Mother Jones

This story was originally published by the Guardian *and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.*A new Trump administration report that attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown. “Climate change is a challenge—not a catastrophe,” wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report’s introduction.

The esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect “if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites.”

The energy department published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back 2009’s “endangerment finding,” a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation.

In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushed back on the “cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science.” But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose was to “justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels.”

“Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,” she said.

The attack on the research underpinning the endangerment finding—which says greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare—comes as part of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of global warming.

“This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,” said Rachel Cleetus, a director at climate and science non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists who was an author on the sixth US national climate assessment.

Asked about scientists’ assertions that the new report is rife with misinformation**,** an energy department spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said: “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence—not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations.”

“They cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature.”

But the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces what is widely considered the gold standard compendium of climate science, compiled by a huge multinational team of scientists, peer-reviewed and agreed to by every national government.

The latest IPCC synthesis report, released two years ago, was a vast undertaking involving 721 volunteer scientists around the world. It states that it is “unequivocal” that human activity has heated the planet, which has “led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.”

By contrast, the Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The energy department did not respond to a question about the authors.

“This report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth, who called the paper a “farce.”

Wright, the energy secretary, insisted he had not steered the report’s conclusions, while Judith Curry, one of the report authors, said in a blogpost she hoped the document would push climate science “away from alarmism and advocacy.”

Mainstream climate scientists, however, condemned the findings as distorted and inaccurate. “This is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,” said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. “This document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.”

Mahowald said the lack of peer review meant it was “obviously not as robust” as the IPCC report or the US government’s periodic national climate assessment, which the Trump administration recently took offline. The latest national climate assessment, compiled by a dozen government agencies and outside scientists in 2023, concluded that the “effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States”

“If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,” Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said of the new report. “The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.”

“Their denialist framing,” says scientist Michael Mann, “rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window.”

Hausfather agreed that the authors’ work “might represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change.” He was among the scientists whose work the authors cited.

The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which he led, claiming it demonstrates how climate models “consistently overestimated observations” of atmospheric carbon. But Hausfather’s research actually showed that climate models have performed well.

“They appear to have discarded the whole paper as not fitting their narrative, and instead picked a single figure that was in the supplementary materials to cast doubt on models when the whole paper actually confirmed how well they have performed in the years after they were published,” he said. The energy department did not respond to a request for comment about Hausfather’s concerns.

That approach to research seems to underpin the entire paper, said Hausfather, who is also the climate research lead at tech company Stripe.

“This is a general theme in the report; they cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,” he said.

Dessler said scientists are obliged to engage with the full range of evidence, even if it contradicts their initial assumptions. Ignoring this principle “can rise to the level of scientific misconduct,” he said.

“The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,” Dessler said. “Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2’s innocence.”

The lack of peer review in the administration’s report led to conclusions that deviated, sometimes wildly, from the scientific literature. Many of its claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers, said Mann.

“It is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations,” he said. “What’s different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.”

The report, for instance claims that warming trends have been overstated, despite evidence to the contrary. It was published as extreme heat is affecting millions of Americans. “They’re literally trying to tell us not to believe what we see with our own two eyes…and instead buy into their denialist framing that rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window,” said Mann.

The authors also write that ocean acidification is occurring “within the range of natural variability” and is beneficial for marine life despite the ocean’s acidic levels currently being the highest since 14 million years ago, a time when a major extinction event was occurring.

And the report references the apparent health of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which it says “has shown considerable growth in recent years.” The reef was recently hit by its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016, a devastating phenomenon for corals in which they whiten and sometimes die due to high sea temperatures. No widespread bleaching events were recorded on the reef before 1998.

The report is “tedious” and at times “truly wearisome,” according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report’s claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Carbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields,” Kopp said. “As a former department of energy fellow, I’m embarrassed by this report.”

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Even before the immigration detention camp deep within the Everglades officially opened, the name of the facility, Alligator Alcatraz, had become apunchline for jokes within MAGA circles.

“People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was the first to announce plans for the project, quipped in a video posted on social media in late June. A few days later, the US Department of Homeland Security shared on X an AI-generated meme of alligators wearing baseball caps emblazoned with the acronym ICE standing guard outside a detention facility. “Coming soon!” the post read. By the way, Alligator Alcatraz is not some clever nickname that appeared on social media. Florida officials have made it the official name of the site.

The humor didn’t let up during President Donald Trump’s tour of the camp in July. “They have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators,” the president said outside one of the white tents where immigrants are detained, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis standing by his side. “You don’t have to pay them so much. But I wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long.”

The juxtaposition between reports of life inside Alligator Alcatraz and the comical branding of the facility by Republicans could not be more jarring. Since opening in early July, Alligator Alcatraz has been accused of dire conditions for the roughly 900 migrants detained there. As I reported last month, reports of theinhumane circumstances have emerged, such as mosquito infestations, malfunctioning air conditioning, and no access to attorneys. Detainees live under tents within chain-linked fenced areas that hold up to 32 beds and three toilets. The facility is at the center of lawsuits filed by environmentalists and human rights groups.

“This just looks like political theater,” Marsha Espinosa, a Biden-era assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s public affairs office, told ABC News last month. “If the goal is to enforce immigration effectively, building a camp in the middle of a swamp just doesn’t do it. The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”

“The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”

Even as Alligator Alcatraz has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s relentless deportation machine, Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general, is selling branded merchandise on his campaign website promoting the facility. Among the swag for sale are shirts with the phrase, “Nowhere to Run. Nowhere to Hide,” a gator ominously peering above the words. They include stickers, baseball caps, and beer koozies. The Republican Party of Florida is also selling similar merchandise, including a shirt for $30 with an image of a correctional facility being guarded by a giant alligator and python.

But the thrill of creating merch from a facility fraught with accusations of human rights abuses is not restricted to Florida. Others are also capitalizing on the camp’s notoriety. A search for “Alligator Alcatraz” on Amazon brings up shirts, hats, car decals, mugs, and flags. One $35 shirt reads, “Make Alligators Great Again.”

In fact, the narrative that alligators would be interested in human prey is inaccurate, according to Axios Tampa Bay. The creatures don’t consider humans a food source. And references of “the alligator lusting for human flesh is rooted in racism, dating back to Jim Crow, when tourists could buy postcards illustrating Black children as ‘gator bait,’” Axios reported.

Marcus Collins, a marketing professor from the University of Michiganwho studies culture and its impact on human behavior, has observed a connection between the days of Jim Crow and today. “This is a bit of a stretch, but it doesn’t feel too distant from when people used to take pictures of lynchings and sell them as postcards,” he says. “This consumption is signaling that these people aren’t people, at least not in the frame of how we evaluate humanity.”

We’ve seen what Collins describes in more recent history.A Business Insider story published in 2019 showcased items the US Navy was selling near the prison,where stories of human rights abuses of detainees emerged in the past. Items for sale included shirts with the phrase “JTO GTMO (meaning Joint Task Force Guantanamo) Detainee Operations” and baseball caps that read “Straight Outta GTMO,” a reference to the 1988 NWA album “Straight Outta Compton.”

I wanted to understand the motivation behind all the Alligator Alcatraz swag and how sales for shirts and other merchandise were going, so I reached out to Uthmeier’s campaign and the Republican Party of Florida for an interview. My emails and phone messages went unanswered.

David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, has written about the allure of Donald Trump for certain voters. He says that connecting the facility with merchandise or a nickname, and making “it sound like a tourist attraction as opposed to something like a concentration camp,” normalizes the facility. Political campaigns have always relied on merchandise to attract and unite supporters, but the Trump administration has “turned up the dial a little bit more than everybody else,” he noted. “You’re more likely to see a van or a pickup truck tricked out in MAGA.” The sale of Alligator Alcatraz swag is just the latest example of that.

Who the individuals and institutions are that market the merchandise also boosts its legitimacy. In this case, the items for sale come directly from powerful sources, such as Florida’s attorney general and the Republican Party. Supporters of Alligator Alcatraz receive tacit permission to engage and purchase the merchandise without fear of judgment. “These consumption patterns become a way of facilitating social coordination so we can find people who are like us,” Collins says. “For some, it’s repugnant. For others, it’s reality.”

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In January 2021, 70-mile-per-hour winds ripped through the High Plains, from Eastern Colorado to Western Kansas, and enveloped a portion of Interstate 70 in a deluge of dust and debris that suddenly blinded drivers. The result was predictable: multiple pileups of cars and semi-trucks, with more than two dozen people injured amid tons of crushed steel. With the nearest major trauma center 80 miles away, paramedics brought most of the victims to a tiny, county-owned hospital in the small town of Hugo. There were only two emergency room beds.

“We had patients everywhere,” recalls Lincoln Community Health Center’s CEO, Kevin Stansbury.

Doctors splinted the broken bones and stitched up lacerations with ease. But they also stabilized the most critical patients, whom they prepared for transport to larger hospitals.

“I think what gets underestimated,” Stansbury says, “is the role that rural hospitals play in the trauma network across the country.”

The importance of these hospitals may become clearer when they begin to disappear. That’s the result rural health experts predict from the budget bill President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4. The downstream effects of cuts to Medicaid, on which a disproportionate amount of rural residents rely, are estimated to put 380 independent rural hospitals “at serious risk of closure nationwide,” according to Families USA, a non-partisan consumer health care nonprofit.

Responding to these concerns—and likely being mindful of the political fallout from cutting health care in rural, predominantly Republican areas—GOP lawmakers appended a $50 billion “Rural Health Transformation Fund” to the bill. But critically, public health experts say, this amount cannot possibly offsetthe $137 billion that rural health facilities are expected to lose under the legislation. Further, many contend that the methods with which the $50 billion will be distributed are perplexingly opaque and seemingly partisan.

“In any other time, we would be massively celebrating,” Heidi Lucas, executive director of the Missouri Rural Health Association, says of the $50 billion fund. But when taken in context of what hospitals in her coalition will lose, “it’s just a drop in the bucket.”

“It’s just not going to save our hospitals, clinics, and health centers.”

“It’s just not going to save our hospitals, clinics, and health centers,” she adds.

Among their most pressing concerns is the uncertainty among the providers about which health facilities will even benefit from the fund.

“I think the answer is,” Stansbury says, “nobody knows.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act specifically mentions “rural hospitals” 10 times. But what “rural” means is difficult to determine. For example, he says, some of the largest medical centers in the country may be classified as “rural” because they treat patients who live in rural areas and travel to the bigger facility for specialized care. These “Rural Referral Centers” include hospitals in wealthy cities like Napa, California; Greenwich, Connecticut; and Miami, Florida.

Stansbury also wonders about the Federally Qualified Health Centers, which provide primary and preventative care to underserved communities, but not necessarily in areas traditionally understood to be “rural.”

“Do they siphon a bunch of money out of the rural areas?” Stansbury asks. “I’d like to see a very tight definition and parameters of where the money should go.”

The ways in which the legislation divvies up the funds among states are perhaps even more problematic, says Timothy McBride, a health policy analyst and health economist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who detailed the breakdown in a recent Substack post.

Half of the $50 billion fund will be evenly distributed to states without accounting for factors like population size. In fact, this means that some of them—such as Wyoming and North Dakota—may receive more from the rural health fund than they lose in federal Medicaid funding. On the flip side, the $50 billion fund would leave other states—such as Kentucky, Washington, and Oregon—in the red. By McBride’s calculations, Wyoming is in an enviable position, potentially receiving stands to cover 1,453 percent of what the state loses in Medicaid cuts. Meanwhile, Kentucky is expected to lose $5.4 billion through the cuts and gain only $1.9 billion from the fund, covering just 36 percent of the state’s losses.

Coincidentally, the states that stand to gain the most from this half of the rural health fund’s distribution are governed by Republicans, and the states that stand to lose the most are not. But there may also be winners and losers for the second half of the fund, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has the discretion to distribute mostly as it pleases. McBride says it’s fair to be concerned that a Republican administration would be biased against blue states when allocating money from this pot.

“One way to cut it is red versus blue,” says McBride. He adds that HHS could also, theoretically, deprioritize states that opted to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a policy option the GOP has not fully embraced. States that expanded Medicaid to broader shares of their populations will be harder hit by the federal cuts.

For the rural health care facilities that ultimately do receive sizable sums, there are even more strings. The money will be limited to certain expenditures, such as recruiting and retaining clinical staff to serve rural areas for minimum periods of time, training new and existing staff on artificial intelligence, and providing technical assistance on cybersecurity.

The money can’t directly be used to make up for the care rural hospitals increasingly have to provide the estimated 16 million uninsured patients that Medicaid cuts are likely to create. And while there are certainly shortages of health professionals serving rural areas, the more pressing shortage, Lucas says, is cash to keep open the health care facilities that would employ them**.**

“If the hospital closes,” Lucas asks, “what good is it going to do to have these additional dollars to help with workforce recruitment?”

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On New Year’s Day, 1946, one of the most surreal and disturbing sporting events in US history was held in the Japanese city of Nagasaki, less than five months after an atomic bomb on August 9 destroyed half the city and killed at least 75,000 people. The all-star football game, staged by the occupying forces of the US military, received wide coverage in the American media at the time and was dubbed the Atomic Bowl. Then it became largely forgotten, almost lost to history.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of this attack, this game remains an appropriate metaphor for the Nagasaki bomb, the second nuclear weapon dropped on a large Japanese city by the United States at the end of World War II. This horrific bombing and its aftermath has long been overshadowed by the first atomic blast three days earlier at Hiroshima.

In late September 1945, shortly after the Japanese surrender that ended the war, tens of thousands of US Army troops and Marines landed near Nagasaki in southern Japan. They found the city decimated—the bomb had exploded a mile off target over a suburb where 15,000 Catholics had lived—with countless survivors injured or suffering from radiation disease. Many of the Americans were exposed to lingering (and poorly monitored) levels of radiation in the ruins.

“What were we doing here, happily celebrating an American holiday…on a grotesque golgotha so recently hallowed by horror? The question had no answer.”

Since the end of hostilities, US commanders had looked for ways to normalize the American occupation in the Pacific and Europe. A military orientation film, Our Job in Japan, (written by Theodore Geisel, who later became Dr. Seuss) was shown to arriving members of the occupying forces. It told them their main job was “to be ourselves” and show that “the American way…was a pretty good way to live.” This included mounting baseball and football games in which US soldiers could compete. Military officials believed this was also a way for servicemen, as one put it, to “blow off steam” and impress the locals with the glory of American sports.

In December, a Marine commander ordered that a football game be held in Japan for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Why did the military choose Nagaskai of all places as the site for this game, on a field so close to ground zero? No written records documenting the reasons exist. Additionally, later in 1946, US servicemen helped organize—and served as judges for—a Miss Atom Bomb beauty pageant in Nagasaki for local women.

One of the organizers of the Atomic Bowl football contest, Lt. Gerald Sanders later noted that the game was a kind of tribute to fallen colleagues. “We thought it would be totally appropriate,” he said. “It was certainly not to look like there was a joyful glee in what had happened there… We were there, yet we had many buddies that didn’t make it through the war.”

A gridiron was cleared in front of a middle school which had lost 162 students and 13 teachers to the atomic bomb. Angelo Bertelli, who had won the Heisman Trophy in 1943 as quarterback for Notre Dame, and “Bullet Bill” Osmanski, the Chicago Bears’ star running back, were selected as captains. A top officer wrote a press release promising that the game would have “all the color—and more” of the bowl games to be played that day back in the States. On hand would be a Marine band and Japanese girl cheerleaders.

But they would have to play touch, not tackle, football because shards from the atomic blast still littered the field.

On an unusually chilly day in Nagasaki, about 1,500 servicemen gathered to watch the spectacle. “Here and there were isolated Japanese—a father and his boy, a group of giggly girls, two old men—all looking small and lost and bewildered by it all,” one observer, a Naval officer, wrote in a letter to his wife.

The result was hardly important—Osmanski scored a late touchdown and kicked the extra point for the 14-13 win—but for two days the game was covered widely in the US. Then no one wrote about it. At all. No photos and no footage emerged. This lack of subsequent attention reflected Nagasaki’s second-class atomic status. In coming decades, American journalists and notables frequently visited Hiroshima, but they rarely trekked to Nagasaki, which the locals referred to as “the inferior A-bomb city.”

Even the players in the briefly celebrated game were reluctant to discuss it. Growing up, Robert Bertelli never once heard his father talk about playing in an all-star football match in Japan in 1946. Angelo would die in 1999 at the age of 78, and his son—by then known as Bob Bert, a drummer who was a member of the influential rock group Sonic Youth—never heard him mention the game. The former quarterback never spoke about it in interviews. Neither did Osmanski.

As I conducted research for a book and the recently released PBS documentary***,*** The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today, I found this was a common experience. The offspring of other players in this game had not been told anything about it by their fathers. This sports stunt disappeared from journalism and history for decades.

Finally, in 1984, one of the Atomic Bowl’s attendees, William Watt, a Navy officer,  poet, and literature professor, wrote a short piece for the New York Times’ sports section describing the game and his reaction at the time: “What were we doing here, happily celebrating an American holiday…on a grotesque golgotha so recently hallowed by horror? The question had no answer.”

While a large segment of the American public continues to support the use of the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima, historians have debated that decision. Some have especially questioned the second bombing. For example, Martin Sherwin, a Pulitzer Prize winner for co-authoring, with Kai Bird, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, called the Nagasaki attack “gratuitous at best…and genocidal at worst.”

The disappearance of the Atomic Bowl and the relegation of Nagasaki to an afterthought of Hiroshima raises the question of whether there are lessons from the second atomic attack that extend beyond those prompted by the Hiroshima bombing.

Nearly all of the victims of the Nagasaki bombing were non-combatants, mainly women and children and the elderly, as well as many foreign workers who had been seized and sent to Japan to work in arms factories. Hiroshima did host a major military base—a fact long used to justify the tremendous loss of civilian life there. The bombing of Nagasaki, which was added as a target at nearly the last-minute, showed that civilian casualties could be completely ignored. So much so that a football game could even be played by Americans on one of the killing fields.

The Nagasaki bombing is a reminder, perhaps more so than Hiroshima, that a military attack on a large city, killing tens of thousands of civilians, can become morally accepted not just by civilian and military leaders, but by the public. Some polls in the past have showed that many if not most Americans would today support a US nuclear strike that might kill massive numbers of civilians in, for instance, North Korea.

As we currently witness massive civilian casualties in wars from Africa to Ukarine to Gaza—more kids dead than soldiers in some cases—there’s good reason for the second atomic bombing to receive as much attention as the first.

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Weeks before losing the 2020 election, President Donald Trump offered a glimpse of the tactic that has defined his second term. It took the form of an executive order banning federal workplace diversity training; the tone was grave, the legalese pulsing with indignation. Public servants, contractors, and military personnel, Executive Order 13950 alleged, were being taught hate, and “divisive concepts” promoted by a “malign ideology” threatened to resurrect ideas “soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War.” This neo-Confederate enemy, as it turned out, was almost any mention of racism, and specifically critical race theory (CRT), an academic framework that studies how racism shapes law, health care, and education.

Joe Biden’s administration rescinded the order. But during his presidency, the right continued to obsess over CRT and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), contorting them into a raging kaiju. Red-state lawmakers piled on gleefully, introducing hundreds of bills, resolutions, and policies circumscribing how racism and inequality are addressed in public forums ranging from K–12 schools and universities to state health departments. “Critical Race Theory is divisive and undermines the cohesion of our troops,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tweeted in 2021. Such “divisive concepts,” declared a 2022 Tennessee law barring diversity training at public universities, “exacerbate and inflame divisions.”

This eager embrace of the word “divisive” is another legacy of Executive Order 13950, which Trump restored immediately upon returning to office. Typically a humdrum means of deeming something controversial, the term has in recent years become a political blow dart. Seemingly innocuous, yet poison-tipped, it appears in condemnations of people and institutions that dare acknowledge the existence of discrimination and bias, subtly granting the accuser moral authority under the guise of meritocracy. The phrase depicts regressive cultural change as a commonsense return to sanity: “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” asserted a March executive order directing Smithsonian exhibits to be less “negative.”

Such declarations treat national unity as a sacred object and division as sacrilege. Race, the thinking goes, has no place in Americans’ idyllic “shared history” because it breeds obsession and discord, preventing us from getting along. Why race holds such subversive power, and why it divides us, is never broached, of course, because that context and history (genocide, pillage, slavery, segregation, mass incarceration) might, if accurately recounted, be “divisive.”

When any mention of race is deemed too “divisive” for American discourse, history is relegated to comfortable fables.

Yet racial ideology perfuses the screeds against divisiveness, jeremiads that often universalize white angst. “I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs,” a parent wrote in a 2021 open letter opposing anti-racism initiatives at his daughter’s private school. “If [the school] really cared about ‘inclusiveness,’” he wrote, it would abandon “the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.”

There is a low bar to declaring something divisive. The charge demands no burden of proof and lacks the force and risk of a label such as “racist.” All that’s required is a tittle of discomfort—a standard that benefits those with the most to lose if systemic racism were dismantled. Hence the indelibly hollow and affective language of statements rebuking divisiveness. Consider South Dakota’s law, echoing Trump’s 2020 order, that purports to “protect students and employees at institutions of higher education from divisive concepts” that might cause anybody “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”

The law reads like a civil rights statute but its protections are fluff. It gets around First Amendment concerns the same way the word “divisive” is often used in arguments: by policing the imposition of feelings rather than speech. Despite their grandstanding denunciations of racial superiority, these laws and proclamations sneakily safeguard white American exceptionalism—the “white” being silent.

That plausible deniability is the draw of weaponizing “divisive.” Users of the word can feel they’re defending America rather than whiteness. The anti-anti-racists frequently present their crackdowns as a fix for corrupted institutions: Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI in the military and the Smithsonian are titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Similarly, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued his own executive order denouncing “inherently divisive concepts,” he made sure to also pitch a rose-tinted version of history. In his flattering timeline, we have progressed “from the horrors of American slavery and segregation, and our country’s treatment of Native Americans, to the triumph of America’s Greatest Generation against the Nazi Empire, the heroic efforts of Americans in the Civil Rights Movement, and our country’s defeat of the Soviet Union and the ills of Communism.” There’s no debate, dissent, or actors in this narrative—just a phantasmal national spirit and its increasingly glorious works.

This vibes-based history makes putty of truth while claiming to protect it. “Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them,” wrote the authors of the 1776 Commission, a group of historians and panjandrums Trump convened to “recollect the great legacy of the American national experience.”

Again, division was invoked as a vague, treasonous plot against the truth of our greatness and unity. “American,” in the commission’s framework, isn’t an identity for people to define through the lens of their own experiences and heritage. Rather, it is the only valid identity—an orthodoxy the right aims to enforce with the full might of the federal government. Under this rigid order, there’s no room to interrogate our rocky history, let alone change it for the better. There’s just one nation, under God, indivisible—now, always, and forever.

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“You cannot rely on the government,” Lily Tang Williams told me last year, shortly after Election Day. “You have to rely on your communities. You have to rely on yourself.”

The week before, Tang Williams had gone viral when she slammed her Democratic opponent, Maggie Goodlander, for being a multimillionaire who couldn’t understand the working class. “You’re worth $20 million to $30 million,” Tang Williams—a Republican running for a western New Hampshire congressional seat—said in a late-October debate. “How do you know about regular people’s suffering? Do you go shopping? Go to Walmart? Buy food? I talk to those people.”

Thank you all for sharing my viral debate clip on @WMUR9 with my opponent @MaggieG603. I have the fire in my belly to fight for the people in #NH02. I will always tell the truth. A vote for me is a vote for American Dream. I will be honored to serve you in Congress. pic.twitter.com/SdhY4A8yE4

— Lily Tang Williams (@Lily4Liberty) November 2, 2024

In that instant, Goodlander—who served in the Biden administration’s Justice Department; is married to Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan; and ownedup to $39 million worth of investments and assets, much of it inherited—became the embodiment of the out-of-touch DC elite. Tang Williams’ populist rhetoric seemed to resonate far beyond her conservative base, striking a chord onlinewith a broad swath of people fed up with rising prices and economic instability.

It wasn’t enough to carry Tang Williams—who is also a multi-millionaire, albeit a less well-off one—to an upset victory in the Democratic-leaning district. But her 6-point defeat was still a significant improvement on the performance of the 2022 GOP candidate there. Donald Trump also experienced a boost in the district, compared to 2020.

In the months since, Tang Williams has turbo-charged her status as a hard-right influencer, posting social media attacks on DEI proponents, “Marxist-Communists,” immigrant-rights protesters, and critics of Elon Musk. In April, she announced another run against Goodlander next year—a race that political analysts view as potentially competitive as Democrats fight to break the GOP monopoly on power in DC.

“Lots of Democrat politicians have become elitist…They don’t understand regular working-class people’s suffering, and they don’t understand the immigrant minorities who live in their blue cities.”

There have been countless think piecesand books published in the aftermath of November 5, all seeking to explain why formerVice President Kamala Harris and theDemocrats lost ground in so many places. One recurring theme is the dramatic rightward shifts among a wide range of traditionally Democratic-leaning demographic groups. Exit polls and post-election studies show huge increases in Trump’s supportfrom 2016 to 2024 among Hispanic voters, Black men, Asian Americans, younger voters,immigrants,and low-income voters. Those shifts outstripped Trump’s 4-point improvement in the overall national popular vote.

When I asked Tang Williams—an immigrant from China with an up-by-the-bootstraps biography—about her exchange with Goodlander, she framed it as part of what she says is a growing disconnect between Democratic officials and working-class people of color who have long formed the base of the party.

“They have been forgotten. Lots of Democrat politicians have become elitist,” she told me. “They don’t understand regular working-class people’s suffering, and they don’t understand the immigrant minorities who live in their blue cities.” Many of these voters, says Tang Williams, are concerned about the high cost of living, crime, and undocumented immigrants, who, she claims, are “draining community resources.”

“There is huge difference [between] a legal immigrant & an illegal one,” she tweeted in June, complaining that anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles were leading to delays at government offices for “real” asylum-seekers. “Supporting illegals is opposing legal immigrants!”

Lily Tang Williams, a Republican House of Representatives candidate in the New Hampshire Second District, talks during a campaign stop in 2022. Charles Krupa/AP

In July, Tang Williams posted about her brother, who she sponsored to immigrate to the United States but who still had to wait 13 years to complete the move. Noting the drawn-out process of background checks, health screenings, in-person interviews, and fees, she wrote, “He has worked nonstop to support his family. If we need workers, let legal immigrants come in quicker & work. No amnesty! No free handouts!”

I’ve spent a good deal of time covering the Trump-era political and cultural battles in Asian American communities. Within those debates, Tang Williams sits at the far-right end of the spectrum—a gun-owning formerLibertarian who rails against undocumented immigrants while tweeting conspiracy theories about the Chinese Communist Party. But you can hear echoes of her views from immigrants across the country, including from some members of my own family, who came to the US from Vietnam in the years following the Vietnam War.

It was clear that Tang Williams could relate to my family and that she understood a good deal of why I had reached out to her—to examine the seemingly stark difference between how they see their own immigration experience and how they view the experiences of many other people of color in America. They persevered through war and authoritarian regimes, fled their homes, started a new life from scratch, and struggled for upward mobility. But they believe they’re now paying for a system designed by Democrats that redistributes their earnings.

There were points in our conversation where I foundTang Williams’ perspective on race and immigration deeply pernicious. “The government actually hurts Asian Americans. Asian Americans are discriminated because we work hard. We rely on meritocracy, we study the hardest, we try,” she told me. “So you are being punished by so-called government policies because you’re not dark enough.”

“Inner-city Black communities live in generational poverty because of broken families, lack of school choice, and being used by the Democratic Party for politics,” she said.

Still, hearing Tang Williams’ story helped me further contextualize the political shifts in communities across the country, illuminating the ways in which many Asian Americans feel their voices are ignored in media and government policy—and how the right is tapping into that growing anger.

For all her rhetoric about wealthy Democrats, Tang Williams is hardly an archetype of “regular people’s suffering” these days. As of May 2025, her assets included stakes in rentalproperties across at least fivestates andan array of investments in stock and cryptocurrency.

But that isn’t where she started out.

Born in 1964 to working-class parents in China,she grew up during the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long sociopolitical earthquake unleashed by communist leader Mao Zedong in 1966. Life was difficult. “We lived in a primitive worker’s row house sharing one restroom and faucet with eight other families,” she recalled in a Mother’s Day X post commemorating her mom, who died in Colorado at the height of the Covid pandemic. “We were literally dirt-poor; our mud floor would sprout mushrooms after flooding. We barely survived on food rationing coupons from the government.”

“Somebody who came here with nothing can achieve the unbelievable.”

The violence supported by Mao was widespread, often carried out by the Red Guards, student-led militants who terrorized individuals and whole communities they deemed counter-revolutionary.“Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road,” the Chinese Communist Party declared at the time.

The victims extended well beyond the wealthy and powerful. Institutions—including schools and universities—were shut down; private houses were destroyed; political murder was widespread. Workers also joined in the bloodshed until Mao deployed the military to establish order, sharply increasing the number of deaths. According to Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder, approximately 1.6 million people died during the years of mass upheaval from 1966 to 1969.

“Mao used critical class theory to destroy thousands of years of Chinese civilization, culture, religion, and art. One-third of cultural relics were destroyed,” Tang Williams told right-wing commentator Tim Pool in 2021. “Even beautiful Chinese dresses were banned to wear during Mao’s time. I could not lay my hair down like this…because that was capitalist. So everything had to be in line and conform to collective society.”

Her mother quietly rebelled against the enforced proletarian conformity. “She was elegant, clean, and loved pretty, pink clothing, which was frowned upon under Mao’s regime,” Tang Williams wrote. “Using what little money she saved to buy pink fabrics was a small act of defiance against Mao’s Cultural Revolution.”

After Mao’s death, China embarked on a series of economic reforms.Tang Williams competed against other students in her province of roughly 80 million, becoming one of just threeadmitted to law school at Fudan University. She hopedto help steer China away from dictatorship. “I was patriotic. I wanted to change China for the better and build a rule of law and have equal liberty and justice for all ordinary people because I was born into poverty,” she told me. “So I’ve always had this big heart for people who are poor, who have no connection, and who don’t have any power.”

But China still lacked basic civil liberties and Tang Williams saw few opportunities to advance her politicalvision. So after American students attending the university opened her mind to what a “free country” could be, she became interested in moving to the United States.

It wasn’t easy. She had to get permission from the Communist Party to leave law school and apply for a private passport. She signed an agreement with China promising to returnafter getting her master’s degree.

Whenshe arrived in the US in 1988, she had just $100 in her pocket—money borrowed from friends. Her American sponsor paid for all of her early expenses, including a plane ticket, paperwork, and her graduate school application to the University of Texas at Austin to study social work. “I owed him $1,200, so I did not start from zero. I started in the negative in this country at almost 24 years old,” she recalled, describing her experience as emblematic of the American Dream. “Somebody who came here with nothing can achieve the unbelievable.”

While living in Colorado, one moment in particular ignited her desire to reshape US politics. Just before the crash of 2001, she was handed a pink slip at her corporate telecommunications job and had to remove her belongings from her office that same day.

Determined to never again work for someone else, she launched a consulting venture to help firms do business in China after it joined the World Trade Organization. “It was not profitable for eight years, so we had to cut expenses,” Tang Williams told me. She was raising three children with her husband, and the family was relying on his job to pay the bills. During the 2008 financial crisis, she began reading books about real estate investment— including Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon L. Lechter’s *Rich Dad Poor Dad—*and built her own real estate business.

“I don’t want our young people to be brainwashed into believing that the government is their solution.”

In her telling, she soon came to view a wide range of federal government policies as reminiscent of theabuses she hadexperienced in China. Initially a Republican, she sawPresident George W. Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act as an egregious infringement on civil liberties and privacy. By 2008, she’d decamped to the Libertarian Party—a reaction to the Bush administration’s abandonment of “small, limited government.” She objected to the financial sector bailouts in 2008 and 2009, which were carried out by officials from both major parties. And she was angered by the Obama administration’s embrace of Common Core curriculum standards, which she considered “centralized indoctrination.” Obama’s attempt to ban assault weapons seemedespecially offensive to Tang Williams, who owns an AR-15, because “the largest mass shooter actually is a tyrannical government.”

In 2014, she ran a long-shot campaign as a Libertarian for the Colorado House of Representatives, pulling in 6 percent of the vote. The following year, she became chairperson of the state party. She launched another quixotic bid for office in 2016, this time for US Senate.

Three years later, Tang Williams and her family moved to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project—a long-running effort by libertarian activists to flock to the Granite State and win control of its government. “I really enjoy their liberty, spirit, and ‘Live Free or Die’ motto,” she says of her adopted home.

For years, Tang Williams spoke in classrooms about her experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution—a project she undertook as part of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit “devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million people killed by communism around the world.” She says she was surprised by how little students and teachers seemed to know about China and communism.

Like many immigrants from communist countries, what she wanted was the polar opposite of the totalitarian society she’d left behind. And she came to see American progressive politics as a dangerous step away from freedom.

“I don’t want this country to go down that path,” she told me. “I don’t want our young people to be brainwashed into believing that the government is their solution. When the government gets too big and out of control, we will be oppressed.”

In her 2021 interview with Pool, she equated “critical culture theory” under Mao with “critical race theory”—the academic concept that racial biases are systemically embedded within our laws and institutions that has become a bogeyman for the likes of Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis. Democrats, she argues, have substituted communities of color for Mao’s “oppressed class” of workers, attempting to persuade voters that they have been discriminated against and that they should elect Democrats, who promise to use government power to help them.

Tang Williams insists that this supposedarrangement ends up harming the very people Democrats promise to aid by enforcing a “victim mentality” and an over-reliance on outside assistance. She argues that minority voters should instead demand conservative policies such as school choice, which, she claims, will better promote individual achievement and equal opportunity.

“I made my kids study hard and not waste food,” she says. “It’s high expectations for them.”

If Tang Williams represents one side of the arguments reshaping Asian American politics, Roksana Mun represents a very different one.Mun is a co-director of Grassroots Asians Rising, a national network of progressive organizations rooted in Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant, refugee, and working-class communities.

Where Tang Williams calls for slashing federal spending and regulations, Mun pushes for solutions like universal health care and a wealth tax. And where Tang Williams blasts “open border policies” and calls for deporting “illegal criminals,” Mun speaks out against efforts to blame migrants “for the problems that we’re facing.”

Despite their ideological differences, the two share some views regarding the Democratic Party’s failures. “The government is not doing enough to support everyday working-class people on the ground, and Democrats—the only time they show up to our communities is for ‘get out the vote,’”Mun told me. But Mun rejects the idea that immigrant success stories—like what Tang Williams has achieved—prove systemic racism is no longer a defining feature of American life.

In recent years, Tang Williams’ side of the debate seems to have made increasing inroads among Asian American voters, and conservative groups have found success organizing around issues like affirmative action, education, and crime.In 2020, Asian Americans voted for Joe Biden over Trump 70 percent to 30 percent, according to a recent Pew study. Four years later, that margin shrunk by more than half, with Harris carrying Asian Americans 57 percent to 40 percent.

“Part of that is the fact that it’s being done by people who very much buy into the model minority myth from a very ahistorical perspective and completely decontextualizing why other communities of color are the way they are,” Mun says. “It’s a narrative that says, ‘If we’re able to do it, anybody else can.’”

It’s also a narrative often used to downplay the realities of racial inequality in America—one that ignores the difference in circumstance between those who came here with law degrees and those whose ancestors came as low-wage laborers or against their will. But it’s a narrative Tang Williams embraces unapologetically—America as a colorblind land of opportunity. “Asian Americans succeed, even if they come here with nothing like me, because we truly value education,” she says. If other communities join in the fight for school choice, then they can “become better educated, they can get a better-paying job, and they can become entrepreneurs.”

Sometimes, there’s a fine line between entrepreneurship and performatively enriching the world’s wealthiest manto own the libs.

“I’m inside my brand new Tesla I bought to support Elon Musk and DOGE,” Tang Williams announced in a March video that has been viewed 4 million times on X. “Radical leftists are Marxist-communists. They want to shut you down if you do not comply to them, if you are a threat to their corruption, their money, their special interests.”

It’s Tesla, baby! I bought it to support ⁦@elonmusk⁩ ⁦@DOGE⁩. We, the free people must defeat the leftists/Marxists/communist mobs or they will destroy America! pic.twitter.com/dC0UmqJwZj

— Lily Tang Williams (@Lily4Liberty) March 10, 2025

“I’m going to go buy some more Tesla stocks and support them whenever I can,” she added. “We must win as a free people.”

That freedom has limits. In June, as millions of Americans took to the streets for “No Kings” protests against Trump, Tang Williams took aim at a group of demonstrators in Los Angeles who werespeaking Mandarin Chinese.

“The way they were chanting and raising their fists remind me [of]Red Guards,” she tweeted. “These are CCP operatives, some might be illegals.” Then she tagged ICE.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The shock and outrage over President Donald Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner because of weak jobs numbers seems increasingly bipartisan.

Several Republican senators told NBC News that they did not support Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer if it was, in fact, motivated by his displeasure over the poor jobs numbers released on Friday. (All indications are that it was.) Democrats, meanwhile, said Trump’s latest move was the behavior of an authoritarian.

On Friday, Trump quickly claimed without any evidence that the revised jobs numbers, which showed weaker job growth in May and June than previously projected, had been “manipulated.” But experts on the work of the BLS, which is part of the Department of Labor, pushed back, saying Trump’s claim is not plausible.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who served in the Clinton administration, said on ABC’s This Week that Trump’s firing “is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did.” Summers explained: “These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number.”

On CNN’s State of the Union, former BLS Commissioner William Beach, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, said “there’s no way” the jobs numbers were “rigged” as Trump put it. “The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers,” he said. “By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system.” Beach added that the firing “really hurts the statistical system” and “undermines credibility in BLS.” In a post on X, Beach called the firing “totally groundless” and said it “sets a dangerous precedent.”

Former BLS commissioner @BeachWW453 on Trump firing his successor over weak jobs numbers: “I don't think there's any grounds at all for this for this firing. And it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility…. This is damaging.” pic.twitter.com/q7lrqfNnjE

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) August 3, 2025

The White House, nonetheless, is doubling down. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, denied that Trump would fire anyone whose data he disagrees with. Even so, Hassett added on Meet the Press: “The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable.” (Notably, Vice President JD Vance, when he was a US senator from Ohio, voted to confirm McEntarfer.)

When host Kristen Welker pressed Hassett for “hard evidence” that the numbers were “rigged,” as Trump claimed, Hassett first replied, “the revisions are hard evidence”—even though such revisions are, in fact, standard procedure. Later in the interview, Hassett added, “if you look at the number itself, it is the evidence.” And on Fox News Sunday, Hassett alleged that there are “partisan patterns” in the data, while offering no proof of that.

WATCH: National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on trusting economic data: "The data have become very unreliable with these massive revisions over the last few years." pic.twitter.com/FtYB4UCBFv

— Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) August 3, 2025

The only real pattern present seems to be a familiar one: bipartisan leaders and experts are decrying Trump’s actions as undermining and dangerous, while Trump and his cronies insist that they are the only ones who can be trusted.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Friday, the Department of Veterans Affairs proposed a policy change that advocates for reproductive rights say could become one of the strictest abortion bans nationwide.

The department filed a proposed rule seeking to eliminate coverage for the limited abortion services and counseling that have been available to veterans and their beneficiaries under the VA health care system for nearly three years.

In September 2022, a few months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the VA under the Biden administration began covering abortion counseling, as well as abortion services for veterans and beneficiaries who report experiencing rape or incest or whose health is endangered by carrying a pregnancy to term. Former VA Secretary Denis McDonough called the move “a patient safety decision,” and advocates praised the policy change for providing a lifeline for the most vulnerable veterans and their beneficiaries in the 15 states that had total or near-total bans at the time. (That tally is now 16 states.)

But the Trump administration alleges that the rule change was a matter of federal overreach, alleging it “contradicted decades of Federal policy against forced taxpayer funding for abortion.” And in arguing its position for yanking extremely limited abortion services from veterans and their dependents, the Trump administration has put forth misinformation and contradictions.

The proposed measure, says Sen. Patty Murray, is“unspeakably cruel and a grotesque assault on women who have put their lives on the line to keep us safe.”

The proposed rule states, for example, that the government would indeed allow abortions to proceed in life-threatening situations such as ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages. Yet, confusingly, the text also blasts “claims in the prior administration’s rule that abortions throughout pregnancy are needed to save the lives of pregnant women” as “incorrect.”

In fact, ectopic pregnancies are nonviable and life-threatening for the pregnant person, and incomplete miscarriages—in which abortion procedures are typically used to empty the cervix—can lead to hemorrhages, sepsis, and death. And contrary to the Trump administration’s claim that “no State law prohibits treatment for ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages to save the life of a mother,” reporting from ProPublica has shown that strict abortion bans have created a chilling effect for doctors, who have feared running afoul of abortion bans and have delayed intervening in medical emergencies, resulting in higher rates of sepsis and death.

The Trump administration further argues that minimal use of the existing policy by veterans makes it unnecessary in the first place. To abortion rights advocates, that claim is nonsensical and will cause harm. “After veterans put their lives on the line to protect our freedoms, the Trump administration is trying to rob them of their own freedoms and putting their health at risk,” Nancy Northup, President and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “This administration is sending a clear message to veterans—that their health and dignity aren’t worth defending.”

Women are the fastest-growing group of veterans, with more than two million living in the US, according to VA data. As of 2024, more than half of women veterans of reproductive age lived in states that banned abortion or were likely to, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families.

The Center of Reproductive Rights also notes that one in three women veterans report experiencing sexual assault or harassment during their military service, according to VA data, which can lead to a need for abortion services. Unplanned pregnancies—particularly as a result of sexual assault—can also exacerbate the post-traumatic stress disorder that many veterans experience.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), a vocal advocate for abortion rights and a senior member of the Senate Veteran Affairs’ Committee, called the measure“unspeakably cruel and a grotesque assault on women who have put their lives on the line to keep us safe.”

“Donald Trump insisted time and again on the campaign trail that he supported exceptions for rape and incest—now he’s going after exactly those exceptions with this move to axe the incredibly limited abortion services VA provides for women veterans in desperate situations,” Murray said in a statement.

This policy move may come as no surprise, given that Project 2025 recommended it and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins has been vocal about his anti-abortion views, as I wrote back in January.

The administration’s filing on Friday in the Federal Register marks the first step in the process of changing the agency’s rules; the next step consists of a 30-day public comment period, beginning on Monday. After that, the agency can finalize the rule, and it would take effect 30 days after being published.

If the proposal is finalized, which appears likely, it will be just the latest example of efforts to restrict abortion, even in states where the procedure is legal.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

The Titanic lies about 12,500 feet under the ocean surface. The pressure down there is so immense that even submersibles supposedly built for those conditions can, as we know, tragically fail.

Now imagine taking a sub nearly three times deeper.

That’s what an international team of scientists did last summer. Led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the researchers took a manned submersible to the bottom of deep-sea trenches in an area in the northwest Pacific Ocean, roughly between Japan and Alaska, reaching a depth of more than 31,000 feet.

Clusters of tube worms.Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, CAS

The researchers weren’t looking for a shipwreck. They were interested in what else might be lurking on the seafloor, which is so deep that no light can reach it.

It was there that they found something remarkable: entire communities of animals, rooted in organisms that are able to derive energy not from sunlight but from chemical reactions. Through a process called chemosynthesis, deep-sea microbes are able to turn compounds like methane and hydrogen sulfide into organic compounds, including sugars, forming the base of the food chain. The discovery was published in the journal Nature.

This was the deepest community of chemosynthetic life ever discovered, according to Mengran Du, a study author and researcher at the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Collections of microbes at the bottom of a trench in the Pacific Ocean.Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, CAS

Using a deep-sea vessel called Fendouzhe, the researchers encountered abundant wildlife communities, including fields of marine tube worms peppered with white marine snails. The worms have a symbiotic relationship with chemosynthetic bacteria that live in their bodies. Those bacteria provide them with a source of nutrients in exchange for, among other things, a stable place to live.

Among the tube worms the scientists encountered white, centipede-like critters—they’re also a kind of worm, in the genus macellicephaloides—as well as sea cucumbers.

The researchers also found a variety of different clams on the seafloor, often alongside anemones. Similar to the tube worms, the clams depend on bacteria within their shells to turn chemical compounds like methane and hydrogen sulfide that are present in the deep sea into food.

Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, CAS

Unlike other deep-sea ecosystems—which feed on dead animals and other organic bits that fall from shallower waters—these trench communities are likely sustained in part by methane produced by microbes buried under the seafloor, the authors said. That suggests that wildlife communities may be more common in these extremely deep trenches than scientists once thought.

“The presence of these chemosynthetic ecosystems challenge long-standing assumptions about life’s potential at extreme depths,” Du told Vox in an email.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Texas is on its way to gerrymandering its own gerrymander. On Saturday, Republicans on the state house of representatives’ redistricting committee approved a new plan to add five Republican seats—part of a radical mid-decade scheme to help Republicans keep control of the US House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections. The plan could go to a full vote in the chamber early next week, after which it will move on to the Republican-controlled state senate.

It might also set off a chain reaction. In response to Texas Republicans’ threats (and now action), some Democratic governors have called for a proportionate response—changing the rules in states such as Illinois, California, and New York to maximize the party’s advantage. And in Texas itself, Democratic legislators are mulling whether to flee the state to deny a legislative quorum.

This is the second time this millennium Texas Republicans have done a mid-decade gerrymander, and it’s easily the most extreme. In 2003, after Republicans finally took control of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, they also set about redrawing the maps, looking to flip five Democrat-held seats. That was a big deal, of course, but the justification was a bit more plausible. Texas, by that point, was operating under an extremely outdated map from the early 1990s that preserved a Democratic congressional majority in a now-comfortably Republican state. Democratic legislators twice fled the state, to Oklahoma and New Mexico, but the gambit ultimately failed.

This time, though, the maps that Texas Republicans are trying to redraw were drawn by Texas Republicans just four years ago. And while the current map was not quite the maximalist gerrymander it could have been, it’s still advantageous to Republicans. Democrats won 13 seats out of 38 in 2024. If the party continues to lose support in its former stronghold of South Texas, that number could easily have fallen to 11 all on its own. The argument that has been rolled out by Gov. Greg Abbott to justify this emergency redistricting is that the map he previously approved is actually an illegal racial gerrymander. Therefore, urgent action must be taken, four years later, to redraw the maps that, again, Republicans themselves enacted.

As my colleague Ari Berman explained in a recent piece, the contradictory arguments for why Texas is moving ahead with this add up to a big, bad-faith mess. The actual explanation for why this is happening, though, is less convoluted: President Donald Trump asked them to do this, and Texas Republicans would sooner denounce germ theory and their own families than tell the president no.

The new map is, of course, a disaster for Democrats. To take one glaring example, 16-term Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Greg Casar would likely be forced to compete for the same Austin-based turf. But the cynicism of the ploy goes behind the gaming of the 2026 elections. As the New York Times wrote about the Democrats’ quorum quandary:

[D]oing so comes with political and practical risks: Republican leaders in the Texas House fast-tracked the redistricting legislation before introducing any bills responding to the deadly floods in the Texas Hill Country —putting Democrats in the position of potentially walking out on legislation that addresses needs caused by the flooding.

I think it’s a bit unfair to say that Democrats would be culpable for blocking flood relief when Republicans have made the very deliberate choice to condition flood relief on first arranging for the defeat of five Democratic representatives. Why, exactly, is defeating Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2026 more important than responding to a natural disaster? But that is the sort of calculus Republicans have created, not just in Texas, but everywhere. With Trump, everything is a hostage negotiation. And this time, he couldn’t have made his demands clearer.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This month’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a bit of a bummer. The nonpartisan federal agency announced Friday morning that its relatively rosy forecast earlier this summer had been way off. While BLS had previously reported 291,000 new non-farm jobs in May and June, on further review, the agency concluded that number was more like 33,000. If that sounds like a big deal, it definitely is—perhaps a sign that massive cuts to government spending and employment, and a truly chaotic and possibly illegal tariff policy, are creating something less than the promised historic economic boom. It’s also exactly what you expect the BLS to release when confronted with more precise data. At a time when institutions inside and outside the government are compromising their independence to accommodate President Donald Trump, it showed that the gold standard in jobs data was still operating as it should.

That is, until Friday afternoon, when Trump responded to the poor jobs report by announcing his intention to fire Erika McEntarfer, the head of the BLS. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate,” he wrote on Truth Social. “[T]hey can’t be manipulated for political purposes.” Economic commentators and analysts of various political stripes condemned the move. Even the conservative businessman Kevin O’Leary told CNN that “whacking statisticians makes no sense whatsoever.”

When I say this is the kind of thing that happens in autocracies, I am not trying to be provocative. Three years ago, when Turkey’s economic statistics agency released a report showing that the country’s inflation rate was at 36 percent, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the head of the agency and replaced him with a loyal ally. When it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.

When it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.

For now, the BLS is still staffed by the sort of professionals who would sooner file for unemployment themselves than fudge the unemployment numbers. But the impulsive firing seems to herald a new chapter in the president’s often delusional second term. Trump is officially in his Mad King era, demanding the impossible, lashing out at those who can’t provide it, and seeing vast conspiracies behind every setback. It is the heir to Caligula appointing his horse as consul, Empress Carlota of Mexico drinking from fountains because everything else was poison, and the Bishop of Quebec excommunicating the passenger pigeon for eating too many crops. (Well, they did eventually go away.) It is Britain banning productions of King Lear, in the twilight of George III’s reign.

But also, BLS aside, a lot of modern conservatism is kind of premised on this kind of cooking of the books (or banning them as the case may be). Trump’s attempt to intimidate the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a fitting end to a week in which his Environmental Protection Agency sought to walk back its landmark finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. They are rejecting a scientific consensus, in other words, to accommodate Trump’s economic agenda. For years, Republican legislatures and administrations have worked to prohibit accurate climate science from informing environmental planning. The first seven months of his term have been defined by a purge of government health data and the people who produce it. At this point, it might as well be the ruling party’s mantra: Hear no evil, see no evil…profit?

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Jade Dass was taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. Scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say this leads to the best outcomes for both mothers and babies. But after Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety, which conducted an investigation and separated her from her newborn.

“I just couldn’t believe it, that people would act like this,” Dass says. “Like how they couldn’t see—it’s, like, you have no humanity if you’re gonna take someone’s baby.”

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

To understand the scale of this issue, reporter Shoshana Walter, data reporter Melissa Lewis, and a team of Reveal researchers and lawyers filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy. This week on Reveal, we follow Dass as she grapples with losing custody of her baby—and makes one last desperate attempt to keep her family together.

Walter has turned some of her reporting for Reveal into a book about the addiction treatment industry, Rehab: An American Scandal, which comes out this month.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2023.

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

Liquefied natural gas vessels are fueled by their cargo—they’re built specifically to make use of the gas boiling off from their tanks. Now Cheniere Energy, the largest US exporter of LNG, is seeking “alternative fuel” tax credits for that.

The claim has baffled shipping experts, because what Cheniere Energy is doing isn’t, in any real sense, an alternative. It would also provide little climate benefit over fueling the vessels with diesel, and seeks to use the credit in a way that tax specialists say was never intended.

Yet if approved by the IRS, the claimed tax credits could yield a payout for the company exceeding $140 million, an Inside Climate News analysis found.

““It’s a very aggressive tax position…It just seems like they’re pushing the envelope here.”

In its annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in February, Cheniere disclosed that it is “actively pursuing” alternative fuel tax credits for its use of LNG in its shipping vessels from 2018 to 2024, the year the credit expired. The IRS is reviewing those claims, the filing said.

Thealternative fuel excise tax credit was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2005. It was intended to incentivize the use of fuels other than gasoline and diesel—including biofuels, LNG, and liquid fuels derived from coal—for use in motor vehicles, and it set no requirements for the relative cleanliness of these fuels.

Cheniere noted in its financial report that LNG is a cleaner-burning fuel than diesel or heavy-fuel oils and that the use of LNG was part of an ongoing effort to mitigate emissions from the company’s shipping operations. However, critics point out that fueling LNG tankers with diesel would be absurd, given that the gas continually boiling off from the refrigerated liquid cargo would have to be burned off anyway, or re-liquefied, if it wasn’t used for propulsion.

“It makes no sense not to use the fuel that you already have because of boil-off,” said Kirsten Sinclair Rosselot, an environmental performance analyst who runs the consultancy Process Profiles and was the lead author of a 2023 study that assessed fuel use and emissions from LNG vessels. “It’s not an alternative fuel.”

Cheniere declined repeated requests for comment from Inside Climate News. The American Petroleum Institute, a trade association representing the US oil and gas industry, also declined to comment.

Cheniere’s eligibility for the tax credit may hinge on how the IRS interprets one word: motorboats. The statute states that tax credits can be claimed for the use of LNG and other alternative fuels “in a motor vehicle or motorboat.”

“It’s a very aggressive tax position,” William Henck, a former IRS tax attorney and agency whistleblower, said of Cheniere’s alternative fuel tax credit claim. “It just seems like they’re pushing the envelope here.”

The tax law doesn’t define what constitutes a motorboat. However,federal shipping regulations state it is a vessel no more than 65 feet long. LNG tankers typically extend nearly 1,000 feet. “They’re talking about a tanker,” Henck said. “Does that sound like a motorboat to you?”

If the IRS approves Cheniere’s claim, the company would be eligible for a 50 cent tax credit for each diesel gallon equivalent of fuel used. Cheniere declined to reveal the size of the tax credit it is claiming. However, according to calculations by Inside Climate News, it could exceed $140 million.

“If Cheniere is looking for a return on investment in its very generous contribution to the Trump campaign, this is certainly an excellent opportunity.”

From January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2024, Cheniere used company-chartered vessels to export LNG on more than 750 departures from its terminals in Sabine Pass, Louisiana, and Corpus Christi, Texas, according to shipping data from Kpler, a global trade analytics firm. The data was analyzed by Data Desk, which conducts investigative research on the oil and gas industry, and Inside Climate News.

Adapting methods used for an earlier Inside Climate News investigation of emissions from LNG tankers, ICN calculated that those export journeys burned about 770,000 metric tons of gas in the vessels’ main engines and generators. Applying the conversion factor approved for the tax credit, that corresponds to more than 280 million diesel gallons equivalent or a credit of roughly $140 million. These calculations do not include LNG used on the subsequent return journeys by the same vessels, which are fueled from a small quantity of the cargo retained for that purpose. If Cheniere is also claiming credits for these journey legs, the payout could nearly double.

ICN also calculated the total greenhouse gas emissions using LNG fuel, compared to a hypothetical situation in which ships were powered by the 280 million diesel gallons equivalent and simply flared the LNG boiling off from their cargo. Using LNG did reduce total CO2 equivalent emissions compared to the hypothetical diesel-fueled journeys, but only by about 12.5 percent. (LNG tankers have relatively high total emissions because of the methane that slips unburned through their engines.)

Companies should only assume the effects of a tax position in their financial projections when there is a 50 percent or more likelihood that their claims will be sustained after the IRS weighs in, according to guidance by the accounting firm PwC and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets accounting standards for companies.

Cheniere stated in its SEC filing that it hasn’t included the tax credits in its projections. The company added that “we believe we qualify and are entitled to claim such credits” but acknowledged “there is ongoing uncertainty regarding the final determination of our eligibility.”

Anthony Burke, a spokesperson for the IRS, declined to comment, stating that “by law, federal employees cannot disclose tax return information.” He did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the IRS has received requests for guidance on the use of LNG in export vessels related to alternative fuel tax credits or whether the agency has provided such guidance to companies.

Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of the climate and energy justice program at Friends of the Earth, said approval of the tax credit by the IRS would raise red flags. “If the IRS decides that Cheniere’s globe-spanning charter vessels the length of a city block are equivalent to 65-foot motorboats, then the independence of the IRS is obviously in question,” said Shankar-Ross, who drew Cheniere’s claim to the attention of ICN.

Fuel tax credits have long been a focus of controversy. Henck’s whistleblowing involved a situation in which the IRS began approving alternative fuel tax credits to paper mills for their use of something called black liquor.

“You can rest assured that if Cheniere gets approved, anyone else in the same situation will file refund claims.”

That byproduct from pulp manufacturing has been burned as fuel in paper mills for nearly a century. Adding in a small amount of diesel—as little as a few drops—qualified the blend for alternative fuel mixture credits that resulted in the use of more diesel, rather than less, and were ultimately worth $8 billion, according to the Washington Post.

“It was aggressive enough that they got the credit in the first place,” said Henck, who at the time advised teams of IRS agents examining tax returns for larger companies. “But what went way over the line, and the reason why I spoke out, is they didn’t even have to report that stuff as taxable income.”

The IRS approved the paper mills’ tax refund amid lobbying by the paper companies. Shankar-Ross said he worries something similar may be happening now with Cheniere, whose claims may get a sympathetic hearing from the fossil-fuel friendly Trump administration.

Company CEO Jack Fusco attended a private meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, when then presidential candidate Donald Trump urged oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign, according to reporting by the New York Times. Trump said the money would more than pay for itself in saved taxes and legal expenses, the Times reported.

Two months later, Fusco donated a total of nearly $500,000 to a Trump political action committee and the Republican National Committee,according to Federal Election Commission data.   “If Cheniere is looking for a return on investment in its very generous contribution to the Trump campaign, this is certainly an excellent opportunity,” Shankar-Ross said.

Shankar-Ross said he worries that if Cheniere receives tax credits for its use of LNG, others will follow. That happened with paper mills, Henck said.

“You can rest assured that if Cheniere gets approved, anyone else in the same situation will file refund claims,” Henck said. “I guarantee you that.”

Cheniere spent just over $1.7 million lobbying Congress and the administration with its in-house team in the first half of 2025, according to federal lobbying reports. Part of that sum was spent on lobbying the Treasury Department, of which the IRS is a part, and the Executive Office of the President on “tax issues impacting businesses and the LNG industry.”

Lobbying on tax credits, Henck has found, can make all the difference.

“I hate to say this, but the actual law or common sense has nothing to do with this,” Henck said. “If they can get inside access, one-on-one meetings with the decision makers in the IRS national office, they can get this thing through.”

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During the 2025 Grammy Awards—the same night he made outdated quips about Colombian cocainewhen speaking about Shakira—host Trevor Noah joked that 13,000 members of the Recording Academy had voted for the night’s winners—before adding, “and 20 million illegal immigrants.” The joke led to massive backlash online and an eyeroll from Doechii on the night. But what stood out wasn’t the premise, which made fun of the false right-wing conspiracy theory that undocumented immigrants are voting in huge numbers. It was the language Noah used.

It’s hardly the only recent use of the term “illegal immigrant” by a public figure associated with the left—or at least onenot in the MAGA movement. Joe Biden infamously did so as president, later expressing regret, in response to heckling from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a State of the Union address. Andrew Cuomo used it during New York’s final mayoral Democratic primary debate when discussing people hired for cleaning services by the city’s transit authority.

Advocates have nowbeen pushing back for more than a decade against the use of the word “illegal” to describe individuals.Lindsay Schubiner, director of programs at Western States Center, an advocacy group that recently published guidelines for journalists on responsible immigration coverage, says the term embeds an accusation of criminality and fuels racial profiling. The term “flattens people,” Schubiner says, and “paints a whole group of diverse human beings with rich lives as subhuman.” Jon Rodney, narrative strategy director at the Immigrant Defense Project, contends that the term not onlyfuels racial profiling but is legally inaccurate: immigration cases are generally civil, not criminal, matters.

But before 2010, “illegal” was standard language among mainstream news organizations covering immigration, which led the nonprofit Race Forward to campaign against its use on the grounds that it was dehumanizing, biased, and ran counter to due process (Rinku Sen, then the organization’s executive director, is a member of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s board of directors). In 2013, the Associated Press updated its stylebook, an industry standard, to no longer sanction its use to describe a person, rather than an action. The New York Times began discouraging its use the same year. Both moves seemed to have wider ripple effects.

Even people in left-leaning areas are now more likely to use dehumanizing terms for undocumented people.

I looked at national data from Google Trends, which measures the use of search terms, dating back to 2010, to compare the frequency of searches for “undocumented immigrants” vs. “illegal immigrants.” There is, of course, the caveat that we don’t know exactly why people search certain terms. As a journalist, I often have to search for terms I’d never use in real life in order to find out what certain people have said about a topic, but most people don’t use Google that way. The other caveat is that people also use other search terms that this dataset wouldn’t cover.

In that data, “undocumented” has never been the leading term, but the Race Forward campaign and subsequent style guide changes seem to have narrowed the gap: In 2010, for every 20 searches for “illegal immigrants,” there was onlyone for “undocumented immigrants.” By 2013, when AP updated its style guide, that had decreased to a ratio of 8 to 1. In 2016, it was 7 to 1—and even continued decreasing during Donald Trump’s first term, all the way to 3 to 1 in 2020. But in 2021, the trend began to reverse.

In 2021, the popularity of searches for “illegal” over “undocumented” immigrants increased to 4 to 1, and to 5 to 1 by 2024. That tracks the increased frequency and visibilityof vile, hateful rhetoric fromTrump and his allies—often accompanied by misinformation about immigrant communities—in the lead-up to his reelection. Advocates I spoke with repeatedly warned about Trump’s use of the word “invasion” when attacking immigrants; Schubiner says that Trump’s language has “been moving closer and closer to the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims a white genocide is being orchestrated through immigration.” Cathy Buerger, director of research at the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit that studies speechthat leads to violence, says Trump’s characterization of migration as an invasion and his repeated use of “military-aged men” to describe people coming across the border “ups the ante on the rhetoric of describing migrants…as a threat to the nation.”

That language isn’t just affecting how the right speaks about immigration. It’s also normalizing the use of loaded, anti-immigrant language by those who oppose the Trump administration’s policies. Even anecdotally, I’ve heard multiple friends in the last few months use the “I-word” in the process of expressing outrage against the administration’s actions on immigration, a trap even well-meaning people can fall into.

Google Trends data bears that out as well, indicating that even left-leaning areas are now more likely to use dehumanizing language when referring to undocumented people. In blue states, the ratio of searches for “illegal” vs. “undocumented” immigrants has also increased: in the 10 states with the biggest Democratic margins in the 2024 presidential election, the ratio went from 2 to 1 in 2020 to 3 to 1 in 2024.

Schubiner doesn’t find that surprising—“The mainstreaming of anti-immigrant language,” she says, “has escalated at really breakneck speed.” Julie Hollar, senior analyst at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media watchdog, lays some of the blame on the way mainstream outlets cover immigration: large publications have increasingly returned to using the term without quotation marks, she says, leading readers to “just assume that is the standard language, and that it is perfectly acceptable and not loaded.”

“The mainstreaming of anti-immigrant language,” Schubiner says, “has escalated at really breakneck speed.”

Broadcast news seems to be following suit: CNN host Abby Phillip used the term during a recent panel discussion about new polling showing growing American support for immigration.

Hollar, like many other advocates, also points out the dehumanizing nature, and danger, of the constant use of natural disaster language in immigration coverage: words like “surge,” “flood,” and “wave,” which Hollar says obscure individual human beings and characterize them as “a faceless, threatening group.”

Such language, Buerger warns, has served as a precursor to violence throughout history, a practice she calls “probably as old as human society,” citing historical examples like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide—now boosted further by social media, as in Myanmar, where Facebook and other platforms were blamed for platforming ethnic violence against the Rohingya people. The Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration, Buerger points out, often include a paragraph using the language of threat to justify the actions being taken.

Less loaded, more humane language, Rodney believes, wouldreflect the fact that all our lives have value. “We’re seeing ICE agents abduct our neighbors, disappear students in broad daylight, smash the windows of workers’ cars, and render people to a torture camp,” he says. “In this moment when we talk about language, I think what should ultimately guide us is shared humanity.”

“As dehumanizing rhetoric becomes more mainstream, that just opens up further avenues for violence and horrific policies,” says Schubiner. “What impact does it have on people’s ability to trust each other, to participate in democratic processes, to believe in equal rights under the law in this country?”

Trevor Noah’s management did not respond to requests for comment.

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

US liberals have become so disgusted with Tesla since Elon Musk’s rightward turn that they are now not only far less likely to purchase the car brand but also less willing to buy any type of electric car, new research has found.

The popularity of Tesla among liberal-minded Americans has plummeted since Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and the world’s richest person, allied himself with Donald Trump and helped propel the president to election victory last year.

While liberals reported mostly positive intentions around buying an electric car in August 2023, their overall support for EVs eroded in the wake of a collapse in their opinion of Teslas, according to the new study, which polled Americans on an array of environmental actions.

By the latest poll, taken in March as Musk was gutting the federal workforce in his role as Trump’s top adviser after delivering what appeared to be a Nazi salute, the intention to buy any EV among liberals slipped into negative territory.

“The suspicion is that Elon Musk became so synonymous with EVs in the US that perceptions of him affected the entire class of vehicles,” said Alexandra Flores, a psychologist at Williams College and lead author of the study, published in Nature. “This made them way less appealing to liberals—he really dragged down perceptions of EVs in general. It’s definitely unusual to have a chief executive have an impact on a whole class of products like this.”

Opposition to Musk over his alliance with Trump, which has since ruptured in acrimony, caused many liberal Tesla owners in the US and Europe to express embarrassment with their vehicles. Some have even adorned their cars with anti-Musk stickers that feature slogans such as “Anti Elon Tesla Club” or “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy.”

However, the new study found that Musk’s right-wing shift has not made conservative Americans more likely to buy a Tesla or any electric car, despite separate polling showing that Republican voters now have a more favorable view of the car company than they once did. Views on Musk are also sharply divided between conservatives and liberals.

Even as liberals dramatically changed their views of Tesla, and to a lesser extent EVs, most conservatives remain skeptical of both and have been consistently unwilling to consider buying an electric car in the past two years of polling.

While buying an electric vehicle was the most politically polarized environmental action when the researchers’ polling began, more so than installing solar panels or even eating less red meat, Democrats and Republicans are now more in line than they were following Musk’s political foray.

“EVs aren’t going away—adoption may stagnate but it won’t go off a cliff..”

“We thought that liberals would be pretty stable because EVs are so historically associated with the green movement and that Musk’s rightward turn would bring conservatives on board,” said Flores.

“But the opposite happened—over time conservatives remained relatively steady in their lack of interest in EVs and Tesla, while liberals’ attitudes really dropped. They are now equally unlikely to buy an EV as they are a Tesla.”

Flores said that EVs’ association with climate-friendly politics may be more influential for conservatives than liberals when it comes to purchasing decisions. “The attitude among conservatives to Tesla may be slightly less negative than before but that didn’t translate into the part of psychology of how they intended to behave,” she said. “That strong link to liberalism is too much for them to be budged on. It’s more foundational to them than if they like or don’t like Elon Musk.”

Musk has recently admitted that Tesla faces a “rough few quarters” ahead amid stuttering sales figures for the company in the US. Last week, Tesla announced sales for the second quarter of 2025 were 12 percent down on the same period last year, amid consumer concerns over tariffs, Tesla’s lineup, and the imminent removal of tax credits—as well as Musk’s own image.

In California, Tesla’s heartland, the situation is particularly stark, with the company posting a seventh consecutive quarter of declines in new vehicle registrations.

Overall EV sales in the US dipped in the three months to July, year-on-year, and the shift to electric models is likely to be slowed further by a Republican spending bill, signed by Trump, that axes a key incentive for buyers to opt for an EV. From September, a tax credit of up to $7,500 for an electric car purchase will be deleted, with dealers expecting a rush of people to take advantage of the subsidy before it expires.

“You can’t deny there are people who say they won’t buy a Tesla but the company’s numbers aren’t too surprising,” said Erin Keating, executive analyst at Cox Automotive. “They have had two major products that are major sellers, they haven’t changed them in years and there is now a big influx of new and more exciting electric products out there.

“I’m not sure you can attribute any falloff in EV sales to Elon, maybe him being on both sides of the coin will free EVs from being a political lightning rod,” Keating said, adding that total market share for EVs may not break 10 percent this year, as previously forecast.

“The removal of the tax credits may slow things down, it will hurt consumers’ perception of whether they can afford an EV or not,” she said. “But EVs aren’t going away—adoption may stagnate but it won’t go off a cliff. We’ve invested too much into it and there are too many good products on the market now.”

Transportation is the largest contributor to planet-heating pollution in the US and any slowdown in EV adoption would hinder attempts to address the climate crisis.

“One of the more troubling implications of our study is what this means for the climate,” said Flores. “It is possible, though, that Musk’s shadow over EVs starts to fade, even if opinions about Tesla don’t recover. That pride in driving a climate-friendly vehicle may rebound among liberals.”

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), now the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in the United States, is embarking on a plan to drastically expand its detention infrastructure. But considering the $45 billion it’s been given for the job, the agency’s vision for its new facilities seems startlingly low-tech.

In July, the Wall Street Journal got its hands on internal government documents revealing that ICE wants to incarcerate more immigrants in tents, or “hardened soft-sided facilities.” The administration hopes to erect thousands of these tents “as quickly as possible to expand detention capacity…at US military bases and adjoining bricks-and-mortar ICE jails,” the Journal reported. Officials say they like this approach, at least for now, because they can quickly set up tons of beds in a few new locations rather than finding space at existing facilities here and there.

One CBP tent facility was so shoddily built, a lawsuit claimed, that an immigrant was able to rip out a door frame molding with his bare hands.”

But tents raise serious humanitarian and safety issues. “There’s a reason no one wants to live in a tent,” says Eunice Cho, an attorney who challenges unconstitutional conditions in immigrant detention centers with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “There are many, many logistical problems—with sanitation, getting food. They certainly are not weatherproof. They do not have the setup to make sure people’s medical concerns are addressed.”

Prior to 2025, ICE did not use tents for long-term detention, but soft-sided facilities are not completely new in the incarceration realm. Here are some recent examples, each highlighting problems that are almost sure to repeat themselves as the Trump administration rolls out its plan.

Arizona’s Infamous Tent CityIn 1993, then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—whom Trump has described as an “American patriot”—responded to jail overcrowding by setting up an outdoor detention space in Phoenix. At its peak, his team housed up to 1,700 people at a time, many of them still awaiting trial on criminal charges, in dozens of military tents left over from the Korean War. In the 2000s, Arpaio became obsessed with illegal immigration, and soon his “Tent City” was filled with undocumented people who’d been picked up by his deputies.

“Sheriff Joe,” who dressed his inmates in pink underwear and comical black-and-white-striped bandit uniforms, once referred to the facility as a “concentration camp.” He later claimed to be joking, but the conditions at Tent City were indisputably awful. As the Guardian reported, temperatures inside the tents could reach 130 degrees during the summer; lacking air-conditioning, detainees relied on wet towels to cool themselves. In the winter, the tents got down to 41 degrees some nights, while holes let in wind and rain that soaked the beds. Jail staff handed out trash bags as raincoats.

“Insufficient lighting hinders the medical staff from being able to clearly see what they are doing.”

Other corrections departments have deployed tents temporarily after emergencies, such as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But the “deliberate and permanent use of tents for the purposes of humiliation and punishment” has been rare, says David Muhammad, a corrections expert who now directs the nonprofit National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

Taxpayers in Maricopa County ultimately paid more than $100 million in litigation costs as former inmates sued over Tent City conditions and other misconduct by the sheriff’s office, but Arpaio did not bow to pressure. A federal court held him in criminal contempt for defying a judge’s order to stop detaining so many immigrants. (Trump pardoned him in 2017, the year Tent City closed.)

Customs and Border Protection tentsICE’s interest in tents is new, but US Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—which polices border crossings and, unlike ICE, is not supposed to detain people for longer than 72 hours—has used them in the past. So has the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which detains immigrant children.

In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security audited a CBP station in El Paso, Texas, and found detainees in “netting-covered enclosures” in a parking lot. “There is no flooring other than the asphalt for the detainees to sleep on,” the auditor wrote. “Chain link fencing had been placed underneath the netting, but not safely…” Immigrants lacked direct access to water or places to sit. The auditor noted that it would be difficult to stop viruses from spreading if anyone got sick.

At another facility in El Paso, a tent was being used for medical triage, but “insufficient lighting hinders the medical staff from being able to clearly see what they are doing and increases the risk for errors to occur,” the auditor wrote. Meals were stored at dangerously high temperatures, creating a risk of food poisoning, the report added.

Dehumanizing immigrants and encouraging them to self-deport is “part of the design.”

In July, former staff from one of El Paso’s CBP tent facilities sued the companies that constructed it, claiming the workmanship was so shoddy that an immigrant was able to rip out a door frame molding with his bare hands, leading to an altercation that left officers injured. (In April, according to ProPublica, an ICE official said one of the companies, Deployed Resources, which made its name setting up tents for popular music festivals like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, was “adding more rigid structures inside” CBP tents in El Paso to make them more secure.)

Amid a drop in border crossings, CBP has fewer people to detain, so in March it gave ICE one of Deployed Resources’ El Paso facilities, in part to relieve overcrowding atother ICE detention centers, according to the local media outlet El Paso Matters. Tents like these were “designed to be temporary,” says Stacy Suh, a program director at Detention Watch Network, a national coalition opposed to immigrant detention. “It’s not meant for longer-term detention, but we’re seeing a shift.”

Alligator AlcatrazThe Trump administration is inviting states to get involved in building soft-sided facilities. Florida recently opened “Alligator Alcatraz,” a tent camp on an abandoned airstrip in the Everglades that was holding about 900 immigrants in July and could have capacity to detain thousands more by the end of August.

As my colleague Laura Morel has reported, horror stories are already emerging—from malfunctioning air conditioners to “rampant mosquitoes swarming” the facility. “People are not getting access to showers for days,” according to Suh. The ACLU’s Cho told me the toilets there are overflowing, the power frequently goes out, and detainees are reportedly given only two to three minutes to eat in the mess tent: “This kind of facility and the logistics lead to innumerable opportunities for cruelty,” she says—and what happens when a hurricane hits? Tents are already leaking and flooding after mere rainstorms.

Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection during the first Trump administration, has described Alligator Alcatraz as “an insult.” Immigration enforcement requires “real detention facilities and actual jails,” Morgan wrote in a Fox News op-ed, “not circus tents surrounded by reptiles.”The awful conditions work to the administration’s advantage, Suh told me, by creating a spectacle that dehumanizes immigrants and encourages them to self-deport: “It’s part of the design.” Or, as The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer more generally describes the administration’s tactics, “the cruelty is the point.”

Florida officials have suggested that Alligator Alcatraz is for hardened criminals, but many of its detainees have no prior arrests. The Miami Herald reported that even a 15-year-old boy was locked up. Experts I spoke with said the Trump administration needs so many detention beds only because it’s arresting immigrants who might not have been detained by prior administrations—undocumented but otherwise law-abiding people living peaceful and productive lives.

And tents, adds Muhammad of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, are likely unnecessary given how many jails around the country have surplus bedspace. “You have tons of existing facilities,” he says. ICE already contracts with some of them and could contract with more.

Nevertheless, additional tent facilities are on the way. The administration is gearing up to divert $608 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s budget to help states build their own immigrant detention centers. Florida officials expect to recoup the costs from Alligator Alcatraz. And those costs are not insignificant. Tent cities may seem cheap—they’re certainly less expensive to build than brick-and-mortar jails—but they’re very pricy to operate, largely because more staff are needed to deal with the logistical challenges. In 2018, Vox found that it cost $775 per day to house an immigrant in a tent city vs. $133 to $319 to house them in a traditional detention center—and just $4.50 per day to let them stay in the community with an ankle monitor. Alligator Alcatraz will cost taxpayers a whopping $450 million annually.“This isn’t cost-cutting,” wrote former CBP commissioner Morgan. “It’s theater. Worse, it’s dangerous.”

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This story was originally published by Capital B as part of their series chronicling the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

As the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached in 2015, Michelle McCullum, a 25-year-old mother of two, drove her children, ages 3 and 5, to a once bustling but now desolate industrial area of New Orleans. It was there that police said she shot her two young children and then herself.

The sudden death of McCullum and her babies was a devastating and bewildering loss for their loved ones, friends, and the city of New Orleans, the family said at the time. It reverberated across the city.

The children’s grandmother, Crystal McCullum, called for city residents and elected officials to open their eyes and to invest in more mental health resources for one of America’s poorest and Blackest cities. “If you have anybody—anybody—that you know that needs help, just help them please,” she said at a vigil shortly after the death of the mother and her children.

Michelle McCullum’s story became a haunting symbol of a new post-hurricane legacy: a young Black mother unable to find a foothold in a city still battered by loss, dislocation, and the slow erosion of opportunity while carrying the weight of mental illness in a fractured health care system.

McCullum was a teenager living in the city’s Treme neighborhood when the deadliest natural disaster in over a century remade New Orleans. At the time, the Treme neighborhood, one of the nation’s earliest free Black communities, was also a cornerstone of the area’s African American culture.

But in the aftermath of Katrina, the neighborhood—and opportunities for residents—shifted. The share of Black residents dropped by 40 percent while the share of white residents increased by 460 percent. And the city’s manufacturing hub, which was anchored by NASA and was one of the main pillars of middle-class Black families, lost nearly 100,000 jobs that never returned.

In the year before her death, McCullum had been laid off from the NASA manufacturing hub. (She ended her and her children’s lives just minutes from her former job.) Her husband had also worked at the facility. After she lost her job, she tried to pivot and aim for a career in dental health, but struggled to afford classes. While the factors that led her to take her own life and the lives of her toddlers are unknown,her family, neighbors, and loved ones could not separate her anguish from Katrinaand the lingering disruptions that continued to ripple through New Orleans in heartbreaking ways.

Kadreal Hebert, who moved to New Orleans about three years ago, is a school teacher. She has already attended several funerals for her students.Adam Mahoney/Capital B

A decade later, as New Orleans approaches the 20th anniversary of the hurricane, researchers have found that Louisiana holds the ominous distinction of being the state most vulnerable to what psychologists call “deaths of despair.” That phrase refers to fatalities from suicide, substance abuse, or chronic issues like respiratory and cardiovascular diseases linked to hopelessness and poverty.

The findings were part of a study by a team of researchers from Texas A&M University and the Environmental Defense Fund that explored 184 social and environmental metrics across 70,000 neighborhoods.

In New Orleans, and especially among Black residents, those numbers illuminate the visible and invisible scars left by compounded climate change disasters over the last two decades—besides Katrina, the city has experienced several tornadoes, winter storms, and hurricanes, including Hurricane Ida in 2021, the strongest storm in Louisiana history.

Today, residents living in McCullum’s old neighborhood are more vulnerable to die a death of despair or experience poor mental health than 99 percent of America’s neighborhoods.

When the concept of deaths of despair was first introduced in the late 1990s, white Americans were more likely to experience such outcomes. But deaths of despair among Black Americans have increased dramatically in recent years, with rates now surpassing those of white Americans.

Rita Gardner (right), who escaped the flooding on an air mattress because she cannot swim at the B.W. Cooper housing project in New Orleans, August 2007.

For many in New Orleans, mental health experts say the absence of meaningful recovery after disasters, persistent poverty, and memories of abandonment have fueled an undercurrent of despair.

“Essentially, this is a city where, if you’re from here, your life is [impacted by] PTSD, which is connected to depression and anxiety,” said Danielle Burton, a licensed professional counselor and member of NOLA Black Mental Health Matters.

Burton said what makes these vulnerabilities so acute is the way disaster is layered atop decades of inequity—limited access to mental health care, systemic racism in employment and housing, and a slow, uneven recovery have deepened the roots of despair. “All of this is not just because of the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but in the environmental damage that comes from gentrification, that comes from the whitewashing of culture and life here,” she added.

When a neighborhood loses its good jobs, safe parks, and health clinics overnight, research shows that daily life becomes a struggle just to meet basic needs, and constant worries about bills, safety, and getting help when you’re sick can make people feel hopeless and alone. For instance, when someone like McCullum is laid off as businesses close and the local mental health clinic disappears, she and her neighbors may find themselves with nowhere to turn when sadness or stress becomes too overwhelming.

New Orleans lost more than half its psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, and other mental health professionals in Katrina’s aftermath, and in the years following, suicide rates nearly tripled. In the two decades since the storm, the city’s suicide rate has grown 37 percent compared to the national rate.

The fallout of storms on victims’ quality of life was recently explored in a study published in Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific research journal. Researchers found that Black people experience the greatest increase in mortality after tropical cyclones like Katrina, for up to 15 years after the event.

When Black and white populations are exposed to the same storm, Black people have more than three times the increase in deaths. This is not because the hurricanes hit them harder right away, but because Black communities are more likely to face challenges like less money, fewer resources, worse health care, and more stress for many years after a storm, researchers said.

Robert Green Sr. sits in front of his FEMA trailer in the Lower Ninth Ward in August of 2007 with a memorial tombstone to his mother Joyce Green and granddaughter Shanai Green. Both were killed in the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina.Mario Tama/Getty

Before the storm, Robert Green, 70, said that despite whatever social inequities might have been present, it was clear that a sense of community and the ability of neighbors to depend on each other were what kept people afloat.

“It was evident. You could look outside and feel like there actually was no room for improvement,” he said this spring, while sitting in his living room. “I knew all my neighbors by name and all my neighbors knew me and my children. But we lost that, either to Katrina or the storm of neglect that followed.”

On the wall across from him, a portrait of his mother Joyce in her U.S. Air Force uniform and a painting of his 3-year-old granddaughter Shanai (“Nai Nai”) looked back at him as he spoke. They were killed when the hurricane’s floodwaters sent his home floating down the street and straight into a massive oak tree.

He said it took him years to battle through the depression and anxiety that followed their deaths and work toward happiness. “The loss of my mother and granddaughter, just like the loss of all our neighbors, was detrimental to my well-being,” he said, “but, I couldn’t run.”

Social and scientific researchers have distilled the components of measuring quality of life into five key metrics: access to health care, education, economic stability, safety, and a clean environment. When considering those factors, researchers say it is not difficult to see why Louisiana residents are most vulnerable to deaths of despair.

In 2004, before Hurricane Katrina, the state’s life expectancy stood at 74 years; today, it has dropped to 72—the fourth lowest in the nation. Educational attainment also remains a concern, with only about 86 percent of adults holding high school diplomas, the third-lowest rateamong the states. Wealth inequality is especially troubling, as Louisiana has the nation’s highest share of residents living in poverty, and New Orleans’ poverty rate is double the national average. When it comes to publicsafety, Louisiana led the nation in homicide rates for 31 consecutive years, from 1980 to 2021. In 2022, the most recent year for which federal data is available, it held the second-highest homicide rate.

Louisiana is alsothe second most vulnerable state to extreme environmental and climate events, contributing to negative health, social, economic, and ecological outcomes.

This fragility is woven into the city’s infrastructure. But people like Burton, the mental health worker, said they gather hope and pain in the same hands. On Thursday evenings, as a curtain of humidity hangs in the New Orleans air, Burton and other Black therapists gather in the halls of the city’s African American Museum. There, they arrange chairs into a circle, inviting anyone to simply sit and speak. This is Therapeutic Thursday, a local ritual wherein Black New Orleanians lay bare what usually goes unsaid**:** the ache of remembering, the fatigue of being pushed out, and the grit of surviving each day with so little of a safety net beneath them.

“Depression and anxiety are here,” Burton said, “but what makes them unique in New Orleans is that here, trauma is not just a personal burden. It’s social, it’s historical.”

It is also generational. According to the Society for Research in Child Development, up to half of children show symptoms of post-traumatic stress symptoms after disasters like Katrina. But culturally competent care is hard to find—only 3 percent of psychologists in the United States are Black.

Every year, as Katrina’s anniversary comes round again, the wound is reopened, Burton said. “It’s hard to move forward when the trauma is so present, as long as gentrification is still happening, as long as the culture keeps getting erased without any care.”

Jacqueline Smith and her mother, Lucille Matthew, await transportation after they were rescued from their flooded neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in August 2021, in Laplace, Louisiana.Scott Olson/Getty

Accessing care, Burton said, is also a struggle with layers of red tape and economic instability. The shortage of therapists is only the first wall. Most Black New Orleanians rely on Medicaid, but therapists who accept it often cannot survive on the slim reimbursements. And private-pay care—sometimes the only option—is financially out of reach for families stretched thin by decades of underinvestment. Many can’t even get to appointments: New Orleans lacks robust public transit, has spotty internet access, and because one out of three Black residents live in poverty, they cannot afford time lost to jobs that barely cover the rent.

“There are Black therapists here who want to help,” she said, “but the same systemic forces that wall off clients wall off the therapists too. We all have to survive.” So Burton and her colleagues build what they can: provide support in the form of a “therapy fund,” fueled by small donations to cover a dozen free sessions at a time for those struggling with mental health issues; open conversations in community spaces; partner with local political power brokers and community festivals.

“We want people to see Black faces—people like them—talking about and doing this work,” she said. “Not just to tell them to get help, but to show them: you’re worth it, your story matters, and there are ways to heal.”

Survival should be the bare minimum, Burton said. Yet in New Orleans, it is not a guarantee. But with each story shared in a circle, each grandmother’s plea for help, each new effort to clear a path to healing, she said, a different legacy becomes possible.

Kimber Smith at the FEMA Diamond travel trailer park in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, May 2008.Mario Tama/Getty

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When President Joe Biden announced the creation of the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program in 2023, Sarah Letsinger enrolled immediately. Graduating in 2012 with a degree in fashion design, Letsinger never earned more than $16 an hour in her chosen field—and hardly made a dent in her approximately $35,000 in federal student loans. After she gave birth to her daughter inMarch 2020, the day her state of Illinois announced its Covid lockdown, she realized that if she returned to work, her wages would just go toward childcare. So she decided to focus on being a mom.

SAVE reduced borrowers’ loan payments to manageable levels and waived interest charges that exceeded their monthly payments—effectively lowering interest rates to 0 percent for the lowest-income borrowers. Under the program, Letsinger’s monthly payments fell to almost zero. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing,’” she says. She and her husband still had lots of student debt from his studies to become a nurse, and eventually a nurse practitioner: more than $65,000 in mostly-private loans that don’t qualify for any federal help. But SAVE meant “I could breathe a little,” Letsinger says. “I don’t have to panic about it.”

Now that sense of relief has evaporated. For the past year, while Republican-led challenges to the plan play out in court, no SAVE borrowers have been charged interest on their loans or been expected to make payments. But three weeks ago, the Trump administration suddenly announced it was ditching the SAVE plan’s litigation-induced 0 percent interest cap as of August 1; going forward, 7.7 million borrowers enrolled in the program will start accruing interest on their federal loans at rates that for some people could exceed 9 percent per year. That announcement followed the news that, under the GOP’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” SAVE and other federal payment plans aimed at helping low- and moderate-income borrowers will end entirely by July 2028.

The programs have fallen victim to the same wrecking ball that President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have used to go after the rest of the US education system—from issuing executive orders targeting trans students, to slashing federal funding for academic research, to drastically reducing the Department of Education workforce as the first step toward dismantling the entire agency. The rollout of the SAVE changes has been typically messy, creating new levels of confusion and anxiety among the millions of borrowers who find themselves suddenly facing significant hits to their finances, with little clarification from the federal government or loan servicers about what will happen next.

“It’s just isolating, being in debt that you didn’t realize you’d have when you were signing all those papers at 18 years old.”

With more than $100,000 in student debt hanging over their heads, the Letsingers have already made sacrifices: They can’t afford to move out of the house they bought in northern Illinois, even though neither of them imagined they’d settle there. They’re unable to travel to see Letsinger’s family in western New York. They’ve returned items to the store to pay off bills. They’ve given up hobbies—Letsinger loves to sew—that cost money to pursue but don’t generate income. And their hopes for future children seem far out of reach.

“I feel like we’re holding our breath while watching a train crash,” Letsinger tells me. “It’s just isolating, being in debt that you didn’t realize you’d have when you were signing all those papers at 18 years old.”

Biden unveiled the SAVE program days after the US Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s earlier initiative to cancel $400 billion in student debt for 40 million borrowers was unconstitutional. As they did with Biden’s earlier efforts, Republican state attorneys general filed suit against SAVE shortly before the program went into full effect. In July 2024, following preliminary injunctions on portions of the plan, theBiden administration placed SAVE enrollees into administrative forbearance, a kind of limbo that paused required payments, froze loan balances, and locked interest at 0 percent for all enrollees—where the program has remained even as the Trump administration set about dismantling it. The SAVE plan is “illegal,” Trump’s Education Department declared in a July 9 announcement, taking up a line of attack that Republicans have used in their legal challenges.

Even though the court cases are still pending, the administration is pressuring borrowers to switch now to a different federal repayment plan for low- and moderate-income borrowers, known as the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan. Unlike other federal repayment programs, IBR was created by Congress, which has insulated it from GOP legal challenges. It’s not yet clear how switching to IBR will impact individual borrowers, says Abby Shafroth, director of the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. But if their applications for IBR are approved—which Shafroth is skeptical will occur quickly and/or accurately—borrowers should expect higher monthly payments and a longer path to forgiveness, she says.

The situation is even more confusing for the millions of borrowers, like school teacher Bryan Riha, who are also enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, another Trump target. Last October, Riha reached a key PSLF milestone: 120 months of public-sector employment. Under the program, enacted by Congress in 2007, that made him eligible to have his $90,000 in student debt wiped clean.

That same month, Riha also should have met the program’s other requirement for debt forgiveness: 120 monthly payments. But after SAVE enrollees were placed in administrative forbearance last summer, Riha was unable to make loan payments that would have counted toward forgiveness. Instead, his clock has been stuck at 116 out of 120 monthly payments. He requested to “buy back” his four remaining months of payments, meaning he’d pay up front what he would have owed during those months in forbearance. Theoretically, this should result in his remaining loans eventually being forgiven, but his request has remained open for more than eight months. “There’s really no end in sight,” Riha says.

“I could really see a future where forgiveness is just never part of the picture.”

With the Trump administration’s changes to the SAVE program, now interest will start accruing again, jacking up the total eventually due. Riha knows how quickly that can add up. When he earned his master’s degreein English in 2013, his student debt totaled about $70,000. Now, accrued interest has pushed his balance $20,000 higher. Forgiveness is a lifeline for Riha: “As a teacher, you don’t make nearly enough to cover [such enormous debt] over the course of a lifetime.”

Riha remains “cautiously optimistic” that his loans will eventually be forgiven. But he worries that the future for other borrowers looks bleak. Indeed, in March, Trump signed an executive order directing McMahon to revamp the PSLF program to exclude work for nonprofit and public sector employers whose activities purportedly have “a substantial illegal purpose.” Those supposedly “illegal” activities include supporting gender-affirming care and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. “I could really see a future where forgiveness is just never part of the picture,” Riha says.

Trump’s Department of Education justifies its decision to rescind the SAVE plan’s 0 percent interest cap by pointing to the federal lawsuits—namely, a nationwide preliminary injunction issued by a federal court in Missouri in April. The administration claimed its goal is to “bring fiscal responsibility to the federal student loan portfolio.”

Butfar from being mandated by the courts, the department’s move to resume interest charges was entirely elective, says Shafroth of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. “These injunctions do not require the department to charge interest to borrowers during the SAVE forbearance,” she says. Another group, the Student Borrower Protection Center, estimates that the average SAVE enrollee will see an additional $3,500 in “unnecessary interest charges” each year, with the lowest-income borrowers being hit the hardest.

And in pushing SAVE enrollees toward the IBR plan, the administration is creating enormous new headaches for borrowers, Shafroth says. Indeed, in a case brought by labor unions challenging Trump’s student loan policies, the Department of Education admitted that as of June, there were already more than 1.5 million outstanding applications for enrollment in any type of income-driven repayment plan. Not only will the monthly obligations under IBR be more than double what some borrowers expected to pay with SAVE, borrowers eligible for loan forgiveness, like Riha, may not be any closer to having their debt wiped clean. The Education Department quietly announced in a Q-and-A in early July that it had paused forgiveness under IBR while “systems are updated.”

When the existing income-driven plans end in 2028, Shafroth says, they will be replaced by yet another program, this one called the “Repayment Assistance Plan,” which will result in higher monthly payments while locking borrowers into three decades of payments before they’re eligible for forgiveness.

“I always wanted to travel. I wanted to have a family. I wanted to have lots and lots of dogs. And that dream is looking more and more distant.”

“In many cases, they’re going to face higher monthly payments than they’ve had in the past, and [higher than] they might be able to afford,” Shafroth says. She says the lowest-income borrowers, including those who took out the smallest amounts or who never obtained degrees, are most at risk for defaulting on their student debt.

Like many of the 43 million Americans who have taken out federal student loans in hopes of creating a better future, Lauren Gardner, a Denver-based telehealth therapist who specializes in obsessive-compulsive disorder, is grieving as debt now threatens to crush her. “I always wanted to travel,” she says. “I wanted to have a family. I wanted to have lots and lots of dogs. And that dream is looking more and more distant as I continue to live in a one-bedroom apartment into my 40s.”

Gardner finished her undergraduate education shortly before the Great Recession. After years of working in jobs she wasn’t passionate about, she decided to return to school to become a licensed therapist, graduating in December 2019 with about $90,000 in federal loans.

“I knew it was going to be hard, and I knew I was going to probably have this debt forever,” Gardner says. But her choices, she says, were either to continue struggling to make ends meet or “take the risk and know what I’m getting into, and hold on to this hope that it works out better than I think it’s going to.”

In one way, Gardner was lucky. In March 2020—a few months before her payments were expected to begin—the pandemic led the federal government to pause all student loan payments, locking them at a 0 percent interest rate. By time the Covid emergency ended in September 2023, Gardner had enrolled in SAVE. She made her first loan payment that October, she tells me, reading off the ledger from her loan servicer. It was $19.37.

But now, with interest, Gardner’s debt has climbed to more than $100,000—and the SAVE lifeline is going away. She’s not sure what her interest charges will be in the future—she’s repeatedly had problems logging into her loan servicer’s portal, a problem Shafroth has been hearing about from other borrowers as well—but she worries her interest could accrue at the rate of at least $1,000 per month.

Many therapists, including Gardner, make intern-level wages at the start of their careers; only a few months ago did she begin earning an income that was “survivable in the current economy,” she says. Gardner also has chronic health issues that are costly to manage. The extra $1,000 a month “would wipe out my savings in about two months,” she says. In the long term, “I have no idea what would happen or if I would be able to survive it.”

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Last fall, retired Judge Karen Radius leaned on her cane as she walked me toward the girls’ housing unit at Hawaii’s only youth prison, remembering the moment three years ago when she’d learned no more girls were living there.

For Radius, a disarmingly matter-of-fact 76-year-old who’d spent much of her career trying to keep teens out of detention, the empty housing unit came as the best kind of news. “These aren’t fucking evil kids who commit bad crimes,” she said as we passed a couple of incarcerated boys studying in classrooms.

The absence of girls at the prison was the rare positive criminal justice story to get national attention. Politicians and activists mused whether Hawaii—a pioneer for women’s and girls’ rights as the first state to legalize abortion and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment—might also have found a way to stop locking them up. “Another world is possible,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted after learning of the news. “Now do the boys,” one of her followers added.

Ending prison for teens might seem like a pipe dream in the age of Donald Trump. But when it comes to girls, who are less likely than boys to commit violence, this fantasy could be closer to reality than you’d think. Maine, Vermont, New York City, and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area also have seen long stretches without a single girl in long-term incarceration. In California, stopping girls’ imprisonment altogether is now “well within reach for the state,” according to the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, which works with jurisdictions across the country to get kids out of detention. “It’s hard for a lot of communities, let alone government leaders, to imagine that zero is achievable. We know that it is,” says Hannah Green, who helped lead Vera’s Ending Girls’ Incarceration Initiative until last year.

What these places have in common is a radical shift in thinking about how to keep kids out of prison. Juvenile diversion programs have existed for decades, often in the form of special courts that order children to go through drug rehab or counseling or anger management programs as alternatives to incarceration. But those courts tend to follow a “medical model,” in which adult experts like judges diagnose the individual flaws that made a child act out—addiction, maybe, or too much aggression—and propose a solution. Kids who don’t comply are often locked up.

Judge Karen Radius in Girls Court in Honolulu.Elyse Butler

Radius and other reformers instead champion the “advocacy model,” which views girls as experts on their own lives and what they need to thrive. The key, says Lindsay Rosenthal, the founding director of Vera’s decarceration initiative, is “not just assuming” what’s driving girls’ arrests, but asking them which resources they need to stay out of detention—and “really listening” to their answers.

From Hawaii to New York, the advocacy model is keeping girls out of prison. It’s saving money. It’s improving public safety. All of which raises the question: What if we expanded it to other people, too?

In a decade of reporting on the criminal justice system, I haven’t encountered much reason for optimism. Three years ago, after wrapping up an investigation about ­Oklahoma moms who were ­imprisoned because they and their children were abused by violent boyfriends (yes, you read that right), I felt desperate for some better news. Who was improving the system? Hawaii had just made headlines for its girl-free prison. A bit of digging pointed to the Girls Court, a groundbreaking program Radius created two decades ago. I booked a flight.

The court grew out of an observation that had irked Radius during her early days as a judge. She was raised on the South Side of Chicago by working-class parents. After graduating from George Washington University Law School as one of few women in her class, she decided to leave DC, where, as she put it to me over coffee, “you have to carry someone else’s briefcase for 10 years before you become anything.” She moved to Oahu in 1974 in her mid-20s and became a Legal Aid defense lawyer for low-income kids. In the beginning, her caseload was almost entirely boys. But after she became a judge in 1993, she ­noticed the gender balance shifting; half the kids who came before her bench were girls. “I’d go back to the office and say, ‘Is anybody else seeing this, or am I just the girl magnet?’” she recalled.

Girls Court is “Flipping that script from thinking about where girls have failed to thinking about where systems have failed girls.”

It wasn’t just her: From 1990 to 1999, the number of delinquent girls detained in the United States grew 50 percent, compared with a 4 percent increase for boys. Youth crime had been rising since the ’80s, and though politicians famously fixated on male teen “superpredators,” their tough-on-crime mentality targeted girls too, with zero-tolerance policies that led to more girls being arrested for fights. The media latched on: Newsweek ran a piece in 1993 titled “Girls Will Be Girls” about teens with guns and “razor blades in their mouths,” while Oprah and Larry King decried the scourge of girl gangs.

Then, in what seemed like a remarkable change starting around 2000, youth incarceration began to drop by more than half. But the proportion of girls in detention, especially girls of color, continued to climb.

And as girls took up more beds in youth lockups, they faced a legal system that had not been built for them: Three-quarters of all juvenile justice programs served only or primarily boys—just 2 percent served only girls. People assumed both genders committed violence for similar reasons, and that the existing punishment structure for boys would work for girls, too.

But girls had different needs. They were less likely than boys to be arrested for violence, and more likely to be arrested for running away, skipping school, and other so-called “status offenses” that were only deemed illegal because of the offender’s age. These transgressions often stemmed from prior trauma. Nationally, according to a 2010 study, 35 percent of incarcerated girls reported previous sexual abuse, compared with 8 percent of boys. Girls in the justice system were also twice as likely as boys to report physical abuse and past suicide attempts.

Courts had a long history of trying to protect girls by locking them up. “There was thinking across the nation that sometimes you have to put kids in detention to save them from themselves,” says Robert Browning, a senior judge who later helped Radius with her reforms. “‘If she’s in jail, at least she’s not gonna run. She won’t be on the street using ice [methamphetamine] with God knows who.’”

That kind of paternalism had deep roots. In the early 1900s, wayward immigrant and working-class girls were sent to “reformatories” charged with shaping them into acceptable wives and mothers. Some of the earliest status offense laws, which also governed things like missing curfew or disobeying parents, applied until age 16 for boys but 18 for girls. Girls were policed for their sexuality, as well. In the 1920s, some were even given gynecological exams at the time of arrest and incarcerated if their hymens were torn.

The legacy of these approaches didn’t sit well with Radius, and she grew frustrated by her limited options as a judge. If she wanted to divert girls from incarceration, she could choose between boy-centric boot camps or anger-management classes, but neither was designed with girls’ needs in mind. In 2003, she went to her boss, ­Frances­ Wong, and made a bold request.

“Let me do a Girls Court,” she asked.

“What’s that?” Wong replied.

“I have no idea,” Radius said, “but we gotta do something different.”

The seeds of the “advocacy model” were planted during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when a group of American psychologists grew tired of their profession’s obsession with blaming individuals for their own mental illnesses. President John Kennedy had recently signed a law to remove people from long-term mental institutions, following press coverage of their horrendous conditions. As protests raged for racial equality and against the Vietnam War, psychologists at a 1965 conference in Swampscott, Massachusetts, proposed focusing not just on an individual’s thoughts and feelings, but also on broader structures and settings: How did poverty, racism, sexism, and other circumstances and relationships affect people’s health and behavior? In the field of “community psychology,” as their discipline would be known, systems, not individuals, were the target of change.

These ideas began to seep into juvenile justice. In 1976, court officials in Ingham County, Michigan, were frustrated at the high cost of incarcerating kids. Alongside Michigan State University faculty and grad students, they launched the Adolescent Diversion Project, a program that took a page from community psychology and tried to reduce teen crime by improving support for boys: strengthening their ties to family, connecting them with neighborhood resources, and keeping them away from negative influences at juvenile hall. Ten years later, MSU researchers launched the Community Advocacy Project, which paired women who’d survived intimate partner violence with community “advocates,” often students, who would ask them about their goals and connect them with resources.

Judge Radius hadn’t heard about advocacy models when she decided to start a court just for girls. But it seemed clear to her that many girls were shaped by conditions beyond their control. She’d learned about a groundbreaking study by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that traumatic incidents during early childhood could have lasting negative impacts on a person’s physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral development. Radius’ most important job as a judge, she now felt, was not to determine whether a girl had committed a crime—but rather to figure out what that girl needed to improve her situation.

So she got to work creating Girls Court. Launched in 2004 with a federal grant, it was one of the first courts in the United States to “specialize in solving girls’ problems, as opposed to having them be ­afterthoughts,” says Meda Chesney-Lind, a nationally renowned criminologist based in Hawaii.

Most of the girls in Radius’ program had a history of sexual abuse, running away, suicide attempts, or drug use; they were either on probation for crimes or under court supervision for repeat status offenses. The court paired each with a female probation officer, who, like the community advocates in Michigan, would try to figure out what resources they needed and what was pushing them to break rules, be it peer relationships, school, medical problems, or family conflict. “Flipping that script from thinking about where girls have failed,” says the Vera Institute’s Green, “to thinking about where systems have failed girls.”

Probation Officer Tia Ikeno and Judge Dyan Medeiros of Girls Court at the Kapolei Courthouse on Oahu, Hawaii.Elyse Butler

I wanted to see what flipping the script looked like in practice, so I tagged along with Oahu probation officer Tia Ikeno and her former client Cherish Kapika, 24, who’d graduated from Girls Court several years earlier. Ikeno was picking up Kapika from her new job at the Bank of Hawaii—they’re still in touch regularly. Kapika grinned as she got into the truck: The bank, she announced proudly, had offered to pay for her college tuition. “Tia is gonna be expecting a whole lot of calls now,” she told me through giggles. “She’s gonna be my private—”

“Don’t look at me to be a tutor. I’m not a tutor,” Ikeno said, laughing too.

They had an easy rapport, but it wasn’t always that way. Kapika entered Girls Court in high school after getting in trouble for status offenses, especially running away. She lived on Oahu’s North Shore with her aunt and uncle after her parents, who struggled with addiction, gave up custody when she was a toddler. She wanted to smoke weed and get tattoos and live independently, and she didn’t appreciate Ikeno checking on her. She “was on my butt constantly,” Kapika told me. “I couldn’t stand her.”

Unlike regular juvenile courts where probation officers might work with dozens of teens at once, Girls Court paired Ikeno with just a handful of girls, giving her more time with each. Talking with ­Kapika every day, Ikeno learned that the teen had a hard time trusting people. ­Kapika had been neglected before ending up with her aunt and her often taciturn uncle. It was hard for her to focus in school. Ikeno paired her with a therapist, who determined that ­Kapika’s cognitive functioning was affected not only by childhood trauma but also by fetal alcohol exposure.

Kapika wanted to go to an alternative school her senior year, so the court helped her transfer. Soon she discovered she enjoyed math and coding, and Ikeno helped her get an internship focused on computer games. Kapika also loved the beach, so they signed her up for surfing lessons with a program called Surfrider Spirit Sessions, which specializes in mentorship and experiential education for at-risk youth. The therapist worked with Kapika’s family too, including her uncle; it turned out he’d experienced childhood trauma as well. Slowly he started opening up to Kapika, telling her he cared about her. “She’d never heard him say things like that,” Ikeno said. “With Girls Court, it wasn’t just the girl,” said Kapika’s aunt, Iwalani Sabarre-Kapika. “It was, ‘How do we support the family?’”

Once a month, Kapika went to the courthouse, where a judge asked her what she needed. “I just want them to talk with me,” Judge Dyan Medeiros, the court’s current judge, told me. “It’s important to hear what they have to say. I want them to figure out what they want for their lives, and we help them try to get there.” For Kapika the experience was transformative. She teared up telling me about it. Before, “I never had anybody listen to my side,” she said.

Since 2004, more than a dozen jurisdictions have launched girls courts of their own. They take different forms, but all of them focus on listening to girls and addressing their trauma. A 2007 study by Chesney-Lind found that girls who participated in Hawaii’s court were arrested 79 percent less often than before and were much less likely than other delinquent girls to end up at the state’s youth prison.

As Kapika went through the court, she stopped running away as much and grew closer to Ikeno. “I was one to not trust anyone,” she told me. Now “she’s my emotional support.” After picking Kapika up from work, Ikeno recommended a computer that might help Kapika at college and urged her to put her paycheck into a savings account. Then, as the sun went down, she gave Kapika a ride home.

Despite success stories like Kapika’s, ­Radius’ Girls Court still has faced criticism from reformers. By checking in with the girls several times a week, probation officers have plenty of opportunities to catch the kids slipping up. And when they do, the court often turns to one of its main tools, a building called Detention Home where kids are sent for short-term stays—days or weeks. Kapika went there and to another shelter about 30 times during her years with the court, whenever she was caught running away. “If it’s a wake-up call—forget sex, drugs, and rock and roll, you’re gonna sit and think for two days,” Radius explains. “In my mind that’s a lot different than ‘You’re gonna stay there a month or two.’”

Kapika said she didn’t mind the arrangement; it gave her space to think. “It was a short break from the real world, where all the issues were,” she told me. But Green at the Vera Institute warns that even short stints of incarceration can cause further trauma. “How can we make sure these resources are available,” she says, “without the threat of detention?”

Turns out, such a system does exist, just a few miles from where I live.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a program that’s “the best model in the country” for ending girls’ incarceration, says Shabnam Javdani, a New York University researcher who studies advocacy models. It’s run by the nonprofit Young Women’s Freedom Center, and part of what makes it so effective, Javdani says, is that it’s led by girls and young women who’ve been through the system themselves. More than half the center’s staff are younger than 25, and most have a history of incarceration or living or working on the streets. Last summer, I asked executive director Julia Arroyo for a tour.

Born in San Francisco in 1985, ­Arroyo entered foster care when she was around 4 and wound up with a family in Milwaukee. Her older brother lived with her there, and she idolized him, dressing in his flannel shirts and baggy pants. After he was sent to a youth detention center, ­Arroyo was devastated. She ran away when she was 13, hopping a Greyhound bus back to ­Oakland, where she lived on the streets. Within about a year she was caught shoplifting and booked into juvenile hall. “I was very little, about 85 pounds,” she recalls, with a “miniskirt on and high-heeled shoes. And they were like, ‘Where did this girl come from?’”

Lateefah Simon, 32, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and is in her office in San Francisco.Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty

One day a woman named Lateefah Simon arrived at the detention center to lead a program. Simon was a young mother in her early 20s running a nonprofit, which later became the Young Women’s Freedom Center, that started in 1993 during the AIDS crisis. Young women and girls in San ­Francisco’s drug and sex trade—many of them teens of color who’d served time—were paid twice the minimum wage to provide HIV information and supplies to young people on the streets. Eventually the center broadened its focus to keeping them safe not just from infection, but from violence and incarceration.

Simon would later work with Kamala Harris while the future vice president was serving as San Francisco’s district attorney; last year, Harris invited Simon to speak at the Democratic National Convention, months before Simon won her current seat in Congress.

When Simon met Arroyo at the juvenile hall around 1999, she shared her own story of living in housing projects and being on juvenile probation, and she seemed genuinely interested in hearing about Arroyo’s past. It was “a lot of raw talk, like, ‘What’s your plan?’” Arroyo told me. “Everybody else was just telling me what they’re prescribing for me.”

Once Arroyo was released, teens from the center invited her back to their San Francisco headquarters for free food. There, Arroyo was paired with another young woman with similar experiences who would connect her with services. Eventually, Arroyo found an apartment and started working with the center. “We’re trying to empower folks to understand what’s happening in your situation, where do you have decision-making power,” she tells me. “The idea here is never to tell someone, ‘Don’t do that,’ but to make their world so much bigger” that breaking the law to survive “becomes less and less of an option.”

“It’s alluring for young women to think, ‘I can come to a place where folks really get me, and we have some collective struggles,’” Simon adds. Before, “they didn’t have a space” for services “where they weren’t being pathologized.”

For years, the Young Women’s Freedom Center led programs in juvenile hall and worked with teens who lived on the streets. Then, around 2014, a judge who ran a juvenile court in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County decided to visit. At the time, Judge ­Katherine Lucero, the daughter of farmworkers, worked for a “model court” that required her to come up with three reforms every year. She’d read that the Young Women’s Freedom Center reduced arrests for girls in the program­—by 85 percent—and she wondered what she could learn from its methods. “How can we support these girls, but not have the court be the center?” Lucero wondered.

When Lucero arrived at the ­nonprofit’s headquarters, it was a far cry from the courtrooms she’d worked in, which positioned the judge as the focal point, the child waiting at a table with an attorney. Here, teens could relax on couches or get a snack. Young mothers could get free child care, and anyone could help themselves to a “self-care station” with condoms, pads, clothes, and toiletries.

Tae Thomas, an 18-year-old I met while touring the nonprofit, told me her advocate became like a sister to her, letting her spend the night or do laundry while Thomas was homeless. Other girls get linked up with therapists or free housing or take workshops on financial management. “It’s the opposite of court,” Lucero told me, so struck by the memory that she started to get choked up. Instead of “lining people up and talking at them,” she said, the center “appeals to the part that’s hungry for connection: You go in there and you feel like you belong.”

Lucero’s visit to the center changed the way she conducted her court. Whenever she had a detention hearing on her docket, she’d try to call someone from the center into the courtroom to talk with the girl: Would she like to skip traditional probation, the judge asked, and instead go through the center’s coaching program? Girls who said yes would receive a monthly stipend of $500 to $1,000 to help meet their basic needs, however they defined them. (Funding for the center’s stipends comes partly from public agencies in California.) “In my mind, I did not order them to participate as much as I asked them,” Lucero says. If the girl agreed, Lucero dismissed her case; there would be no punishment if she started the coaching and didn’t finish. “What is so powerful about the Young Women’s Freedom Center is that we have judges trusting it” and giving up some control, says Vera’s Rosenthal.

Their combined efforts appeared to pay off. For about a year during 2021 and 2022, Santa Clara County held no girls in long-term detention facilities, and no more than two girls in short-term facilities. The center has expanded to Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Contra Costa County, which have seen their rates of girls’ incarceration fall, too. Lucero now leads California’s Office of Youth and Community Restoration, a government agency that’s trying, among other things, to end the detention of girls statewide.

New York City is experimenting with a similar program called ROSES, developed by NYU’s Javdani, that pairs girls with university students who can help them advocate for their goals, kind of like the programs at Michigan State. It seems to be working: Researchers found that teens in ROSES are significantly less likely to engage in delinquent acts than kids in traditional juvenile justice programs. For at least a year and a half in 2021 and 2022, New York City had no more than two girls in juvenile placement facilities.

Such programs also save money, especially since juvenile incarceration can be two to five times as expensive as adult incarceration. The Young Women’s Freedom Center spends several thousand dollars a year to serve one girl. In most states, it can cost more than $100,000 a year on average to lock up a single kid. In California, where housing is so expensive, it can be triple that.

So what if we expanded this thinking beyond girls? What if, instead of stigmatizing people after their arrests, we asked them what they need to turn their lives around?

In 2023, Hawaii’s judiciary launched the Women’s Court in Honolulu, for women convicted of certain nonviolent crimes. Like Oahu’s Girls Court, it offers an empathetic judge and probation officers who have the time and training to offer real support. When I stopped by a hearing, Judge Trish Morikawa spoke so casually with the women that at times they seemed like friends catching up over lunch. “You look good!” she told one of them.

“I love the house, I just love it,” the woman said of her new digs.

When another woman started apologizing for “being a lot,” Morikawa tried to affirm her. “You’re not a lot,” she said. “Don’t ever apologize for what you need.”

At first glance, it would seem as if girls and women are the most likely to benefit from the advocacy model, because they tend to be convicted of nonviolent crimes. But NYU researchers recently examined dozens of juvenile justice programs and found that boys’ behavior improved much more in programs designed for traumatized girls than in traditional programs for boys. In fact, boys saw even more progress in these programs than the girls did, with greater reductions to delinquency, aggression, and other disruptive behavior. “Who couldn’t benefit from a more relation-­focused, healing-centered approach?” says Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, who directs the nonprofit Justice and Joy, which works to reduce girls’ incarceration nationally.

In Texas’ Harris County, home to Houston, the judiciary created a girls court to help victims of sex trafficking, but it later changed the name and began including boys. That kind of move could make these programs more welcoming to gender-nonconforming teens, who constitute a surprisingly large portion of the justice system: Around the country, about 40 percent of kids whom courts identify as “girls” self-identify as LGBTQ, many of them transgender or gender expansive.

Of course, getting politicians to prioritize advocacy models is a tough sell. Nationally, violence shot up during the early days of the pandemic, and though it has since fallen to some of the lowest levels in decades, people remain deeply afraid of crime. Even Californians voted to roll back progressive criminal justice reforms last year, and ousted two progressive district attorneys who were more forgiving of teen offenders.

A rainbow appears during a Surfrider Spirit Session at Kuhio Beach in Waikiki, Oahu on November 10, 2024.Elsye Butler

The country’s youth incarceration rate is also changing: After decades of steady decreases, it rose slightly in 2021 and 2022, the latest years for which we have data. When Judge Radius and I visited Hawaii’s Youth Correctional Facility last October, the girls’ housing unit was no longer empty; four kids were living there. “A lot of localities,” says the Vera Institute’s Rosenthal, are in “the last mile between ‘almost zero’ and ‘permanently zero.’”

Even so, more communities are starting to notice the benefits of keeping girls out of incarceration. With the money saved, Hawaii recently opened a homeless shelter and a human trafficking assessment center on its youth prison grounds*.* Deputy ­Warden Matelina Aulava guided me and Radius on a tour there, past fields where kids grow taro and breadfruit and a stable used for horse therapy. Aulava said she hopes that one day this place, which once served as a boarding school for Indigenous kids, stops incarcerating teens altogether and becomes a hub for social services. “What is it that we need to put at the front end” of the system? she added.

Although getting the population of teen lockups down to zero makes for good headlines, it’s only one part of the equation; it won’t be enough until communities help kids stay out of trouble in the first place. Radius told me that a few years ago, when the girls’ housing unit finally sat empty, she found her excitement tempered by a nagging worry that people might forget about the issue. Please don’t take this as a total success, she wanted to tell them, and assume we don’t need to think about girls anymore.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

All eyes were on North Carolina this week, as Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley formally announced a run for Senate in the key battleground state, backed with an endorsement from Donald Trump.

Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has also announced plans to run, kicking off what’s expected to be among the most-watched races of the 2026 midterms.

Whatley has yet to release the details of his platform. But a piece of the top GOP official’s past may inform his approach to issues like climate change and renewable energy in North Carolina, a state still recovering from September’s Hurricane Helene.

Before his journey into Republican leadership—first as chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, later as general counsel and chair of the RNC—Whatley, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked for more than 15 years at HBW Resources, a PR and lobbying firm focused on energy and transportation policy.There, his profile shows, Whatley took a position as executive vice president of a mysterious organization created and staffed by HBW, the Houston-registered nonprofit Consumer Energy Alliance.

On its website, Consumer Energy Alliance claims to advocate for “sensible energy policy,” and has branded itself the “voice of the energy consumer.” But according to tax records and media reports over the last 15 years, the firm has close ties to the fossil fuel industry and a record of questionable, behind-the-scenes tactics to influence energy policy.

HBW asserts on its website that it “built Consumer Energy Alliance from the ground up,” claiming that the group represents 550,000 individuals and “nearly 300 companies spanning America’s economy.” “We build organizations with real governance and corporate structures, real grassroots and grasstops support, and run them with real people,” HBW’s site reads. “We don’t build a website, call a staff member the executive director and pretend that’s real.”

In fact, almost all of Consumer Energy Alliance’s staff also hold roles at HBW, as the Center for Public Integrity reported in 2014, blurring the lines between the two organizations. Whatley himself worked at the nonprofit from 2008 to 2019, during which time he also maintained a position as a partner at HBW.

Consumer Energy Alliance’s nonprofit status means it isn’t required to disclose its funders—but as the Washington Post noted earlier this year, HBW lobbies on behalf of many fossil fuel clients, and Consumer Energy Alliance has reportedly received funding from Big Oil industry groups like American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. Its current members include fossil fuel trade groups, utilities, and oil and gas corporations like Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil.

Although the group claims to advocate for “affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy solutions,” much of its work has focused on opposing climate regulations and expanding access to fossil fuels.

In 2011, for instance, Salon reported that it had obtained hundreds of pages of email records between then–HBW staffer Whatley and his friend Gary Mar, a Canadian diplomat, including discussions of plans to oppose low-carbon fuel standards under consideration in several US states in 2009 and 2010. Whatley reportedly wrote to Mar about the possibility of “conducting a grassroots operation” in “target states” that would “generate significant opposition” to the new standards. Later, after federal lawmakers expressed interest in a low-carbon fuel standard, Consumer Energy Alliance launched a $1 million radio and TV ad campaign in four statesclaiming that the standards would “further damage our ailing economy,” according to the Hill. “Low-carbon fuel standards may sound like a good idea,” the ad reportedly said, “but as usual, Congress wants you to pay the price.”

Further details of the group’s influence came to light in 2014, when the Center for Public Integrity reported that Consumer Energy Alliance and HBW worked closely with the governors of eight states, including North Carolina, to lobby the Obama administration to expand offshore drilling operations in US waters. Consumer Energy Alliance reportedly provided talking points and research to the governors, some of whom relied on the materials in at least one meeting with then–Interior Secretary Sally Jewell—giving industry further back-door access to the administration.

Several more recent media reports raise further ethical questions about the nonprofit’s advocacy tactics.

In 2016, the Toledo Blade reported that Consumer Energy Alliance may have sent the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hundreds of allegedly fraudulent letters in support of a proposed natural gas pipeline to be built between Ohio and Michigan. Some of the letters appeared to come from Ohio residents—but were, according to the Blade, submitted without the senders’ knowledge, including one letter supposedly from an Ohio man who had died in 1998.

Similar issues arose in 2023 with a Consumer Energy Alliance letter campaign supporting fracking in Ohio state parks, with dozens of Ohioans telling Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper, that their names were used without permission. (Consumer Energy Alliance has denied any wrongdoing in both cases, and has said that any errors in the letters were unintentional.)

Most recently, as the Washington Post reported in January, Consumer Energy Alliance helped launch an advocacy group called the Energy Poverty Awareness Center (EnPAC), “dedicated to advancing the prosperity of minority communities through reliable and affordable energy solutions,” led by former NFL player Gary Baxter. While higher energy costs do disproportionately impact Black and Brown communities, critics like the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters and the Energy and Policy Institute (EPI) call Consumer Energy Alliance a “front group” for industry; EPI has also accused Consumer Energy Alliance of packaging pro–fossil fuel objectives as social justice concerns.

(Neither Whatley, through the RNC, nor Consumer Energy Alliance responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones. In response to the Post‘s reporting, a Consumer Energy Alliance spokesperson characterized the group’s practices as “normal,” its involvement in EnPAC as “something that happens every day in advocacy,” and the Post‘s reporting as “a blatant attempt to generate a headline.”)

It wouldn’t be the first time Consumer Energy Alliance received this kind of criticism. In 2022, the group paid up to $8,000 for a Facebook advertisement featuring two businesswomen in the construction industry that linked fossil fuel access to feminism. “As two women, running a business in a male-dominated field is hard enough,” the ad, first surfaced by the Energy and Policy Institute, read. “Add in energy fluctuations and you’re not only responsible for your employees, but you’re also responsible for the impacts to your neighbors and your community.”

Outside of his work with Consumer Energy Alliance, Whatley has been noticeably quiet about climate change beyond objections to the potential impact of climate regulations on energy costs—at times laying out conflicting positions about renewable energy.

In a 2013 blog post for Consumer Energy Alliance, he responded to then-President Barack Obama’s 21-page “Climate Change Action Plan,” which Whatley described as an overstep of congressional authority (“the word ‘Congress’ isn’t used once,” he wrote, citing DC politics outlet National Journal) and a “mixed bag of incentive programs, new regulations and lofty goals.” Obama’s proposed limits on power plant emissions, Whatley argued, would mean “less fuel diversity and higher electricity costs”—although he conceded that the plan offered “some good news” in its goal to double renewable electricity generation by 2020, and especially its proposals to generate power on public lands, electrify dams, and streamline permitting.

Still, he concluded, “Every homeowner, business, manufacturer and electricity consumer will undoubtedly feel the painful effects of higher energy costs under the President’s proposed plan. Congress must take an active oversight role in order to prevent these negative ramifications.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Nearly a decade ago, Darryl Cooper, then a little-known amateur historian, agreed to appear on Rebel Yell, a self-described “Southern Nationalist podcast of the Alt-Right.” Cooper’s decision to come on the show was not the norm. The show funneled donations to Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And, as one of Rebel Yell’s co-hosts told Cooper in May 2017, potential guests “usually” refused their invitations after concluding the show was run by “a bunch of fucking Nazis.”

But Cooper had a different perspective. “You guys do a great job,” he said about the show’s place in the far-right media ecosystem. “You class the place up a little bit.”

Over the last decade, Cooper’s ideas have not changed much. The throughline of his career is his abiding interest in reshaping people’s understanding of two groups: Jews and Nazis. But he has cleaned up his act enough to build a major audience. Instead of appearing on a neo-Confederate podcast, this year Cooper went on Joe Rogan, where he subtly shifted the story of the Nazis into a more flattering light for millions of listeners.

With more than 170,000 subscribers, Cooper has the most popular history newsletter on Substack—beating out Adam Tooze, the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. On X, he has nearly 350,000 followers; one is Vice President JD Vance. Cooper has been profiled by the New York Times (“The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History’s Villains”) andheld up as an author for understanding the modern right by a guest on The Ezra Klein Show. Tucker Carlson has claimed that Cooper is the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Cooper is most famous for his ongoing project titled “The Martyr Made Podcast.” The first podcast in the series was a critical history of Zionism. The slant of his current series, which purports to tell World War II from the perspective of the Germans, is not hard to discern. The trailer Cooper is using to promote the series has clips of a thundering Hitler speech, delivered in English, as metal music plays in the background. It depicts regular Germans suffering while Weimar cosmopolitans enjoy their cabarets, and Nazi soldiers marching triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées in occupied Paris. There’s barbed wire, but German prisoners of war are the ones behind it.

Compared to overt Holocaust deniers, Cooper is subtle—even shifty. He has not, like Richard Spencer, Sieg Heil-ed at a public event. His references often require research. Cooper, for example, wrote “Guten morgen” to a user on X last August, along with a picture of himself holding a coffee mug. It might take a moment to realize the user is a self-identified Nazi, and the mug Cooper holds is sold on a website where you can buy a T-shirt in which a Nazi SS sword plunges through the Star of David. Cooper implores his followers not to fall into the morass of “low-IQ vulgar antisemitism.” He leaves his views on high-IQ sophisticated antisemitism more ambiguous.

Last year, Cooper posted two photos alongside each other on X: One was of drag queens imitating the Last Supper during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics; the other was of Hitler standing in front of the Eiffel Tower in conquered France. As a caption, Cooper wrote, “This may be putting it too crudely for some but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.” (Cooper deleted the post after backlash, then later wrote that he stood by the “overall point.”)

For fans who do not closely follow Cooper on social media, his far-right sympathies might be harder to discern. On his podcast, he shows empathy for a wide range of historical victims—including Jews. He does not sound like an Alex Jones. One of his greatest talents as a podcaster is coming across like an earnest nerd who just wants to share some indisputable facts. As Cooper put it earlier this year in the introduction to his Nazi Germany series, “My audience trusts me to be honest with them. And even when they disagree or get uncomfortable, they will give me the benefit of the doubt that I am coming from a place of empathy and a desire to genuinely understand people at the extremes of human experience.”

This self-presentation has been shockingly successful. In March, Rogan, a committed fan, told his audience that there is “no fucking way” Cooper is an antisemite “in any way, shape, or form” and that he is as “charitable as possible” to his subjects. They could see for themselves, Rogan said, by listening to the first hour of Cooper’s Zionism series, which opens with harrowing accounts of the violence Jews faced in turn-of-the-century Europe.

But previously unreported information found by Mother Jones, including posts under a username affiliated with Cooper, cast doubt on this narrative. It raises a more sinister possibility about his attempts at even-handedness: That Cooper may have deliberately downplayed his extremism as part of a carefully plotted effort to bring his hard-right ideology into the mainstream.

In 2016, a user going by the name “Juggernaut Nihilism” left a comment on a transparently white nationalist website called Counter-Currents.

Public records show that “Juggernaut Nihilism” is part of an email address associated with Cooper. When Juggernaut Nihilism asked goldbugs in the online forums of the TF Metals Report in 2013 whether he should buy a house, the personal details he supplied about his work history and where he lived matched those of Darryl Cooper. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, once attacked Cooper in a Twitter post that began “You go by juggernaut nihilism.” (This was an apparent reference to Cooper’s username on the site at the time.) “No time for scrotes who live in shit & won’t work a shovel,” Simon added.

Cooper did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent to him by Mother Jones, including whether he wrote the comments from Juggernaut Nihilism.

The article Juggernaut Nihilism was responding to on Counter-Currents was written by Colin Liddell. Previously, Liddell had wondered about what the “best and easiest way to dispose of [Blacks]” would be in an essay titled “Is Black Genocide Right?” In the reply, Juggernaut Nihilism took him to taskforattacking allies on the far-right whochose not to publicize their racist views**.**

“A movement like this needs to operate at various levels, from the intellectual core (that remains terrifying and offensive to the general population right up until the big shift), on up to covert supporters slipping occasional language and subversive information into conversation and normie media,” Juggernaut Nihilism wrote. “Think of how most people you know got here. It wasn’t from basic American ideology to reading Mein Kampf and then, boom, they’re onboard. It’s a process, and you have to initiate people without scaring them off (and without blaming them for being scared off…the human mind works the way it works, and the enemy studies it carefully, controls the education system, and dominates the media).”

Juggernaut Nihilism’s comment reads as an almost perfect encapsulation of Cooper’s work as an amateur revisionist historian. He is highly attuned to when he can operate at which level. He makes it known that he is largely “onboard,” but leaves it up to his followers to surmise just how much. He has read Mein Kampf but is patient with those who have not.

Two months after the comment appeared, Greg Johnson, the founder of Counter-Currents, posted an interview in which he argued for a white America and aligned himself with the “judeo-critical” wing of the far right on the “Jewish Question.”

“Wow, really great,” Juggernaut Nihilism wrote in response.

Nine days later, Johnson shared a new interview. It was a podcast with Darryl Cooper.

Cooper has no formal credentials as a historian.After a largely isolated youth in California, during which he attended as many as 40 schools, Cooper did some college, dropped out, and enlisted in the Navy. After, he became an electronics technician. After Cooper left the service in the early 2010s, he went on to work as a Department of Defense contractor. (Cooper explained his biography in response to questions from a New York Times journalist that he published on his Substack.)

In 2014, he became obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict amidan earlier war in Gaza. A friend suggested he create a podcast. And, surprisingly, his hours-long episodes took off. Much of the show focused on the kinds of critical depictions of early Zionists in Palestine that can be found in the work of Israeli historians like Benny Morris. But Cooper’s tics were apparent as well. He had a habit of noting Jews’ prevalence in the left-wing political movements he counts among his enemies.

Cooper’s claims about World War II in recent interviews raise more serious questions about his biases. During his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last year, Cooper argued that Winston Churchill was “primarily responsible” for World War II “becoming what it did,” while making unsubtle and ahistorical insinuations about Churchill’s alleged ties to “financiers” and a “media complex” supportive of Zionism. He later specified that his source for this claim was David Irving, an infamous British antisemite and Holocaust denier.

Irving, who also lacks formal training as a historian, has been discredited for decades. In 1991, after denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, he used the acronym “ASSHOLS” to refer to “The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars.” In 1996, he unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history at Emory University, for defamation in the United Kingdom after Lipstadt depicted him in her book Denying the Holocaust as a Nazi apologist who distorted the historical record in support of Hitler.

Lipstadt and Penguin Books prevailed after assembling a group of experts who showed it was accurate to label Irving a Holocaust denier and a Hitler apologist. The cornerstone of that effort was a more than 700-page evisceration of Irving written by Sir Richard Evans, the Regius Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cambridge. “Not one of [Irving’s] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject,” Evans wrote in his report. “All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about.”

Cooper has defended his decision to cite Irving in a Substack post in which he said he was “not yet in a position to adjudicate the various disputes.” But his defense distorts and waters down Irving’s views, while falsely implying that even Evans respects Irving as a historian. In Cooper’s telling, Irving believed that “gas chambers were not a primary method of killing” at Nazi death camps. Irving put it much more bluntly: “I’m a gas chamber denier.” Cooper went on to say in the post that Irving accepted that millions of people were killed in the Holocaust, that Hitler took no action to stop it, and that he bore ultimate responsibility. After reviewing the post, Evans told Mother Jones that this summary of Irving’s work contained a “collection of falsehoods and half-truths.”

During his appearance on Rogan in March, Cooper offered another piece of revisionism that bore a striking resemblance to Irving’s pseudoscholarship. This time, it involved Cooper minimizing Hitler’s role in Kristallnacht, the infamous 1938 pogrom during which around 1,000 synagogues in Germany burned down. “Hitler had to actually get on the phone with [Joseph] Goebbels and say, Cut this shit out. Like, This is not good,” Cooper claimed. “And not because he loves the Jews all of the sudden obviously. But because this is bad propaganda.”

Evans, one of the world’s foremost experts on Nazi Germany, reviewed a longer version of Cooper’s Kristallnacht comments on behalf of Mother Jones. His response left no doubt that Cooper—like Irving before him—severely distorted the historical record. “The order to local Nazi bosses was given by Propaganda Minister Goebbels, after a confidential conversation with Hitler, observed by eyewitnesses, in which the Nazi dictator had clearly sanctioned the action,” Evans said via email. “In addition Hitler personally ordered the arrest of 30,000 Jewish men, who were taken off to concentration camps where they were beaten and intimidated until they agreed to leave Germany. The following morning, Hitler and Goebbels brought the action to an end, since it seemed to have achieved its objectives.”

Taken together, Cooper’s many elisions are reminiscent of something else Evans wrote in his trial report about Irving: “Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own ideological ends in the present.”

Last year, one of Cooper’s claims garnered national headlines. During the appearance on Carlson’s show, he said that the Nazis were “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war” and “local political prisoners” they captured after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As a result, Cooper continued, the Nazis “just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.” Cooper’s remarks implied that the killing of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and Jews was, in essence, a logistical oversight.

In doing so, he ignored countless massacres of Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime, as well as the extensive record showing that the Nazis intended to starve millions of people to death after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As University of Toronto Professor Timothy Snyder makes clear in Bloodlands—a book Cooper has cited—the Nazis’ initial plan was to kill about 25 million people by starvation.

Evans made a similar point to Mother Jones after reviewing Cooper’s comments about Soviet prisoners of war. “The Nazis regarded ‘Slavs’ as racially inferior and deliberately killed 3,300,000 prisoners taken from the Red Army by starvation, neglect and untended disease,” he wrote. “The Nazi ‘Hunger Plan’ was based on a conscious choice to use the large food supplies present in Eastern Europe to feed their own troops.”

Cooper’s suggestion that many Jewish deaths during the Holocaust had been unintentional ended up provoking the largest backlash of his career.Then-President Joe Biden’s White House called the interview a “disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans.” Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, said that Carlson and Cooper had “engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years.”

But the response to Cooper on the right said more about his place in the world. Vance refused to condemn the Holocaust revisionism on the grounds that Republicans “believe in free speech and debate.” A backlash to the backlash temporarily sent Cooper’s show into the top spot on the podcast charts.

Since the incident, Cooper has grown bolder. In a Substack post in response to the criticism, Cooper left no doubt he was also talking about Jewish victims of the Holocaust—not only Soviet POWs. He stated that one of his sources was a letter written by Rolf-Heinz Höppner, a senior Nazi official, to Adolf Eichmann in July 1941. “There exists this winter the danger that all the Jews can no longer be fed,” Höppner wrote about 300,000 Jews under his authority, whom he planned to send to a concentration camp. “It should be seriously considered if it would not be the most humane solution to dispose of the Jews, insofar as they are not capable of work, through a quick-acting agent. In any case it would be more pleasant than to let them starve.”

Höppner continued, in a section not included in Cooper’s Substack post: “In addition the proposal was made to sterilize all the female Jews in this camp from whom children could still be expected, so that with this generation the Jewish problem is in fact completely solved.” Nor did Cooper mention the subject line: “Re.: Solution of the Jewish Question.”

The letter from Höppner makes clear Nazi leaders’ willingness to exterminate Jews. But, in Cooper’s telling, it is evidence of how millions of people “ended up” dead and that, as Cooper put it on Substack, a senior Nazi official did not seem “overjoyed at the prospect of mass killing.”

In the first episode of his new series on World War II Germany, released this January, Cooper proves far more willing to depict American soldiers and concentration camp survivors as eager to kill than Nazis. He describes how, after the liberation of Dachau, American GIs “rampaged through the camp, murdering dozens of surrendered German soldiers.” The survivors, Cooper adds, “were given free reign to torture, humiliate, and murder” Germans. As evidence, he quoted extensively from an interview in which Jack Hallett, a US Army veteran, described the anti-Nazi violence he witnessed after the camp’s liberation. But he does not include what Hallett said immediately before describing the revenge taken: “Control was gone after the sights we saw.”

Also missing is any mention of what those sights were. “The first thing I saw was a stack of bodies that appeared to be about 20 feet long and about as high as a man could reach, which looked like cordwood stacked up there,” Hallett stated earlier in the oral history Cooper quoted from about what Nazis had done. “And the thing I’ll never forget was the fact that on closer inspection we found the people whose eyes were still blinking maybe three or four bodies deep inside the stack.”

This is not an anomaly. Cooper provides not a single detail in the episode about the horrors that American soldiers encountered at Dachau, or what the victims they liberated endured. Instead, at Cooper’s camp, the victims worth mentioning are German.

“The goal is not to get you to sympathize with the Germans, much less the National Socialist regime,” Cooper declares toward the end of the episode. “The goal is to understand. And if a side effect of understanding is sympathy, then so be it.”

As a forum-dweller named Juggernaut Nihilism once wrote, “It’s a process, and you have to initiate people without scaring them off.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Last month, as the moderators of the final debate in New York City’s Democratic primary began a section asking candidates about antisemitism, I was reading the breaking news that the Trump administration, using Israeli intelligence (that our government doubted) had just bombed Iran. It was a familiar dissonance.

In the world around me, there were plenty of debatable consequences from our tight partnership with Israel. In Democratic politics, the assumption was that questioning the relationship—responding to these events—was tantamount to hate.

Over the past two years, votershave seen the US’s lonstandingalliance with Israel lead to the US aiding indiscriminate bombings and killing in Gaza; mostly silence on apartheid enforced by settler violence in the West Bank; and, now, the implementation of mass starvation—children, emaciated, dying in their mother’s arms—created by an Israeli blockade on aid and a US-backed humitarian firm. Horrified, Democrats look up. And they watch on TV their party, still seemingly living in another era of politics, ask its candidates: Do you condemn Hamas?

Years of this has been disorienting. But the tone, it seems, is changing.

Since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in New York City, and as the famine in Gaza becomes more acute, there has been a shift. “Between the carnage in Gaza and the apartheid in the West Bank, it is virtually impossible to exist firmly on the American left,” Ross Barkan wrote in New York and argue Israel’s actions are “defensible.”

Even some moderates are finally critiquing Israel. Former President Barack Obama called for the “cessation of Israel’s military operations.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York), an arch defender of the Jewish state, has begun to speak about the suffering of Palestinians. In perhaps the clearest sign of a potential shift, on Wednesday, 27 Democrats voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) resolution to block the sale of thousands of guns to Israel. This included swing-state politicians up for re-election in 2026, like Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.).

This is not a full-blown evolution. One should not expect to see the Democratic Party suddenly shed its past. It was not even a year ago when a Palestinian speaker, who was eager to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, was disallowed from speaking at the DNC. And it is impossible to forget just how fiercely President Joe Biden backed Israel—both in the White House and before that as a senator.

But it does seem that, even among centrists, some memo has come down to change course. Suddenly, one can see a flock of insiders in the party eager to say that what is happening in Gaza is wrong. (Their ability to blame Israel for this horror? Well…)

If liberal American sentiment continues to rapidly change at this pace, it is not impossible to imagine that the Democratic Party, especially in its most left-leaning races, would litmus test its candidates in the exact opposite manner as it has in the past. “Do you condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza?” a moderator may ask. Or, more pointedly for the 2028 presidential primary, “Do you believe Palestine has a right to exist?” Canada, France, and the United Kingdom have all taken steps to recognize a state. Would you? Will you?

It is worth stopping a moment to realize how radical a shift that is from the past. The Democrats are catching up with the reality of the past few yers. Somehow, finally, even politicians cannot deny death.

Still, I would not hold out for such a massive upheaval of norms. The dissonance of the base demanding something from Democrats and the party half-listening before shifting to election year doom (we must band together to stop Republicans, pipe down and get in line—but only our moderate line, we won’t change!) is still the standard. I am sure there is a way to make statements of anger at children’s deaths—18,000 of them—without condemning Israel. But, then again, for how long? The truth is beating back. And, as Democrats ask about antisemitism alienating voters on TV, many are looking down at their phone to show many more Palestinians have died.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Over and over again, Democratic members of Congress have attempted to enter Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities to investigate the conditions inside—and again and again they have been turned away, even though federal law guarantees them access to ICE detention facilities in order to conduct oversight. The Trump administration’s decision to keep lawmakers out created a Constitutional showdown.

The case will test constitutional checks and balances.

Now, the issue is heading to court. On Wednesday, 12 Democratic House members sued for access to ICE detention facilities, in accordance with the law. The case is important to US immigration policy, and to the Trump administration’s goal of detaining immigrants without oversight into conditions in those facilities. It also raises a larger question: Can the executive branch turn off an oversight duty that is not just implicit in Congress’ powers butthat it specifically inscribed in law?

Since 2019, Congress has included language in its bills funding the Department of Homeland Security that guarantees members of Congress access to inspect ICE detention facilities without prior warning, so as to get an unvarnished view of conditions inside. This came as a direct result of members of Congress being turned away from DHS facilities holding minors during the first Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents.

As detailed in Wednesday’slawsuit, over the past few months ICE has come up with new reasons to deny entry to members of Congress and their designated staff. Though federal law allows for unannounced visits by lawmakers and 24 hours notice for their staff, ICE unilaterally instituted a seven-day notification requirement. But even when lawmakers provide a week’s notice, they have been turned away. In June, for example, despite giving seven days notice, New York Reps. Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman found themselves denied entry to a detainee holding space in Manhattan by an ICE official wearing a novelty Guinness shirt with the top buttons undone—an indelible image of an agency with no respect for the first branch of government.

According to the lawsuit, filed by the legal groups American Oversight and Democracy Forward, Goldman and Nadler were turned away because ICE insistedthe 10th floor of its New York field office was not a detention facility. Even though ICE was holding people there, some for more than two days, the agency claimed that it fell outside the scope of Congress’ authority to enter ICE facilities “used to detain or otherwise house” detainees.

The lawsuit alleges multiple legal violations on the part of DHS and asks a federal district court in Washington, DC to compel the agency to comply with their oversight requirements.

This case could determine whether ICE, which will receive $45 billion in additional funding under President Donald Trump’s new budget bill, will operate its ballooning detention schemes in increasing darkness. As the Trump administration seeks to detain and deport millions of people, congressional oversight provides a critical window into how detainees are being treated. Reports of overcrowded and inhumane conditions are already prevalent.

The case will also test the checks and balances that each branch can impose upon the other. In this case, members of Congress are relying not only on their historical oversight role, which is critical to its legislative function, but also on an explicit ability to investigate ICE detention facilities that it has repeatedly written into law.

When administration lawyers respond to the suit, they could argue that the lawmakers are misreading the statute, or they could swing big and argue that immigration is an executive function where Congress has no constitutional role. It could also argue that individual members of Congress cannot sue to vindicate their rights, and instead that only a suit brought by a majority of Congress—now controlled by Republicans—would have standing. Finally, they could argue that the current oversight ability, enabled by a portion of a congressionally-appropriated funding bill, does not carry the necessary force to require ICE compliance. If accepted, any of these arguments would diminish Congress’ role in our scheme of checks and balances.

At the Supreme Court, the GOP majority has moved toward a maximalist view of executive power in recent years while curtailing Congress’ own powers—a change in the law that has accelerated upon Trump’s return to office. That has included skepticism of Congress’ ability to issue requirements through spending bills, as if some of the laws Congress passes carry less force than others.

The justices may quickly be asked to respond. Over the past six months, the administration has rushed to the Supreme Court for emergency relief when lower courts rule against them, where the Republican-appointed majority hasgenerally given them what they want.

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Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026 midterms became crystal clear on Wednesday, as Texas Republicans introduced a new congressional redistricting map that would give their party five new seats in the US House, making it much more difficult for Democrats to retake the chamber next November.

The map is designed to give Republicans control of nearly 80 percent of the state’s House delegation, though Trump only won 56 percent of the vote there in 2024. The plan creates 30 districts that Trump would have carried by 10 points or more, up from 25 seats in the current map.

Republicans accomplished this feat by drawing more Republicans into the seats of two vulnerable Democrats in South Texas, Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzales Jr., and eliminating Democratic-held seats in Austin, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. No Republican-held seats became significantly more competitive as a result.

“This map is racist, it’s illegal, and it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to keep Black and Brown Texas from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey.

New districts are typically redrawn following the decennial census, and it’s highly unusual to redraw them mid-decade, absent a court order. Texas did it once before in 2003, under the orders of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but the legislature at that time redrew districts that had been drawn by a court. This time, the GOP-controlled legislature is redrawing maps that were drawn by that very legislature, which is virtually unprecedented.

“The maps are already bad,” said Emily Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “Now they’re getting worse.”

Texas State Sen. Phil King, chair of the senate’s special committee on redistricting, said the new map was drawn by GOP redistricting operative Adam Kincaid, who authored the 2021 Texas redistricting maps that civil rights groups are challenging as racially discriminatory and is executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which was founded after the 2020 census to “coordinate the GOP’s 50-state redistricting effort.”

The brazenly partisan nature of the re-gerrymandering of the state undercuts the stated rationale for the special session provided by the Justice Department, which claimed earlier this month in a letter to Texas that four congressional districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, constituted “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

Voting rights experts, Democrats, and even Texas Republicans have since debunked that argument. Justin Levitt, a high-ranking official in the Obama Justice Department, called the letter “a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to redistrict.”

The DOJ letter claimed that coalition districts, in which different minority groups form a combined majority of the voting population, violate the Voting Rights Act, citing a 2023 opinion by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in the country. But the Fifth Circuit’s decision, while holding that states like Texas are not required to draw coalition districts under the Voting Rights Act, did not say that existing coalition districts must be dismantled, as the DOJ letter claims. Nor has the Supreme Court weighed in yet on that decision.

Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, testified before the Texas Senate that the Justice Department’s argument was “factually wrong” and “littered with errors.”

And Texas Republicans have repeatedly asserted that they drew the current redistricting maps “race-blind,” contradicting the DOJ’s claims. “I’ve certainly never seen any indication that any map that has been passed out of this legislature, anytime I’ve been in the legislature, would violate in any way the Voting Rights Act,” said State Rep. Cody Visut, the Republican chair of the House special redistricting committee.

Democrats in the Texas legislature have sought to subpoena the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, a close Trump ally who authored the DOJ letter, to compel her to testify.

If anything, the 2021 maps give too little representation to communities of color, argue civil rights groups who are challenging it in court. Ninety-five percent of the state’s population growth over the past decade came from people of color, but the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead.

Trump’s new plan makes that problem worse, by targeting districts held by minority representatives, including Representatives Al Green in Houston and Greg Cesar in Austin.

“This map is racist, it’s illegal, and it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to keep Black and Brown Texas from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey.

Blue states could retaliate in response to Texas’ new map but their options are more limited. California and New York, where Democrats could pick up the greatest number of new seats, have independent redistricting commissions and prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering that make any mid-decade redistricting effort more complex. And Democrats have already come close to maximizing the number of representatives in other blue states, such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing forward with mid-decade redistricting in Ohio and floating similar schemes in states including Florida, Indiana, and Missouri.

Trump, with the help of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, is supercharging a new race to the bottom, using re-redistricting as the latest tool in his ever-growing war on democracy. As his popularity sinks and a majority of the public disapproves of his handling of every major issue, the president seems to believe that the only way his party can win is if election outcomes are predetermined in their favor.

“The president and his party are afraid of the voters,” former Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Senate Democrats on Wednesday, “and they’re trying to manipulate the maps in Texas so that they can rig the elections in 2026.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

On a Friday evening this July, the Trump administration announced it would lay off all of the health research scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Hundreds of investigators who try to understand how toxic pollution affects the human body would be gone.

That wasn’t a surprise. The EPA—which had a founding mission to protect “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” as President Richard Nixon put it—has been busy dismantling policies that are in place to ensure environmental and public health.

This week, the agency announced it would seek to repeal its recognition of climate change as a threat to human health, potentially limiting the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has relaxed existing standards for mercury and lead pollution—two toxins that can lead to developmental problems in children. And the EPA has postponed its implementation of new Biden-era regulations that were supposed to reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals Americans are exposed to.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are attempting to grant widespread liability relief to pesticide companies and restrict EPA regulation of PFAS “forever chemicals” through provisions that have been tucked into the spending bills currently moving through Congress. (Democrats, for their part, have offered opposing legislation that would protect an individual’s right to sue over any harm from pesticides.)

This collective assault upon America’s environmental regulations targets not just the environment, but human health as well. Which means it sits oddly with the work of another Trump official whose office at the Department of Health and Human Services is just a 15-minute walk from EPA headquarters: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement seeks to, obviously, make Americans healthier.

The US is even moving backward on pollutants like mercury and lead, for which the scientific evidence of their harms is undisputed.

But Kennedy hasn’t spoken up about these contradictions—and his supporters are beginning to notice.

In response to the pro-pesticide industry proposals in Congress, MAHA leaders wrote a letter to Kennedy and Zeldin voicing opposition to a bill that they believe “would ensure that Americans have no power to prevent pesticide exposure, and no path to justice after harm occurs.” In the letter, they also urged the EPA to ban two pesticides—atrazine and glyphosate—that have been linked to birth defects and liver and kidney problems.

“These toxic substances are in our food, rain, air, and water, and most disturbingly, in our children’s bodies,” the MAHA letter says. “It is time to take a firm stand.”

Kennedy is no stranger to these issues: Earlier this year, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission report, which sought to document and explain the dramatic increase in chronic diseases like obesity among US children, identified both chemicals as health risks. Zeldin, however, has been working to deregulate both atrazine and glyphosate in his first few months leading the EPA.

“It is completely contrary to MAHA to relax regulations on PFAS and many different chemicals. We are calling upon them and to reverse some of these actions that [the administration] is taking or seemingly may allow,” said Zen Honeycutt, one of the letter signers and the founder of the MAHA-aligned group Moms Across America. “We are extremely disappointed with some of the actions taken by this administration to protect the polluters and the pesticide companies.”

“In the case of Kennedy, you have someone that has spent his life thinking about public health, but seems unable or disinterested in stopping what’s going on.”

MAHA burst onto the political scene as part of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign. It has become a vehicle for public health concerns, some exceedingly mainstream (like addressing America’s ultra-processed food and reducing pollution) and some of them very much outside of it (such as undermining the effectiveness of vaccines). After dropping his own candidacy, Kennedy joined forces with Trump, and ended up running the nation’s most important health agency.

But now that he’s in office, he and the movement he leads are running into the challenges of making change—and the unavoidable reality that MAHA has allied with a president and an agenda that is often in direct opposition to their own.

“In the case of Lee Zeldin, you have someone who’s doing incredibly consequential actions and is indifferent to the impact on public health,” said Jeremy Symons, senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network and a former adviser to the EPA during the Clinton administration. “In the case of Kennedy, you have someone that has spent his life thinking about public health, but seems unable or disinterested in stopping what’s going on.”

Kennedy has successfully nabbed voluntary industry commitments to phase out certain dyes from American food products. He has overhauled the government’s vaccine policy, and one state has already followed his lead in banning fluoride from its drinking water. But his ambitions to reduce the sheer number of toxins that leach into America’s children in their most vulnerable years are being stymied by an EPA and a Republican-controlled Congress with very different priorities.

“Food dyes are not as consequential as pesticides for food manufacturers. The ingredients they put into the food contaminate the food,” Honeycutt said. “That issue is a much larger issue. That is the farmers, and changing farming practices takes longer.”

To Kennedy’s credit, these are issues he’d apparently liketo tackle—if he could. His HHS report earlier this year pointed out that “studies have raised concerns about possible links between some of these products and adverse health outcomes, especially in children.” Specific ingredients in pesticides have been associated with cancer, inflammation, metabolic problems and more. But the EPA, meanwhile, has reversed regulations and stymied research for those same substances.

The EPA has proposed easing restrictions on the amount of the herbicide atrazine that can be permitted in the nation’s lakes and streams. Human and animal studies have associated exposure to atrazine with birth defects, kidney and liver diseases, and problems with metabolism; the evidence, however, remains limited and the MAHA report called for further independent research. The EPA has also moved to block states from putting any new limits on or requiring any public disclosures for glyphosate, a herbicide that the MAHA report says has been linked to a wide range of health problems. Zeldin also postponed Biden-era plans to take action on chlorpyrifos, a common insecticide increasingly associated with development problems in kids.

“From the perspective of the polluter takeover of EPA, Kennedy is largely seen as inconsequential and ineffective. He’s playing wiffle ball.”

The EPA has also been slow to move on microplastics and PFAS, both substances of growing concern among scientists and the general public. These invisible but omnipresent chemicals are a priority for the MAHA movement, singled out in the White House report for further study and policymaking. The EPA, though, has delayed implementing a new standard to limit PFAS in drinking water and announced it would consider whether to raise the limits of acceptable PFAS levels in community water systems, while also slashing funding for more research on the substance’s health effects.

Bisphenols (also known as BPA) and phthalates are two other common materials used in plastic production and food packaging, which have also been identified by researchers as likely dangerous because of their ability to disrupt hormone and reproductive function. The MAHA movement singles them out for further study and possible restrictions, but the EPA has delayed safety studies for both.

The US is even moving backward on pollutants like mercury and lead, for which the scientific evidence of their harms is undisputed. They are toxins that regulators have actually taken steps over the decades to reduce exposure, through banning the use of lead paint, strictly limiting mercury levels, etc. Yet over the past few months, the EPA has moved to grant exemptions to coal power plants and chemical manufacturers that would allow more mercury pollution, while cutting monitoring for lead exposures.

This is a long list of apparent contradictions and we’re barely six months into Trump’s term. How long can the contradictions pile up without Kennedy challenging Zeldin directly?

We reached out to HHS to see if we could get Kennedy’s perspective on any of this. In response, an agency spokesperson sent a written statement: “Secretary Kennedy and HHS are committed to investigating any potential root causes of the chronic disease epidemic, including environmental factors and toxic chemicals,” the spokesperson wrote. “The Secretary continues to engage with federal partners, including the EPA, to ensure that federal actions align with the latest gold standard science and the public health priorities identified in the MAHA report.”

But as the EPA continues to roll back environmental protections despite the reassurances that the administration is aligned on MAHA, Kennedy’s constituents are growing impatient.

“Our children’s lives and futures are non-negotiables, and claims from the industry of ‘safe’ levels of exposure ignore the impacts of cumulative exposure and the reality of serious, evidence-backed risks,” the MAHA movement’s recent letter says. “The industry’s call for delay or inaction is completely unacceptable—immediate and decisive action is needed now and is long overdue.”

The conflict between the two agencies’ agendas has been striking: The EPA, under Zeldin, is allied with the industries it regulates and plans to deregulate as much as possible. HHS, on the other hand, is focused on its vision of making the environment safer in order to improve people’s health—a goal that will inevitably require moreregulations that require companies to restrict their use of certain compounds that prove to be dangerous to human health.

Trump himself has said the two sides are going to have to work together and figure things out, Honeycutt noted—words that she is taking to heart for now. And the movement’s leaders recognize that they are now in the business not of outside agitation but of working within the system to try to change it. “We’re not always going to be happy,” Honeycutt said.

But Kennedy may be playing the weaker hand: Zeldin and his agency hold obvious advantages, and in a fight between HHS and EPA, EPA will likely win—unless, perhaps, Trump himself steps in.

The biggest reason is a matter of authority: The EPA has the responsibility to regulate pollution, while Kennedy’s HHS does not. The federal health agency can offer funding to state and local health departments to advance its policy goals, but it has effectively no regulatory authority when it comes to the dangerous substances identified in the MAHA report’s section on chemical toxins. The EPA, on the other hand, has broad discretion to regulate the chemicals that industries pump into the American environment—or not.

“The movement must hold Republicans accountable for undermining public health with policies like liability shields.”

The difference between the leadership at the two agencies is also stark: Kennedy is a former lifelong Democrat who has never held a government position; Zeldin is a seasoned GOP operator who served four terms in the US House. Kennedy has brought in an assortment of unconventional personnel at HHS, many with skepticism about mainstream science and who are viewed dubiously by the industries they oversee. At the EPA, representatives of long-entrenched polluting interests have commandeered powerful positions: Nancy Beck, a former scientist at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical manufacturing industry’s trade association, for example, is now holding the position overseeing chemical safety and pollution prevention.

The perception within the industry, according to insiders who spoke with Vox, is that Kennedy is, well, a lightweight. “From the perspective of the polluter takeover of EPA, Kennedy is largely seen as inconsequential and ineffective. He’s playing wiffle ball,” Symons said. “Kennedy talks a good game, but watch carefully what’s happening at EPA and all the favors being given to corporate polluters that are going to do far more damage than anything.”

“The food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe are going to get more toxic and more dangerous because of what’s happening in EPA,” Symons told Vox.

When it comes to jockeying for influence, Zeldin also enjoys more powerful friends in the Republican Party. He has relationships with conservative politicians and advocacy groups across the nation. Almost all of the Republican state attorneys general, for example, are motivated to roll back environmental regulations because it’s compatible with their priorities in their respective states.

“A lot of this is being driven by polluter states, red states with Republican attorneys general,” Symons said.

And, as evidenced by the pesticide liability relief legislation in Congress that prompted MAHA’s letter to Kennedy and Zeldin, Republicans in the House and Senate remain much more allied with corporate interests—an alliance that has stood for decades—than with the public health movement that has only recently been brought inside the broader Make America Great Again coalition.

It is a bitter irony for a movement that has often called out corporate influence and corruption for the government’s failures to protect public health.

The White House’s own MAHA report cites the influence of big businesses to explain why the chronic disease crisis has grown so dire; in particular, the report says, “as a result of this influence, the regulatory environment surrounding the chemical industry may reflect a consideration of its interests.”

MAHA’s leaders aren’t running for the hills yet; Honeycutt said she urges her members not to vilify Kennedy or Trump for failing to make progress on certain issues. But they sense they’re losing control of the agenda on the environment, forcing difficult questions onto the movement just a few months after it attained serious power in Washington.

“As for MAHA organizations, they must decide whether they are to become appendages of the Republican party or coalesce into an effective, independent political force,” Charles Eisenstein, a wellness author who was a senior adviser to Kennedy’s presidential campaign, wrote for Children’s Health Defense, a once-fringe group with ties to Kennedy. “To do that, the movement must hold Republicans accountable for undermining public health with policies like liability shields. It must not sacrifice its core priorities to curry short-term favor with the Republican establishment.”

The MAHA-MAGA political alliance is new and tenuous—many MAHA followers voted for President Barack Obama, Eisenstein points out—and it may not be permanent.

And some fractures are already apparent: Honeycutt, the leader of Moms Across America and a signer of the MAHA movement’s letter to Kennedy, told Vox that her own members have told her directly that they are considering voting for Democrats in the next election. Even as she urges MAHA to keep the faith, Honeycutt said that Republicans risk alienating this enthusiastic part of their coalition by going hog wild on environmental deregulation. Her group is in the process of pulling together a legislative scorecard to hold lawmakers to account.

“There could be dire consequences for the midterm elections, if they don’t realize,” she said. “We don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democrat. We will support whoever supports us.”

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