pressure from anti-abortion opponents to use the Comstock Act to institute a federal ban, even though the idea is embraced by the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the second Trump administration, Project 2025.

Meanwhile, Texas and other conservative states have passed increasingly draconian laws targeting providers of mail-order abortion medication. Abortion-friendly states have sought to defend against such aggressive tactics by passing shield laws designed to protect providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, professional discipline, and civil liability. Some 22 states and the District of Columbia have passed some sort of shield statute, with eight states, including California, adopting the most robust protections. Thanks to these laws, as well as the availability of abortion pills and telemedicine, the number of abortions has risen since Dobbs.

So far, shield laws have helped protect at least one doctor.Last December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York-based telehealth provider, Margaret Carpenter, in Texas state court and secured a $113,000 judgment against her. But a county clerk in New York has repeatedly rejected Paxton’s attempts to collect the fine, citing the state’s shield law. In January, prosecutors in Louisiana indicted Carpenter for allegedly providing abortion pills to a teenager. But, again citing the shield law, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has refused to extradite her.

“We’ve seen this dynamic before, with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”

Those were both state court cases. Until the Rodriguez case, shield laws have been untested in the federal courts, where the state claims could face major resistance.

Ziegler says it’s unclear why Paxton and Louisiana officials haven’t taken the shield law issue to federal court already, but the new case shows that Mitchell—who has a history as an anti-abortion provocateur—is once again unwilling to wait. “We’ve seen this dynamic before,” Ziegler says, “with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”

The federal judges in Texas are famously conservative and have proven extremely sympathetic to anti-abortion efforts to curtail access to abortion pills and other reproductive health care. The lone district judge in the Galveston division, Jeffrey V. Brown, is a former Texas Supreme Court justice whose conservative views on reproductive issues are well-documented.

With Rodriguez’s girlfriend already two months pregnant, Rodriguez claims that he fearsthat Garza “will again pressure [her] to kill his unborn child and obtain abortion pills from Coeytaux to commit the murder.”

This story has been updated to include information about the Galveston judge who will oversee the lawsuit.

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In 2019, Susan Bowlus got a text from a friend that caught her off guard. “I’ve been watching the coverage on the Golden State Killer,” her friend wrote, referring to the California serial killer who’d been arrested in 2018.

The killer’s name was Joseph DeAngelo, a cop-turned-criminal who’d broken into homes to rape and kill people during the 1970s and 1980s. He was finally caught in Sacramento County, thanks to DNA evidence and a genealogy website. Soon, he’d be prosecuted. “It’s so creepy and I feel weird asking you about this,” the friend continued, but “I remember you telling me about an assault you had.”

Forty years earlier, when Bowlus was 22, a man had entered her Sacramento-area house while she was sleeping and spent hours attacking and violating her. Police never identified him. As she tuned in to the coverage of DeAngelo’s arrest, she grew unsettled: Other confirmed survivors were describing rapes that seemed eerily similar to what she’d experienced. And DeAngelo had lived just a short drive away from her. Was it a coincidence?

Bowlus, who’d long yearned for some resolution to her case, reached out to the Sacramento County district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices, asking for the old crime report. If DeAngelo were the culprit, it would be too late to participate in his trial, but she wanted to know one way or the other and hoped getting an answer would help her heal. “It sounded like that bastard DeAngelo for sure,” retired Sacramento Sheriff’s Detective Richard Shelby, who searched for the Golden State Killer during the 1970s, told me when I described Bowlus’ assault.

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The Golden State Killer Story Police Don't Want You to Hear

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DeAngelo’s arrest and conviction made national headlines, framed as long-awaited justice for the dozens of people he raped. He was sentenced in August 2020 to life without parole. “It’s just so nice to have closure and to know he’s in jail,” Jane Carson-Sandler, who survived a 1976 assault, told the Associated Press after DeAngelo’s arrest.

“The nightmare has ended,” Carol Daly, one of the original detectives working the case in Sacramento, said in a statement on behalf of another victim.

Susan Bowlus circa 1979Courtesy Susan Bowlus

But Bowlus was not acknowledged as a survivor by local authorities, and her quest to learn more about her assault would morph into a nightmare all its own: Over four years, she had so much trouble getting records from the sheriff’s office that it began to feel deliberate: “Why were these people that were supposed to be helping me becoming my adversaries?” she asked me rhetorically. Bowlus “felt that she had been failed and betrayed” by law enforcement, says Jim Hopper, a Harvard psychologist who spoke with her before she filed a lawsuit seeking access to the records.

Citinginsufficient evidence, authorities frequently deny victims of violent crimes access to government resources, including state compensation funds established to help survivors cover the costs of therapy, lost wages, or funerals. That’s according to Jennifer James, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Officials who administer the funds tend to assume “people are lying” if they don’t have all their records, and so they “weed them out,” James said.

Bowlus, indeed, spent years trying to get her share of the compensation the state legislature promised to each of the Golden State Killer’s living victims. Along the way, she learned she was not alone. There were other potential survivors still out there in need of assistance—and closure.

Bowlus grew up in Northern California and moved to Sacramento to attend Heald Business College, where she studied to be a legal secretary. In her early 20s, she got a secretarial job with a railroad company, where her roommate also worked.

The gig wasn’t her dream—she wanted to become a photographer—but it paid well enough to buy a house in nearby Citrus Heights with a big oak tree in the backyard. It was in the fall of 1979, as she was looking forward to a promotion to railroad engineer, a role very few women held, that the attack took place.

Bowlus worked as a railroad engineer in the early 1980sCourtesy Susan Bowlus

She recalls falling asleep after midnight on September 25 and waking up with a man on top of her. He’d already blindfolded her and proceeded to tie her up. The attack lasted for hours as he moved her from room to room. She prayed for her survival as he started rattling knives in a kitchen drawer. “I was strong, but in dire fear I would not make it out alive,” she told me.

When her attacker finally left, she ran outside for help, pounding on her neighbors’ door. They called the police, and she went to the hospital for a forensic exam. Afterward, she sold her house, relocated to Nevada, and focused on her engineering job at the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. She would eventually move to New York City to pursue her current career as a portrait and fashion photographer.

In the meantime, for decades, she tried to move on from that traumatic night in Citrus Heights. But after hearing from her friend and following DeAngelo’s prosecution, Bowlus couldn’t ignore her insatiable curiosity to find out what had happened to her. “I was always wondering through the years” who did it, she says. She hoped an answer might exist in her crime report, but when she first requested the documents in 2020, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said it couldn’t find them. She asked the staff to keep looking.

Joseph DeAngelo, who was dubbed the East Area Rapist, the Golden State Killer, and other nicknames, appears in a Sacramento County courtroom with public defender Diane Howard for his arraignment on multiple murder and rape-related charges in April 2018.Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty

After DeAngelo’s sentencing, the office finally produced the report, but it was incomplete. Whoever had redacted the page numbers had forgotten one—“page 15 of 24”—which caught Bowlus’ attention, because the office had handed over only 20 pages.

When she inquired further, staff at the sheriff’s records bureau said they’d given her everything except a few pages of medical records, which they’d need a court order to release. Puzzled, she reached out to the district attorney’s office, where an investigator agreed to request the remaining pages on her behalf. “It doesn’t make sense that you can’t get your own medical records,” the investigator, Kevin Papineau, wrote to her in an email. But his request to the sheriff’s office was rejected.

As Bowlus obsessed over her case documents, she started to experience intense anxiety and problems sleeping. Why couldn’t she see her own medical files? Striking out with law enforcement, she turned to other survivors for support. Rose Ireland, who’d been attacked by DeAngelo in Santa Barbara County, told her that state lawmakers had passed a law allowing his victims to apply for up to $10,000 apiece for therapy to help them deal with their trauma—Ireland’s application had been approved. Bowlus, noting the close similarities between her case and the others, decided to try.

This, too, proved more challenging than she’d anticipated. California’s Victim Compensation Board, the agency processing the applications, denied her request, arguing that she was not a crime victim. Bowlus pushed back—she had 20 pages of her crime report, after all—whereupon the board clarified that she was not a victim of the Golden State Killer specifically.

When Bowlus emailed the sheriff’s office to ask about this, Detective Rob Peters wrote back to say there wasn’t enough evidence linking her attack to DeAngelo. “There were very specific things he would say to his victims, things he would have his victims do, as well as things he would take from the residences,” he wrote, and “none of those things were in your report.” Peters suggested that perhaps she’d been assaulted by another serial criminal such as the Woolly rapist, who wore wool gloves during his crimes in the 1970s. But that was impossible—the Woolly rapist was locked up at the time she was attacked.

In fact, there were parallels between Bowlus’ rape and ones DeAngelo committed that conflicted with what Peters had claimed: The Golden State Killer often burglarized other homes in the neighborhood first. His victims tended not to hear him enter, and he usually moved them from room to room and rummaged through their things. All of that happened to her. Her attack had lasted about four hours. “I don’t know any other rapist that would stay in the house that long,” Shelby, the retired detective, told me. Her perpetrator also had repeatedly told her to “shut up,” asked her to get lubricant and masturbate, and instructed her to remain still for at least 15 minutes after he left the premises—all rather unusual habits of DeAngelo, according to court filings in her case. How could the sheriff’s office be so sure her rapist wasn’t DeAngelo?

DeAngelo was also identified as the Visalia Ransacker because of the crimes he committed there, including a murder, during the 1970s.Visalia Times-Delta

When Bowlus posed that question, Peters simply reiterated that her assault did not sound like a typical DeAngelo assault and that he felt confident about his assessment after reviewing 54 pages of her file. This, too, confused her: Hadn’t the records bureau suggested there were only 24 pages?

Frustrated, Bowlus turned to private investigator Tony Reid, an expert on the Golden State Killer who had helped law enforcement search for him and then wrote a book on the subject. Reid had obtained crime reports for other victims while trying to help an incarcerated man he believed was framed for one of DeAngelo’s crimes. Bowlus messaged him on Facebook in 2020, and he’d been intrigued enough to take her case.

Then, a bombshell: In 2022, Reid got a trove of documents from an anonymous source—47 pages of Bowlus’ crime report, or 27 more than she’d already received.

The documents showed there had been footprints outside Bowlus’ house that resembled those of DeAngelo: same size, same type of shoe. Jim Bevins, the lead investigator on the interagency Golden State Killer task force during the 1970s, had investigated her rape and had sent Bowlus’ bedsheets to a forensic lab for analysis. “There is nothing in the available information” that would exclude DeAngelo as a suspect, Reid wrote in a report later submitted in court.

With this evidence, Bowlus hoped she could convince the Victim Compensation Board to approve her therapy funding. Wasn’t it clear or at least probable that she’d been attacked by DeAngelo? The sheriff’s office still didn’t think so, though it stillhadn’t shared her full file with her. And the board continued to deny her application, citing lack of proof.

An undated photo released by the FBI shows ski masks from East Area Rapist cases.FBI/AP

California’s Victim Compensation Board, established in the 1960s, was a first of its kind in the nation, though every state now has one. It’s a three-member panel that reimburses people for expenses related to violent crimes, from hospital bills and funeral costs to lost wages and therapy fees. California typically gives victims seven years to apply, but in 2018, state lawmakers enacted a bill extending the deadline for Golden State Killer survivors.

Crime victims nationwide have long complained about the red tape they’ve encountered when applying for compensation funds: There’s a lot of paperwork, and the requirement to submit police reports can be disqualifying for some people. In a 2022 survey, the victims advocacy group Alliance for Safety and Justice found that 96 percent of violent crime victims never saw a dime, and three-quarters received no mental health support.

In California and nationally, about half of violent crimes aren’t even reported to police, the same survey found, often because the victims don’t believe law enforcement will help them. In another 2022 report, the nonprofit Prosecutors Alliance of California found that roughly 70 percent of the 700 crime survivors surveyed didn’t know why they had been denied compensation.

FBI Special Agent Marcus Knutson (left) and Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Paige Kneeland look for evidence at the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.FBI/AP

As Bowlus was fighting for access to her records, the California Legislature passed a law to compensate people forcibly sterilized while serving time in state prison years before. But the Victim Compensation Board denied more than 300 of the 500-plus applications it received, most often for lack of documentation. Journalists at KQED and the Nation identified multiple cases in which former prisoners with valid claims were rejected. “Many people experienced trauma from applying,” said James, the UCSF professor, who helped some of them apply. “It feels like as a state, as a society, we’ve prioritized bureaucracy—needing to weed out fraud and someone taking advantage of the system—over making sure that everyone who needs care or resources is able to access services.”

After the board rejected Bowlus’ first application and appeals, she asked it to request her complete 54-page file from the sheriff’s office—a California court had previously ruled that the board is obligated “to obtain full crime reports from law enforcement agencies…through its subpoena power if necessary.” The board refused—so Bowlus filed a lawsuit. Under legal pressure, the board issued a subpoena and the sheriff’s office finally handed over 24 pages to Bowlus, and ultimately, after some urging, the additional 23 pages that private investigator Reid had obtained.

But seven pages were still missing. Bowlus and Reid suspected they contained the lab results for the semen-stained sheets that were sent for testing, which might have identified the perpetrator. “Of all the things that could go missing from a case file,” Reid told me, “this would be the last. This would have been essential information for any prosecution.”

The DA’s office also told Bowlus that it didn’t have the semen analysis from her sheets. But the lack of transparency Bowlus faced throughout her quest left her highly skeptical. “It was so traumatizing to be gaslit,” she told me. She and her supporters began to wonder whether local officials were hiding something. “Somebody was not producing all the documents,” says her attorney, Patrick Dwyer. “And the question was, why?”

Carol Daly and Richard Shelby were two of the original detectives assigned to the East Area Rapist (Golden State Killer) case. On the mirror are notes taken by Russ Oase, a friend of Shelby’s and former federal officer who pursued the case on his own time.Nick Otto/Washington Post/Getty

That question became harder to ignore after Reid obtained yet another record: an internal police memo from March 1979 that cast even more doubt on the sheriff’s office’s claims. Peters, the detective, had told Bowlus that DeAngelo could not have been her attacker because he’d already left Sacramento by 1979 and moved elsewhere in California. But in this memo, issued a few months before Bowlus was raped, a police officer on the East Area Rapist Interagency Task Force informed his team that he believed the Golden State Killer had tried to rape someone else in Sacramento County that week. The officer wrote that the sheriff’s office wanted to hide this new attack from the public “so that the press will not over-react” and cause more panic.

This came as a shock for Bowlus. Could the sheriff’s office now be brushing her off, she wondered, because her rape had happened at a time when county officials were leading the public to believe—despite potential evidence to the contrary—that the Golden State Killer was no longer located there?

Even more upsetting: The memo’s author had predicted the killer would strike again on a Tuesday, as was his habit. That was the day of the week Bowlus was raped. (DeAngelo was arrested for shoplifting a few miles from Bowlus’ house in July 1979. He was suspended from his job at the Auburn Police Department that August; she was raped in September.) “They lied to the public, knowing that he’s still attacking,” she thought. “The community was not warned.”

An article from the Auburn Record notes DeAngelo’s shoplifting conviction.Auburn Record

The internal memo clearly states that Sacramento authorities intended to concealfrom the public the Golden State Killer’s likely whereabouts in 1979. A year earlier, the Bay Area Journal reported that the sheriff’s office had previously asked journalists to “sit on” the story a while, so as not to jeopardize the Golden State Killer investigation—as those reporters held off on publishing, more women were raped. Journalists “are cooperating very well,” Bevins, the investigator who later looked into Bowlus’ case, told the Journal.

I found no evidence to support Bowlus’ suspicion that the sheriff’s office was trying to cover up something related to her case—though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t. (The office did not respond to my requests for comment and rejected my public records request. The district attorney’s office also declined to comment.)

Shelby, the former detective, who retired in 1993, told me that he doubted the sheriff’s office was conspiring to deny her the records. More likely, he said, its personnel were stretched thin and didn’t see much point in spending time on her case—and frankly didn’t care because DeAngelo is in prison. “In their mind, it’s over and done,” he said. “They’re thinking, ‘It’s not him, and we don’t even care if it is because he’s already arrested; we’re not gonna spin our wheels.’”In the meantime, Bowlus was denied the help she sought. “It’s incomprehensible why they’d spend more than four years torturing an identified, known, agreed rape victim,” says Kristen Reid, investigator Tony Reid’s spouse and business partner, “instead of spending five minutes to resolve an easy question of forensics.”

Or simply asking the Golden State Killer, who had no incentive to lie. Earlier this month, Tony Reid got his hands on the minutes from DeAngelo’s 2020 sentencing. Prosecutors had made an unusual deal with the serial killer: In exchange for him pleading guilty to 13 murders and 13 kidnappings and admitting to 161 other uncharged crimes, they agreed to never press any more charges, even if he admitted to other crimes later.

This past September, the Victim Compensation Board finallyapproved Bowlus’ application. After half a decade advocating for herself, she received state funding to cover the cost of therapy. A judge also ordered the state to pay $83,000 to cover her attorney’s fees.

The board has, by now, granted money to 29 of the killer’s 33 survivors who applied. But at least a couple of others didn’t bother submitting applications because they’d already been disappointed by how police treated them and couldn’t stomach another bad interaction.

Liz Silva was 12 years old when she was abducted and raped by a cop she now believes was DeAngelo, based on his appearance and the fact that her stepdad worked in the same town as DeAngelo for a while. She says the Sacramento County DA’s office did not invite her to DeAngelo’s 2020 sentencing hearing because she lacked enough evidence—the snub left her feeling “totally dismissed.”

DeAngelo joined the Exeter Police Department in 1973, around the time 12-year-old Liz Silva was raped by a police officer.Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office

I also spoke with Karen Burns, who was raped in a Sacramento-area home invasion in 1979, shortly after Bowlus’ attack. She struggled to obtain all her records from a police department after DeAngelo’s arrest and didn’t apply for victim compensation, she says, after she heard how much trouble Bowlus was having: “I started getting everything together,” all the paperwork, “but I didn’t have it in me to finish and get disappointed again.”

Hopper, the Harvard psychologist, told me police are sometimes insensitive with survivors because of their training: “It can be a job where you’re overwhelmed, you’re dealing with things nobody else wants to deal with, you’ve got too many cases, and criminals who are lying to you all the time. The interviewing methods you learn can be focused on trying to break down the criminals and get them to confess, and those can become deeply ingrained habits, and now you’ve got a rape victim sitting across from you.”

But when cops treat survivors with suspicion and question their honesty, he says, it can cause “betrayal trauma,” wherein victims feel hurt by an institution that was supposed to help them.

Every case is unique, but the experts I spoke with said the roadblocks Bowlus faced are a nationwide problem. “Most crime victims have encountered similar challenges in getting any kind of information from law enforcement,” says Tinisch Hollins, executive director of the advocacy group Californians for Safety and Justice. That ranges from follow-up and general information about their case to the documents and evidence the victims need to show to secure compensation.

According to attorney David Snyder, executive director of the nonprofit First Amendment Coalition, California’s public records law generally allows police to withhold arrest reports indefinitely. “A lot of people assume that when an investigation is over, you can get the records. That’s not the case,” says Snyder, who has done legal work for Mother Jones in the past, and there’s little oversight to ensure that police are handing over even the documents they are required to share.

Californians for Safety and Justice is pushing a bill introduced by San Diego Assemblywoman LaeShae Sharp-Collins that would make it easier to apply for compensation without a police report—instead, survivors could provide records from a counselor or social worker showing they were harmed. The state “is failing to help many victims of violent crime,” she said in a statement accompanying the bill.

“People for many reasons are afraid of police, or they’re afraid of retaliation by the perpetrator, or they are so traumatized they don’t want to go through a lengthy court proceeding, but if they don’t file a police report, they can’t access services,” says Alicia Boccellari, a San Francisco Bay Area psychologist who works with survivors. In 2001, she created a first-of-its-kind trauma recovery center at UCSF to provide free services ranging from victim support groups to home visits and assistance with compensation applications. Now there are trauma recovery centers statewide, and in other states, too, though some have had their funding cut by the Trump administration.

Susan Bowlus in the Citrus Heights neighborhood where she was attacked.Sam Van Pykeren

It is too late for Bowlus to benefit from these reforms. In April, I met her outside her old house in Citrus Heights, where a family now lives. She admired the big oak tree in the backyard, always her favorite part of the property, and said she was relieved that it had survived as long as she had. As we walked around the neighborhood, she told me about the therapy she’d started and the coping tools she was learning.

She had been practicing summoning an image of her favorite place—Lake Tahoe, where she loves to spend afternoons with a book and a sandwich. She thinks often of Sacramento Superior Court Judge Jennifer Rockwell, who took her side and helped her get therapy.

Bowlus may never see all of her records. After so many years obsessing over how to get them, she is trying to move on. But this, too, is harder than she’d imagined.

“It’s an age-old story, the fight for truth and justice,” she says. “And is it worth it?”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In 2023, Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech titan and investor, issued a proclamation: He would not make political donations in 2024 to any candidate, including Donald Trump, whom he had backed in 2016.

Now, after sitting out the 2024 election cycle, Thiel is back in the game. He has quietly donated more than $850,000 this year to finance Republican incumbents attempting to retain their party’s control of the House in next year’s midterm elections.

That renewed largesse comes as the stock price of Palantir, the company Thiel founded and still owns much of, soars, with the firm raking in profits from contracts awarded by the Trump administration.

Palantir, which describes itself as a software company that helps clients manage data, has played a supporting role in the administration’s mass deportation efforts. It also is helping implement Trump’s call to create a massive, searchable federal database, reportedly using information from Americans’ tax returns.

Critics, including congressional Democrats, say Thiel’s company may be helping the administration to violate privacy laws and to implement an unprecedented US surveillance state. Republican lawmakers appear uninterested in scrutinizing the company’s work.

Asked about its federal contracting, a Palantir spokesperson replied in an email, “We are delighted to support the US government as our growth reflects growing government AI adoption. Meanwhile, our growth in the private sector still significantly outpaces our government growth (45% vs. 71%).”

A spokesperson for Thiel did not respond to multiple inquiries from Mother Jones seeking comment about his political donations.

Thiel was once a steady source of campaign funds for Republicans, including Sens. Orrin Hatach and Ted Cruz, as well as for libertarian groups and the anti-tax Club for Growth. In 2016, he contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign, earning himself a speaking slot at the Republican convention. And in 2022, he poured $15 million into the Senate campaigns of JD Vance of Ohio and Blake Masters of Arizona. Thiel’s support for Vance, who once worked for Thiel’s venture capital firm, was crucial for launching the vice president’s political career.

Trump’s first term, however, left Thiel disappointed. Thiel, who presents himself as a political theorist, was yearning for a slashing of regulations and demolition of the so-called administrative state. That, he hoped, would foment disruption conducive to the development of a futuristic libertarian techno-state that could deliver flying cars, new forms of food production, and scientific efforts to achieve something approaching immortality. That’s not what happened. (In 2009, he had written, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”)

When Trump campaigned for reelection in 2020, Thiel sat it out. There was no public endorsement from the billionaire, and no contributions, though he did support congressional Republicans that year and in the 2022 midterms. But apart from his funding of Masters and Vance, the donations were relatively modest.

This year, Thiel has returned aggressively, with a focus on helping Republicans preserve their majority in the House. In February, he gave $852,200 to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s political action committee, Grow the Majority. The PAC then distributed those funds to the House GOP campaign arm and to Republicans in competitive districts around the country. Recipients included Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, Don Bacon in Nebraska, Young Kim in California, and Derek Van Orden in Wisconsin.

Thiel’s support this early in the 2026 midterm cycle may augur more to come for Republican lawmakers.

To hear Thiel tell it, his political aims are high-minded—if kind of out there. During a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, he groused that current politics have led to a societal stagnation that impedes technological progress. He decried government regulation. He warned against the rise of a “one-world totalitarian state” that would exploit popular concerns over climate change and nuclear war and choke the development of AI and other technologies. He mused about the threat posed by the coming of a woke “Antichrist”—possibly in the form of environmental activist Greta Thurnberg.

He did not enthuse about Trump. Rather, he described the president like an investment that hadn’t panned out. Thiel said he supported Trump in 2016 hoping the populist candidate would cause a disruption that would bring about technological dynamism. This turned out to be “a preposterous fantasy,” he told Douthat. But he remarked that the populism of Trump 2.0 is “still by far the best option we have.”

Asked whether he had stopped funding politicians, Thiel did not mention his recent support of Republicans. Instead, he replied, “I am schizophrenic on this stuff. I think it’s incredibly important and it’s incredibly toxic.” He indicated that he did not enjoy the criticism he has received after backing conservative candidates.

Thiel chided Elon Musk for having been sucked into political brawls over such common issues as the federal budget. He recounted to Douthat a conversation he had with last year with Mus: “I said: ‘If Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country.’ And then Elon said: ‘There’s nowhere to go.’”

Musk, as Thiel saw it, had lost faith in his hope that populating Mars would save humanity: “In 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you to Mars.”

Here on Earth, Thiel also has more pedestrian interests. In April, Palantir inked a contract to assist ongoing efforts by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove undocumented immigrants by building a platform to track migrants’ movements in real time. That deal helped the company pull in more than $113 million, as of early May, as part of its new and previous federal contracts, according to the New York Times. That figure does not include other contracts Palantir has obtained from the Trump administration including a $795 million deal—which could go as high as $1.3 billion—to provide AI-powered software to the Department of Defense.

These deals have helped Palantir’s stock rise from around $40 a share in November to more than $150 a share on Wednesday.

That’s good news for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the influencial architect of Trump’s fanatical immigration policies. He owns $100,000-$250,000 worth of Palantir stock, according to his financial disclosure form, a holding that creates a colossal potential conflict of interest, the Project on Government Oversight reported last month.

If the Democrats manage to recapture either congressional chamber in 2026, they will likely make Washington less hospitable for Palantir. Last month, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and eight other Democrats sent a letter peppering the company with questions about its “enabling and profiting from serious violations of Federal law by helping the Trump Administration compile a database including Americans’ taxpayer data.”

Palantir has issued statements disputing the lawmakers’ letter and the New York Times reporting on its federal contracts. The company contends that its software is supporting US soliders and helping hospitals save lives. “We are committed to America, regardless of which party the American people have voted into office,” the firm said.

But the Democrats’ plans are clear. These legislators asked Palantir to preserve records related to its work for the Trump administration for “future Congressional oversight.”

“Congress will fully investigate and hold accountable Trump Administration officials that violate Americans’ rights, as well as contractors like Palantir that profit from and enable those abuses,” they wrote.

Thiel talks about encouraging political disruption that unleashes AI and allows tech pioneers to run unfettered. But as he bankrolls Republican lawmakers, keeping the Democrats from gaining subpoena power may also be on his mind.

Russ Choma contributed reporting.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

This past Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report about President Trump’s relationship with convicted child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. According to the Journal, the materials collected as part of the Department of Justice’s investigation into Epstein included a 2003 birthday message from Trump to Epstein.

Trump’s alleged message consists of “several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.” The drawing, which the Journal describes as “bawdy,” includes “[a] pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” Inside the figure of the woman was the following text:

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Trump told the Journal that the letter is “fake” and quickly sued the paper, its owner Rupert Murdoch, and the two reporters who wrote the story for $10 billion. On Truth Social, Trump insisted that the letter is “not the way I talk.”

Meanwhile, numerous allies of the president have echoed this claim, arguing that the letter is inauthentic because its language does not sound like Trump.

“Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?” Vice President JD Vance asked rhetorically on X. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the letter published by the Journal is “not at all how he speaks or writes.” Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said it is obvious the letter is inauthentic because it doesn’t match his father’s “very specific way of speaking.”

To evaluate these claims, Popular Information examined the most distinctive aspects of the letter and assessed whether they are consistent with Trump’s history.

“Enigma“

The most distinctive single word in the letter is “enigma.” Is it plausible that Trump, known for using simple language, would use that word?

Trump’s defenders do not believe so. “I find it to be an enigma that Donald Trump would use the word enigma,” billionaire Bill Ackman, a prominent Trump supporter, wrote on X.

Sean Davis, the CEO of the right-wing publication The Federalist, posted that he asked Grok, the chatbot created by xAI, to “search every record of Trump speaking or writing” for the word “enigma” and determined “there is no record of him ever saying or speaking the word.” (Trump Jr. reposted Davis’ claim.)

Davis’ confident assertion is false and demonstrates the hazards of relying exclusively on AI tools for research. In 2015, Trump used the word “enigma” twice to describe Ben Carson, one of his Republican primary opponents. “Now, Carson’s an enigma to me,” Trump said. “Carson’s an enigma.”

Trump also used the word “enigma” twice in his 2004 book, Trump: How to Get Rich. “Dan Rather is an enigma to me,” Trump wrote on page 166. He uses enigma again on page 55, writing that entrepreneurial skills are “one of those grey areas that remain an enigma even to those with finely-honed business instincts.”

Trump also used the term in his 1990 book, Trump: Surviving at the Top. “Any discussion of Mike’s affairs eventually leads to the subject of Don King,” Trump wrote about Mike Tyson on page 200. “Don, like Mike, is something of an enigma.”

So, while enigma is not a commonly used word, it is one that Trump has deployed in a variety of contexts for many years.

“Pal“

The word “pal,” which appears at the end of the letter to Epstein, is somewhat old-fashioned and less commonly used than the more straightforward term “friend.” Trump, however, has used “pal” over the years to describe his close associates.

In a 2018 roundtable on tax reform, Trump talked about his friendship with Steve Witkoff, who is currently Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. “He’s become a very wealthy, successful man,” Trump said. “And he’s my pal.”

During a 2011 speech to the Nevada Republican Party, Trump referred to developer Phil Ruffin as “my pal.”

Maurice Sendak

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the letter is the opening line: “There must be more to life than having everything.” This is a direct quote from Higglety Pigglety Pop!, a classic 1967 book by children’s author Maurice Sendak. It comes off like an inside joke between the two men.

Sendak and Trump have a history. In 1993, Sendak published We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. The book, which stirred controversy due to its exploration of weighty topics such as the AIDS crisis, garnered extensive coverage in the national media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Palm Beach Post—the local paper for Mar-a-Lago.

It also featured a direct attack on Trump, with one illustration featuring homeless children against the backdrop of Trump Tower. The children exclaim, “Tricked. Trumped. Dumped!”

Maurice Sendak

A September 5, 1993, story in the New York Times highlights Sendak’s criticism of Trump. The reporter, Degen Pener, said he reached out to Trump for comment. (Trump did not respond.)

Trump is a voracious consumer of media, especially when it involves him, so he almost certainly would have read the coverage of Sendak’s book. The fact that the New York Times, a paper Trump follows closely, reached out to him increases those odds further.

The timing of the incident, 1993, coincides with a period during which Epstein and Trump were known to socialize together regularly.

Third person

Another distinctive feature of the letter is that it creates a fake dialogue between Trump and Epstein, in which Trump refers to himself in the third person.

Trump frequently refers to himself in the third person. A Washington Post analysis of this habit, published in 2019, refers to Trump as the “third-person-in-chief.”

Trump also enjoys recounting conversations between himself and another person. Many of these tales are apocryphal. For example, during a June 2020 rally, this is how Trump relayed a conversation between himself and First Lady Melania Trump after Trump was filmed having difficulty drinking from a glass of water:

I call my wife, I said, “How good was that speech? I thought it was a…” But I call my wife and I said, “How good was it, darling?”

She said, “You’re trending number one.”

I said to our great first lady, I said, “Let me ask you a question. Was it that good, the speech, that I’m trending number one? Because I felt it was really good.'”

“No no, they don’t even mention the speech. They mention the fact that you may have Parkinson’s disease.”So, so then my wife said, “Well, it wasn’t only the ramp. Did you have water?”I said, “Yeah. I was speakin’ for a long time. I didn’t wanna drink it, but I wanted to wet my lips a little bit, you know?” … So what happens is I said, “What does it have to do with water?” They said, “You couldn’t lift your hand up to your mouth with water?” I said, ‘I just saluted 600 times like this, and this was before I saluted, so what’s the problem?

The same speech involved Trump narrating extended conversations between himself and the CEO of Boeing, as well as with an unnamed general. In other words, the form of the letter is consistent with one of Trump’s favorite rhetorical devices.

The “picture”

Trump also claimed the letter was fake because it featured a picture drawn by Trump, and “Idon’t draw pictures.”

In fact, Trump has drawn many pictures, frequently using a “heavy marker,” just as the Journal described the Epstein letter. The pictures were sometimes auctioned for charity.

Juliene’s Auctions

He also discusses his artistic talents (and uses the third person) in his 2008 book, Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success.

“It takes me a few minutes to draw something, in my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then sign my name, but it raises thousands of dollars to help the hungry in New York through the Capuchin Food Pantries Ministry,” Trump wrote.

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Just a few years ago, historian and activist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kendi became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. In 2019, his book How to Be an Antiracist became a best-seller. And later, just months after the death of George Floyd—a Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis—Kendi founded The Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, receiving $55 million in funding.

But over the last few years, as a backlash grew against the BLM movement, Kendi also came under attack. His ideas urging people to be actively antiracist were often the target of conservative critics fighting against DEI policies and the teaching of critical race theory. Kendi was also accused of mismanaging the antiracism center at BU, which laid off much of its staff before closing last month. (BU cleared Kendi of financial mismanagement.) Later this fall, Kendi will head up another academic project, this time at Howard University’s Institute for Advanced Study, which will focus on racism and the global African diaspora.

As the Trump administration eliminates DEI initiatives and erases parts of Black history throughout the federal government, Kendi places this moment alongside two others in American history: the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the racial violence that marked the segregation era during the 1920s. “These are moments in which you had very powerful racist forces who were seeking to eliminate policies and practices and ideas that had been created to bring about more democracy and equity and equality,” Kendi says. “We’re literally right now in a very pitched battle for the future of justice in the United States and frankly around the world.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Kendi discusses this historical moment with host Al Letson, responds to the criticism he faced at Boston University, and talks about Malcolm Lives!, his new book for young readers about Malcolm X.

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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 I was first introduced to your work when I read your 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist. Now, I had never heard that term antiracist before. It was a new way of looking at how to address racism. For those who haven’t had a chance to read it, what does it mean to be an antiracist?

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi: Well, the book and what I try to show through my research is that the true opposite of racist is not not racist, it is antiracist. That historically, and even in our moment, typically people who self-identify as not racist, they do so largely after they just did or said something that was racist. It’s also the case that the term not racist is a term that’s widely used without a definition. So I actually have yet to see somebody actually define clearly what it means to be not racist. And then thirdly, the reason why antiracist is the true opposite of racist is because most people understand, for instance, that a racist idea is a notion that suggests racial hierarchy, that a particular racial group is superior to another racial group, or inferior. What’s the opposite of hierarchy? Equality. There’s a true opposite. And antiracist ideas suggest racial equality, that no racial group is superior or inferior.

If a racist policy is yielding racial inequity between groups, what’s the opposite of that? A policy that yields racial equity. It’s a clear opposite. And so I’ve tried to show that we should be supporting antiracist policies that lead to racial equity. We should be expressing ideas, antiracist ideas about racial equality, and ultimately we should be striving to be antiracist, which is to say we should be actively seeking to confront the structure of racism, while recognizing that if we do nothing in the face of the status quo of racial inequity, then that racial inequity and injustice will persist. And those who are seeking to conserve that status quo want the rest of us to do nothing. That’s literally the goal of racist ideas, to convince us that there’s no problem other than, let’s say, Black people. And so that’s why being antiracist is an action. It’s an active term, it’s an active practice, while being racist could be active or even passive. You just do nothing and allow racism to persist.

I guess the thing that I’m thinking about a lot is, when you talk about race in America, what triggers a lot of white people, at least the white people that I’ve spoken to specifically on this topic, is that they feel like they have worked extremely hard for the things that they have. And when you tell them that there’s another group of people who have had it harder, and some of them have come from very hard circumstances. I remember someone talking years ago about, try explaining white privilege to people who are living in Appalachia with nothing. And so I’m wondering, how do we bridge that gap?

One of the ways in which those of us who study racism, one of the findings and one of the things we’ve tried to show in recent years, and I certainly showed this in a chapter called “White” in my book, How to Be an Antiracist, Heather McGee has written about this in a book called The Sum of Us. There’s another book called Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl. And the throughline between these three books is really showing through evidence the ways which it is the case that white people benefit more, let’s say, than peoples of color from racist policies and practices. But what we’ve also shown is that they, white people, would actually benefit even more from antiracist policies and practices.

In other words, white people are less likely to be disenfranchised because of the series of voter suppression policies that have been instituted in this country in the last few years, frankly since the undermining of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. It’s less likely for them to struggle to vote. But that doesn’t mean that there are not white people that are still struggling to vote, particularly white people who are students, particularly white people who are poor, particularly white people who are senior citizens. And so a truly equitable and antiracist electoral policy that would make it easy for all of us to vote would actually make it easier for more white people to vote, just as it would make it easier for people of color to vote.So the current system benefits white people more than it does people of color, but an actual truly equitable policy would benefit us all. So I think one of the things we’re trying, let’s say, to show white people is that Donald Trump is not an aberration. Which is to say, a person who is trying to say to white people, “I am your defender” when his actual policies are harming the majority of white people and people of color, is not an aberration. That’s racism in and of itself.

Yeah. So I want to move on to your work and where it’s been and where it’s going. And you founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, and you just closed up shop there. So there have been reports that there were some mismanagement, and the university said that the investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. Can you walk us through what happened? Because it was a really big deal when you opened up the center.

Well, what happened is we created a center for antiracist research, and it was founded in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of the so-called racial reckoning. And so of course we had really ambitious ideas for our center, and we started receiving resources and hiring people and pursuing projects. And by 2021, especially 2022 and 2023, a lot of the support we were receiving had started to get dried up. And at the same time, the attacks on so-called critical race theory and so-called wokeism and so-called DEI was picking up tremendously. And of course we as a center became the subject of that. And frankly, if you’re a Black leader, chances are somebody have claimed that you mismanaged something, because apparently Black leaders, we can’t manage anything. And so it wasn’t surprising for me or anyone who sort of studies racism that those allegations surfaced. And just as it wasn’t surprising to us when ultimately it was investigated, and in our center there was really no wrongdoing.

Can you talk to me about what it feels like to be in the center of the storm? I’ve actually on social media at times been a subject of conversation, but nowhere near the amount of being in the eye of the storm that you’ve been in. And I imagine having a center like this in a time when basically, at least when your center was going on, it was at the start of what I consider a Blacklash, where people were tired of hearing about antiracist policies. They were tired of 1619, and they’re tired of it because they’re being pushed by provocateurs to look at this as like it’s a bad thing and it’s harming the country. So what is it like to be in the center of the storm while that’s all going on?

I think ultimately the biggest challenge of being at the center of a storm is not taking it personally. That ultimately-

Oh my God, how do you do that? I don’t know how to do that.

Yeah, it’s incredibly hard to not do. But ultimately, even by 2020, the major talking point that emerged to really undermine those of us who were engaged in antiracist work was actually an old white nationalist talking point, which essentially was that antiracist is code for anti-white. And so those of us who were striving for racial justice, who were striving for equal opportunity, who were striving for equity, we were misrepresented as striving to somehow harm white people or take away opportunities or resources for them. And that was purposeful, because there was an attempt to anger white Americans and to manipulate them into somehow seeing that all these efforts are going to harm them, as opposed to, as we talked about earlier, help them just as it was going to help peoples of color.

And so I became one of the faces of that. And again, I had to figure out a way to know that this had nothing to do with me. That even as my name was being used, my image was being used, anyone who had read my work could know that I was being misrepresented. And so at the time, I really had to trust readers. I had to trust people who consumed my work. And I had to also, again, not take it personally. But it was very difficult because there was people who hated me who never read my work, and it was pretty obvious by the things that they said. The other part of it that I think is less talked about is, there’s not only a lot of these attacks coming from people who want to conserve racism, but then there’s also people who have been challenging racism who personally want to be the person in the spotlight, and they take issue with anyone who is in the spotlight. There’s a certain level of envy there as well.

And so when you’re in the spotlight, particularly in this context, you not only get attacked, bad faith attacks by people who want to conserve racism, but even bad faith attacks by people who claim they want to challenge racism, because they didn’t enter this arena truly committed to the eradication of racism. They entered the arena because they’re interested in fame and resources. And then those who are in the spotlight, they project themselves onto those people. So that’s also incredibly difficult. And it’s particularly difficult when those persons I’m speaking about are Black.

So now you’re heading back to DC, you’re going to Howard University, and you’re launching a new institute there. So what are you hoping for with this new institute?

Well, just first and foremost, I feel like this is a full circle moment for me personally, because I really started my journey to be an intellectual at Florida A&M University, at an historically Black university. And I don’t know if I would have embarked on that journey if I had not been in that space. And so to be able to return to Howard University, to be able to work very closely with Howard faculty and students and alumni, to be able to be in a space where there’s a long history of nurturing scholars like me who study racism, is something I’m incredibly excited about. And to be there with other, again, scholars whose work I’ve studied and admired for a long time, I’m just really excited about the prospects.

Yeah. So I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, so I’m a big Rattlers fan. So going to Howard University, and your work primarily is in antiracism, I’m just wondering, how do you adapt that for a school that is celebrating their Blackness? I think the beautiful things about HBCUs is that in many ways the world of America, the world that rejects Blackness, is on the outside of those campus walls, and on the inside of that campus is nothing but love and nurturing for these young Black minds moving forward. And so antiracism is definitely something to be talked about there, but it’s different than being at BU, isn’t it?

So I think the way that I have conceived of being antiracist, and let me actually even return to How to Be an Antiracist, most of that book, which is largely a story of my journey, my journey of internalizing anti-Black racist ideas, and ultimately how I was able to begin to liberate myself from those ideas and strive to be antiracist, most of that book is actually set in Black spaces, is actually set in which I’m interacting with other Black people. And there are multiple chapters in that book on FAMU, in which I talk about how at FAMU I experienced and witnessed colorism, how at FAMU I experienced and witnessed beliefs that certain groups, Black ethnic groups, were better or worse than others. And how I went on to another Black space in African-American studies and found that there were certain views that Black men were better than Black women, or had it worse.And so I mention that because even within Black spaces, there may be a general consensus that there’s nothing inferior about Black people in general, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a recognition that there’s nothing inferior about any group of Black people, whether they’re dark-skinned Black people or Black women or Black poor people, or Haitian Americans or African-Americans. And so I’ve always, through my work on being antiracist, ensured that being antiracist was something that Black people most importantly needed to do. And so I’m excited to really show that and convey that and codify that in a Black space like Howard.

Yeah. I want to take a few minutes to really dive into your new book. So let’s talk about Malcolm Lives! How important was it to introduce Malcolm X to young readers for you? I would tell you that for me personally, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X literally changed my life. I remember when I read it, I was in middle school. The book had been around, I don’t know if you remember, but the autobiography had a painted cover with a black background of Malcolm X on it. It was such a beautiful book, and I remember seeing it around the house, and I picked it up one day and just started reading it, and it literally shifted the trajectory of my life. So when I heard that you were writing this new book, Malcolm Lives! for young readers, I was just immediately excited.

Yeah. And frankly, what’s striking about Malcolm is, so many people like you have been completely transformed by reading his autobiography, or other people have been transformed by people who were transformed by reading Malcolm’s autobiography.

Right, right.

And so Malcolm’s story is truly transformational. And why should young people have to wait until, let’s say they’re in high school, to be able to be transformed too by Malcolm’s story, by Malcolm’s ideas? And so that’s one of the reasons why I thought it was critically important to write Malcolm Lives! and to write it for young people so that they can be transformed just like we have.

Yeah, I still remember going to see Spike Lee’s movie, Malcolm X, which I will argue with anybody is the greatest American biopic ever. And that’s all I have to say. But again, watching his life and taking in the lessons and the turns that his life made, it sounds like your book is concentrating on his life after he came back from his trip to the Middle East and Africa. Is that right?

So it narrates, certainly, his transformation after coming back from Mecca, after recognizing and realizing that nation of Islam theology that white people could not be Muslim and that they were inherently evil, that that simply was not true. Because he came across many white Muslims in Mecca and came across white people who treated him equitably and equally. And so him realizing racial equality, obviously, and narrating how he came to that, and also how he came to the importance of Pan-African, global Black solidarity through meetings that he had with leaders of African states, newly decolonized African nations, was absolutely pivotal. And I think it was also pivotal in Malcolm Lives! to show the ways in which as a young person, everything that he went through, which you can’t really understand Malcolm as an adult, you can’t really understand Malcolm as this revolutionary who’s become so clear and audacious in his challenge to global white supremacy and racism, without understanding the ways in which he was impacted by those structures as a young person constantly and consistently. And so I also wanted young people to see that and learn about that.

Yeah, you can’t understand Malcolm X unless you understand Malcolm Little and then understanding El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. It’s like the whole trajectory of it.

Definitely.

Last question for you, and this is a big one. Given that you are a historian, a public thinker, you’ve studied these movements for a very long time, where do you think we’re going?

So I think we’re headed for, I think this moment is actually quite similar to moments like the 1870s or even the 1920s in American history. And these are moments in which you had very powerful racist forces who were seeking to eliminate policies and practices and ideas that had been created to bring about more democracy and equity and equality. And so we’re literally right now in a very pitched battle for the future of justice in the United States, and frankly around the world. And so it’s hard to say where we’re going, but I can say what the battle is. And the battle is between equality and inequality, between justice and injustice, between democracy and dictatorship. And we all have to figure out what side of that battle that we’re going to be on.

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The seeds of a court case that has lasted for more than 20 years were planted in February 2001, when the parents of 11-month-old Yates Hazlehurst took him to the doctor for a routine measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Soon after, his family would allege in a court hearing, Yates became “wild,” “very hyperactive,” and “out of control.”

“By the summer of 2001,” a US federal appeals court judge would later write, “Yates had lost all meaningful speech, even though he had previously used words such as ‘mama,’ ‘please,’ and ‘thank you.’ At about the same time, he developed chronic diarrhea and abdominal pain. Following a series of evaluations in July 2002, Yates was diagnosed as exhibiting a pattern of behavior consistent with autism.”

In 2003, the Hazlehurst family filed a claim with the Office of Special Masters of the US Court of Federal Claims. The office is part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which was established in the 1980s by Congress to compensate people who are able to prove a likely vaccine injury. The money comes from a fund of billions of dollars accumulated from a small excise tax applied to most childhood vaccines.

From 2006 to 2023, about 70 percent of those who brought cases were awarded money without going to trial. Given the safety of vaccines, in the majority of those cases, the government did not conclude that a vaccine was responsible for the alleged injury. Instead, as the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which keeps data about vaccine injury claims, explains, the government might settle based on precedent or “to minimize the time and expense of litigating a case.”

More challenging cases are evaluated not by a jury or a trial judge, but in a separate courtroom presided over by special masters, judicial appointees who have extensive knowledge in vaccine injury cases.

In Yates’ case, one of his attorneys was his father. Rolf Hazlehurst, currently an assistant district attorney in Tennessee, became focused on vaccine injuries after his son’s diagnosis. Beginning in 2019, he worked for six years as a senior staff attorney at Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chaired before going on leave to launch his presidential bid in 2023. Like many other parents of autistic children, Rolf and his wife, Angela, had become convinced that the MMR vaccine had caused Yates’ condition, a theory that, despite having been repeatedly and conclusively disproved, remains a perennial claim in the anti-vaccine world.

Eventually, the Hazlehursts’ case would become part of the Omnibus Autism Proceedings, where a slate of vaccine court special masters carefully considered three theories about how vaccines might cause autism, using six test cases, including the Hazlehursts’. In 2009 and 2010, the special masters handed down several decisions, concluding the vaccines could not be credibly linked to any of the children’s autism diagnoses.

Yet even as their petition for compensation was denied, the litigation involving Yates has persisted for 22 years and counting. After appeals failed, the Hazlehursts continued pursuing the case in civil court and added allegations of foul play to their complaint. Among other things, Rolf Hazlehurst has claimed that the Department of Health and Human Services, the defendant in vaccine court cases, “took advantage” of what he scornfully described as the “so-called vaccine court,” where, he said, “the rules of evidence, discovery, and civil procedure mechanisms available in a regular court do not apply.” Hazlehurst has repeatedly alleged a “shocking coverup,” claiming that lawyers for HHS had concealed evidence showing vaccines cause autism during the omnibus hearings. In October, Hazlehurst returned to civil court to argue that he should be able to reopen his vaccine court case. The judge denied his request, but the CEO of Children’s Health Defense has said Hazlehurst is “evaluating next steps” to pursue his goal of bringing the case to court. If he succeeds, the omnibus cases could be reopened, and potentially 5,000 plaintiffs could be allowed to have their cases reheard.

Almost 50 years ago, a similar courthouse crush had prompted Congress to set up the specialized vaccine court to ensure lifesaving shots taken by millions would always be available despite any legal liabilities. Its success is why HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the broader anti-vaccine movement have moved to kill it off.

“If you can’t win in the vaccine court, you probably can’t win anywhere.”

In the anti-vaccine universe, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that they believe failed Yates is one of the ultimate enemies—and Kennedy’s longtime allies believe the time is finally ripe to achieve their moonshot goal: abolishing or weakening it. Kennedy himself wrote the foreword to a book about the evils of the vaccine court system, and Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy officially resigned from in December, has made no secret of its hope that he will quash the vaccine court for good. “For years, he has argued that shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability removes any meaningful incentive to ensure product safety,” an April CHD post read. “If there is any hope of undoing this decades-old mistake, it may rest in his hands.”

Their dreams may be quietly becoming reality. In late June, Kennedy made a little-noticed comment boasting that his agency had “just brought a guy in this week who is going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.” In June, HHS had awarded $150,000 to an Arizona law firm, Brueckner Spitler Shelts, for what federal contracting records describe as “National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) expertise.” One of the firm’s attorneys, Drew Downing, has years of experience representing petitioners in vaccine court; it did not respond to a request for comment*.*

“Secretary Kennedy is committed to restoring scientific integrity, transparency, and public trust in federal health policy, especially where it concerns vaccines,” Emily G. Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, wrote in response to questions. “Any suggestion that his goal is to ‘make vaccines harder to access’ or ‘discourage manufacturers’ is completely false.”

Chantal Jahchan; Rebecca Noble/Getty; Getty

As secretary of the nation’s most powerful health agency, with oversight of everything from the FDA to the CDC and the NIH, Kennedy has been able to turn his long history of attacks on vaccinations into government policy. He has stacked HHS leadership with critics of both vaccine and basic public health policy, including contrarian physician friends who first gained notoriety opposing Covid vaccines. There’s Dr. Vinay Prasad, a former University of California, San Francisco, hematologist-oncologist who has regularly opposed the FDA’s recommendations to get Covid boosters, who in May was named the agency’s top vaccine regulator. Dr. Marty Makary, a pancreatic surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who now leads the FDA, has made a career opposing mainstream medical knowledge, especially on vaccine guidance, including questioning the efficacy of Covid booster shots and what he called “booster mandates,” meaning requirements by some institutions and workplaces to get vaccinated during the height of the pandemic. Former Stanford University health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has downplayed the success of the Covid vaccines and argued that the virus should have been left to run rampant, now heads the NIH. Kennedy also tapped David Geier, a vaccine critic who was disciplined by the Maryland medical board for practicing without a license, to rehash the settled science of a purported link between vaccines and autism.

In late April, the Washington Post reported that Kennedy planned for all new vaccines, including updated Covid shots, to be tested against a placebo—an ethically and scientifically questionable mandate that could hamstring approvals. In May, the FDA suggested it would now recommend regular Covid vaccines only to people 65 and older and those 6 months or older who have at least one risk factor for serious illness. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Geier was “hunting for proof” in the federal Vaccine Safety Datalink database to find a basis for his claims that the CDC hid evidence that vaccines cause autism. Both Geier and his father, Mark, were banned from accessing the VSD in 2004 “after CDC officials determined they had misrepresented what they were going to do with the data.” They were banned again in 2006, but today, David Geier works for HHS as a “senior data analyst,” according to an agency directory.

One of Kennedy’s most shocking moves came on June 9, when he executed what critics saw as an administrative coup by removing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an expert body that issues recommendations on vaccines to the CDC. While all of the ousted ACIP members warned in an editorial that the US vaccine infrastructure had been left “critically weakened,” an HHS press release called the removals “a bold step in restoring public trust” and quoted Kennedy hailing them as a way to promote “unbiased science—evaluated through a transparent process and insulated from conflicts of interest,” irrespective of a “specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda.”

Kennedy will “do everything possible to destroy the vaccine infrastructure.”

But Kennedy went on to stack the committee with his friends from the anti-vaccine world, including Dr. Robert Malone, who claims to have invented mRNA vaccines—an oversimplification, according to other researchers who helped develop the technology—and has gone on to question their safety, as well as Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse who’s served on the board of the anti-vaccine National Vaccine Information Center. Also appointed was Martin Kulldorff, a dismissed Harvard University researcher and Covid lockdown opponent who Reuters reported has earned substantial sums as an expert witness in lawsuits against Merck’s HPV Gardasil vaccine.

The CDC—for now—recommends Gardasil, which protects against the virus that causes cervical cancer, to people under 26, citing numerous safety studies and noting that the most common side effect is pain, swelling, and redness at the injection site. But Kennedy has a close relationship with Wisner Baum, a Los Angeles law firm that is representing a large number of Gardasil plaintiffs who allege a laundry list of injuries from getting the shot, ranging from seizures and fibromyalgia to diabetes and arthritis. Kennedy served as co-counsel on the firm’s Gardasil cases before stepping aside to serve as HHS secretary.

Upon joining the Trump administration, Kennedy disclosed that he was entitled to “10% of fees awarded” in cases he referred to Wisner Baum. He has received roughly $2.5 million in referral fees since 2022. The firm says they were unrelated to vaccine litigation, but instead to lawsuits brought by wildfire victims and suits regarding the weed killer Roundup. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he’d give any Gardasil fees to one of his sons. Michael Baum, a partner at the firm, told Mother Jones that Kennedy “will not be receiving any fees arising from the Gardasil cases.” (Kennedy’s son Conor is also an attorney at Wisner Baum, but does not work on Gardasil litigation.)

As head of HHS, Kennedy is poised to attack vaccines from both the supply and demand sides. If he is successful, vaccines will, at the least, become more expensive and difficult for people to get—and, given the increasing likelihood of costly litigation, drug manufacturers may be reluctant to make them at all.

“Unfortunately, it’s pretty much going exactly how we would’ve expected,” says Laurel Bristow, an infectious disease researcher who also hosts Health Wanted, a podcast produced by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “When he got confirmed, people were really worried that he would just do an outright ban. But he is smarter than that and knows the ways in which he can inhibit people’s ability to access vaccines.”

Kennedy raised the stakes considerably when he promised that, by September, HHS will discover the causes of autism, a ludicrous timeline that the Autism Society of America has called “harmful, misleading, and unrealistic.” In April, Kennedy said the United States would undertake a “massive testing and research effort” to achieve this goal, adding that, “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”

His use of the word “exposure” is telling; Kennedy has persistently claimed that autism is caused not by a complex constellation of forces, including genetics, as most experts believe, but by environmental exposures, including vaccines.

Shortly after, Kennedy tried to revise the goal, saying he expected “some” of the answers by September. But to public health experts, it still seems like nothing more than a pretext to justify whatever vaccine-related havoc Kennedy already has in mind. “He’ll say, ‘I’ve looked behind the curtain at CDC and FDA and found something disturbing,’” predicts Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, who previously served as an ACIP member from 1998-2003.

Namely, Offit and other experts expect that in September, Kennedy will present some data that he claims proves vaccines somehow cause autism. Armed with that preordained conclusion, Kennedy will “do everything possible to destroy the vaccine infrastructure,” adds Offit, who served as an ACIP member from 1998 to 2003. And one relatively obscure but important part of that infrastructure is the federal vaccine court.

Immunizations are overwhelmingly safe and effective. While vaccine injuries do happen, all available evidence shows they are extremely rare. For most vaccines, the likelihood that someone will have a serious complication like anaphylaxis is lower than giving birth to triplets naturally, being struck by lightning, or being born with an extra finger or toe.

In the early and mid-1980s, however, a string of civil lawsuits were brought by families that alleged their children had been injured by diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus shots. “Even though most public health officials believed that the claims of side effects were unfounded,” according to a New England Journal of Medicine article about vaccine court, “some families won substantial awards from sympathetic juries who were convinced otherwise.” While just one DPT injury lawsuit was filed in 1978, by 1984, there were 73, as the amounts of money being demanded skyrocketed, from about $10 million to more than $46 million.

“The vaccine court was largely started as a result of a marriage of parties who didn’t like or trust one another, who married for the sake of the child.”

In response, drug companies began to shy away from producing vaccines, creating a serious risk they would no longer be available. The fear came extremely close to reality: By December 1984, the number of vaccine makers had dwindled. Just one still made DPT shots; it was eventually phased out altogether.

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 was meant as a compromise among families, drug manufacturers, public health officials, and the federal government to ensure that vaccine-injured people could be compensated without endangering the vaccine supply. When the VICP launched two years later, a key aspect of the program was the use of special masters, who are appointed by the US Court of Federal Claims to four-year terms to hear only vaccine injury cases.

“Let me put it this way: The vaccine court was largely started as a result of a marriage of parties who didn’t like or trust one another, who married for the sake of the child,” says Colonel Denise K. Vowell, who was appointed as a special master in 2006.

“The idea behind creating the Office of Special Masters in the first place was to create a cadre of people who’d acquired experience in handling these cases,” adds Vowell, who, in her previous work as a senior Army attorney, had handled medical malpractice and toxic tort suits. “I joked for a while after doing the autism cases that I think I could teach a graduate-level seminar on mercury toxicology. I read over 1,000 medical journal articles preparing for the [omnibus proceedings].”

Today, most vaccines are covered by the program, with some exceptions, including ones for Covid. Vaccine manufacturers can be sued in civil court only after a claim has gone through the vaccine court system. That system is designed to serve the petitioners claiming injury, Vowell says; vaccine court has more lenient rules of evidence and allows them to make arguments and produce experts who wouldn’t necessarily be allowed in civil court. “If you can’t win in the vaccine court, you probably can’t win anywhere,” she says.

The court has its issues, says Renée Gentry, who directs the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at George Washington University Law and has represented litigants for more than 20 years. The caps on compensation are too low, she says, and the system is “stretched to its limits” over a lack of special masters. “You’re waiting two years for a trial right now. There’s eight special masters and 3,500 cases.”

But despite her criticisms, Gentry acknowledges the court as “the best alternative.” While abolishing the vaccine court would be difficult, she says Kennedy has lots of ways to sabotage the program: “You can gut it from the inside and let it crash on its own, or let it wither and die.” For example, petitioners at the court are supposed to get a decision on their claim in 240 days. If they don’t, the special master can allow them to sue in civil court. HHS, technically the defendant in all the court’s cases, could make it a practice under Kennedy to stop responding to claims altogether, even as claims continue to roll in. If the cases simply sit, Gentry says, “people will stop filing.”

If the CDC stops recommending a vaccine, Gentry adds, “that could remove them from our program,” meaning people who got that shot could no longer be able to apply for VICP compensation and would have to proceed to civil litigation right away.

Conversely, Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s law school who specializes in vaccine law and policy, notes that Kennedy could sabotage the court by adding unscientifically supported injuries—including autism—to the list that entitles families to compensation. “If he comes up with something that allows him to make the HHS’s official position that vaccines cause autism,” Reiss says, “he’d have better grounds for doing that.”

The consequences of doing so would be catastrophic, Offit warns. “Just add something that affects 1 in 31 children and you’ll break the program,” he says.

A similar body blow could come from concocting a link between aluminum adjuvants—an ingredient that boosts immunizations’ effectiveness—and a host of health problems.

The element has become another Kennedy obsession. In 2021, Kennedy served as an attorney in a suit against Merck, claiming that the aluminum adjuvant in its Gardasil vaccines had caused “serious and debilitating injuries.” He has also blamed it for rising rates of anxiety and depression, asthma, and food allergies. “You wonder why all the Claritin is being sold and all these kids have allergies today,” he said at an event earlier this year. “It comes from the aluminum in the vaccine.” (Claritin, an antihistamine, is primarily used for seasonal allergies.)

A key ally in Kennedy’s crusade against aluminum is Aaron Siri, a lawyer who has worked extensively on Kennedy’s behalf, as well as for the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network. In 2021, Siri accused the FDA of not ensuring that 13 vaccines met approved levels of aluminum and petitioned the agency to stop distributing the shots, including those that prevent catastrophic diseases like polio and tetanus.

The agency has not complied with Siri’s request—likely because of the vast body of research affirming the element’s safety and use as an additive to strengthen the body’s immune response to a vaccine.

A judge ruled in March that the bellwether plaintiffs in the Gardasil cases hadn’t proved a link between the aluminum in the vaccine and their health conditions, but that likely won’t be the last we hear of Kennedy’s fixation on aluminum, says Offit, who expects to see bad science targeting the element. “He’s going to say, ‘See? Aluminum adjuvants cause autism,’ and then he’s going to try and attack the vaccine compensation program.”

Vaccines are widely considered the greatest breakthrough in public health history: They prevent millions of deaths each year, save billions in health care costs, and have played a major role in extending lifespans.) by decades. So why would Kennedy want to undermine them? The answer lies in knowing that Kennedy’s skepticism extends beyond immunizations. Despite more than a century of research and indisputable health outcomes, he simply rejects most of what is understood about germ theory.

In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy promotes the principles of the “miasma theory,” an ancient and now-discredited hypothesis asserting that all disease is caused by dirty air. Scholars attribute miasma theory to writings by Hippocrates from around the fifth century BCE. It lingered until the late 19th century, when German doctor Robert Koch proved Louis Pasteur’s suspicion that microscopic organisms are the true culprits in contagions. Koch deliberately infected a mouse with anthrax by injecting blood from a sickened sheep. The mouse died.

Koch’s definitive disproving of miasma theory has been replicated millions of times in labs and in families every time a parent gets sick from a school-age kid. But Kennedy is unconvinced. His take on the miasma theory, he explains in his book, is that people can reliably stave off sickness “by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.” In the ideal environment, he writes, the immune system is always strong enough to fight off illness. “When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition,” he approvingly writes. “Germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus.”

“I’m not accusing Secretary Kennedy of being indifferent to the suffering of children with vaccine-preventable illnesses, but if he gets what he asks for, I hope he lives to regret it.”

Given that line of reasoning, Kennedy’s response to the recent measles outbreak—which sickened more than 1,300 people and killed three by mid-July 2025—makes sense. “It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” he toldFox Nation in March, suggesting that a child victim might have been malnourished because of the lack of access to healthy food in her West Texas community. Meanwhile, the Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed the child “was not vaccinated” and had no “known underlying conditions.”

Kennedy made the same kinds of arguments in the wake of a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people. In a letter to Samoa’s prime minister, he claimed that children are “biologically evolved to handle measles” and argued that before the advent of the measles vaccine, few infants died of the disease. Why? Because they acquired natural immunity from mothers who had been previously infected with the virus. “In contrast, mothers vaccinated with a defective Merck vaccine provide inadequate passive immunity to their babies,” he concluded.

That statement is patently false. To the contrary, before there was a vaccine, measles would kill 2.6 million people worldwide every year, many of whom were likely children under 5. But for miasma believers like Kennedy, those deaths can be brushed away as artifacts of poor sanitation and inadequate nutrition that weaken the otherwise all-powerful immune system. It is vaccines, the miasma crowd argues, that actually undermine the body’s natural defenses against viruses.

Against the backdrop of this belief, Kennedy’s malign plan to undermine the country’s vaccine infrastructure comes into sharper focus. As his tenure as HHS secretary continues, the experts we spoke with believe that abolishing or weakening the federal vaccine injury program is likely one of his ultimate goals—and would be a huge mistake. If the vaccine injury compensation program is opened to include children with autism or asthma, it could overload the system meant to compensate people with legitimate, scientifically supported vaccine injuries. If litigants could sue drug companies in civil court without going through the VICP’s special masters first, it could create a mass of lawsuits, frightening drug manufacturers out of making vaccines at all, as nearly happened in the 1980s.

Offit points out that there’s even more precedent for this than just the DPT lawsuits; LYMErix, a vaccine for Lyme disease, was pulled off the market in 2002 after just three years. That happened in part because, following only a weak endorsement from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, it wasn’t covered by the VICP. Some patients began reporting alleged autoimmune side effects from the vaccine and sued its manufacturer in civil court, and the producer discontinued the drug. The manufacturer spent $1 million in legal fees, but the alleged autoimmune effects were never conclusively proved, and an FDA analysis did not find any evidence of a causal link between the vaccines and the symptoms. “Litigation drove it off the market,” Offit says.

Kennedy’s crusade will create even more doubt over vaccines’ effectiveness, as he uses his position to broadcast and legitimize debunked ideas about their risks. In the end, experts warn, it will be patients who suffer.

“When you start a fire, there are unintended consequences,” cautions Vowell, who retired as the court’s chief special master after nearly a decade of cases. “We’d be reaping those unintended consequences. I’m not accusing Secretary Kennedy of being indifferent to the suffering of children with vaccine-preventable illnesses, but if he gets what he asks for, I hope he lives to regret it.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Earlier this month, Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, joined several state lawmakers on a tour inside Alligator Alcatraz. When Eskamani entered a large white tent where detainees are separated into chain-link fenced areas, each containing 32 beds and three toilets, the men began chanting “Libertad!”—which means liberty in Spanish.

Eskamani and the other lawmakers, who had sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after previously being denied access to the facility, were not allowed to speak to detainees. Florida Division of Emergency Management director Kevin Guthrie, who guided the tour, said the facility was housing about 900 immigrants and would be able to accommodate up to 4,000 by the end of August, Eskamani says.

State Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat from Miami-Dade County, was also there and recalls that someone with a thermometer showed that the temperature at the entrance of one of the tents was 81 degrees. He noticed that one of the detainees was bare-chested, with his shirt wrapped around his head.

Jones, whose office is in touch with some families, read me a text he received from a detainee’s wife. She wrote that one of the men in her husband’s cell was using the toilet when guards had ordered the men to stand by their beds for a head count. Guards began to yell at him. In another text, she wrote, “He told me that [the guards] all flip their badges over so that you can’t read their names.” The text continued,“The mosquitoes are getting worse, and they don’t spray them with bug spray.”

In the days since the tour, Eskamani says she has heard reports from detainees’ loved ones of rampant mosquitoes swarming the tents, as well as leaks after summer rainstorms. “In a weather situation, not even a hurricane, just a general rainy day in Florida,” Eskamani says, “this facility is not one that is sustainable.”

Wearing mosquito netting, Florida State Sen. Shevrin Jones, State Rep. Michele K. Rayner and Rep. Anna V. Eskamani, PhD, are denied entry along with fellow representatives into Alligator Alcatraz in Collier County, Florida.Al Diaz/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty

Hastily erected on a remote airfield by Big Cypress National Preserve, and predicted to cost $450 million per year to run, Alligator Alcatraz has been unusually controversial even within the already controversial area of immigration detention. As reported by family members, attorneys, and lawmakers, the facility is fraught with malfunctioning air conditioners, scarce food, and no recreational time for detainees. State and federal officials running the center have previously stated that it would hold immigrants with criminal records. But as the Miami Herald recently reported, many detainees have no prior arrests. One is a 15-year-old boy. Another is a recipient of DACA, an Obama-era program that provides temporary legal status to immigrants who came to the US as children. In addition, environmental groups have accused Florida and federal officials of opening the center in the middle of the Everglades without first weighing the environmental risks. Alligator Alcatraz is the only immigration detention facility that a singlestate is responsible for both creating and managing.

Even before the second Trump term, Florida had distinguished itself for its outsized approach to immigration. Florida State Republicans have pursued aggressive immigration enforcement laws, including one that criminalized the act of driving undocumented immigrants into the state, and another that made it a crime to reside in Florida without legal status. Both were blocked by courts that ruled that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. As I reported in April, Florida also leads the nation in the number of 287(g) agreements between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Alligator Alcatraz is a kind of crucible for what can happen when federal enforcement efforts are fully supported by a sympathetic state infrastructure, while those who are taken there reportedly face nearly inhumane conditions. Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, describes the new detention camp as “a culmination of Florida and the governor’s efforts to essentially create its own immigration system.”

The new detention camp is “a culmination of Florida and the governor’s efforts to essentially create its own immigration system.”

The Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, has not responded to my requests for comment. An ICE spokesperson referred me to the Florida emergency agency for further information on the facility.

For Rep. Eskamani, Alligator Alcatraz is “a political stunt with environmental damage and everyday lives being harmed. It needs to close immediately.”

The detention camp is now at the center of several lawsuits. As I reported last month, environmentalist groups sued Florida and federal officials to shut down Alligator Alcatraz, arguing that the project moved forward without an environmental assessment or public comment.

The groups also raised concerns about the detention camp’s impact on the area’s various ecosystems and wildlife. Traffic to and from the detention site increases the likelihood of panthers being struck by vehicles, according to court filings, and light pollution could destroy the nighttime foraging abilities of bats in the area. Aerial photos also indicate that previously undeveloped areas are now paved over with asphalt.

US President President Donald Trump tours a migrant detention center, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. Andrew Caballero/AFP/Getty

Other parties have also weighed in on the case. The advocacy group Florida Immigrant Coalition filed an amicus brief arguing that “only the federal government can authorize a place of immigration detention.” And the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, which has resided in the preserve near the detention facility for generations, filed a motion in support of the lawsuit. Today, there are 15 active villages within Big Cypress National Preserve. “The facility’s proximity to the Tribe’s villages, sacred and ceremonial sites, traditional hunting grounds, and other lands protected by the Tribe raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts caused by the construction and operation of a detention facility,” their filing states.

In its response to the lawsuit, the US Department of Homeland Security said it was not in charge of operations at Alligator Alcatraz, and that the facility was solely the responsibility of Florida, “using state funds on state lands under state emergency authority.” In what appears to be a Catch-22, the state argued the environmentalist groups are seeking relief under the National Environmental Policy Act, which does not apply to state agencies. A hearing is scheduled for August 6.

Last week, another lawsuit was filed against officials operating the facility. Since the detention camp’s opening, attorneys have reported being unable to have contact with or speak to detainees. Several law firms, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union, sued in federal court to gain access to their clients. Some have driven to the facility to ask how they can meet with clients, only to be provided with an email address to schedule an appointment that resulted in bounced back messages, the lawsuit states. “No instruction exists as to which immigration courts have been designated for submission of motions for bond redetermination for people detained at Alligator Alcatraz,” the complaint reads. “As a result, detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz effectively have no way to contest their detention.”

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuits, the detention camp opened just before the peak of hurricane season, when storms are most likely to form in August and September. It’s a scenario that state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat from Orlando, says could be inevitable. “How are they going to decompress that site? Where are all these detainees going?” he says. “It’s not a question of if, it’s when we get a hurricane that will blow through that site.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long railed against antidepressants, and now he has very practical ways to attack them.

As my colleague Kiera Butler has written, Kennedy has claimed, without evidence, that they can cause addiction and school shootings. He even proposed sending people who take them to “wellness farms,” where they can grow their own organic foods, get “re-parented,” and wean themselves off antidepressants and other medications.

But on Monday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appeared to move closer towards realizing RFK’s goal of getting people off the drugs, quietly convening a so-called expert panel to discuss selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—a type of antidepressant commonly known as SSRIs—and pregnancy.The two-hour panel was livestreamed and is available to watch on the FDA’s YouTube page. It was moderated by a pair of FDA staffers, who gave each panelist five minutes to make an opening presentation and then asked a few questions submitted by the public. While 13 percent of Americans use antidepressants, whose efficacy varies but have been shown to help at least 20 percent of people who take them, a far smaller number of pregnant women—research suggests six to ten percent—are on them.

Many of the panel’s ten participants—a combination of researchers and practicing psychologists, several of whom have publicly spoken out against the use of antidepressants—largely repeated what one women’s health expert called “MAHA talking points” against medications and the biological legitimacy of anxiety and depression. Often, panelists’ arguments were so full of misinformation that Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a professional group for OB-GYNs, promptly put out a statement calling the panel “alarmingly unbalanced” and alleging that the majority “did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated perinatal mood disorders in pregnancy.”

There are, indeed, major mental health struggles facing American moms. Research published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2020 found that approximately one in eight women experience postpartum depression (PPD) after giving birth, which can lead to difficulties bonding, developmental delays for the infant, and other negative health outcomes. The latest CDC data, from 2017 to 2019, shows that mental health conditions, including suicides and overdoses, were the leading underlying causes of pregnancy-related deaths. The picture has only grown more dire recently: Research published in February in the Journal of Health Economics and Outcomes found that the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade led to an increase in PPD diagnoses in states with abortion bans compared to those without. Another large study, published in the May issue ofJAMA Internal Medicine, found that American mothers reported large declines in their mental health from 2016 to 2023, with single and low-income mothers reporting particularly large drops.

But listening to the FDA panel on Monday, you would be forgiven for thinking that perinatal depression—which refers to depression both during and after pregnancy—is not, in fact, real.

In his introductory remarks, FDA Chief Dr. Martin Makary—an abortion opponent and a former surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine—called for more study of the “root causes” of perinatal depression. “We have to talk about the role of healthy relationships, of communities, of natural light exposure, of other modalities and co-factors that may be involved,” he said.

Another panelist, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a psychiatrist whose practice focuses on weaning people from their psychiatric medications, similarly claimed that in contrast to physical conditions, it is impossible to point to distinct causes for mental health disorders. Instead, he claimed, personal problems like loneliness and job dissatisfaction tend to triggerdepression. “These are not things to be fixed with medical intervention,” added Witt-Doerring, who also runs a YouTube channel that spotlights the stories of people who have faced adverse side effects from taking psychiatric medications.

Women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.”

Roger McFillen, a psychologist and host of a podcast on which he and guests have railed against vaccines and birth control, suggested that women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.” McFillen also suggested, without evidence, that “many women feel coerced” to get on medications to treat perinatal depression.

"If you want to increase suffering, you fundamentally get people to battle their own internal experiences. You learn not to trust your emotions, you judge them as symptoms." We are facing an epidemic of iatrogenic harm. Manufacturing a disease to sell more drugs. There are better… pic.twitter.com/KTFCF9FmJB

— Dr. Roger McFillin (@DrMcFillin) July 22, 2025

I reached out to Wendy N. Davis, a psychotherapist and the president and CEO of Postpartum Support International, to get her take on the panelists’ characterization of perinatal depression. “That kind of thinking is not evidence-based,” she said, “and not even anecdotally true.” Indeed, physicians and researchers who treat and study PPD note that a combination of genetics, a history of anxiety and depression, and psychosocial factors can play a role in the development of the disorder. Experts say it can be effectively treated through a combination of therapy, medication, and support groups.

David Healy, a former professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Canada and Bangor and Cardiff Universities in the UK, agreed with Witt-Doerring, claiming that people with depression and melancholia, a severe type of depression, can often “recover spontaneously,” even within a few months. But the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that new parents should repeatedly be screened for PPD until the baby is six months old, noting that, if left untreated, it can lead to “long-term adverse health complications.” A 2020 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that 25 percent of nearly 5,000 mothers studied had higher rates of PPD at some point in the three years after giving birth.

Then there was the misinformation about actually treating perinatal depression with medication. Several of the panelists suggested, for example, that theuse of SSRIs during pregnancy can lead to an increased risk of autism in infants. But while some studies have found a higher occurrence of autism in these babies, researchers have cautioned against drawing a causal inference, and several large studies have found no association at all between SSRI use in pregnancy and autism.

Another claim repeated by many panelists was that doctors have withheld information about the risks of SSRIs from pregnant patients. In response, Fleischman, from ACOG, explained, “Patients who choose to continue taking SSRIs during pregnancy with the support of their OBGYNs do so following counseling on the risks and benefits that includes discussion of the data and consideration of their own needs, values, and priorities.”

“The claim that the FDA’s expert advisory process is ‘one-sided’ or politically driven is insulting to the independent scientists, clinicians, and researchers who dedicate their expertise to these panels.”

Panelists offered several suggestions for the path forward. They argued the FDA should strengthen its warnings about SSRI use during pregnancy to include more information about the impacts on preterm birth, preeclampsia, and postpartum hemorrhage. “There is now more than enough evidence to support strong warnings from the FDA about how these drugs disrupt fetal development and impact moms,” panelist Adam Urato, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at MetroWest Medical Center in Massachusetts, claimed. But studies show that SSRIs have only small or negligible impacts on the health issues that Urato raised.

A spokesperson for HHS said the agency would not comment on potential future policy decisions, adding, “The claim that the FDA’s expert advisory process is ‘one-sided’ or politically driven is insulting to the independent scientists, clinicians, and researchers who dedicate their expertise to these panels.”

Dr. Kay Roussos-Ross, an OBGYN and the director of the Perinatal Mood Disorders program at the University of Florida College of Medicine, was a rare expert in this group who pointed out that research has shown how untreated depression and anxiety in pregnancy can lead to a host of health problems for the pregnant person and their baby, including preterm delivery, inadequate prenatal care, substance abuse, and developmental delays for the child. Roussos-Ross also pointed to one study that revealed women who stopped taking medications in pregnancy were five times more likely to experience a relapse of symptoms compared to those who remained on them. “Not every single woman will need an antidepressant,” Roussos-Ross said during the panel, “but for those that do, it’s life-changing and life-saving.”

Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN and author of three books on menstruation, menopause, and vaginal health, called most of the panelists “depression deniers” who did not share basicevidence-based information. In a post on Bluesky, she praised Roussos-Ross for “shutting down all the others who were fear-mongering.”

Davis, from Postpartum Support International, said she just hopes struggling mothers understand that there is evidence-based help out there. “A mom can’t call the FDA panel,” she said, “and it’s not going to help her to listen to it.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a departure from his previous calls for transparency, announced that he would not ask for a vote on whether the files pertaining to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be released. Only a week before, on the right-wing podcast “The Benny Show,” he had said, “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.” This week, he changed his tune, and at a press conference, he said, “We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing.” He allowed that should there be a “neccesary or appropriate” need for further congressional action, he would look at it. But then said emphatically, “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, because we agree with the president.”

It’s impossible to truly know what prompted Johnson’s about-face, but it’s worth noting that he has long been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical movement that teaches that Christians are called to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including the government. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that NAR has had a “profound influence” on his life, according to a report issued by the Congressional Freethought Caucus last year.

It’s also worth noting that arguably the most influential and visible NAR leader, a Texas business strategist named Lance Wallnau, has been outspoken in recent weeks in his defense of Trump on the Epstein issue. On July 14, Wallnau told his 100,000 YouTube followers that he believed that Trump was acting in the best interest of the country by not releasing the files. Wallnau’s line of reasoning began with his suggestion that both the assassination of JFK and the assassination attempt on Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, were inside jobs. He went on to describe Trump’s critics on the left as “demonic” people who “smell disunity” in MAGA and are using the infighting as an opportunity to tarnish Trump’s reputation. “I think they would be willing to plant information and evidence and create false trails, all kinds of booby traps,” he said.

Among Wallnau’s followers are some powerful people. As I reported last year, Wallnau has forged strong connections with GOP leaders—for example, he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance last September. He also helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump. Wallnau has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons.

Another prominent Christian nationalist influencer, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, has also arrived at a belief in Trump’s innocence—but from a different perspective. Webbon isn’t connected with the NAR like Johnson and Wallnau—instead, he’s a member of the TheoBros, a network of Christian nationalist millennial influencers. Many of them believe that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and that the Ten Commandments should replace the US Constitution. Like NAR, the TheoBros are also well-connected to Republican politicians. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a TheoBros-aligned church, and Vance has socialized with members of the movement, as well.

Last week, Webbon devoted an episode of his YouTube show, which has 123,000 followers, to the Epstein files. His guest was Scott Horton, a libertarian podcaster and staunch critic of the left-wing government “deep state” that Trump has consistently blamed for all of America’s ills. In the episode, Horton asserted that he didn’t believe that Trump would be implicated in the Epstein files. Moreover, he argued that Epstein was a foreign asset, likely working with the Israeli national intelligence agency Mossad to entrap Trump.

He’s not alone in believing this particular conspiracy theory; it was also put forth by right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who also hosted Horton on his show. “This isn’t just like, ‘oh my goodness, maybe we had somebody working with Israeli intelligence that was blackmailing politicians here in America,'” said Webbon. “The reality is that [US-Israeli relations have] been a toxic relationship stretching back decades.” He added, “This is becoming a massive problem that people are noticing, as the kids say.” The latter was an allusion to the antisemitic trope of “noticing,” a phrase that refers to people taking note of the fact that a powerful person is Jewish.

A link between Epstein, who was Jewish, and Mossad fed neatly into Webbon’s preexisting biases. He has routinely expressed antisemitic views on social media. Last November, he posted on X, “I hate Judaism but love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” In a podcast episode, he called Judaism a “parasitical” religion. “What it has done historically throughout the ages is typically go into other countries, other peoples with other religions, and kind of cozy up but not really for their benefit—not a mutually beneficial relationship, but where they ultimately get far more out of the deal than the Christian nation does.” In an email to Mother Jones last year, Webbon said he stands by “everything I’ve said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil.”

Meanwhile, some other evangelicals—though not Trump supporters— are pushing for the administration to release the files. Last week, Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore penned an op-ed in his magazine titled “Why We Want to See the Epstein Files.” The main reason was that “we want justice done,” he wrote. “We want to believe that our institutions—even in the present crises of credibility that most are going through—are not wholly corrupt.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

More than 100 million Americans are obese, 38 million are diabetic, 116 million are hypertensive, and 26 million suffer from asthma. Whether or not you’re among the 60 percent of Americans whose medical chart lists a chronic illness, everyone suffers from them: They keep people out of work and in pain and contribute to skyrocketing healthcare bills that come out of the country’s coffers and yours. Most importantly, they shatter families whose loved ones die prematurely from the conditions. At a White House event in May, President Donald Trump affirmed he was intent on addressing this public health crisis. Flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—whose remit includes the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration—Trump said the rate at which Americans develop chronic illnesses is nothing short of “alarming, unbelievable, terrible.”

In principle, this issue might be a rare point of agreement between most public health experts and the president and his HHS secretary. But while Trump and his administration have championed the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, it’s more like an optical illusion with roundtables and flashy baseball hats. Though promoting what may appear to be a worthy endeavor, health experts argue the MAHA slogan is undermined by policies that do the opposite—especially for low-income Americans whose relative health status and long-term outcomes are disproportionately worse than for affluent ones.

“Health is wealth” is a popular saying among crunchy MAHA influencers. But the reality in the US, especially when the Trump policies and budget cuts begin to hit, is the inverse: wealth is health. In just six months, this “pro-health” administration, whose initiatives are led by an anti-vax advocate, has terminated 2,100 NIH research grants and withheld $140 million worth of funding already earmarked for fentanyl addiction response. Those cuts are small in comparison with the dual blows wrapped into the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July. The legislation gifted roughly 16 million people the loss of health insurance (to begin in 2027) and removed $186 billion in funding for food assistance programs for low-income people.

“Health is wealth” is a popular saying among crunchy MAHA influencers. But the reality in the US, especially after these cuts, is the inverse: wealth is health.

The duplicity of an administration that trumpets its commitment to transforming the state of health in the US versus the dire consequences of its policies confounds public health experts, hospital administrators, and physicians alike.

“It is incongruous to say ‘I’m making America healthy,’ and then, on the other hand, say, ‘But I’m taking away the resources that are necessary to make people healthy,’” Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the US Surgeon General under President George W. Bush, tells me. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Consider the federal free and reduced-cost school lunch program, which has been shown to reduce rates of poor health by at least 29 percent and lower rates of obesity by at least 17 percent. The program is connected to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supports 12 percent of US households, nearly half of which include children. Put simply, cuts to SNAP eligibility mean fewer recipients of free breakfast and lunch at school.

As my former colleague Tom Philpott explained in a recent article, the new budget bill Trump signed into law is “literally taking food off the tables of poor people and handing much of the savings to large-scale commodity farmers.”

Then there is projected $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade, which will have even more obvious and drastic effects on public health than the SNAP cuts. Some Medicaid expansion enrollees will see their co-pays increase, and others may see reduced benefits as state governments cut optional services when they become responsible for a larger share of the costs.

Additionally, new Medicaid work requirements require beneficiaries to more frequently prove their eligibility, which is anticipated to result in the loss of benefits for many people who do have jobs. As the Atlantic put it, the increase in arduous paperwork is akin to “annoying people to death.”

There is one population that Jill Rosenthal, the director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress, anticipates will be especially hard hit by new bureaucratic hurdles and tightened eligibility: cancer patients and people who will develop cancer, cases of which are increasing.

“People who are uninsured are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer later in the progression of their cancer, they’re less likely to get evidence-based preventive care, screening, treatment, and end-of-life care,” she says. Not a problem, according to Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. She reassured her constituents who were expressing concerns about Medicaid cuts by saying, “Well, we all are going to die.”

Privately insured Americans will feel the pinch, too. The Medicaid changes are anticipated to burden hospitals, especially those in rural areas that treat more Medicaid patients. Even without insurance,low-income people will still have medical emergencies requiring hospital care, and hospitals are legally obliged to stabilize them. This increase in what healthcare administrators call “uncompensated care” will lead to staff layoffs, reduced services, or even hospital closures, as has already taken place in Curtis, Nebraska.

Kevin Stansbury, the CEO of a 25-bed hospital about 107 miles Southeast of Denver, recently told me that about a quarter of its patients are on Medicaid. If program cuts pushed the county-owned hospital out of business, the next closest emergency room would be 85 miles away. And what would happen in the community if they closed? “More fatalities,” he said.

A little credit where credit is due: The MAHA movement has raised important questions about the health of the food items that dominate grocery store aisles and our pantry shelves.

Roughly 60 percent of what Americans eat (and 67 percent of what kids consume) is ultra-processed, such as sugary cereals, frozen meals, sodas, and fast food—all of which Kennedy refers to as “poison.”

While this isan exaggeration—for all their liabilities, these foods do go through safety testing—he’s correct that the overconsumption of processed foods has been linked to poorer health outcomes. A 2024 review of 10 million study participants found “convincing” evidence that ultra-processed foods increase the risk of cardiovascular disease by 50 percent. The same review found “highly suggestive” evidence that people whose diets are dominated by these foods are at much greater risk for obesity, sleep disorders**,** and depression. A separate study, published in 2022, concluded that men who ate large amounts of ultra-processed foods were 29 percent more likely to develop colon cancer.

“That is something that could improve Americans’ health, and so it’s a valid issue,” Rosenthal says about reducing the consumption of ultra-processed foods.

But potato chips and frozen pizzas can be extremely difficult to resist—not only thanks to marketing and synthetic ingredients, which certainly help, but because this is what appears in stores that serve low-income communities, areas often referred to as food deserts.

“Communities that don’t have access to grocery stores and need to buy their food from other sources often can’t find good, nutritious food, and they often find that it’s more expensive,” Rosenthal explains.

In other words, slashing a benefit that helps poor Americans afford more nutritious alternatives is effectively to say, “Kale for me, but not for thee.” (Just look at the ultra-processed chicken bacon ranch pasta dishes Kennedy is eagerly sending to Medicare and Medicaid patients.)

Former Surgeon General Carmona adds that Kennedy’s interest in increasing the consumption of more natural foods is “a great opportunity” for bipartisanship. But that would require breaking through the “hyper-partisan, divisive, acronym politics that we are dealing with today.”

Outside of hyping healthy foods, some of MAHA’s other priorities are more suspect. The 73-page MAHA report the White House published in May, stridently argues for more research to explore a long-discredited theory linking childhood vaccinations and autism.

Most experts reason that diagnoses of neurodivergence have increased due to increased societal awareness and improved diagnostic criteria. But for those still unsure, a newly released study tracking more than 1.2 million children across 21 years found no connection between early childhood vaccines containing aluminum and any of the 50 conditions that were reviewed, including autism and ADHD.

Meanwhile, measles outbreaks continue to rise alongside the decline of vaccination rates for a disease whose incidence was nearly eradicated over the last sixty years. That kind of data should matter to anyone who says they are serious about making America “healthy again.”

“They’re moving us back almost into the Dark Ages,” says Carmona. “The ramifications are extraordinary, and the policies that are being promulgated are ignorant.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The Trump administration has launched a war on former Obama administration officials, and to do so, it has engaged in one of the most egregious and obvious acts of politicizing intelligence in decades.

On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released formerly classified US intelligence reports about the 2016 election that she said were evidence of an Obamaadministration “conspiracy to subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency.” In a hysterical press release, she accused former President Barack Obama and his national security aides of having “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the ground for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” Describingthis as a “treasonous” plot, shesaid she was forwarding documents to the Justice Department, presumably toinitiate a criminal investigation. Naturally, she went on Fox News to amplify her allegations against Obama and his advisers.

It’s all a fabrication. What’s worse, her skullduggery appears to have been the catalyst for one of PresidentDonald Trump’s most disturbing and dangerous social media posts: An AI-generated video of Obama in the Oval Office visiting a smiling Trump, being manhandled and arrested by FBI agents, and then tossed into a prison cell.

Gabbard claims that the Obama administration and its top national security officials schemed to create and promote a phony intelligence finding to undermine Trump. On January 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump was to begin his first term as president, the intelligence community released an assessment (called an ICA) that stated Russia had attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation and a secret social media campaign designedto sow political discord in the United States, harm Hillary Clinton’s chances, and help Trump win. Ever since, Trump has called the Russia story a “hoax” and each of the subsequent investigations a “witch hunt.”

Gabbard, acting muchlike a Soviet commissar, is trying to disappear that assessment and the taint it applies to Trump’s 2016 victory.So on Friday, she released over 100 pages of documents that she insists show that the ICA was concocted to purposefully present the false finding to the public. But she is engaging in a sleazy sleight of hand.

Gabbard offers her case in an 11-page memo that quotes excerpts of intelligence records from 2016. The first one is an August 16 document that was sent to James Clapper, then occupying the position Gabbard now has asthe director of national intelligence. It said, “There is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.” A September 9 record cites an intelligence official observing, “Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.” A September 12 assessment published by the intelligence community noted, “[F]oreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks on the diverse set of information technologies and infrastructures used to support the November 2016 presidential election.”

Following the election, Gabbard’s memo points out, DNI Clapper’s office concluded, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”

Gabbard then delivers the j’accuse moment of this memo: The ICA, which was produced on Obama’s order, said Russia had waged a clandestine operation to influence the operation, even though this previous intelligence reported “Russia lacked intent and capability to hack the 2016 election” and did not impact the election through cyber hacks on the election.”

This proves, she says, that the ICA was “politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more.”

The ICA was not the basis for the FBI investigation, which began months earlier and eventually morphed into the Mueller probe. Nor did it trigger the first or second impeachment of Trump. More importantly, Gabbard is deliberately misleading the public about the intelligence she cites.The ICA’s finding that Russia had clandestinely interfered in the election to assist Trump was a separate matter from anotherconcern of the intelligence community: the possibility that Russian operatives would monkey-wrench vote-counting systems and throw Election Day into chaos.

That had been a worry for the Obama administration throughout 2016, after it received reports that Russian intelligence had penetrated and probed election boards in several states. The prospect of a Russian cyber-attack on the election system was the subject of intense intelligence reporting and analysis, and, as the documents Gabbard released indicate, the intelligence community came to believe that Russia would not be able to rig election results. The ICA reported this, noting that the Department of Homeland Security had assessed “that the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.”

Yet in this memo, Gabbard applies intelligence reporting on the potential election tampering to an entirely separate issue: the Russian attack that included the operation that hacked Democratic targets and released their emails to impede the Clinton campaign, and that ran an influence operation through secret social media efforts to denigrate Clinton and boost Trump. These are twodifferent matters. The conclusion that Russian cyber operatives were unlikely to impact the electoral infrastructure is unrelated to the assessment that the Russians were seeking to sabotage the campaign through covert action and a clandestine social media propaganda campaign.

The person in charge of overseeing the US intelligence community ought to know this.

Gabbard is engaging in blatant cherry-picking and gaslighting. And she’s being sloppy with her subterfuge. Her case is easy to debunk. The intelligence reporting she cites does not contradict the ICA and does not indicate there was a high-level plot to produce a bogus report to damage Trump. She is providing a phony and weak cover story, both for Trump and Vladimir Putin. After all, long after the ICA was produced, the Mueller report and two congressional investigations confirmed that the Russians had assaulted the 2016 election, facts that Gabbardneglects to mention in her memo.

When it comes to perilous conspiring, Gabbard is the guilty one, especially when she suggests that Obama and his aides broke the law. Her moves follow similar conniving by CIA director John Ratcliffe, who recently released a sketchy report attacking the ICA and referred former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey to the Justice Department for criminal investigations.

Ultimately, this is about rewriting history to serve Dear Leader and seeking vengeance on his behalf against those who dared investigate the Russian effort to help himreach the White House—an effort Trumpaided by denying its existence. These endeavors to pervert intelligence demonstratethat the nation’s spy services are being led by lackeys subservient to an autocrat who places his own interests above responsible concerns for national security. But they also supply fodder for Trump’s never-ending and treacherous campaign to demonize his political foes and brand them as traitorous criminals who deserve to rot in prison. An intelligence community that serves a president and not the truth is a threat to the republic—especially when that president yearns to be an authoritarian.

Spy services often conduct clandestine disinformation operations. These are supposed to target adversaries overseas. To prove her loyalty to Trump, Gabbard is running adevious disinfo op, this one against the American public.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Sunday marked six months of President Donald Trump’s return to office.

To celebrate, he and top Republicans kicked the hagiography into full gear. “Today is Six Month Anniversary of my Second Term. Importantly, it’s being hailed as one of the most consequential periods of any President,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social rant. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) claimed in a post on X, “JUST SIX MONTHS into President Trump’s second term, America is safer, stronger, and more prosperous”—despite ample evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, the White House posted an absurd cartoon depicting a slimmed-down Trump with $100 bills and bald eagles flying in the air around him, plus a nearly two-minute-long video that touted his alleged accomplishments.

But millions of Americans would disagree with those assertions. In fact, a closer look at the reality of Trump’s second term so far shows that his administration has made life worse for huge swaths of the electorate. Let’s count the ways.

His so-called Big Beautiful Bill is expected to explode the deficit to $3.4 trillion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and kick 10 million off their health insurance; defund Planned Parenthood, which poor women disproportionately use to access services such as cancer screenings and birth control (though this measure has currently been paused by a federal court); slash billions earmarked for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps poor people buy food; raise energy prices; and secure tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor.Trump and DOGE’s dismantling of the federal government has undermined the future of the federal workforce. Gutted offices include those that promote healthy pregnancies, combat human trafficking, track gun injuries, and work to prevent intimate partner violence, just to name a few examples. DOGE has also effectively abolished USAID, the agency that supports foreign aid abroad, which has already undermined responses to crises abroad and reportedly already led to more deaths. Researchers also estimate the cuts could lead to another 14 million deaths by 2030. (It’s no wonder that other countries kind of hate us right now.)ICE agents have kidnapped student protesters and lawful residents, harassed the volunteers who support immigrants, and snatched asylum seekers after court hearings. The staggering increase in ICE funding, outlined in the recent Republican spending bill, is set to make all this worse.The administration launched a full-scale assault on transgender Americans. This includes the shutting down of a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth; banning trans troops from the military; unscientifically declaring there are only two genders; attacking gender-affirming care; removing resources relevant to LGBTQ people from federal websites; and targeting teachers who support trans and nonbinary students.Progress disabled people have made has been steadily rolled back across government, which will likely lead to lower pay and more housing discrimination for people with disabilities, among other outcomes.The administration has also enacted an assault on rural America. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill could lead 140 rural hospitals to close; his ever-shifting tariff proposals have thrown farmers into whiplash; the Department of Agriculture suspended billions of dollars in payments for programs for farmers and rural communities and gutted the department’s regional offices, which support farmers; and the defunding of public media will disproportionately harm local stations in rural communities.Despite Trump’s campaign trail pledge to make IVF more accessible, he has yet to do so, more than two months after a self-imposed deadline. Other ways his administration has undermined reproductive health include seeking to restrict access to abortion pills and nominating anti-abortion officials to lead critical federal agencies in which they could further crack down on abortion access.Trump has emboldened political violence and extremists from his first day back in office, when he pardoned nearly 1,600 peoplewho participated in the January 6 attack at the US Capitol. The administration has also quietly dismantled an office at the Department of Homeland Security charged with preventing violence; he has also shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and ordered the rollback of firearm regulations.Trump and his allies demolished progress on climate change by withdrawing the US (again) from the Paris Climate Agreement, challenged state laws aimed at targeting climate change, and dismissed nearly 400 contributors to the government’s annual study on climate change.

When you consider the past six months in their totality, it’s clear that it was an historic start to Trump’s second term—just not in the ways he thinks.

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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.

On a clear February evening in 2020, a smell of rotten eggs started to waft over the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, followed by a green-tinged cloud. A load roar could be heard near the highway that passes the town.

Soon, nearby residents started to feel dizzy, some even passed out or lay on the ground shaking, unable to breathe. Cars, inexplicably, cut out, their drivers leaving them abandoned with the doors open on the highway.

“It was like something you see in a movie, like a zombie apocalypse,” said Jerry Briggs, a fire coordinator from nearby Warren county who was tasked with knocking on the doors of residents to get them to evacuate. Briggs and most of his colleagues were wearing breathing apparatus—one deputy who didn’t do so almost collapsed and had to be carried away.

Unbeknown to residents and emergency responders, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide near Satartia had ruptured and its contents were gushing out, robbing oxygen from people and internal combustion engines in cars alike.

“I worry we could see increased incidents now. The drop in enforcement is very troubling.”

“We had no idea what it was,” said Briggs, who moved towards the deafening noise of the pipeline leak with a colleague, their vehicle spluttering, when they saw a car containing three men, unconscious and barely breathing. “We just piled them on top of each other and got them out because it’s debatable if they survived if we waited,” said Briggs.

Ultimately, the men survived and were hospitalized along with around 45 other people. More than 200 people were evacuated. “It was like we were all being smothered,” said Jack Willingham, director of emergency management in Yazoo county, where Satartia is situated. “It was a pretty damn crazy day,”

The near-fatal disaster was a spur to Joe Biden’s administration to, for the first time, create a rule demanding a high standard of safety for the transport of carbon dioxide, a small but growing ingredient of pipelines increasingly captured from drilling sites and power plants.

“There’s been a lot of concern about safety among states that permit CO2 pipelines,” said Tristan Brown, who was acting administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration (PHMSA) until January. “Stronger standards like the ones we drafted last year have the dual benefit of addressing permitting concerns while also improving safety for the public.”

But shortly before the new safety regulations were due to come into force early this year, Donald Trump’s new administration swiftly killed them off. A crackdown on gas leaks from pipelines was also pared back. This was followed by an exodus of senior officials from PHMSA, which oversees millions of miles of US pipelines. Five top leaders, including the head of the office of pipeline safety, have departed amid Trump’s push to shrink the federal workforce.

Broader staff cuts have hit the regulator, too, with PHMSA preparing for 612 employees in the coming year, down from 658 last year. There are currently 174 pipeline inspectors within this workforce, PHMSA said, which is 30 percent less than the number Congress required it to have when authorizing the agency’s budget in 2020.

These 174 inspectors have the task of scrutinizing 3.3 million miles of pipe across the US, or around 19,000 miles per inspector. The indiscriminate nature of cuts at PHMSA “has real world consequences in terms of undermining the basic foundations of safety for the public,” Brown said.

“A lot of expertise has left and that is worrying,” said one departed PHSMA staffer. “The attitude from DOGE [the so-called Department of Government Efficiency] was, ‘Your job is meaningless, go and work in the private sector.’ Many people have thought they can’t go through this for four years.”

America has more miles of pipeline—carrying oil, propane, gas, and other materials—than it does federal highways, and a federal regulator that was already overstretched. Brown said typically just one or two people have the responsibility of inspecting America’s transported nuclear waste while a mere dozen staffers have to oversee more than 170 liquified natural gas plants.

“The overall state of pipeline safety is really languishing…We are not making good progress.”

Each state has its own pipeline regulatory system and inspectors, too, but PHMSA is responsible for writing and enforcing national standards and is often the one to prosecute violations by any of the 3,000 businesses that currently operate pipelines. However, enforcement actions have dropped steeply under the Trump administration, which has initiated just 40 new cases this year, compared to 197 in all of 2024.

“All of these things will contribute to an increase in failures,” said Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. “A strong regulator helps prevent awful tragedies and I worry we could see increased incidents now. The drop in enforcement is very troubling.”

“Everyone at PHMSA is focused on safety, there’s not a lot of fat to trim, so it’s hard to imagine that any reduction in force won’t impact its ability to fulfill its duties. I can’t believe they were ever prepared to lose so many people at once.”

In some contexts, US pipelines can be viewed as very safe. A few dozen people are killed or injured each year from pipeline malfunctions, but the alternatives to moving around vast quantities of toxic or flammable liquids and gases aren’t risk-free.

Trains can come off their tracks and spill their loads, as seen in East Palestine, Ohio, while the death toll on American roads from accidents is typically about 40,000 people a year. “There is some super duper bad stuff that happens on the interstates,” said Briggs.

Still, as Caram points out, there is a significant pipeline incident almost every day in the US, ranging from globs of oil spilling onto farmland to raging fireballs from ignited gas. Many of the pipelines snaking under Americans’ feet are aging and need replacement, which can lead to failures. There has been a worrying uptick in deaths from pipeline accidents recently, too, with 30 people killed across 2023 and 2024, the most fatalities over a two-year period since 2010/11.

“This is not the time to look at deregulatory efforts, this is not time to look to save money and deregulate,” Caram said. “The overall state of pipeline safety is really languishing with poor performance. We are not making good progress and we need stronger regulations.”

A PHSMA spokesman said the agency is “laser-focused on its mission of protecting people and the environment while unleashing American energy safely” and is in the process of appointing “well-qualified individuals” to fill the departed senior officials.

“PHMSA has initiated more pipeline-related rule making actions since the beginning of this administration than in the entire four years of the preceding administration,” the spokesman added. “Each of these rule makings represents an opportunity for us to promote pipeline safety by modernizing our code and encouraging innovation and the use of new technology.”

The agency spokesman added that pipeline firm Denbury, now owned by ExxonMobil, paid $2.8 million in civil penalties for its regulatory violations in Satartia and agreed to take corrective actions. PHMSA also warned other operators to monitor the movement of earth and rock, to avoid a repeat of the Satartia incident where sodden soils shifted following days of rain and crunched into the pipeline, severing it.

The leak was only confirmed after an emergency responder called Denbury to ascertain what happened, more than 40 minutes after the rupture, according to the PHMSA investigation. Communications between the company and the emergency services has improved since, according to both Briggs and Willingham. Denbury was contacted for comment.

Today, Sartartia bears few visible scars. The pipeline is obscured from passing view by trees and blankets of kudzu, the invasive vine. The town’s sleepy, tree-lined streets contains a micro town hall, as big as a tool shed, a couple of small churches, a single shuttered store. On a recent summer day a single person was outside, contentedly cutting the grass, as if that harrowing day in 2020 was a surreal dream.

“We will see how it goes with the changes, I hope it doesn’t affect the safety we’ve worked so hard to get,” Willingham said of the cuts at PHMSA. “We don’t want a day like we had in Satartia again. In 35 years in emergency service I have seen some crazy stuff but that was a wild, wild day.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

They entered in tight formation. There was Eddie Gallagher, the alleged war criminal Navy SEAL granted clemency by President Donald Trump; Tom Satterly, the Delta Force sergeant major made famous by Black Hawk Down; Christian Craighead, the SAS soldier who led a rescue mission for hostages held by al-Shabaab in Nairobi; DJ Shipley, a second-generation SEAL who served on the prestigious Team Six. And—leading this squad of vets-turned-influencers into the launch event for Tucker Carlson’s [new nicotine pouch](https://alplaunchparty.rsvpify.com/?securityToken=xQaB12qaMs3AZUMNmjhIbF4liQB26cJQ https://www.facebook.com/tuckercarlsonTCN/posts/alp-is-for-the-people-had-a-great-launch-party-yesterday-with-our-friendsa-speci/1141637837325625/) last December—there was Shawn Ryan.

Ryan’s military exploits are less notable—a short stint as a Navy SEAL, a slightly longer career as a security contractor, both for Blackwater and the CIA. His triumphs as a podcaster, however, are significant. In October 2024, the Shawn Ryan Show hit first place on the Spotify podcast chart. He has hovered near the top ever since. Ryan has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube—a viewership that nearly doubled last year alone.

Ryan’s style blends the deeply confessional with the darkly conspiratorial. His guests range from MAGA politicians and manosphere mainstays to UFO enthusiasts and exorcists. But the staple of his show is fellow veterans. “We’re probably one of the communities that are treated the shittiest,” Ryan told an interviewee in 2023, “flushed down the toilet and forgotten.” Since it debuted on Christmas Eve in 2019, the Shawn Ryan Show has specialized in hosting special forces veterans excavating their deepest traumas. Combining a military ethos with an anti-­establishment message has made his show a hit and, in certain circles, made Ryan a celebrity. “People just blow past you to try to get to him,” Shipley told me.

“I cannot believe that fucking idiot is a shot caller now.”

At Carlson’s nicotine pouch party, held in a converted barn near Ryan’s home in Tennessee and themed “Cowboy Christmas,” his new fame was on display. Guests huddled around Ryan. At one point, Carlson—between conversations with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and podcaster Theo Von—walked over to pay his respects.

Ryan, like many other podcasters, has veered into Republican politics in the last few years. In the runup to the election in 2024, his show was a destination for Trumpworld figures, including JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard. Eventually, Trump himself came on the show. Ryan’s appeal isn’t the flexible curiosity of Joe Rogan, or the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate. Instead, he reiterates a singular message, utilizing his time inside the special forces to punch it home: Every institution has secrets, elites lie to keep them, and the process exists for one reason: to screw you.

In episodes that can stretch more than five hours, the former SEAL conducts emotional interviews, interwoven with esoteric grievances. Ryan’s role as a CIA contractor, he tells listeners, gave him a front-row view of the deep state in action. “It’s hard to find someone with more credibility than someone that says, ‘I was in the establishment, and that’s why I know how corrupt it is,’” said Reece Peck, a CUNY professor studying right-wing influencers. As Ryan’s website proclaims: “We’re better than entertainment, we’re the REAL thing.” Whether riffing on aliens, Democrats, or homegrown terrorism, Ryan spins half-truths, evincing at times a ridiculous level of credulity. (He asked an exorcist last October, “What do you think is going on with this UFO type stuff? Is it demonic?”) The mix of bravado and deep state paranoia fits the Trump ethos.

In January, during Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, Ryan’s name entered the Congressional Record. “On the Shawn Ryan Show, you said and I quote, ‘I’m straight up saying that we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective,’” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said to Hegseth. He responded that he was talking “not about the capabilities of men and women” but “about standards.” The news cycle moved on, and Hegseth quickly provided many more scandals.

But the moment was revealing of something beyond sexism. Anyone who listened to the entire episode would find Ryan represented a different vision of the military. “I think women do have a place in combat,” he told Hegseth. The problem was that the DOD, he said, was itself unsalvageable. “I feel like that’s how we fix it,” Ryan said. “You abandon it.” Even Hegseth seemed taken aback.

In Ryan’s answer is a model of the men scarred by the “forever wars”: a loner militant, suspicious of all institutions.

Friends died overseas, as Ryan often discusses on his show, fighting for a cause that served primarily to benefit companies like Halliburton. Those who came back from the Middle East did not transform into hippie peaceniks. To them, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was the ultimate betrayal. It made the entire effort seem meaningless.

“I was on the mission that captured Saddam Hussein,” Chris VanSant, a retired Delta Force team leader who has appeared on Ryan’s show, told me. “When that happened back in 2003, honestly, we thought we would go home after that, but we didn’t.” The aftermath, followed by the messiness of the Afghanistan withdrawal, made it feel “like a lot of it was in vain,” he said.

Ryan is still fighting—only now against the military-industrial complex he once served. “I don’t think we’re the good guys anymore. I don’t agree with a lot of the shit I was involved in as a SEAL or CIA contractor,” Ryan told Joe Rogan in September 2024. “I just keep going down the rabbit hole, diving into the military-industrial complex, all the lies that the government has been telling us, all the unreleased classified shit. It’s overwhelming.”

Last week, Ryan got one more boost. As part of a podcast push, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom sat with Ryan for a four-plus-hour episode. After gifting Newsom a gun, Ryan described himself as a moderate, telling the governor, “I got painted out to be a MAGA troll or something because of a lot of the people that I’ve interviewed—including Trump himself. And while I do lean conservative, I am not that far right.”

Newsom similarly played the common man; he told Ryan he is a fan of Joe Rogan, is interested in UFOs, scored 960 on the SAT, and can’t pronounce “bona fides.” Despite their political differences, the two men bonded. And Ryan seemed to win over a new market in the process.

“I don’t know Shawn Ryan’s politics,” said Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor on a follow-up episode of Newsom’s own podcast, in which the group spoke with the governor about his appearance. “I did come away just feeling like he really wanted to connect with you as a human being, and he seemed curious, and I really respected that.”

Ryan’s peer might be surprised to hear such a glowing review. His success has confounded former comrades in arms who never saw him as outstanding, and even looked down on him. “I’ve got this little group text of four or five SEALs. It’s not infrequent that somebody sends a link to some stupid Shawn Ryan thing,” said Dan Barkhuff, a retired officer on Ryan’s SEAL team. “The universal reaction is: I cannot believe that fucking idiot is a shot caller now.”

Shawn Ryan has conducted interviews with RFK Jr., Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance, among other MAGA celebrities.Shawn Ryan Show/Youtube

Though his show traffics in vulnerability and truth-telling, Ryan has his own secrets. “Shawn Ryan” is a pseudonym. Born Sean Ryan Palmisano, Ryan grew up the son of a military pharmacist in ­Chillicothe, Missouri (“The Home of Sliced Bread”), where his quarter-Japanese heritage made him stick out. “They called me a ‘chink’ all the time,” he explained on an episode in January. A classmate told me she remembers Ryan as aloof and sometimes angry. “He was an asshole,” she said. The classmate recalls Ryan falling in with a group of friends who bullied other students. “He was not one to back down,” she said of the young Ryan. “If he was being a jerk or annoying, you couldn’t get him to stop.”

Fresh out of high school in 2001, but before 9/11, Ryan joined the Navy. “As I got older and academics just kept dropping off, my parents kind of told me, ‘Hey, we’re not going to pay for your college,’” he said on a 2023 podcast. “I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m going to join the military.’” Ryan has said in interviews that he survived the brutal course required to join the SEALs by telling himself he couldn’t afford to disappoint his parents again.

“He was like a C-minus SEAL,” Barkhuff recalls. “He could carry a gun and he could shoot okay, but he wasn’t somebody you put in leadership. He was a sled dog.”

Ryan was eager for action. But he found little to do. In 2004, he was sent to Haiti. He lamented that it was others who “yanked [President] Aristide out of power.” When Team Eight deployed to Baghdad, he hoped for combat. Ryan ended up guarding Iraqi politicians. Barkhuff remembers Ryan trying to fit in—painting his face like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, putting in lips of cherry Skoal—but his fellow SEAL also sensed Ryan misunderstood life in the military. “Everyone was making fun of him,” Barkhuff recalled. “I don’t think he has a super clear understanding of the division between professional military operations and what he sees on media.” Ryan, it seemed, wanted the war he saw on TV.

In 2006, Ryan left the Navy. “I was really dissatisfied,” he later told Megyn Kelly. “I went to the teams to go to war and to fight for the country and I wasn’t getting enough.” After an abortive dip into real estate, Ryan says he joined Blackwater, the private security contractor that played an outsize role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The firm had just become infamous after its contractors massacred civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17. The brutality did not alter Ryan’s perception of the company. Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, is a regular on his show. (Prince sold Blackwater, which he had renamed Xe, in 2010.)

From Blackwater, Ryan says he then moved to the CIA’s Global Response Staff (GRS), which provides security for agents abroad. Near the end of his time with GRS, the former SEAL says he moved to ­Medellin, Colombia. America’s foreign wars had grown increasingly unpopular and, in the United States, Ryan felt he was viewed as a monster. Colombia offered a reprieve. Jimmy Watson, who commanded the Blackwater unit that perpetrated the Nisour Square massacre, also took refuge in Medellin. Though Watson never met Ryan, he understands why he left the US. “When I went overseas,” he told me, “I felt like I was finally free.”

“I want to take the Rogan slot.”

In Medellin, Ryan struggled. He had started abusing opiates following a 2006 hernia surgery. In Colombia, he dove into benzos and coke—eventually, Ryan says, taking six bumps of cocaine an hour. He started dealing, too. Ryan boasted to Kelly last year that he’d built a major international drug network. In a 2022 interview with fellow former SEAL Mike Ritland, he downplayed his operation: “I never had bricks,” he explained. “I would go and buy 50, 60, maybe 100 grams that are already bagged.”

Ryan has said he regularly cycled between Colombia and the US at the time. (He was arrested for petty theft in South Florida in 2012.) But he often talks about a moment of clarity that broke through. In the mid-2010s, Ryan remembers overdosing on Mother’s Day in Colombia. “I was like, goddamn,” he told Ritland. “I’m calling my mom on Mother’s Day, whacked out of my mind, and I’m probably going to die at the end of this phone call.” Ryan lived. But, soon after, he says a doorman told him he was being surveilled by ­Colombia’s federal police. He soon returned to the US. “Was this real or was this coke paranoia?” director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor) asked when Ryan recounted the story on his show. “This was real,” Ryan replied. (Colombian police did not respond to a request for comment. A DEA spokesperson said, “We do not comment on or otherwise confirm active investigations.”)

After moving back, Ryan’s downward spiral continued. At one point, Ryan has said, he tried to take his life, closing a garage door and leaving his Audi running.

After the attempted suicide, Ryan sought out a therapist—a “Florida liberal.” He found redemption, both professional and personal, in telling his story. “She really didn’t say a whole lot. A lot of times, you just start figuring things out yourself by just getting it out,” he told Kelly. “I realized that if you just let somebody talk, then they’re just going to keep going.” This key insight would provide his eventual path to podcast stardom.

In December 2015, Ryan started a self-­defense training company called Vigilance Elite. Such companies were a common ­career move for former military operators. Ryan created a YouTube channel to promote the firm. In videos, he presented himself as a renegade initiate into the warrior and intelligence elites, spilling their tactical secrets to you. His mode was, from the beginning, confessional. Ryan appeared to realize that his disappointments—the pain of the SEALs, the thirst for action, the banality—were a brand. Soon after, he dropped Sean Palmisano and became Shawn Ryan.

Ever since, Ryan has fought attempts to reveal his identity. In legal disputes, his lawyers have argued that he “adopted the name…to protect himself and his family because he was concerned about being placed on a terrorist hit list as a result of his service as a Navy SEAL and CIA Contractor.” His current lawyer, Tim Parlatore—who has also represented President Trump and Gallagher, the alleged war criminal—echoed the sentiment in an email to Mother Jones. Ryan did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Shawn Ryan Show responded to a list of questions by inviting Mother Jones to verify facts by looking through “what Shawn has said in the past.”

Many former CIA employees and Navy SEALs, including one of the men who says he shot Osama bin Laden, live publicly under their given names. Barkhuff sees Ryan’s pseudonym as one more way in which he tries to puff himself up. “He’s a vanilla SEAL,” he said, “pretending he’s Liam Neeson in Taken.”

The tough guy act has worked. At first, Ryan tried a survival reality show on his YouTube channel. Then, he uploaded a video in which he trained Keanu Reeves for a John Wick film. But finally it clicked when he began interviewing men who had been in the special forces. His earliest episode to top 5 million views was his first sit-down with Shipley, the famous SEAL, in 2021.

Ryan borrowed his interview style from his former therapist. “He just kind of sits there and looks like he’s taking it all in,” said Barkhuff. “It comes across as wisdom, but I think he’s confused.”

Still, the revelations that spill out are often powerful. Macho men talk about mental health struggles, often crying, breaking long-standing taboos. “In special operations, we were expected, not only externally, but also internally, to be these cyborg robots, these unemotional creatures,” Nick Lavery, an active-duty Green Beret who has appeared on Ryan’s show, told me. Shipley wept for an hour after his interview. “I’ve been bottling that stuff up my entire life up until that point, couldn’t tell anybody anything, really,” he said. The rawness of the interviews convinced Ryan that he had a hit. “To see a man like that be vulnerable,” he told conservative podcaster Brett Cooper, “it just captivates millions of people.”

After appearing on his show, Ryan’s guests are often inundated with messages from listeners. “The biggest benefit that I got from being on Shawn’s show was people reaching out to me to say, ‘Hey, man, I’ve been through this too,’” said Ryan Hendrickson, a former Green Beret who shared that he’d been sexually assaulted as a six-year-old. “There’s a handful of us that put ourselves out there and we’re vulnerable,” said VanSant. “That showed a lot of people that it’s okay to talk about that stuff.”

Ryan is aware of the effect this openness has on his audience. “By the end of it they’re so attached to the guests that they just want to support them because they just spilled their whole life, all the good, all the bad,” he once told Forbes. When this connection is used to direct people toward dealing with inner struggles, it’s arguably good. But his sympathetic ear can also provide cover to bad actors and alleged war criminals.

The first half of Ryan’s conversation with soldier-turned-cop Blake Cook last November is among his most affecting. Cook describes rolling his windows down while preparing to shoot himself because he “wanted somebody to hear the gunshot,” he said, and “find me before the birds come in and eat me away.” A call from a friend stayed Cook’s hand. He told Ryan about the experience before telling some members of his family.

In the second half of the show, though, Cook describes how he left the police force. For some time, supervisors had accused him of racial profiling. “I used to get in trouble and have to go do racist classes ’cause I was pulling over too many Black people,” he said. “It’s piss leadership. It’s because instead of having a backbone and being a man, they would rather throw you under the bus.” Eventually, he said he quit after he was accused of lying about an incident involving the use of force.

On Ryan’s show, empathy is afforded to the service member but not their adversaries. That dynamic is glaring when Ryan platforms special forces veterans accused of misconduct, like Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of killing a prisoner of war in Iraq. “I just don’t understand how half of the nation can be so up in arms, even if you did stab the fucking kid to death,” Ryan said during their interview. “The poor little ISIS kid.” (In 2019, a military jury found Gallagher not guilty of the murder.)

Ryan has recently outgrown his military niche and begun working to expand his appeal.

“I want to take the Rogan slot,” he said in 2022. “I’m going real broad. I’m honestly getting bored with the special operations stuff.” Before long, he was conducting friendly interviews with conservative superstars. When Trump came on his show last August, Ryan lobbed softballs: “We have a government that’s not functioning right now. How are you going to gain the trust back of the American people within the government?…Are we going to see anyone held accountable?” “Everybody is behind you guys,” he told JD Vance the following month, “including me.”

In his conversation with Hegseth, Ryan lashed out at Democrats for “turning pedophiles into some kind of sexual preference that everybody’s okay with” and “wanting to put fucking pedophiles on the map and make it okay to molest my fucking kids.” Yet he acted surprised when Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t accept an invitation to come on his podcast. “That paints me in a picture where it’s like, ‘Oh, he’ll only have this party,’” Ryan complained to Forbes. “But I’m open to everybody.”

Indeed, along with military vets and politicians, UFO theory promoters are some of the most frequent guests on his show. In Ryan’s telling, this obsession with the paranormal began after Ryan went to Mexico to partake in psychedelic therapy in 2022. “I came back and I just was like, whatever I want to do, I’m doing,” he told Cooper, the conservative podcaster. The following year, Ryan believes God spoke to him in Sedona, Arizona, where he also says he witnessed a UFO while on a hike.

Whatever happened in the high desert, it’s also true that talking about UFOs is a commercially viable way of channeling an audience’s distrust of the government. “Most regular people are more going to click on a UFO link than they are a deep dive into the atrocities the CIA has committed,” said A.J. Bauer, a University of Alabama professor studying conservative media. Such content, he argued, allows listeners “to experience this sense that the government is hiding something” without dwelling on their own responsibilities.

Ryan’s affinity for conspiracies isn’t new for the special forces. In war, soldiers had to respond to limited, often flawed, information with lethal confidence. “They come home and they still feel like they need to fight back, to act on the information they’re being given,” said Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a former platoon commander in Afghanistan and the author of Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body. “But their sources of information are mostly con men or cranks and they’re just as credulous to this crap as they were to the information they were fed on the front lines.”

Ryan appears to have become a captive of the narrative he’s spinning, a believer in the reputation he’s propagated. It’s a pitfall common in military circles. “Yes, you are very good at kicking down doors, you are very good at jumping out of planes, and shooting bad guys,” noted John Armenta, a veteran who studies veteran media and lectures at UC San Diego. “It doesn’t necessarily translate to other parts of life.” This confidence can lead to a suspicion that ironically accepts conspiracy easily.  “When you’re high on your own supply,” Armenta said, “you stop questioning things.”

On New Year’s Day, an active-duty Green Beret named Matthew Livelsberger blew up a Cybertruck in front of the Las Vegas Trump hotel, killing himself and injuring seven others. It was part of an apparent bid to bring attention to information Livelsberger claimed he had about UFOs. Before the attack, Livelsberger had tried to spread the news other ways, including by offering himself up for an interview with Ryan.

The tragedy could have been a moment for Ryan to glimpse the consequences of the conspiratorial worldview he promotes, but instead he began cryptically hyping another conspiracy. “My family and I are disappearing for a few days,” he warned. “What we are about to release is mind boggling and will raise a lot of questions.”

Two days after the explosion, Ryan released an episode with Sam Shoemate, a retired army officer who read aloud an email he’d received from Livelsberger contending that America and China had “gravitic propulsion systems.” Ryan noted that “we’re not necessarily validating what came in on that email.” But they spun an outlandish narrative of their own, speculating that Livelsberger had staged his death to send a message.

Ryan said he did not condone Livelsberger’s actions. But he could understand someone who saw a broken system, filled with secrets, and chose to act. Ryan’s show—which began as a way for warriors to talk about their demons—had become the exact venue Livelsberger imagined: one where military credentials give prestige, and even plausibility, to warped worldviews.

Either way, after Livelsberger’s death, Ryan did what he has become best at: He turned the tragedy into content.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This story was originally published by Mission Local*, a nonprofit newsroom covering San Francisco. You can donate to them here.*

Three asylum-seekers were arrested Friday directly after court hearings at San Francisco immigration court, continuing a weeks-long pattern of federal agents waitingjust outside courtrooms and arresting people as they step into the halls.

Mission Local saw all three arrests, which took place at 630 Sansome Street, which houses an ICE field office and several courtrooms. The first was at about 8:40 a.m., when a woman, surrounded by people who appeared to be ICE agents, was handcuffed in the hallway outside of the courtroom.

The second and third arrests were later that morning, before noon. In both cases, asylum-seekers had barely stepped outside the courtroom when about five federal agents, some of whom clearly wore Immigration and Customs Enforcement badges, arrested them. They were swarmed and directed through a nearby door.

One lawyer pleaded with a courtroom security guard to let a man use his cellphone to text his attorney: “He’s about to be arrested outside.”

In all three cases, a Department of Homeland Security attorney had moved to dismiss the asylum-seekers’ petition, a novel tactic the Trump administration is using to arrest immigrants and put them on a fast-track to deportations. In at least two of the three cases, the judge did not accept the attorney’s motion.

Instead, the judge gave the asylum-seeker time to respond in writing, which should have given them protections from deportation. But, as has happened routinely in San Francisco, ICE agents arrested them anyway.

They are likely to be taken to detention centers in California or even outside the state. There are no centers near San Francisco, so for most people arrested at court, it means travel to far-flung parts of the state like the Golden State Annex in McFarland or Mesa Verde in Bakersfield.

Friday’s arrests are the latest at increasingly-tense courtrooms in San Francisco: ICE has made more than 30 arrests after court hearings since May 27, and on Friday agents, at least one of whom was armed, walked up and down the hallways outside the courtrooms, waiting to make arrests.

Those inside the courtroom are more fearful than ever: One woman, who arrived at court with a young child, started crying in the back of the courtroom. When the judge asked her how she was, she told him in Spanish through an interpreter, “Nervous.”

While immigration attorneys giving free legal advice have typically conferred with asylum-seekers in a private room, on Friday and, at a different courtroom at 630 Sansome Street on July 10, they huddled in the back of the courtrooms instead. The attorneys knew that if they stepped out into the halls even en route to give legal advice, the asylum-seekers would be detained immediately.

These attorneys, dispatched to court by the Bar Association of San Francisco under the “Attorney of the Day Program,” also collect contact information of relatives, so they can be told that their family member may be detained.

But even that simple communication is facing increasing scrutiny from court security.

On Friday, a security guard came into the courtroom and tried to get an asylum-seeker—whose case DHS had moved to dismiss and who was about to be arrested—to put away his phone while in court as he spoke with the immigration attorney. The attorney pushed back and stood between the guard and the asylum-seeker.

“He’s about to be arrested outside,” she said. He would not be able to contact his attorney out in the hall, he said, “because he’s about to be arrested.”

The security guard relented. But he stood just a few feet from the asylum-seeker, occasionally looking over his shoulder, as the man whispered to his lawyer and continued to text.

Electronics are not allowed in court, though the rule has not always been strictly enforced. Mission Local has observed security guards cracking down, and on Friday a guard told two court observers to put their phones away.

In a different courtroom at 630 Sansome Street on July 10, Mission Local saw a security guard raise his voice at a member of the public who was observing court for having her phone out. The judge in that courtroom, Patrick O’Brien, told the security guard to let him handle it.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

When Reps. Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York were barred last month from entering 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, where immigrants reportedly have been detained in inhumane conditions, the two Democrats became the latest in a string of lawmakers refused entry from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. The denial was not surprising. Such refusals are happening with increasing regularity around the country, as it becomes clear that ICE is not a federal agency concerned with even a patina of transparency.

But neither Nadler nor Goldman could have anticipated the manner of refusal: a man in a short-sleeved novelty shirt emblazoned with a large Guinness toucan arguing with them in a hallway.

The shirt’s owner, seemingly unconcerned with its top buttons, allowed an ample view of his chest. He spent a considerable part of the encounter adopting a faux hapless position, hands in his pockets. Yet what William Joyce lacked in basic notions of professionalism, he made up for in his authority. “We’re not going to do it because we don’t have to,” Joyce replied when pressed for a reason for the refusal to allow federal legislators into the building. (Nadler and Goldman soon left, vowing to take the issue up the chain of command.)

Although hardly the most alarming feature of the encounter, Joyce’s appearance was striking. Here was a government official who had received advance notice that he was to meet with two sitting members of Congress on a Wednesday morning. Did he intend to convey disrespect? Maybe. But more notably, a clear throughline emerges between Joyce and an unofficial uniform that has taken root among those assigned to carry out President Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations. The apparel is pedestrian, but specific in its register of American bro-iness, evocative of a puff-chested dude in a graphic tee. Maybe he’s a divorcee seething with low-hum aggression as he walks into the vape store. “The types of people who open carry handguns to go to Buffalo Wild Wings,” the writer Hamilton Nolan noted.

ICE agents arrest noncitizens inside 26 Federal Plaza in New York on July 1.Cristina Matuozzi/Sipa USA/AP

It’s easy to mock. But accessible masculinity appears to be the aesthetic of the new institutionalized terror in our burgeoning $200 billion police state, as ICE disappears immigrants. Members of this goon squad look like the guys who roam around America’s dead malls. Yes, the aesthetic affords them powerful obscurity, sowing fear and confusion in the communities they torment; they dodge accountability through the use of facial coverings and unmarked cars. But it also makes you wonder about all the other men who look the same and aren’t ICE agents.

“You don’t know where they’re from. You don’t have any idea who they are, and they are given carte blanche [authority],” said Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics and a professor at UCLA. She likens ICE agents to the Nazi-era Sturmabteilung, also known as Brownshirts, many of them unemployed men and former soldiers who terrorized German towns with chaos and violence. “They were the rabble-rousers and drunks,” Ravetto-Biagioli said. “They looked like a bunch of ‘bros,’ as you might say in common parlance, and angry men who felt disaffected by being on the losing side of World War I.”

If what we are witnessing is indeed the arrival of fascism in the United States, it’s helpful to understand ICE’s bro aesthetic as a small feature of a larger repudiation of things outside the right’sliking: gender fluidity, increased transgender visibility, MeToo, reproductive rights. The result has been a hyperfocus on traditional gender norms, embraced in the faces and fashion across MAGA.

Accessible masculinity is the aesthetic of the new institutionalized terror in our burgeoning $200 billion police state. Members of this goon squad look like the guys who roam around America’s dead malls.

“I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living,” Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous German filmmaker whose work fueled Nazi propaganda, once said. Riefenstahl is given a special focus in Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism.” Sontag argues, among many things, that perceptions of cleanliness and purity were integral to fascist power, especially when performed in unison.

Officers who reportedly pin down and punch immigrants may not conjure ideas of beauty to you and me. But for Trump and his ilk, ICE inspires a reverence that mirrors Riefenstahl’s. “These officers are doing a tremendous job,” the president likes to say. “They’re great patriots.” On Truth Social, Trump has praised agents for demonstrating “incredible strength, determination, and courage.” Squint and you start to get the picture that ICE belongs to a larger MAGA cultural project to imbue American life with a virility. We like the strong, silent type—the cowboy. What better way to make a state crackdown look like an American reclamation—a project of the anti-government party—than to have cops dress like an average guy with a gun?

Yet for all the presidential admiration and immense financial priority ICE enjoys, morale among officers is said to be at an all-time nadir, laying the groundwork for a hellish recruitment effort to meet Trump’s plan to carry out the “largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” Images of the everyday man in a snapback hat and jeans—turned “heroes” in the eyes of the most powerful man in the world—are instrumental to ICE’s recruiting. The group has set out to hire a staggering 10,000 more officers quickly, thanks to the Republican spending bill.

Federal agents walk around at the immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York in June.Yuki Iwamura/AP

“It’s a uniform that is accessible to anybody, so that any person can feel like they can become an ICE member,” Alison Kinney, author of Hood from the Object Lessons series, told me.

For apologists, the aesthetic makes it easy to argue that these are ordinary American men simply doing their job. Consider the Ku Klux Klan hood. Today, it provokes terror. But in the early days of the Klan, defenders were quick to point to the hood as evidence that these were just good ol’ boysengaging in play. As Georgia state Rep. John Harrison Christy told Congress in 1871: “Sometimes, mischievous boys who want to have some fun go on a masquerading frolic to scare the negroes, but they do not interrupt them, do not hurt them in any way. Stories are exaggerated.”

What kind of person grows up to be an ICE agent? It’s hard to know what those now working for ICE, created in March 2003, had in mind as adolescents considering future career paths.

But my mind traces back to the dudes I knew as a kid, growing up as a first-generation American and a kid of color in suburban New Jersey, where the concept of my “otherness” arrived early. One feature I found striking then, as I do now, is that reminders of this “otherness” nearly always came from boys; I can’t recall an encounter in which my Korean background was called out by a girl. The pattern created the impression, even as a kid, that boys enjoyed a special permission to deploy such taunting. That boys, by their very nature, couldn’t help themselves.It was fun. Wasn’t I having fun, too?

A similar cruelty animates ICE’s harassment of immigrant advocates, the volunteers who show up to court to observe hearings and assist immigrants. Now grown men, these agents shove volunteers, lock people in elevators where they push all the buttons—“we’ll just go for a little ride,” one volunteer recalls an agent telling her—threaten, and sexually harass. Such actions are followed up by public notices from the Trump administration that the project of horror is, in fact, very enjoyable. Here’s a meme about sending people to an El Salvador megaprison. You’re having fun, right?

President Donald Trump, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, is welcomed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Daniel Torok/White House/Planet Pix/Zuma

That ICE is an agency rife with allegations of sexual abuse against detainees is not surprising. “He grabbed my breasts,” a detainee named Maria told the New York Timesin 2018, describing an assault by a male guard. “He put his hands in my pants and he touched my private parts. He touched me again inside the van, and my hands were tied. And he started masturbating.” Today, as Republicans work with the president to shield ICE from outside transparency, you can imagine that the opportunity for sexual assaults is skyrocketing.

It is not an accident that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a woman, is at the top of this hierarchy, with her literal face prioritized by Trump to help sell his brutal immigration policy. “She’s like the most delicate, beautiful, tiny woman,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said, defending Noem after security at her press conference violently removed Sen. Alex Padilla to block him from asking questions. “What actual testosterone dude goes in and tries to break Kristi Noem?”

Here, a woman’s perceived beauty appears to serve as cover for the incredible cruelty of the men beneath her. Their critics, like Padilla, must lack “testosterone.” Today, like yesterday, the same rules of the boys’ club prevail.

ICE’s aesthetics—the choice to look like a plainclothes goon squad—doesn’t just help the agency keep its secrecy. It helps another mission: to make it seem like this is all normal. Because you know this American man. And he might do bad things. But he isn’t so bad, is he? And you’re having fun—even if you’re cringing—right?

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

As President Donald Trump’s bitter feud with Elon Musk spilled into public view last month, aides to the president reportedly launched a behind-the-scenes effort to carry out Trump’s threats to terminate Musk’s contracts with the federal government. Those threats marked an alarming willingness by the president to take his wrestling match with Musk to a potentially new level of lawlessness.

Ultimately, aides to the president, the Wall Street Journal reports, concluded that SpaceX contracts were too critical to operations at the Defense Department and NASA, once again underscoring the federal government’s heavy reliance on Musk’s technologies. But it’s the review itself, that it happened at all, that should cause considerable alarm, even if it involves an unsympathetic character such as Elon Musk.

As my colleague Jeremy Schulman wrote: “In a democracy, politicians simply cannot be allowed to punish dissent by threatening to destroy the businesses of people who cross them—whether those businesses are media companies, law firms, or a defense contractor run by the world’s richest man.” Of course, such concerns can be identified nearly everywhere throughout Trump’s second term, as he uses the enormous powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies: top law firms, cultural institutions, Biden officials, civil servants, and more. Just look at the bogus “investigation” into a renovation at the Federal Reserve as Trump openly considers firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

With SpaceX, Trump may have been thwarted. But that might only be temporary. As the WSJ reports, the review remains ongoing, and aides are sure to be looking into other areas of retribution against Musk as he continues pouring gasoline over their feud. (Musk, who earlier appeared to suggest that Trump may be named in the Epstein files, is now one of several prominent MAGA characters to claim a full-blown “coverup” by the president.) Whatever you might think of the billionaire, that should frighten you.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

As Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who made history last month with his stunning victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, continues to rake in powerful endorsements, he made a scheduling announcement: He’s ona brief trip to celebrate his February nuptials with “family and friends.”

Such bland news wouldn’t normally require the creation of an entire social media video. But it was the trip’s destination—Uganda, where Mamdani was born and lived for seven years before moving to the United States—that Mamdani highlighted to cheekily skewer his critics head-on.

In the clip, Mamdani played on the explosion of racist attacks telling him to “go back” to Africa. He also prepared a string of pun-heavy headlines for the conservative-leaning New York Post.

“UGANDA MISS ME.”

“HE AFRI-CAN’T BE SERIOUS.”

The clip once again underscored the Mamdani campaign’s ability to use social media videos to engage with everyday New Yorkers in ways that are widely praised as authentic, a crucial ingredient to his success. In turn, Mamdani’s opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, have used Mamdani’s social media savvy to attack him. “Let’s be clear: They have a record of tweets,” Adams said last month when he launched his independent campaign.

Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends. But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month. See you soon, NYC. pic.twitter.com/fIOf5NcZqy

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) July 20, 2025

The Uganda trip follows a much-maligned New York Times story on Mamdani’s 2009 college application to Columbia University, in which Mamdani identified as both African-American and Asian. The leaked info used by the Times came from a right-wing eugenicist, whom my colleague Noah Lanard later reported once wished a happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, and used a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

Since stunning the country with his victory last month, Mamdani has worked to charm his detractors, including powerful figures in the business community, with direct meetings. On Friday, he scored the powerful endorsement of a local health care union, which had previously backed Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, who told an audience at a Hamptons fundraiser hosted by Gristedes billionaire John Catsimatidis this weekend that he would move to Florida if Mamdani becomes mayor.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The Trump administration is making it much more difficult for women fleeing gender-based violence in other countries to immigrate to the United States.

On Friday, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the Justice Department, determined that a person can’t seek asylum for persecution based on their sex alone—or sex and nationality. “It’s a significant decision,” says Neela Chakravartula, a lawyer at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies who is co-counsel on the case. “This is trying to make it harder for all women fleeing harm.”

“Out of context,” the decision’s language “might sound like something that Republicans would caricature as coming from some left-wing woke academic.”

The case focuses on a woman from El Salvador, referred to as K-E-S-G, who came to the United States after Salvadoran police would not protect her from gang members who were stalking and threatening her. The Board’s decision is chock full of legalese, but one of the most important lines is this: As a woman from El Salvador, K-E-S-G “is not a member of a cognizable particular social group.” To understand what that means, I turned to Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He directs the UNLV Immigration Clinic and says the Board of Immigration Appeals “got its logic tangled in an effort to close the door on gender-based asylum claims.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. In layman’s terms, why is this decision so important?

This is the latest chapter in a legal struggle about when women who flee gender-based violence are eligible for asylum. It goes back to the Clinton administration at least, so more than 30 years.

A lot of people know that to get asylum, you need to be in danger of persecution. But the problem is that it’s not enough to be in danger of being killed or beaten or raped. You have to be in danger for the right reason, and there are five. [They are race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and “particular social group” membership.]

This is a definition that was written in 1951, and so while some categories that we would recognize from discrimination law, like race and religion, are among the five reasons, sex and gender were not listed. What is in the definition is something called “membership in a particular social group.” So for decades, there’s been a legal struggle over whether gender-based violence can fit in this definition.

This has often been fought over domestic violence cases, but it can also come up in other types of gender violence. The gangs in El Salvador like MS-13 have often targeted women for kidnapping and sexual slavery. Their choice is either to be subjected to repeated rape or to flee.

How difficult was it, before this case, to seek asylum for gender violence?

Winning asylum is never easy. It’s very time consuming and it requires a great deal of evidence, or at least a great deal of testimony by the applicant. It also requires pretty extreme facts: Mild forms of domestic violence that might be criminal under US law might not be enough to generate an asylum claim if someone fled from another country.

In addition, the key question is, often, does the other government take enough steps to protect women from it? Domestic violence happens in every country, but violence can be worsened if men are taught by their society that their partners are their property or that men are allowed to beat their their wives, and likewise, if a government decides, “We don’t get involved, or our police don’t protect women from this because we think men are allowed to beat their female partners,” then that might be discriminatory violence. And that gives rise to the question of, well, are women a particular group? The decision today is that women are not. That is kind of a surprising conclusion.

Why surprising?

It certainly fits the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant orientation, but it seems surprising in terms of gender ideology issues. In other contexts—think of the rhetoric about transgender identity—the government is saying there’s only two genders, and we know exactly what they are—”we know what is a man, and we know what is a woman.” But now we have them saying, “Well, actually, we don’t think women are a socially cognizable group,” which certainly sounds like you’re saying, “I don’t know what you mean when you say ‘women.'”

If you read the Board of Immigration Appeal’s decision, literally what it says is that women are not socially cognizable. And that sounds like talking out of both sides of your mouth. If you took some of those lines out of context, it might sound like something that Republicans would caricature as coming from some left-wing woke academic at an Ivy League university, but actually it’s being deployed here for a very different purpose.

What are the holes in the argument?

I think there are ways in which it confuses elements of the asylum definition. In fact, if a student turned it in, I would have a number of critiques that I’d want them to do some more thinking about.

An initial critique is that it seems to conflate, at least for women, the question of being a cognizable social group with being being persecuted at a high rate. The board noted that female genital mutilation in Somalia might still be a valid basis for asylum, because in Somalia 98 percent of women are mutilated.

I’m glad that women from Somalia can seek asylum. But in terms of the legal theory, this is where the Board of Immigration Appeals got its logic tangled, because you are generally not supposed to define the particular social group by the persecution. Instead, you’re supposed to show that the persecution is caused by membership in the particular social group. And they got that confused.

Let me give an illustration. White men could be a particular social group. The issue, though, is, are white men likely to be persecuted because of their identity? Usually not, so they wouldn’t have valid asylum claims. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid particular social group. In the case today, the board seemed to get these issues confused. Just because women are a social group doesn’t mean every woman would be able to get asylum—she would still have to show, “I have a well-founded fear of being persecuted on account of being a woman in my country,” and that’s difficult in many cases.

This is a very basic question, but what exactly is the Board of Immigration Appeals, and are its decisions binding in the way a court decision might be?

It is not a court, though it tries sometimes to walk and talk like a court. Immigration courts are not really courts either, but they also try to walk and talk like courts. This is administrative adjudication within the Department of Justice. So basically, decisions of immigration judges are appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and both of those entities sit underneath the attorney general, who can overrule either of them.

Going back to the Clinton administration, there has been a promise to have regulations on gender-based claims for asylum, particularly by Democratic administrations, but they never get it done. Clinton didn’t get it done, Obama didn’t get it done, and then Biden didn’t get it done. And so we’ve actually ended up with fairly muddled law.

There was muddled law at the end of the Obama administration that left the door open to domestic violence-based asylum claims, but in a fairly convoluted way. Then, in Trump’s first term, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, issued a decision called Matter of A-B that largely rejected asylum based on domestic violence, but also was a very, very long decision that seemed, in some ways, to just be a long essay of Sessions’ thoughts about asylum and immigration law. That decision was then vacated by [then-Attorney General] Merrick Garland during the Biden administration. But the Biden administration didn’t actually clear up the legal terrain very much. They just erased what Trump had done. So they kind of returned things to the way they were under Obama, which hadn’t been perfectly clear.

Trump is back now, and this is where we are. Appeals can be reviewed in normal asylum cases by the Circuit Courts of Appeals, and this decision by the Board is likely to be challenged in multiple courts around the country. Maybe the Supreme Court will eventually take it up. That’s very hard to predict, but this is probably not the last word, though it’s a very significant development.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This story was originally published byVox.com,and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the wake of the record-breaking wildfires in Los Angeles in January—some of the most expensive and destructive blazes in history—one of the first things California Gov. Gavin Newsom did was to sign an executive order suspending environmental rules around rebuilding.

The idea was that by waiving permitting regulations and reviews under the California Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), homeowners and builders could start cleaning up, putting up walls, and getting people back into houses faster.

But that raised a key question for housing advocates: Could California do something similar for the whole state?

Earlier this month, Newsom took a step in that direction, signing two bills that would exempt most urban housing from environmental reviews and make it easier for cities to increase housing by changing zoning laws. Newsom also signed another executive order that suspends some local permitting laws and building codes for fire-afflicted communities with the aim of further speeding up reconstruction.

“Anecdotally, we’ve heard that a lot of people have decided they don’t want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.”

Housing reforms can’t come soon enough for the City of Angels. Blown by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds over an unusually dry, grassy landscape, the wildfires that tore through LA burned almost 48,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including more than 9,500 single-family homes, 1,200 duplexes, and 600 apartments in one of the most housing-starved regions of the country.

Los Angeles is a critical case study for housing for the whole state, a test of whether the Democratic-controlled government can coordinate its conflicting political bases—unions, environmental groups, housing advocates—with a desperate need for more homes. Revising the state’s environmental laws was seen by some observers as a sign that the Golden State was finally seeing the light.

But despite the relaxed rules, progress in LA has been sluggish. More than 800 homeowners in areas affected by wildfires applied for rebuilding permits as of July 7, according to the Los Angeles Times. Fewer than 200 have received the green light, however. The City of Los Angeles takes about 55 days on average to approve a wildfire rebuild, and the broader Los Angeles County takes even longer. (Los Angeles County has a dashboard to track permitting approvals in unincorporated areas.)

“LA’s process is super slow, so that’s not surprising,” said Elisa Paster, a managing partner at Rand Paster Nelson based in Los Angeles and specializing in land use law. “Anecdotally, we’ve heard that a lot of people have decided they don’t want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.”

Now, half a year out after the embers have died down, it’s clear that changing the rules isn’t enough. Advocates for CEQA say the 55-year-old law is really a scapegoat for bigger, more intractable housing problems. Other factors, like more expensive construction materials and labor shortages, are still driving up housing construction costs, regardless of permitting speeds. And some environmental groups worry that the rush to rebuild everything as it was could re-create the conditions that led to the blazes in the first place, a dangerous prospect in an area where wildfire risks are only growing.

CEQA is one of California’s tentpole environmental laws, signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970. It requires that state and local governments preemptively look for any potential environmental harms from a construction project, like water pollution, threats to endangered species, and later, greenhouse gas emissions. Developers need to disclose these issues and take steps to avoid them. The law also allows the public to weigh in on new developments.

In the years since, CEQA has been blamed as a barrier to new construction. Many critics see it as a cynical tool wielded to prevent new housing construction in wealthy communities, even being invoked to challenge highway closures and new parks on environmental grounds. It’s one of the villains of the “abundance” movement that advocates for cutting red tape to build more homes and clean energy.

“The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that’s designed to burn?”

However, CEQA isn’t necessarily the gatekeeper to rebuilding single-family homes after wildfires, according to Matthew Baker, policy director at Planning and Conservation League, a nonprofit that helped shepherd CEQA in the first place.

For one thing, CEQA already has broad exemptions for replacing and rebuilding structures, and new construction of “small” structures like single-family homes. “Our general take is that the executive orders around revoking environmental review and environmental regulations around the rebuilding [after the fires] did little to nothing beyond what was already in existing law,” Baker said. He added that the vast majority of projects that face CEQA review get the go-ahead, and less than 2 percent of proposals face litigation.

But the mere threat of a lawsuit and the precautions to avoid one can become a significant hurdle on its own. “CEQA can be an expensive and lengthy process, especially for large or complicated projects. This is true even if there is not litigation,” according to a 2024 report from California’s Little Hoover Commission, the state’s independent oversight agency. “Preparation of an Environmental Impact Report under CEQA can take a year or longer and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even, in some cases, more than $1 million.”

In addition, CEQA does come into play for people who want to make more extensive changes to their property as they rebuild, like if they want to expand their floorspace more than 10 percent beyond their original floor plan. The law is also triggered by broader wildfire risk reduction initiatives, namely brush clearance and controlled burns, as well as infrastructure upgrades like putting power lines underground to prevent fire ignitions or installing more pipelines and cisterns for water to help with firefighting. Exempting these projects could help communities build fire resilience faster.

For multifamily homes like duplexes and apartment buildings, CEQA can be an obstacle, too, if the developer wants to rebuild with more units. “We have multifamily buildings in the Palisades that had rent-controlled units, and what we’ve been hearing from some of these property owners is like, ‘Yeah, sure. I had 20 rent-controlled units there before, but I can’t afford to just rebuild 20.’ Those people want to go back and build 50 units, 20 of which could be rent-controlled, or all of which are rent-controlled.” By bypassing CEQA, higher-density housing has an easier path to completion.

Rebuilding after fires is always going to be expensive. Your home may have been built and sold in the 1970s, but you’ll have to pay 2025 prices for materials and labor when you rebuild. California already faces some of the highest housing costs in the country and a shortage of construction workers.

The Trump administration is pushing the price tag higher with tariffs on components like lumber and its campaign to deport people. About 41 percent of workers in California’s construction industry are immigrants, and 14 percent are undocumented.

But even before they can rebuild, one of the biggest challenges for people who have lost their homes is simply becoming whole after a loss. “From the clients that I’ve spoken to, they’ve had to argue with their insurance company to get full replacement value or reasonable compensation, and that’s where they’re getting stuck,” said David Hertz, an architect based in Santa Monica.

“There’s a balance” between housing and environmental concerns. “Nature doesn’t have its own voice.”

On top of the tedious claims process, insurance companies in California have been dropping some of their customers in high fire-risk areas, leaving them no option besides the FAIR Plan, the state’s high-priced, limited-coverage insurer of last resort. But after the multibillion-dollar losses from the Los Angeles fires, the FAIR Plan had to collect an additional $1 billion from its member companies, a move that will raise property insurance prices. People who can’t get property insurance can’t get a mortgage from most lenders.

There’s also the concern of exactly where and how homes are rebuilt. In 2008, California updated its building codes to make structures more resistant to wildfires, but bringing burned-down old homes to new standards in high fire risk areas adds to the timeline and the price tag.

“There’s this tension between all of us wanting to have people be able to rebuild their homes in their communities, and there’s the question of ‘Are we just going to build back the same thing in the same unsafe place? Are we going to try to do things better?” Baker said.

All the while, wildfires are becoming more destructive. Wildfires are a natural part of Southern California’s landscape, but more people are crowding into areas that are primed to burn, and the danger zones are widening. That increases the chances of a wildfire ignition and makes the ensuing blazes more damaging.

With average temperatures rising, California is seeing more aggressive swings between severe rainfall and drought. The 2025 Los Angeles fires were preceded in 2024 by one of the wettest winters in the region’s history, followed by one of the hottest summers on record, and bookended by one of the driest starts to winter. It created the ideal conditions for ample dry grasses and chaparral that fueled the infernos.

“The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that’s designed to burn?” Hertz said. Reducing wildfire risk on a wider scale requires coordination between neighbors.

For example, Hertz said that in many of the communities that burned, there are likely many residents who won’t come back. Neighbors could coordinate to buy up and swap vacant land parcels to create a defensible space with fire-resistant trees like oak to serve as fire breaks and water storage to help respond to future blazes. Hertz himself leads a community brigade, trained volunteers who work to reduce wildfire risk in their neighborhoods.

He also cautioned that while there’s a lot of well-deserved pushback against regulations like CEQA, the reasoning behind it remains sound. Development without any environmental considerations could put more homes in the path of danger and destroy the ecosystems that make California such an attractive place to live. “I think there’s a balance,” Hertz said. “Nature doesn’t have its own voice.”

At the same time, without speeding up the pace at which California restores the homes that were lost and builds new ones, the housing crisis will only get worse. The state will become unlivable for many residents. Long after the burn scars fade and new facades are erected, communities will be altered permanently.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

“I want every email from Epstein,” declared MAGA activist, self-styled journalist, former men’s rights advocate, former Pizzagate promoter, and former juicing evangelist Mike Cernovich recently, speaking to MAGA-world figure and disgraced BuzzFeed plagiarist Benny Johnson. “It might embarrass people, I don’t care. We’re done.”

In the decades since the Jeffrey Epstein scandal began, it has attracted a lot of attention from very strange and distinctly unsavory people, each drawn to the case for their own reasons. Cernovich, for instance, got involved in his capacity as a quasi-journalist and promoter of conspiracy theories involving wealthy and powerful cabals of sexual abusers. He was one of the people who sued to unseal documents in the civil case of Victoria Giuffre, a woman who alleged that Epstein trafficked her to numerous wealthy and powerful men.

But these days even the frequent disinformation peddlers like Cernovich have a reasonable point: There is a disturbing amount that we still don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein.

The first real question is about Epstein’s personal fortune; it’s never been clear how, exactly, he got so rich.

The basic facts are clear, of course: Epstein was a billionaire pedophile and friend to the world’s wealthy and powerful who, in all likelihood and according to every piece of available evidence, died by suicide in 2019 while incarcerated and facing sex trafficking charges. But from the time Epstein’s crimes first began to attract notice from the police and press in the early 2000sto the scandal and chaos that ensued this month after Trump’s FBI and Department of Justice tried to quietly close the book on the case, there have been loose ends, unanswered questions, unreleased documents, and an endless amount of fodder for future conspiracy theories.

The first real question is about Epstein’s personal fortune; it’s never been clear how, exactly, he got so rich. In a 2019 story, the New York Times attempted to answer that question, noting that in the 1980s, Epstein befriended Victoria’s Secret founder Lex Wexner, quickly becoming his personal money manager. Epstein had worked for two years as a math and physics teacher at the elite Dalton School and then as an options trader for Bear Stearns before being dismissed in 1981. From there, he founded his own money management firm for billionaire clients. That business was an immediate, almost baffling, success. As New York magazine wrote in 2002, “There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos—just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.”

By the time Vicky Ward wrote a famous profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, he was committed to a life of secrecy, what Ward described as “fastidiously, almost obsessively private.”

Among those clients—central among them, as far as anyone can tell—was Wexner of Victoria’s Secret. Those around the executive also couldn’t understand why Epstein had so quickly assumed a position of trust in his financial life. “Virtually from the moment in the 1980s that Mr. Epstein arrived on the scene in Columbus, Ohio, where L Brands was based,” the Times wrote in its 2019 story, “Mr. Wexner’s friends and colleagues were mystified as to why a renowned businessman in the prime of his career would place such trust in an outsider with a thin résumé and scant financial experience.” And it was through his association with Wexner’s companies that Epstein began trying to expand his access to young women, the Times wrote, “trying to involve himself in the recruitment of lingerie models for the Victoria’s Secret catalog.”

(While Wexner didn’t speak to the Times after Epstein’s second arrest, he told his employees in a 2019 letter acquired by the paper that he was “NEVER aware of the illegal activity charged in the indictment.”)

By the time Vicky Ward wrote a famous profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, he was committed to a life of secrecy, what Ward described as “fastidiously, almost obsessively private—he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym.”

“There are many women in his life, mostly young,” Ward wrote, in a line that now sounds incredibly ominous. “But there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit.”

It would take until 2019 before Epstein was indicted again, this time on federal sex trafficking charges, with the date of the alleged offenses listed as from 2002 to “at least 2005.”

By the early 2000s, Epstein was living in a Palm Beach mansion. There, he and his accomplices, including ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, hired teenage girls to massage him; during these sessions, Epstein would sexually abuse them. (Maxwell was not charged until 2020; she’s now serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges.)

Epstein was finally indicted in 2006, but as journalist Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald has meticulously documented for years, he was almost immediately handed an extraordinarily, scandalously gentle plea deal. Epstein pleaded guilty to just two felony prostitution charges, and he and his accomplices received a federal non-prosecution agreement where he wasn’t charged for sex trafficking. Top federal prosecutor Alex Acosta was directly involved in brokering the deal; years later, while serving as Donald Trump’s labor secretary, renewed criticism of his role in the Epstein deal led him to resign. Epstein served just 13 months in county jail, where he spent most of his time at his office on what was dubbed work release. A jail supervisor wrote in a memo that his jail cell should be left unlocked “for the time being” and he should be given “liberal access to the attorney room where a TV will be installed.” It would take until 2019 before furor over the non-prosecution agreement reached a fever pitch and Epstein was indicted again in New York, this time on federal sex trafficking charges, with the date of the alleged offenses listed as from 2oo2 to “at least 2005.”

Besides the mystery of Epstein’s wealth and his exceptionally soft-handed treatment by the justice system, there’s also a mountain of unreleased material attached to the many civil and two criminal cases filed against him. As Brown outlined in March, material from numerous cases has never been released, including discovery documents for a civil case filed in 2008 against the FBI by Epstein’s alleged victims. There’s also unreleased evidence relating to Epstein’s properties in the US Virgin Islands, Little Saint James and Greater Saint James.

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote in open letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

(After weeks of criticism, Trump recently called for the release of grand jury records from Epstein’s Florida and New York cases; since grand jury records are usually secret, the process of releasing those records could take a very long time. “I have asked the Justice Department to release all Grand Jury testimony with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, subject only to Court Approval,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial on Saturday morning. “With that being said, and even if the Court gave its full and unwavering approval, nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request. It will always be more, more, more. MAGA!”)

Besides all the unreleased court records and the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, there is, of course, the question of why the FBI and DOJ released an unsigned memo declaring the case closed. And just this week, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois alleged that the FBI was told to “flag” any Epstein files relating to Trump. The implications of that allegation, however, are not yet fully clear.

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” Durbin wrote in open letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

One of the less compelling allegations in the Epstein saga is the idea that a Deep State assassin snuck into his Manhattan jail cell in 2019. In all likelihood, Epstein died alone, facing something approaching a real consequence for the first time in his sordid life. But it’s absolutely true that it’s still not fully clear who aided his rise, bolstered his fortune, and possibly helped him evade responsibility for his crimes, nor is the extent of those crimes or the infrastructure of wealth, power, and coercion that made them possible. In a rare moment of unity for the American public during an impossibly fractured time, that, at least, is something we can all agree on.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Thursday, Stephen Colbert, the beloved, sharp-tongued comedian and host of the Late Show, announced that CBS was cancelling the legendary franchise. “This is all just going away,” Colbert told the audience, as they responded with a wave of gasps and jeers. Online, the news was met with a similar blend of shock and anger.

The move to cancel one of television’s last remaining crown jewels of broadcast programming came just days after Colbert publicly criticized CBS’s corporate owner, Paramount, for agreeing to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle an outrageous $20 billion lawsuit against the company. Trump has now long claimed that 60 Minutes producers unfairly edited their interview with then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris, a complaint widely viewed by legal and media experts as completely baseless. The agreement was the latest in a series of bootlicking moves by Paramount as its chairwoman, Shari Redstone, desperately tries to sell the company to Skydance Media, a deal that requires federal approval.

If that sounds like the groundwork for a bribery, Colbert agrees. In his opening monologue on Monday, the host called the settlement a “big fat bribe.” CBS has since claimed that Colbert’s cancellation is “purely financial,” even though the Late Show currently clocks in as the highest-rated show on late-night.

So, what’s the truth? There’s little to doubt that the finances surrounding late-night production are probably not great. TV, particularly shows that require original writing and a marquee host, is an expensive undertaking. But the details of what led to the decision to sack Colbert are certain to expose an extraordinary level of eagerness by Paramount’s top brass to grovel at the feet of this president, as he targets his perceived enemies—the nation’s top schools, law firms, and so forth—with colossal funding threats, lawsuits, and beyond. Remember that Redstone, daughter of Paramount founder Sumner Redstone, reportedly saw nothing wrong with instructing CBS leaders to shelve negative stories about Trump until after the Skydance merger was officially sealed.

But Paramount’s future aside, the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide. Though his second term has already produced a string of stunning capitulations by some of the most powerful forces in the country, one could argue that Trump’s attacks had yet to take down our actual culture. I’m talking about the literal content we consume—the television, art, movies, literature, music—no matter how much Trump complained. That it remained protected and free-willed, a rare area of control for a public that otherwise feels powerless to take action. Clearly, that was magical thinking.

The only upside is that Colbert will soon be free to go scorched earth against a president he detests. Every other network stands to gain enormously right now. Here’s to hoping a spine emerges.

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