Mother Jones

During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump talked a lot about pulling America out of international treaties and disentangling from military operations abroad.

Once in office, he started talking about the idea of Manifest Destiny—that the expansion of the US was both justified and inevitable. In some cases that’s meant turning the tables on America’s friends and allies.

For this week’s show, Reveal reporter Nate Halverson and Panamanian journalist Andrea Salcedo investigate how the Trump administration’s threats to reclaim the Panama Canal are fueling protests and destabilizing a longtime ally. Trump has said military force may be necessary to retake control of the canal from China.

“China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back,” Trump said in January.

But the administration’s allegations about China’s control over the canal perplex many Panamanians.

“We just said wow, how many people can be wrong about the Chinese having a lot of influence over the Panama Canal?” says Jorge Luis Quijano, the canal’s top administrator from 2012 to 2019.

The Trump administration’s threats against Panama are also reviving painful memories of the 1989 US invasion that claimed the lives of an estimated 500 Panamanians.

For wider context, host Al Letson speaks with Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who wrote about the Panama Canal in his book American Psychosis. Corn talks about how reclaiming the canal has been used as a political cudgel by conservatives in the US, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Letson also speaks with Emma Ashford, a foreign policy expert at the Stimson Center, about how Panama fits into the Trump administration’s other moves on the international front.

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

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Thursday, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, approved the $8 billion merger between Skydance Media and Paramount, a deal that would allocate more than a billion dollars towards the latter company’s staggering debt.

But the agreement came with onemajor caveat: The media company must appoint a “bias monitor.”

According to reporting from The Wrap, an FCC “ombudsman” would work directly with New Paramount’s president, Jeff Shell, to review “any complaints of bias or other concerns” regarding CBS News, a subsidiary under Paramount.

Paramount also agreed to eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including scrapping all DEI messaging from its internal training programs and removing DEI objectives in its compensation plans.

This move comes after the company announced the cancellation of The Colbert Report only a few days after the eponymous host critiqued the network’s recent settlement with the president. Earlier this month, Paramount agreed to cough up $16 million to Trump after the president sued the network for allegedly unfairly editing an interview with Kamala Harris, an accusation that many legal experts have called “baseless.”

As my colleague, Inae Oh, has reported, Colbert’s cancellation marks a dark new chapter for our culture as a whole. Oh writes:

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. If this can happen to Colbert and a storied franchise, this can happen to anyone.

And when it comes to using his presidential power as a cudgel against the media that critiques him, Trump clearly shows no signs of stopping. This week alone, the president threw a tantrum over two TV shows that joked about him. On Wednesday, the White House issued a statement threatening the ladies of The View after host Joy Behar joked that Trump was jealous of former president Barack Obama’s “swag.”

A White House spokesperson told Entertainment Weekly, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

A White House spokesperson told Entertainment Weekly, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome” who “should self-reflect on her own jealousy of President Trump’s historic popularity before her show is the next to be pulled off air.”

Behar’s joke was tame compared to the animated show, South Park‘s treatment of Trump, who was depicted naked in bed with Satan. In response, the White House claimed that the show hasn’t been relevant in “20 years” and said “no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”

How long will South Park, whose creators just signed a 50-episode deal with Paramount, last under Trump’s regime? Let’s hope the ombudsman finds the Trump jokes funny.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

The devastating flood that swept through Camp Mystic in Texas this month is every parent’s worst nightmare. Hours or days of fear and uncertainty, feeling powerless to help, and, for the families of the 27 campers and staff members who perished, the most painful news imaginable.

Although flash flooding is a recurring problem in the region, climate change exacerbates the problem. Scientists in Europe have already conducted a rapid assessment and determined that the storm dropped 7 percent more rain than it would have otherwise because of global warming. With 129 fatalities—including at least 36 children—and more than 170 people still missing, it is among the deadliest floods in the state’s history.

Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, posted a message to LinkedIn about the flooding on July 5, writing, “The news is heartbreaking. As a parent it’s hard to even process.”

The fact that so many children and young people lost their lives underscores the importance of educational groups like Science Moms, a nonpartisan organization started in 2019 by Hayhoe and other leading climate scientists and mothers. The group works to demystify climate change and motivate moms to demand plans and solutions that will protect the planet for their kids—and their kids from dangerous, climate-change fueled extreme weather events.

“We feel like we have an obligation to both, get prepared, get on it, reduce our emissions, and help our people weather this.”

Joellen Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona, says her identities as climate scientist and concerned mother merged long before she helped start Science Moms.

Russell was several months pregnant with her first child in 2007, when 12 states sued the EPA over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Russell reached out to John Mike Wallace, her mentor and former colleague at the University of Washington, where Russell worked as a research associate after completing her PhD. “I wrote to him, and I said, ‘Hey, Mike, I’m pregnant. I’m waiting on this new little one, and you need to step up and help me, because we need to turn this bus,’” she recalls. “‘We need to make a change in the world.’”

Wallace wrote back right away saying he’d help. Russell, Wallace, and other scientists signed an amicus brief submitted in the landmark Supreme Court case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, which the Supreme Court cited when they ruled the Clean Air Act covered carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Russell’s son Joseph was born a few months later.

United States emissions have dropped 15 percent since 2007.

Now, Russell says, she tries to lean into her humanness and her “momness” as an educator, scientist, advocate for truth. “I’m so thrilled that I have these two gorgeous babies, and I am really worried,” Russell says. “I don’t want them to have to lift this burden. They will, but if there’s anything I can do, I want to do it.”

Science Moms has partnered with Potential Energy, a nonprofit marketing firm “for planet Earth,” on a multimillion-dollar campaign to inform moms about climate change. Their most high-profile ad to date ran during the 2025 Superbowl, when millions heard the message: “Climate change is like watching them grow up: we blink and we miss it.” Months after the commercial aired, Erica Smithwick, a Science Mom and professor of geography at Penn State, still gets postcards from moms the ad resonated with.

A 2020 study by theYale Program on Climate Communication found over half of the US population is concerned about climate change. An analysis by Potential Energy found approximately 70 percent of mothers say they’re concerned about climate change. According to Smithwick, moms are ideal environmental advocates because they cut to the core of complex issues. Moms already led advocacy groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (now Everytown for Gun Safety), and climate change will impact future generations most of all, so a mom-led climate science organization just made sense.

Erica Smithwick explores a burned area of Yellowstone National Park with her son.Courtesy of Erica Smithwick

“Mothers throughout time have always put in that extra labor because they care about the health of their families,” Smithwick says. “Whether that’s smoking or seat belts or gun safety, all of those are things that I think moms do care about profoundly. When we think about climate change…we really are worried that our kids are going to get heat stroke, and we’re worried that our kids aren’t going to be able to go on vacation or play outside.”

Smithwick says she waited 15 years to take her two kids to Yellowstone National Park, where she has research​​ed forest resiliency. With the recent wildfires in the West, she thinks it may be too late for her children to see these landmarks without them being shrouded in smoke. Now, as a dangerous heat wave surges across the eastern United States, moms like Smithwick worry even more about the safety of their kids in a rapidly changing world.

Despite the gravity of the issues Science Moms communicate, Smithwick says they strive not to “problematize,” and instead move toward action.

The Science Moms website provides mothers with resources and connects them with individual scientists. The site features explainer-style videos and podcasts, guides for how to talk about climate change with family members, and a letter template for moms to reach out to local leaders and ask about plans to stop big polluters.

“It’s really hard to shine the light on climate change after a tragedy…but it’s actually super important.”

This year, Science Moms will be rolling out education campaigns related to extreme weather events. They want to ensure moms around the country are prepared for emergencies, including heat waves and hurricanes, in what may be the hottest summer on record. Russell lives in Arizona, one of the fastest warming states in the nation. In 2024, Arizona’s health department appointed its first chief heat officer, Eugene Livar, to lead the state’s Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan.

“We’re sitting in the hot seat, the bullseye of global warming,” Russell says. “We feel like we have an obligation to both, get prepared, get on it, reduce our emissions and help our people weather this.”

Russell says Science Moms will be focusing outreach toward purple and red-leaning states like Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, states where a large percentage of people have been skeptical about climate change information in the past.

According to Russell, the mission of Science Moms remains the same, regardless of administration. Science Moms aims to cut through misinformation and share facts backed up by science. “The sort of cacophony of shifts that are happening up at the higher level of the administration doesn’t really speak to what a lot of moms care about, whatever side of the political aisle they’re on,” Smithwick says.

Tragedies like the Texas flood show how challenging it is to walk a neutral political line, especially when attacks on science are primarily coming from one political party. The exact degree to which the Trump administration’s National Weather Service budget and staffing cuts may have played a role in the disaster is still a matter of debate.

“I think every time we have a tragedy like this, which is unimaginable in its own ways—this particular one—it’s unfortunately a reminder that we have to not look away from climate change,” says Emily Fischer, a professor in the department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and one of the founding members of Science Moms. “We have to look straight at it and work together to prevent these kinds of disasters from getting worse.”

But she recognizes how difficult that can be, especially in a moment like this. “It’s really hard to shine the light on climate change after a tragedy,” she adds. “It feels icky in some ways, I think, but it’s actually super important.”

Writing on LinkedIn (in a personal capacity, not necessarily as a representative of Science Moms) Katharine Hayhoe said: “The more climate change supersizes our weather extremes, the more info we need to keep people safe. This includes experts, instruments, models, research, and assessments: everything that’s currently being reduced or cut by the US administration.”

Despite political and environmental uncertainty, Russell sees hope for the future in the eyes of her children. Climate change is a family affair, she says, one she shares with her son, Joseph—a budding climate educator who has passed out exams in her classes for years—and his younger sister, Maeve. It’s an issue that has developed over generations, and it will take generations to fix.

“I plan to fight until I can’t anymore,” Russell says. “When I drop in the traces and can’t go any farther, my kids will step right over me and get up that hill.”

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Donald Trump is coming for the “holy grail” of climate regulations. As multiple media outlets reported this week, the administration plans to roll back the “endangerment finding,” an Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency decision at the center of the government’s ability to address climate change.

On paper, the endangerment finding states that greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide pose a risk to the public’s health and well-being. That may sound obvious enough. But in practice, it’s one of the agency’s most important decisions.

That’s thanks to the landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the agency not only has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, but the obligation to do so, if it determines the pollutants pose a health hazard. In 2009, backed by an overwhelming body of science, the endangerment finding did just that.

Now, the Trump administration reportedly plans to throw out the finding, stripping the EPA of its central role in regulating emissions from vehicle tailpipes, power plants, and more. If the administration succeeds in court (a big if), experts say it would put the United States’—and the world’s—ability to fight climate change at risk.

To understand what rescinding the endangerment finding might mean, I called up Pat Parenteau, an emeritus law professor and senior fellow for climate policy in the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School, and James Milkey, a retired Massachusetts Appeals Court justice and former environmental attorney who argued Massachusetts v. EPA before the Supreme Court.

Here are a few takeaways from our conversations.

The evidence that greenhouse gases are bad for health is irrefutable.

More than two decades ago, Milkey and his team at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office sued the Bush administration over its inaction on climate change in Massachusetts v. EPA. At the time, he recalls, they faced all sorts of challenges, but “marshaling the underlying science was not one of them.”

The science was clear. “Scientists are the most skeptical people on Earth,” he says. “And there was a scientific consensus that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere posed dire threats.”

Since then, those threats have only worsened. As the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed in 2023, concluded, “Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.”

The Trump administration, in a sense, appears to recognize this. While it hasn’t released the details of its proposal publicly, reports from the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets indicate that Trump officials aren’t planning to repeal the endangerment finding on scientific grounds, but procedural ones, and will reportedly argue that the Obama administration overstepped its authority under the Clean Air Act.

Rescinding the “endangerment finding” won’t be easy.

On June 30, the Trump EPA sent its proposal—”Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards”—to the Office of Management and Budget, an EPA spokesperson told Mother Jones in an emailed statement. The proposal will be published for public comment, the spokesperson said, “once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the Administrator.”

After it’s finalized, expect “lawsuits galore,” Parenteau says, whether from attorneys general in blue states, public health groups, or climate nonprofits.

“God help us,” Parenteau says, “because there are not five votes to uphold.”

From there, it could take years—possibly the rest of the Trump administration’s term in office, according to Parenteau—for the courts to sort out the lawsuits. Ultimately, the question is likely to go to the Supreme Court. If the court also decides to reconsider Massachusetts v. EPA, the foundation for the endangerment finding, “God help us,” says Parenteau, “because there are not five votes to uphold [the ruling].”

And in the meantime, if EPA rolls back other rules based on the endangerment finding—like the Biden administration’s efforts to curb tailpipe emissions and encourage the transition to electric vehicles—the administration is likely to face even more lawsuits, Parenteau says: “Litigation, litigation, litigation, all the time, everywhere, all at once.”

It could also backfire.

As Parenteau wrote in the Conversation in March, throwing out the endangerment finding might not be all good news for Big Oil.

Across the country, Parenteau explains, cities and states have sued fossil fuel companies in dozens of lawsuits over damage caused by climate change. In response, the companies have argued that the federal Clean Air Act supersedes the state lawsuits. But if Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding succeeds, Parenteau says, and greenhouse gas emissions aren’t regulated under the Act, that could “undercut” the companies’ arguments.

“You’ve got to be careful what you ask for in law,” he says, “because you never can be sure what the unintended consequences are going to be.”

Win or lose, Trump has signaled no intention to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

When I asked Milkey how a challenge to the endangerment finding might play out in court, he didn’t think Team Trump would have much of a chance, at least on the scientific front. “But the scary part is,” Milkey says, “from their perspective, I don’t think it matters.”

“The damage is being done regardless of who wins the ultimate legal fight.”

As the legal conflict rolls on, the administration may go years, potentially, without implementing any sort of climate regulation (or enforcing existing ones). “It’s parallel to the Trump administration illegally pulling research grants from universities—the damage is being done,” Milkey says, “regardless of who wins the ultimate legal fight.”

That would set the country back on climate action at a time when we can’t afford to delay. The United States is the second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases, after China, in the world. If we abandon any effort to reduce emissions, Parenteau warns, the world won’t come close to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement—limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, let alone a less damaging 1.5 degrees. “That’s the cascading effect of this,” Parenteau says, “we cripple the world’s ability to create anything approaching a livable planet.”

“Many areas here and abroad are well on their way to becoming uninhabitable before our eyes,” Milkey says, echoing Parenteau. “People are dying. There are 100 million people suffering under a heat dome in the United States. So what makes the current proposal by EPA so astonishing to me is its sheer audacity.” When the country’s top environmental agency ignores those threats in the face of clear science, he says, “It’s not an exaggeration to call it another Big Lie.”

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) reported to federal prison on Friday, after pleading guilty in 2024 to identity theft and wire fraud, stemming, in part, from a spectacular straw-donor scandal that was dwarfed by his still-more-spectacular “entire life story” scandal. As political prisoners go, Santos is not quite on par with his friend and mentor Nelson Mandela, buthe has hinted in recent days that he may be killed in prison for what he knows. I don’t wish that on him, of course, but also don’t take it very seriously. Before becoming the first member of the House to get expelled from the chamber in more than two decades, he’d spent barely enough time in Washington to know where the Speaker’s Lobby is—let alone where the bodies are buried.

But Santos’ banishment and subsequent imprisonment does make him an exceptional case in one key way: Santos showed that it was possible for party leaders and rank-and-file members to act swiftly to deal with a fabulist whose very presence insulted the office he held—provided it was just a powerless back-bencher whose transgressions they could all laugh away.

Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.

When the New York Times first exposed Santos’ biography as largely fictitious after the 2024 election, a lot of people spent a lot of time asking how someone like this could win. There was, of course, a major failure from Democrats in New York to pick up on basic red flags over the course of two successive campaigns. And there was a failure by Republicans’ vaunted Nassau County machine to do the same before twice giving their official imprimatur to a man who lied about being both Jewish and the producer of the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. These were fair questions, but they also tended to obscure a larger one.

Some of the loudest voices in favor of expulsion were Santos’ fellow New York Republicans, eager to cast out their colleague as a MAGA imposter and condemning his lies and transgressions with unusual directness. It’s that age-old, never-quite-true maxim: This is not who we are. Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.

Santos’ fleeting ascent is no great mystery if you view it in the larger context of a party leadership that’s desensitized to scammers and a party base that’s uncommonly susceptible to them. His claims to have played varsity volleyball at a college he never attended are not so different from the president’s recent claim to have an uncle who taught the Unabomber at a college the Unabomber never attended. The president, of course, was convicted on 34 felony counts in 2024 of falsifying business records to circumvent campaign finance laws. His administration seems to lie about everything, as a matter of course. It requires more than a little bit of credulity to blame the rise of a transparent a grifter like Santos on bandwidth issues at the vetting department; “How could a con artist from Queens make it so far in Donald Trump’s Republican party?” is a question that seems to answer itself.

None of this is to excuse Santos’ illegal behavior. It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust. But also: It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust! And in an age of court-sanctioned impunity for presidential crimes, of mass pardons for insurrectionists and political allies and seemingly anyone who has been convicted of public corruption in recent memory, it sort of feels like a joke that the one Republicans actually facing consequences for his actions is this guy.

There’s a famous quote from the late UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian about the false morality at the heart of college athletics: “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky,” he said, “it’s going to give Cleveland State two more years of probation.” I don’t think you need to know much about college sports to get the basic point. The Republican Party in the Trump era is awash in grifters, weirdos, and frauds. The animating purpose is a mass public deception for the sake of wide-scale fleecing by a billionaire hustler. So it got rid of George Santos as fast as it could.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter,Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

There’s nothing like a $125 million opening weekend to overcome MAGA whining, and Superman just walloped the bad-faith culture warriors of the right.

The conservative movement has long relished ginning up moral panics to distract from more important matters, such as its never-ending assault on low- and middle-income Americans and its obeisance to plutocrats. The right resorts to culture warfare over abortion, guns, gay rights, immigration, and religion to win over voters who might otherwise recoil at GOP efforts to increase the power and wealth of corporate America and 1-percenters. And Trump and Co. have followed this playbook, with their crusades against wokeness, transgender rights, and demographic diversity. So when James Gunn, the director of the new Superman, told the Times of London that “Superman is the story of America, an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country,” cranky voices on the right leaped at the chance to accuse Hollywood of making Superman “woke” to advance a left-wing agenda.

Fox host Jesse Watters half-joked, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” For Fox, immigrant equals gang member.

Before the film hit theaters, Fox News informed its viewers that the new Superman embraced “pro-immigrant themes.” And MAGA pundit Kellyanne Conway, appearing on the network, huffed, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us.” Fox host Jesse Watters half-joked, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” For Fox, immigrant equals gang member.

No surprise, the MAGA pundits had no idea what they were talking about. The only pro-immigrant theme in the movie is rather basic and hardly objectionable. Superman (David Corenswet), an alien who fervently wants to help humans, is propelled by an elementary motivation: kindness. He is so empathetic that when his nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult)—in this telling, an Erik Prince-like character who’s an arms dealer and tech genius who has invented the “pocket universe” (don’t ask me to explain)—unleashes a 30-story-tall dinosaur-like beast (think Godzilla) in the middle of Metropolis, Superman insists on neutralizing, not killing, the monster so it can be taken to a sanctuary to be studied. Other superheroes helping him just want to blast it to smithereens.

There are certainly reflections of present-day crises in the movie. The film’s main tale is Luthor’s unrelenting attempt to destroy Superman, who stands in the way of Luthor’s diabolical schemes. One piece of Luthor’s plan is to delegitimize Superman, and he does this with the accusation that Superman is an untrustworthy alien who has a secret agenda to take over the Earth and claim as many wives as is needed to restore the Kryptonian race that perished on his home planet. In other words, this immigrant is an existential threat anda sex fiend. Luthor’s effort to demonize Superman does initially turn public opinion against the Man of Steel, showing how easy it is to other-ize and vilify a migrant.

It’s laser-guided weaponry versus pitchforks. And it’s nearly impossible not to think of the ongoing war in Gaza.

The other callback to the real world is a burgeoning war between two fictitious nations, Boravia, an ally of the United States, and Jarhanpur, its neighbor. At the start of the film, Superman intervenes to prevent Boravia, which is being armed by Luthor’s transnational corporation, from invading Jarhanpur. But this leads to a superhuman created by Luthor defeating Superman in battle. Through the rest of the movie, the prospect of war looms, with Boravia’s high-tech army poised to slaughter the civilians of Jarhanpur at the border. It’s laser-guided weaponry versus pitchforks. And it’s nearly impossible not to think of the ongoing war in Gaza. Reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Superman’s gal pal, tells him that his unilateral interference in the Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict raises questions of politics and morality. But Superman sees it more simply: What could be more important than preventing the bloodshed of war?

Gunn has pointed out that he wrote the script before the Gaza war broke out. He said that Superman“doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East. It’s an invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that’s problematic in terms of its political history, but has totally no defense against the other country. It really is fictional.” Yet the imbalance of power between these make-believe countries and the suggestion that one is poised to wipe out civilians in the other offers a strong example of art imitating life. No wonder Palestinian activists have hailed the work.

Put all the political chatter and sniping aside, Supermanis a fun and smart take on an all-too-familiar story. It’s not a great film. The character of Superman—a tremendously non-dark superhero—does not lend itself to profound drama. This is no The Dark Knight with a brooding and conflicted hero (Batman) facing a nihilistic villain who seeks to illuminate and exploit the hypocrisies of modern society (Joker).

Superman is a fine summer distraction for the tough times of the moment. But if you want to look past the titanic fight scenes and gee-wiz CGI and be prompted to think about more, Gunn provides that opportunity.

But Gunn does tease out for dramatic purpose the dilemmas and inner conflicts Superman/Clark Kent faces in dealing with both geopolitics and interpersonal relationships. The script is packed with creatively choreographed intense action scenes. Superman is confronted with challenges he might not be able to overcome—though you know he will. The side characters—particular superhero Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi)—are well drawn. The movie is infused with the same delightful sass that animated the Guardians of the Galaxyfilms Gunn previously directed. And, as you might have heard, the dog Krypto steals scene after scene.

Superman is a fine summer distraction for the tough times of the moment. You can munch popcorn and watch the ultimate good guy triumph over a villain who bears a resemblance to today’s tech billionaires. But if you want to look past the titanic fight scenes and gee-wiz CGI and be prompted to think about more, Gunn provides that opportunity, for Superman is a reminder of the pressing need to recognize and serve the basic commonality of our species—as sappy as that sounds.

It’s an antidote to the perverted political culture Donald Trump has forged. Since he entered politics, Trump has presented mean-spiritedness as an asset. In the White House, he and his henchmen have implemented and celebrated policies of cruelty. And Elon Musk, the champion of Big Tech libertarianism, recently belittled the concept of empathy, dismissing it as weakness. Supermanis a retort to all this.

In the Timesinterview, Gunn said the movie “is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost…[O]bviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.” It’s a sad comment on our present circumstances that such talk can spur controversy—which makes Gunn’s Superman more important and necessary than the average summer blockbuster.

By the way, Superman, who was created by Jerry Siegel and Jospeh Shuster, each the son of Jewish immigrants, has always been woke:

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Three asylum-seekers leaving routine court hearings at San Francisco immigration court Thursday morning were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, including one man who a judge had just said might be mentally impaired.

They’re the latest in a series of ICEactions, where over 30 immigrants have been arrested by federal agents while leaving San Francisco immigration court, at 100 Montgomery Street or 630 Sansome Street—which also has an ICE field office and is where Thursday’s arrests took place.

After a Department of Homeland Security attorney on Thursday moved to dismiss the case of the man, a strategy federal attorneys have recently been using to make asylum-seekers easier to remove, immigration judge Patrick O’Brien raised doubts over his mental ability, saying, “it’s obvious to me that there are competency issues.”

The man—who was only fluent in Mam, a Mayan language primarily spoken in Guatemala—had been muttering to himself throughout the morning, O’Brien said.

Later in court, the man was unable to tell O’Brien his address. O’Brien even asked the man at one point if he was on medication.

There appear to be competency issues beyond just a language barrier, O’Brien said. (After a few hours of requesting one, the court had been able to find a remote Mam interpreter to help with the man’s hearing.)

Prior to her arrest, one woman said she wanted a chance to explain why she came to the US and was afraid to return to her home country. “We’re not going to do that today,” said the judge.

O’Brien then proceeded to ask the Department of Homeland Security attorney for a continuance of the case, rather than a dismissal, due to the man’s possible mental incompetence. The man needed time to find a lawyer and other support, O’Brien said. “He’s clearly not understanding the questions,” O’Brien said. “Is this someone the department really wants to move to dismiss a motion to appear on?”

The DHS attorney agreed, and allowed for a continuance of the case, which essentially means the man will come back for another hearing in a few months. The DHS attorney said she could “renew” the motion to dismiss another time.

But as the manleft the hearing room, Mission Local observed about five ICE officers stopping the man and then leading him out a side door. The man’s arrest was the third over the course of three hours Thursday morning.

Earlier that morning, the DHS moved to dismiss two other cases, both of women who appeared in court alone. In both cases, the DHS attorney recited what has become a standard script in recent months: “Circumstances have changed” since the women were first told to appear in court.

When DHS moves to dismiss cases, it does so with the goal of placing asylum-seekers in a process called expedited removal, which can fast-track them out of the country without appearing before a judge again.

Judges in San Francisco rarely immediately grant those motions. On Thursday, O’Brien told the women he would give them time to respond to the motion. He would not rule on it that day.

However, as would happen to the potentially impaired man later that morning, and has happened routinely in recent weeks, both women were arrested directly following their hearings anyway.

In court, O’Brien appeared to try to prepare the women for a possible arrest. “I am pretty sure you won’t be coming back to my court,” he said. He also urged them to get a lawyer as soon as possible.

Both women were at first confused. “How am I supposed to respond to this motion if I don’t understand it?” one asked in Spanish, through an interpreter. They quickly became terrified. Both started crying as they asked O’Brien questions at the front of the courtroom.

The same woman said that she wanted a chance to explain to the judge why she came to the United States, and why she was afraid to return to her home country. “We’re not going to do that today,” O’Brien said.

The moment the women walked out of the courtroom into a hallway, Mission Local observed ICE officers arresting them. The officers ordered them to turn around and face the wall, and then handcuffed them.

Over the course of the morning, Mission Localasked two ICE offices for their badge numbers. They refused to provide them.

After arrest, asylum-seekers are normally taken two floors up from the immigration courtroom, to a temporary detention and processing center on the sixth floor of 630 Sansome St. After a couple of hours, they are generally then placed into long-term detention at one of the for-profit private prison detention centers elsewhere in California, or the country.

At most public hearings, attorneys for the Bar Association of San Francisco are present under the “Attorney of the Day Program.” They provide legal supportto asylum-seekers and transmit information to the Rapid Response Network, allowing for attorneys to be dispatched to support the immigrants placed into detention. They also warn those asylum-seekers who have cases that DHS moved to dismiss that they might be detained.

But Thursday morning, no attorneys were present. As a result, none of the arrests can be independently confirmed. According to Milli Atkinson who runs the program, immigration support services “are working backwards from limited info we have.”

Moments after the women’s arrest, the courtroom returned to business as normal. Classical music played over a speaker phone while the judge sat on hold for a remote interpreter. Moments later, he heard the case of a family of four: two parents, a toddler and a baby. The four of them had been scammed by a lawyer so were still unrepresented, they said. They had driven from their new home in Oregon for the hearing.

O’Brien was apologetic for both. “I appreciate you folks making it on time, with two young children as well,” he said, then filed paperwork to move their case to a court nearer their new home.

As of noon, ICE officers were still hovering in the hallway outside the immigration court. Public court hearings had ended for the day.

Frankie Solinsky Duryea contributed to this report.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Tuesday’s landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on climate change came as residents of some island nations are already “scraping barnacles off our grandfathers’ graves” as sea-level rise accelerates, said Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, in a poem he recited outside the Peace Palace as the judges started their two-hour presentation.

That sense of urgency for action also came through in the 15-judge panel’s unanimous opinion. The court stated that a range of international laws charge governments with legal duties to “prevent significant harm to the environment” and “use all means at their disposal” to prevent activities within their territories from causing significant harm to Earth’s climate.

Even when governments withdraw from or haven’t ratified international climate agreements, they still have legal obligations to address climate change, the court ruled.

Among the obligations cited in the opinion are requirements for historically high polluters to cut emissions and enhance their sequestration of greenhouse gases. Governments could be violating their international legal obligations if they continue subsidizing fossil fuels and issuing new licenses for oil and gas production, the court said during an oral reading of its key findings.

If governments breach those obligations, they could be legally liable, and potentially subject to orders from the ICJ or other courts requiring them to cease climate-harming activities or make compensation payments to climate-impacted people or countries, the opinion noted.

The court also recognized climate change as a threat to human rights.

“States have obligations under international human rights law to respect and ensure the effective enjoyment of human rights by taking necessary measures to protect the climate system and other parts of the environment,” the court noted.The court also affirmed the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as recognized by more than 150 countries. That right, the court said during its oral presentation, “is essential to the enjoyment of other human rights.”

While nonbinding, the court’s opinion interprets existing laws that are binding, and the opinion can be cited in future legal actions.

The opinion was “unexpectedly clear and strong,” said Philippe Sands, an international law expert at University College London. It marks the environment coming of age in the international legal order and its unanimity gives it extra heft, he added.

The court rejected the argument from some high-emitting nations that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary source of international climate governance, which they argued requires little of nations.

The opinion also made clear that even when governments withdraw from or haven’t ratified international climate agreements, they can face similar obligations under other international laws.

The process leading to the advisory opinion was sparked by young students in Pacific Island countries who have watched their homes and futures being swallowed by rising seas. Spearheaded by Vanuatu, the United Nations General Assembly in 2023 formally requested the ICJ advisory opinion.

The result is a “milestone for climate action and the discourse on climate change,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister of lands, geology and mines, energy and water resources.

A nation’s failure to control emissions from private companies, the judges agreed, can be a breach of its international legal obligations.

“For the first time in history, the ICJ has spoken directly about the biggest threat facing humanity, which is climate change,” he said. “I want to also reflect on the importance of the science. We’ve heard in this advisory opinion that climate science is the heart of climate law and the compass for climate justice.”

The opinion recognized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the best available source of climate science and quoted the IPCC’s prior findings that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is unsafe for most nations and people.

Environmental attorney Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh was co-lead counsel with Aguon for Vanuatu in the ICJ proceedings. She said the opinion will assist countries pursuing reparations for the harms they are enduring from global warming. “The court has provided critical guidance that is very helpful to those seeking climate justice,” she said.

The court made clear that when governments breach their legal obligations to address climate change, they can cause losses and damages in other countries. And the ICJ’s opinion clarified that “when there is injury or loss and damage…when a state commits a wrongful act, it is under a legal obligation to make full reparations for the damages caused.”

That’s important, Wewerinke-Singh said, “because there was an argument that liability and compensation had been excluded or made impossible” by the Paris Agreement.

Some countries with high emissions had argued that the diffuse nature of the drivers of climate change, with myriad human activities around the world adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, made it impossible to assign individual liability to one country or emitter, but the court dismissed that reasoning.

“The court noted that the science has evolved so much that it is actually possible to establish these causal links,” Wewerinke-Singh said. “The court made it clear that these are not necessarily obstacles.”

The judges were not required to address “each and every obligation of the parties under climate change,” said ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa, but focused on the main obligations under the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

The “ultimate objective” of the agreements is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that “would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” to make sure it’s done soon enough to allow ecosystems to adapt, and to ensure secure food production and sustainable development, Iwasawa said.

The opinion also said governments have obligations to regulate private companies and people, and failure to control emissions from private companies can be a breach of their legal obligations to address climate change.

Climate groups cheered the ruling, which has come amidst a series of rollbacks on environmental protections in a number of countries. Among them is the world’s most historically polluting nation, the United States, which is leaving the Paris Agreement and the UN climate negotiations.

“We’re a decade on now from the Paris Agreement,” said Vanuatu’s Regenvanu. “It’s very important now that we make sure our actions align with…what came out today from the courtroom. Today’s ruling, I’m sure, will also inspire new cases where victims around the world, in a legal sense, realize that they can claim their rights and seek accountability.”

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Amid the rancor and rhetoric of the fight over the “big, beautiful bill,” we heard many a story about Americans likely to suffer as a result of it—families who might lose access to elder care and food stamps and homes and health insurance and other important things. Largely missing were insiders’ views of the kinds of families who stood to gain.

To be fair, Harvey Schein—the central figure in Death & Taxes, a new documentary from his son, filmmaker Justin Schein—passed away in 2008. When the younger Schein began collecting family footage, he wasn’t so much thinking about tax policy as the unraveling of his parents’ marriage—which as it happened was tangentially related to tax policy.

Harvey, raised in Depression-era Brooklyn, had managed to hustle and scrape his way up the corporate ladder, aided by the GI Bill, to make his fortune in the entertainment industry as a top executive at companies like Columbia Records, Sony America, and Polygram. Harvey saw himself as self-made, and multiplied his wealth with investments in the stock market.

He was frugal, however, and bristled at the notion of Uncle Sam taking a bite of his nest egg. He’d worked hard and paid his taxes and the estate tax was “double-taxation,” he would say—a common if misleading sentiment, as the film reveals by exploring myriad wealth-friendly aspects of the tax code his argument fails to account for.

Justin and his brother, Mark—Harvey’s heirs—were uncomfortable with their privilege. Growing up in New York City in the 1970s, Justin took notice of the stark inequality around them. As a teenager with growing political awareness, he pushed back against his father’s rigid worldview, and they bickered. He attended Stanford, but rather than going on to Wall Street or Harvard Business School, he began making documentaries—which Harvey felt impractical: “One minute he would be very proud that he helped facilitate my career. They next minute he asked when I was going to start making, you know, real movies. That was Dad.”

But Harvey was a difficult person to live with—loving but prone to depression and angry outbursts. His tax obsession made matters worse. His wife, Joy, is a consummate New Yorker who’d been a professional dancer before marrying Harvey. But after Harvey retired, he was so dead set on avoiding taxes that he resolved they would relocate to spend more than half of each year in Florida, which, unlike New York, doesn’t have an estate tax.

Joy was not joyful there, to say the least.

Harvey Schein in his office at Sony America in 1977Schein Family Archives

The marriage suffered, and in the end Harvey would be stricken with lymphoma. “I stopped shooting when it was clear that, you know, a film needs drama and my family needed peace,” Schein told me in the interview excerpted below.

After his father died, he shelved his footage until 2017, when Donald Trump came to power and Republican lawmakers began plotting their regressive tax cuts. “I was seeing the reality that the estate tax could be abolished, and I was wanting to explore that,” he recalls. “I asked around and nobody would talk to me about their estates, and it became clear that this footage of my family could be a good foundation.”

It was indeed. The film humanizes an aspect of our unequal society seldom explored in a nonfiction visual medium—the way wealth, and our desire to hoard it and pass it to our children, can result in unhappiness even for the haves—while the policies that enable the hoarding beget further misery for the have-nots. Schein sits down with experts ranging from liberal economists, academics, and policy wonks to conservative anti-tax crusaders to explore the issues, while his family saga provides a compelling thread.

Death & Taxes is well-timed, with this month’s passage of a wildly unpopular Republican bill that rewards America’s richest at the expense of its poorest. The film is showing this week in selected theaters in New York City and Los Angeles—other big cities are expected—along with an evolving list of one-off showings in smaller cities. (I will be moderating a post-showing conversation at Berkeley’s Elmwood Theater on Tuesday, August 5, at 7 pm.)

Schein also hopes to get the film in front of wealthy audiences, where it might jumpstart some useful conversations. He expects it will be available for streaming in the fall or early winter, though no deal has yet been inked.

“PBS was interested, but then the arm that PBS wanted to show it on was eliminated,” he told me. “I’ve had festivals invite us and then retract it because they’re afraid that their funders would be offended. So it’s a little bit of a minefield, but it also means that it’s, you know, more relevant.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This all began with you documenting what was happening with your family, and only later did you come to focus on your dad’s tax obsession. Was there a particular moment or event that prompted that pivot?

Well, I always I knew that I had this footage, and he and I were butting heads about politics and his insistence that taxes and his pocketbook took precedence over anything else. That started when I was a teenager. I was in like seventh grade when Reagan was elected, and at first I was like, Oh, Dad’s voting for Reagan. Maybe that’s cool. Maybe I should be behind that? And then slowly, as I got into the punk scene and became more aware, and as I was looking to push away from my dad, we would argue. We argued about apartheid and abortion—things like that. And taxes.

Harvey and Justin Schein in 1972.Schein Family Archies

As you were becoming more aware of the inequality in our society?

Yeah. In the film, there’s that moment where I took the bus up to Horace Mann every day, right through Harlem, which was a burned-out shell, and that was 10 blocks from my house. It became clear, looking out the window, that there was a lot of inequality. And nobody was talking about it, certainly not when I got off the bus at school. So that bus ride was a really important part of my education.

The other side of it was the fact that my dad was very proud that he had a rags-to riches-story where he worked hard and was the only kid in his family to go to college and he became so successful. And this was what America was supposed to be about. And it was just becoming clear that it was becoming much harder for everybody to work hard and achieve success.

In the 1980s and 1990s, estate taxes were way higher than they are now, and the exemption—the amount of money you could give your kids tax-free, was a lot lower. I see why your dad might not like that. But the top tax on large estates is now 40 percent and Congress doubled the exemption in 2017. It’s now $28 million for a couple, soon to be $30 million thanks to the “big, beautiful bill.” It’s a little nuts that a child can now inherit tax-free superwealth.

Yeah. Until 1976, the exemption was $60,000, and I think like 10 percent of Americans were subject to it. That was problematic and needed to be changed. People should be able to pass on a reasonable amount of their security and wealth for their kids. But the loopholes are causing a problem: Huge fortunes are going untaxed. There’s the stepped-up basis rule.

Right, and also these grantor trusts and other tricks that help rich sidestep the estate tax entirely. Your dad is pretty focused on this idea of double taxation. He says he worked his ass off and paid taxes, so why should he pay more? That sounds reasonable on the surface, right? So why should we have an estate tax?

For one thing, it’s this myth that these successful people do it on their own, and so they deserve to keep more of it. My dad went to college and law school on the GI Bill. When he rose to prominence in the ‘50s and ‘60s, taxes were super high and that was creating this fertile ground for American economy to prosper, with infrastructure and stability and a stable working and middle class and education—all these things contributed, I believe, to his success, and is a reason we need a reasonable estate tax.

Would it be fair to say most Americans don’t understand the nuances, and may well think they’re going to be taxed on minor transfers of wealth to their children?

Yeah. There’s definitely this myth. And I think it was John Steinbeck who said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

When you go out on the street and ask people about the American dream—which I did—it’s universally accepted that America is a meritocracy and anybody could strike it rich. People still come to America hoping for that. But we need to understand that that is becoming harder and harder to achieve. And I don’t think that’s a partisan issue.

The film talks about how unrealized investment profits escape taxation. A guy like your dad, most of his wealth is from investment gains over the years. And the failure to tax those returns until those assets are sold is a major reason we’re seeing this massive concentration at the very top.

I mean, looking back at my dad over the years, there was this whole period where there were tax shelters—there was the Schein cattle company and the Schein oil company. And those were, I think, just on paper—I don’t think we ever had a cow or an oil well. Eventually those loopholes were closed.

So these companies were totally bogus?

I have no idea. I was a little kid then. It was legal. It was clearly a strategy that worked for a number of years and then was closed. It’s a game people who have this money love to play. And why wouldn’t you? It’s better than any casino, because you’re the one writing the rules with your other wealthy friends.

Harvey, post-retirement, and Joy. Sanibel, Florida, 1994Schein Family Archives

But you could just as easily ask, why would you? Because there’s the competing idea that, hey, I have plenty of money, so maybe I don’t need to do this?

Yeah. And the fact that my dad went from being this very Brooklyn kid—who wanted to raise his family amid this diversity—to living on an island in Florida surrounded by millionaires. You lose the sense of community and why your contribution to society is important. I think we need to change the conversation so that when Trump says it makes him smart to avoid taxes, people realize that “smart” is subjective, and it’s clearly in some ways un-American to be hoarding wealth.

Or quintessentially American!

[Laughs.] Yeah. But there have been times when there was more of a sense of community and responsibility to each other. I think that’s possible again in our country. The estate tax was created in a time very similar to this one, and was partially intended to keep America from being too aristocratic.

Things have clearly gone haywire, which is why [former Trump adviser Gary] Cohn said “only morons pay the estate tax.” That’s why the estate tax wasn’t abolished in this last budget: It doesn’t need to be because it’s been completely emasculated. It’s almost like a front.

Will you talk a bit more about the the discomfort you and your brother had knowing that you stood—or stand—to inherit a lot of money?

It is complicated, because I still hear my dad telling me that it’s not my money, and I have a responsibility for my grandchildren to pass it to them. But the reality was that, in the film, I received a letter from my dad when I was in college telling me how unhappy he was, and I saw what [his obsession with holding onto his wealth] did to my parents’ marriage.

Nobody is talking about making rich people poor. We’re talking about stopping this bizarre game we’re playing to avoid as much taxes as possible at the expense of our democracy. Now that I have kids of my own, two boys like my dad did, I see the harm being done to the country. And I feel like inheritance goes beyond stocks and bonds.

That’s a good point. I also want to bring up the part in the film where you ask your wife what she thinks about you doing this. And she basically says you should be careful, because people will pull out the world’s smallest violin in response to a rich boy’s discomfort with his privilege. People will say stuff like, You have issues with inheritance? Hey, send the money my way.

I’m already getting that.

But the discomfort is real.

I mean, if you don’t have the feelings, that’s more of a problem than having them.

One thing you didn’t touch on is this argument Republican politicians dust off every time the estate tax comes up. They claim it hurts family-owned companies and family farmers and small businesses. But that’s very misleading, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s completely false—certainly the farm issue is complete disinformation. First, family farms are being destroyed by giant agribusiness. But also, show me one family farm that has been lost because of the estate tax. There are so many rules that protect them.

And the number of estates that exceeded the exemption was very, very small even before Trump and Congress doubled it.

Yeah, maybe that was an issue in the 1970s that needed to be corrected.

And it was.

It was overcorrected. And now we have a big problem.

We never do learn what happened after your father’s death, insofar as you and your brother presumably inheriting his wealth and how you’re dealing with that.

Part of the reason that is that my mom is still alive. Technically the estate goes to her. But there are trusts and LLCs and things that have been created. I mean, we haven’t actually had to deal with it. I have had to deal more with thinking about my own kids.

My dad started on day one with me, you know, passing money. And I have been extremely derelict in doing that because, partly because of my conflicted feelings. We have 529 [college savings accounts] for our kids and things like that. But I haven’t created any network of trusts, and I’m certainly not moving to Florida.

I don’t have to do much, because as privileged and wealthy as I am, this [$30 million] exemption pretty much does the job. I mean, I’m happy to speak out against it, and if and when that changes, I would create a situation where my kids didn’t have to worry about their health care and would have a down payment for a house. But I’m not doing what Harvey did.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This story is published in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.

In Minnesota, two tenants, the parents of a young autistic son, were told that they would be evicted. The reason? One neighbor had repeatedly complained about noise stemming from the child’s behavior, though it was nothing constant nor pervasive, according to Courtney Arthur, the program manager for Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid’s Housing Discrimination Law Project. But the landlord, who decided that this was reason to evict them, was constrained because this potentially could constitute a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“They’re not really disturbing anyone, but they’re being discriminated against,” Arthur noted. She then explained that “99.9 percent of the time,” her organization was able to intervene in similar situations, with families who have disabled relatives. When they do, she said, “Those people are allowed to stay in their home and not be treated differently.”

That’s what happened in Minnesota. The mother called Arthur’s team. They then directly wrote to the landlord asking to rescind the lease termination because the basis of the “breaches of lease” was due to her son’s disability, and therefore, discriminatory. The whole process took two weeks, and in the end, the family was allowed to stay in their home. All over the country, nonprofits like Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid work to protect tenants from abusive circumstances, such as sexual harassment from landlords and property owners who refuse to lease to tenants paying with vouchers. But now, their work in fair housing enforcement is in jeopardy.

On Feb. 27, the Trump administration abruptly canceled funding grants for 78 nonprofit organizations that work to combat housing discrimination nationwide, including that of Arthur’s organization. That funding, she said, comprises all of the organization’s fair housing funds. These Fair Housing Initiatives Program grants, a program that has existed since 1987, have helped fund organizations that provide direct assistance to those who feel they have faced discrimination while attempting to purchase or rent housing, as well as organizations that focus on outreach and awareness campaigns relating to fair housing.

Will Fischer, director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained that more people would lose protections from a whole range of discriminatory actions—race, gender, ethnicity, age, disability—as well as options to seek any enforcement. “What this means also is that owners, people in the real estate industry, will know that there’s less enforcement,” he said, “so it will just kind of embolden bad actors to be more likely to discriminate than they would be today.”

In February, nearly half of all local fair housing enforcement agencies received notices of cancellation, totaling around $30 million in cuts, which were substantial portions of their budgets. About a month later, a temporary restraining order from Judge Richard G. Sterns of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts reinstated those grants in response to a class-action lawsuit from the National Fair Housing Alliance, but the eventual outcome remains uncertain with potentially dire consequences for consumers.

Minnesota is just the tip of the iceberg. The Fair Housing Council of Orange County in California reapplied for their grants from HUD months ago, in advance of their grants lapsing at the end of June. David Levy, a programs specialist, said they have been met with radio silence. That money makes up around 60 percent of their funding, and without it, they will have to lay off nearly half of their 10-person staff and reduce their programs significantly. Others, including Arthur, expressed similar concerns about grants not being renewed once they end.

“We’re not going to have the resources to be as assistive in filing complaints as we’ve been able to be in the past,” Levy said. “We’re worried that people will be less informed, and perhaps not even in an intentional way. There will be some discriminatory behavior that creeps in.”

As the massive assault on the federal government by the Trump administration unfolds, the damage to federal agencies—from the Department of State to the Department of Health and Human Services to FEMA—has been almost too much to calculate. Foreign aid, public health efforts, the Internal Revenue Service, national parks, research grants to colleges and universities, and countless other programs have been eviscerated—at least 51,000 federal employees have been laid off or are targeted for layoffs, according to a CNN analysis. A Supreme Court decision from early July cleared the way for the Trump administration to go ahead with mass layoffs across agencies, including HUD. Within this chaotic landscape are also dramatic cuts to housing programs funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD programs impact millions of Americans—there are over 788,000 public housing units and over 2.3 million housing vouchers leased across the country, according to data from agency dashboards.

“We are witnessing an assault on fair housing and fair lending by this administration as the nation is in the throes of a fair and affordable housing crisis,” said Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. She warns that the changes “will open the floodgates to predatory conduct in the housing market.”

HUD was officially established as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in 1965 to run all federal housing programs. It’s a $70 billion agency tasked with managing everything from public housing to assistance for the elderly, the disabled, and military veterans. Trump’s appointee to head the office, Scott Turner, a former NFL defensive back and two-term Texas state House lawmaker, promised during his confirmation hearings to uphold fair housing laws, but focused much of his testimony on the need to build more housing. Turner also served as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during Trump’s first term, which focused on private investment into low-income “opportunity zones.”

Turner may have to maximize a smaller budget in the upcoming fiscal year if the Trump administration gets its way in the appropriations process. The 2026 budget request from the White House, released on May 3, might exacerbate some of those concerns as it proposes slashing nearly $33 billion to HUD, a 43.6 percent cut to the agency. The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—tasked with massively downsizing the federal government—has already cut over $747 million in grants and contracts from HUD since early February, according to its own data.

The administration has also proposed cutting $26 billion and imposing a two-year limit on HUD’s State Rental Assistance Block Grant, which the AP reports would result in 1.4 million people losing rental subsidies and public housing vouchers, further exacerbating the housing crisis.

“Without these resources, affordable housing projects will slow down significantly or stop altogether,” Kim Johnson, of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, wrote. “Millions of people who rely on rental assistance to pay rent every month will be at immediate risk of eviction, and, in worst cases, homelessness…For landlords and owners/operators of HUD-assisted affordable housing, even the uncertainty of continued funding acts as a disincentive to participate in HUD programs.”

“There are a lot of different directions that this could go in, but they’re all bad and all harmful for people who are struggling to afford housing.”

The proposal would turn these programs into block grants, shifting the burden to states for making significant cuts to housing assistance programs. Rent vouchers could be taken away from people who rely on them, assistance for owners of subsidized housing could be ended, and funding for maintenance and repairs to public housing would all be cut, according to Fischer. Eventually, this would lead to evictions and potentially homelessness for many vulnerable individuals, and housing units could fall into disrepair without proper upkeep, thereby further exacerbating the housing crisis for low and moderate-income people.

“There are a lot of different directions that this could go in,” he added, “but they’re all bad and all harmful for people who are struggling to afford housing.”

Shifting to a block grant, Eric Oberdorfer, director of policy and legislative affairs at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, said, presents a different constellation of problems by cutting the funding connection among three crucial groups: public housing authorities, residents, and landlords. This “not only undermines service delivery but also makes these programs more susceptible to future cuts,” he wrote in an email. “Without a clear, visible link between funding and the families being served, it’s far easier to reduce or eliminate resources, ultimately helping fewer families over time.”

Finally, this budget would “institute a two-year cap on rental assistance for able-bodied adults, and would ensure a majority of rental assistance funding through States would go to the elderly and disabled.” But even if funded at its current levels, finances for the voucher program are already not meeting the need that exists. “Right now, about one-fourth of all families are actually eligible to receive assistance through the voucher program,” Oberdorfer said. “And so any underfunding of that has the potential to make it more difficult to serve families.”

And that two-year limit, Fischer said, raises a problem for the many Americans who cannot afford market rents.

“You can be in a low-wage job for an extended period and still need help to afford housing,” he said. “Establishing these arbitrary time limits would mean that for a lot of folks, they would see their assistance suddenly come off at the end of this two-year time period, but they would still need help to afford housing.”

The White House justifies its budget request that eliminates $60 million from the Fair Housing Initiatives program by arguing it is being used to fund nonprofits that “advocate against single-family neighborhoods and promote radical equity policies inconsistent with the Administration’s efforts to eradicate DEI programs.” Gutting the program also aligns with Project 2025 proposals, which claim that fair housing implementation “is muddled by the repeated application of affirmative race-based policies” and advocates for moving many HUD functions to state or local governments.

In the past, fair housing policies have seen support from both sides of the aisle. The federal Fair Housing Act, which first established these systems, was passed in 1968 with broad bipartisan support, and the 1988 expansion of the act under Ronald Reagan similarly passed across party lines. But since 2016, the issue has seen more partisan division, with Republicans seeking to roll back federal involvement in housing policy, including in fair housing.

The impact of rolling back fair housing laws, however, can be seen in both red and blue states. In fiscal year 2023, 34,150 cases of housing discrimination were filed, according to a report from the National Fair Housing Alliance, with California and Ohio claiming the most cases. Over half of all cases nationally stemmed from concerns about discrimination due to disability.



“I think the reality is that we’re dealing with these changes while the country is in the throes of a fair and affordable housing crisis, where people really voted for action,” Bailey said. “People want to see increased federal intervention to address soaring housing costs in a shrinking supply of fair and affordable housing, so they want to see increased federal support, not a retreat from basic civil rights.”

Grantees report that announcements regarding their future have been chaotic and sometimes unreliable. They’ve received notices about cuts to their programs, often at odd hours, with no warning. Policy changes are often released via notices on various websites or even on social media, Bailey said. One agency in the Mountain West region of the country received its notice of funding cancellation at almost 8 p.m. local time—the next day, they began telling staff it was likely they should look for other jobs.

On the same day in February, dozens of nonprofit housing organizations received a boilerplate memo announcing that HUD was issuing the notice of termination at the direction of DOGE: “HUD is terminating this award because it no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

Immediately, organizations started planning on how to cut costs. For some, such as Levy’s team in Orange County, this meant potentially laying off a portion of the staff. For others, such as Project Sentinel in California’s Bay Area, this meant that unless they could find another significant source of funding, they would have to significantly cut down on the scope of their work.

“We will be operating on fumes in terms of a budget, unless we’re able to find external sources of funding,” said one housing nonprofit employee who asked not to be named out of concern for retribution against his agency. Even “fumes” however, would be short-lived, and then there would be inevitable layoffs, before closing down the organization. “We would not have any source of income to provide the resources needed,” the employee said.

And even if those canceled grants were restored by a court order, it is still unlikely organizations would be able to receive what is owed to them from their current grants without delays or gaps, much less anticipate that they will be renewed for the long term. Carole Conn, the executive director of Project Sentinel in Santa Clara, California, said that their organization had been told that between the initial funding cancellation and the judge’s order to restore funding, they would not be paid for any expenses incurred during that time—which added up to nearly a month of rent, salaries, and benefits.

“We’ve received this grant for decades,” said Arthur, from Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. “We’ve never had an issue.”

In late June, the National Fair Housing Alliance and the Tennessee Fair Housing Council filed a lawsuit against HUD in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that the administration’s “refusal to administer critical grant funding under the Fair Housing Initiatives Program” breaks the law by refusing to allocate congressionally-appropriated funds.

The lawsuit specifically accuses HUD of not initiating the second year of grants that allow nonprofits to independently investigate potential fair housing violations and conduct testing of landlord compliance. It also cites HUD’s failure thus far to issue a Notice of Funding Opportunities that would have allowed the dispersal of fair housing funds already approved by Congress in the FY25 budget.

“We, as an organization, have been told by HUD, the regional staff, that everything is on pause. HUD staff cannot negotiate any contracted funding,” said a member of one agency’s leadership team, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from the administration in future funding opportunities.

“We’ve all kind of dedicated our lives to this work, and it was a little bit of a slap in the face,” Arthur of the Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid program said.

HUD declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

Bailey from the National Fair Housing Alliance added, “It’s been very fear-driven the way that information has been delivered, and it’s very dysfunctional.” She described the degree of “chaos” front-line organizations faced in “trying to serve victims of housing discrimination.” But the real victims, she noted, were the people who need services. “They’re not getting notice that the places that they could potentially go to address cases of housing discrimination are being impacted.”

For potential clients experiencing discrimination, the cuts have had immediate effects. Bailey noted that changes to the intake procedure for those filing housing discrimination complaints have only added to the confusion and dysfunction. Historically, she said, there have been multiple ways to file a complaint—via phone, an online form, or a physical, mailed form, with the ability to contact a regional office with the issue at hand.

But an April letter from the National Fair Housing Alliance to HUD Secretary Turner argued that many of these mechanisms no longer work. Complaints by phone are now all routed through a national 1-800 number. However, calling that line leads to a message saying that the caller has reached the “reasonable accommodation line,” and specifies that the number will only return messages that are solely requesting accommodations in the online complaint filing process—the line cannot be used to file a complaint directly over the phone.

The online form, which is currently available in English and eight other languages, has been riddled with issues since mid-March. And 404 error messages, frozen website pages, and limits on the number of characters in the description section of the form made it difficult, if not impossible, to submit forms or receive any response, the letter alleges. Regional offices have historically acted as liaisons to local fair housing nonprofits and previously fielded many of these complaints. But they also report that their phone contacts for those seeking to report fair housing complaints have been discontinued.

Levy recalls that in the past, they would have assisted clients they believed had legitimate complaints. “We had a means of getting that complaint submitted through an email process to our regional office,” Levy said. “That has all now been shut down.”

For those filing reports—even with the help of a fair housing organization—the mechanisms already presented significant delays. But changes under the Trump administration are expected to make that timeline even longer by forcing all of the requests to be processed by one national office. Even in the past, there were backlogs, with regulations that required decisions on cases to be reached within 100 days of the complaint being received.

“They haven’t been able to meet that for years,” Levy pointed out. “With reduced staffing that’s now coming into place, that problem is not going to get any better, even if people are able to apply.”

The downstream effects of these backlogs and funding cuts do benefit unscrupulous landlords. Will Fischer, director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that funding cuts to fair housing programs don’t just make it harder to report discrimination—they may encourage more bad behavior among building owners.

“What this means also is that people in the real estate industry will know that there’s less enforcement, so it will just kind of embolden bad actors to be more likely to discriminate.”

Arthur emphasized that changes in policy and funding will not mean that housing discrimination will disappear in communities. “It’s very real, and it affects people’s lives and their happiness in their homes,” she said. “We get dozens of calls a week. This work is important, and these things are still happening to people, and it’s still very real.”

Changes to public housing systems that have been implemented so far are “lots of smoke, but very little fire,” one housing advocate said. Indeed, a HUD spokesperson insists that, thus far, none of the regional FHEO offices have been shut down completely.

Technically, that may be correct, but HUD regional offices, including the one in Orange County, have lost several key staff, including the office director and at least one grant representative, according to Levy. “Those people were always readily available to us if we had questions about what was going on with the case,” he added. “We’re fearful the complaints will disappear in the HUD, not to be heard of again for or just closed without any real interaction, there will just come a case closure letter.”

Region 5, which covers much of the Upper Midwest, is still functioning as normal, Arthur said, but she noted that delays have increased due to layoffs.

“There is increasing fear and uncertainty among residents as the administration moves to slash staffing at HUD and threatens to cut funding for vital affordable housing and homelessness assistance programs,” Johnson wrote in an email.

Some concerns among advocates were short-lived and have already been resolved, including a four-day funding freeze earlier in the year that was rescinded quickly. But this back-and-forth also foreshadowed how many of the worst fears of housing advocates might play out.

“We’re not worried at this point about it, but just in light of the funding freeze that happened in January, we do want to be mindful,” said Oberdorfer. He added that thus far, funding cuts have not impacted the affordable housing work that his members—administrators for public housing and voucher-based housing programs around the country—are managing.

But the issue of homelessness and housing insecurity remains—a December 2024 HUD report shows that over 770,000 Americans experienced homelessness in 2024, a rise of nearly 200,000 people in just the last two years. And the Census Bureau estimated that in 2023, nearly half of all renting families were cost-burdened, meaning that over 30 percent of their income is spent on housing. Rents, on average, increased by almost 4 percent in 2023, the largest annual increase since at least 2011.

Congress has thus far largely matched Trump’s budget request, with the House Appropriations Committee allocating just under $29 million for fair housing programs and around $36 billion—a 40 percent reduction in funding—for rental assistance programs in its bill draft passed on July 17, which the Senate Appropriations Committee will debate later this month.

The proposed budget would completely eliminate the Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP), the program whose grants were cut in late February and that funds over 100 organizations nationwide that assist those filing housing-discrimination claims, including doing initial inspections themselves. The budget request also seeks to end any funding to translate HUD materials into other languages. And while the budget request promises to keep the Fair Housing Assistance Program, or FHAP, which funds state and local fair housing agencies, it cuts all funding for the National Fair Housing Training Academy, which trains the program’s staff.

HUD has also faced layoffs since Trump took office. The Washington Postreported in late February that the agency’s workforce was expected to drop by over half, including significant cuts to field offices nationwide, according to an internal memo their reporters obtained. NPR has reported similar numbers, also noting that some departments within HUD could face cuts of up to 75 percent of their staff. And in March, the union representing HUD employees filed a national grievance against “mass termination of bargaining unit employees” under a Reduction in Force. However, a HUD spokesperson denied that any staff have been cut, writing that “staff have opted to leave through acceptance of the DRP offers, among other optional routes.”

“Without staff to administer these programs and provide technical assistance, communities will not receive the funding and assistance needed to carry out projects and programs,” Johnson said.

These institutional changes within HUD are also reflected on the agency’s website, which was revamped at the end of March. Several links have been taken offline, redirecting to the department’s home page rather than to crucial information about programs. Though the material that public housing authorities might use to implement those programs is missing, a HUD spokesperson said,  “There is no correlation between hyperlinks and a program’s implementation.”

On the Public Housing Programs page—the division that manages the nation’s public and voucher-based housing—only three of 10 links are active, and dead links include those to programs such as “Moving To Work” and “Demolition/Disposition,” which are designed to upgrade public housing properties. Some sites, however, that were previously down recently have been reinstated. The “Two-Year Tool,” for example, which allows public housing authorities to estimate their funding and the number of families served for the next two years, came back online on April 15.

Throughout all of this upheaval, advocates hope that they can continue to rely on the fact that much of fair housing has long been enshrined in the law, and the Trump administration must follow through on upholding it.

“Fair housing is the national policy of the United States, and HUD’s obligation and the federal obligation is to comply with the Fair Housing Act. It has to do that,” Bailey said. “It’s not dependent on who’s in office. That’s a federal responsibility.”

HUD Secretary Scott Turner committed in his confirmation hearings to upholding fair housing laws, but he will have far fewer financial resources to do so if Trump gets his way in the budget process.

“It’s hard to know how this is going to turn out. There’s been a long history in Congress of bipartisan support for many of the programs where the administration is proposing these devastating cuts,” Fischer said in April. “So, hopefully, Congress will recognize how harmful these cuts would be and provide funding levels that prevent them. But it’s a long process, and we’ll have to see how that plays out.”

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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.”

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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.

---

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.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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.

Video

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

https://youtu.be/oCkmSxZksBg

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?”

---

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.”

---

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.”

---

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.

---

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.”

---

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.”

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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.

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

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

Al Letson: So 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.

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

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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.”

---

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.

---

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.

---

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed