Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want to take the Rogan slot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

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

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

“UGANDA MISS ME.”

“HE AFRI-CAN’T BE SERIOUS.”

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

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why surprising?

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

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

What are the holes in the argument?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Donald Trump filed suit late Friday afternoon against the *Wall Street Journal’*s parent company, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and several other defendants, saying he was defamed by a story that claimed he contributed to a 50th birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump is demanding $10 billion in damages; in a post on TruthSocial, he called the legal action a “POWERHOUSE Lawsuit,” calling the article “false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS” and the Journal a “useless ‘rag.'”

The story concerns a birthday album compiled by Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s now serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges. In the album, the paper wrote, was a “bawdy” letter bearing Donald Trump’s name.

“It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker,” reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo wrote. “A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” The typewritten text features an imaginary conversation between Epstein and Trump, written in the third person. The letter closes with the words, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

The Journal story also prominently featured Trump’s denial, in which he called the letter “a fake thing,” adding, “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

In the complaint, Trump’s lawyers write that Safdar and Palazzolo “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.”

Trump also immediately threatened to sue the paper, “just like I sued everyone else.” Paramount recently agreed to pay a $16 million settlement to settle a suit from Trump alleging that CBS had engaged in election interference by what he loudly insisted was unfair editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris. (For good measure, CBS is also canceling Stephen Colbert’s show, days after he called the Paramount settlement “a big fat bribe” on air, citing vague financial concerns.) In December 2024, ABC News agreed to make a $15 million donation to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made about writer E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits, which she brought against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump was ordered to pay Caroll $5 million, a judgment that was just upheld by a federal appeals court in June. But Stephanopoulos incorrectly stated that Trump was “found liable for rape,” which he was not.

In his suit against Murdoch and the Journal, filed by Florida law firm Brito PLC, Trump also names Dow Jonesand NewsCorp CEO Robert Thomson as defendants as well as each journalist on the story individually. In the complaint, Trump’s lawyers write that Safdar and Palazzolo “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.” It also complains that the story went “viral” on the internet and Twitter, including screenshots of organizations like the Lincoln Project and figures like former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann sharing it.

In a post on TruthSocial after the lawsuit was filed, Trump cast it as part of a long history of legal actions against the media.

“We have proudly held to account ABC and George Slopadopoulos, CBS and 60 Minutes, The Fake Pulitzer Prizes, and many others who deal in, and push, disgusting LIES, and even FRAUD, to the American People,” he wrote. “This lawsuit is filed not only on behalf of your favorite President, ME, but also in order to continue standing up for ALL Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings of the Fake News Media. I hope Rupert and his ‘friends’ are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In April 2024, medical staff testified before Louisiana’s House Health and Welfare Committee about just how bad things had gotten at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center.

The West Monroe hospital had been under fire from the state Health Department over lapses in patient care that seemed to be escalating. The hospital had stopped paying bills for oxygen supplies, the blood bank, and repairs to the elevators that take patients up to surgery.

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Former Glenwood nurse Debra Russell testified that there wasn’t a cardiologist available when a man suffered a heart attack or a $5 piece of equipment she needed for a routine procedure.

“You would send a nurse to go get it,” Russell said. “And she would come back and say, ‘Oh, Miss Debra, I don’t have any.’ I said, ‘Go to another unit.’…‘We don’t have one.’”

Glenwood was run by Steward Health Care, at the time one of the country’s largest for-profit health care operators. But its building was owned by Medical Properties Trust—a real estate company based in Birmingham, Alabama, that charged Glenwood monthly rent.

Related### Wall Street Gutted Steward Health Care. Patients Paid the Price.

State Rep. Michael Echols, a Republican whose district includes Glenwood, had been flooded with concerns from community members. Echols had begun to wonder whether the high rent to MPT was fueling Glenwood’s financial crisis. He struggled to get real answers.

Glenwood is just one of nearly 400 health care facilities owned by MPT and rented out to hospital chains. Nine companies that leased hospitals from MPT have gone bankrupt—including Steward, Glenwood’s former operator. And while dozens of hospitals have been sold, entangled in bankruptcy proceedings, or become depleted shells, MPT’s top brass has earned millions.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek dig into MPT—its history, its business model, and how treating hospitals like financial assets leaves them gutted. And don’t miss Levintova’s yearlong reporting project on Steward’s demise, including our collaboration with Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines:

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

This year’s Fourth of July was the first time that the town of Comfort, Texas, used the sirens intended to warn its roughly 2,000 residents of imminent flooding. Founded by German abolitionists in 1854, Comfort sits along the Guadalupe River in an area known as “flash flood alley.” It installed its siren-based warning system last year, a move that neighboring Kerr County, where well over 100 people died in this month’s floods, opted against.

One Comfort resident told Grist that when she heard the sirens, she had no way of knowing just how much urgency was called for.  “In my mind, I’m going, ‘Okay we’ve got a couple hours before it gets up to the house, because it’s a 50-foot drop from our house to the creek,” she said. Her husband started walking down to check on the water level, but quickly ran back inside. “You’ve got five minutes,” he told her. “Grab everything you need.’”

Ultimately, she and her husband were lucky—they were able to shelter with a neighbor whose house is on higher ground—but their close call captures a dilemma that’s taking on new urgency as flash floods claim lives from Texas to North Carolina: Even the most comprehensive disaster warnings are only as helpful as the responses of those who receive them.

“If you’ve never seen water rise in front of you in minutes, it’s hard to conceive of how quickly that can happen—and how quickly your life and property can be at risk,” said Rachel Hogan Carr, executive director of the Nurture Nature Center, a nonprofit focused on flood-risk communication.

“There’s barriers to warning delivery from things like internet connectivity, people not having cell phones, or being asleep when a warning comes in,” added Hogan Carr, who is also a co-chair of Integrated Prediction of Precipitation and Hydrology for Early Actions (InPRA) a working group within National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that researches early warning systems. “Communities need to anticipate these barriers, and set up local systems in order to amplify the distribution of warnings when they come in.”

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support.”

In the aftermath of the July 4 deluge, questions about the efficacy of local warning systems have swirled, particularly in Kerr County, which saw the most devastating flooding. Although the county had the ability to use FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), to push out aggressive, vibrating alarms to residents’ mobile phones—similar to those that sound when an AMBER alert is issued to inform residents of a given area about a missing child—that system wasn’t used until days after the flood, as more rain headed towards the area.

That said, cellphone customers in the at-risk service area were sent a variety of warnings—including a flash flood warning from the National Weather Service—but their effects appear to have been limited. Many received no alert, or only received an alert after the flood had overtaken them. Even if the county had sent additional warnings, many residents likely would have missed them if their phones were off or out of reach for the night.

Plus, a warning from local officials may have carried more weight than the alerts from the National Weather Service, Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who studies emergency management, told the Washington Post. People tend to be more receptive to warnings that are tailored specifically to them, added Hogan Carr.

“We saw this in Superstorm Sandy,” she explained. “Even though the entire New Jersey shoreline there was at risk, if it didn’t say somebody’s specific small town name, they often decided it [didn’t apply] to them.”

On the night of the flooding, Kerr County resident Martha Murayama says she was woken up by an audible alert on her phone. But she turned it off without reading the warning, assuming that it was an AMBER Alert. Murayama lives in the gated subdivision of Bumble Bee Hills, which sit directly across from the Guadalupe between Kerrville and Ingram, Texas. By then, the flood was already well underway. Not long after she got back to bed, Murayama received a panicked call from her neighbor, saying that someone was banging on the door. It was a family who lived directly across from the river, trying to warn people as they moved to higher ground. Murayama was worried—her neighbor, Joe, suffers from Parkinson’s and was not in good health. When Murayama’s husband went outside to investigate, he was quickly swept away by floodwaters, although he was ultimately able to make his way back to the house.

Just up the hill, Ramiro Rodriguez was awoken by the same family seeking shelter. Like Murayama, he too thought immediately of Joe and made his way down to the house through floodwaters to help Joe and his wife up the hill. As they managed to pop the garage door open, Rodriguez spotted a tow strap, which he used to haul the couple to his house. “I tied up Joe to my hips,” he said. “And right about that time, you can hear the flash flood warning.”

But just as quickly as the water arrived, it receded. Since July 4, Murayama says, she’s gotten new flood alerts constantly.

Flash floods are among the deadliest natural disasters and the most difficult to accurately predict. Less than 1 percent of waterways across the United States have stream gauges that monitor rising water in real time; the National Weather Service often relies on computer modeling to assess flood risk in smaller creeks and streams. (Kerr County only has six river gauges, which makes predicting floods more difficult).

But nearby development can quickly render these models outdated. For example, a stream bordered by concrete will flood much faster and cause much more damage in the surrounding community than one that runs alongside a park, which has natural features that can absorb water.

Even when floods can be anticipated, communicating their severity to the public is a tall order. Because flash floods are very localized, even neighborhood-level warnings may seem like false alarms to some residents, leading to what the journalist Zoë Schlanger has dubbed “alert fatigue.”

That’s why early community education is such an integral part of a functioning warning system, according to Hogan Carr. “If you get a flash flood warning and you never see it, you got lucky,” she said.

Many people do not understand the speed with which floods move, which can lead to them driving through areas that are about to be submerged, for example. Warnings such as the ones sent in Texas, encouraging residents to “move to higher ground,” don’t necessarily convey urgency, according to Ashley Coles, an associate professor of environmental geography at Texas Christian University who studies flash flooding.

“I spoke to somebody regarding the flooding in Texas. They said, ‘You know, if I had gotten that message I would’ve gotten together a go bag and then gone to bed.’ So they would have been ready to evacuate if needed, but it came so fast that they would have been swept away,” said Coles. “It makes it very difficult even for people who are trying to be cautious.”

The National Weather Service has defended its response to the floods, pointing out that it issued warnings at 1:14 am, two hours before the flood waters reached inhabited riverside areas like Camp Mystic. But the warnings, though they cautioned that “life-threatening” flooding was possible, did not order evacuations.

As climate change makes flash floods and other extreme weather events more common and deadly, researchers across the country are struggling with how to effectively communicate risk to the public, without losing their trust through over-warning.

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support, wrapped around the issuance of a formal flood warning,” said Hogan Carr, explaining that ideally, the local weather service would have a forecaster whose job was dedicated to doing community outreach, explaining local risks, where forecasts come from, and where residents can get reliable information in an emergency. “It’s an investment of time and resources proactively, that could pay off tremendously during these large-scale events,” she added.

In the meantime, Kerr County residents are hoping for a siren system, like the one used in neighboring Comfort. “I slept through [the phone alert],” said Rodriguez. “If it wasn’t for those people knocking on the door, I would have slept right through it.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Friday, María Daniela learned that her younger brother, Neri Alvarado Borges, and more than 200 other Venezuelans sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador were being released after spending more than four months in an infamous prison. “Now it’s done,” María Daniela said in a call from Venezuela. “Now we can say we are done with this nightmare.”

Alvarado’s case, which Mother Jones reported on in March, was emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s decision to send hundreds of Venezuelans to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison. Like many others, Alvarado, who worked as a baker in the Dallas area, appears to have been targeted simply because he was a Venezuelan man with tattoos. It did not matter that his most prominent tattoo was an autism awareness ribbon adorned with the name of his teenage brother.

“We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.”

The Venezuelans were released as part of a prisoner swap deal including 10 Americans. (The Venezuelan government has been reported to imprison foreign nationals to gain diplomatic leverage.) The exchange comes after a previous deal being negotiated fell through, and despite the Trump administration’s insistence in court and in public statements that it did not have the power to compel El Salvador to return the removed migrants to the United States. (Court records show that Bukele’s government told the United Nations the men were under the authority of the United States, contradicting the White House’s claims.)

A relative shared a video from Venezuelan broadcaster teleSUR featuring his brother, Arturo Suárez, on the plane after it landed near Caracas. “We spent four months without any contact with the outside world,” Suárez said. “We were kidnapped.” He went on to say: “We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.”

Arturo Suárez raises his arm as he leaves the plane upon arrival in Venezuela.Ariana Cubillos/AP

Family members of some of the Venezuelan men held at CECOT told Mother Jones they were relieved, but still heartbroken over what they consider a wrongful detention. On Friday, families had been instructed by the Maduro government’s office to go to the airport near Caracas to reunite with their relatives.

Anaurys Orlimar, the sister of one of the men, Julio Zambrano, said that earlier on Friday their mother was contacted with “good news” and told to travel from Maracay to the Caracas area. Her son, Julio, had been seeking asylum in the United States. The father of two was detained in January during a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His then-pregnant wife, Luz, said an officer told her they suspected Zambrano—who has two tattoos of a crown with his name and a rose—was part of a gang, which his relatives dispute.

“We are all happy and eager to see him,” Orlimar, who lives in North Carolina, said. “We didn’t expect this. We didn’t know anything. What we all did was cry with emotion knowing that my brother is going to return, that he’s going to get out of this.” Later, she recognized her brother, wearing a red face mask and a Puma t-shirt, in Telemundo’s live coverage of the flight’s arrival.

A screenshot of a text message from the sister of Julio Zambrano, who had been detained at CECOT for four months.

Mariangi Sierra, sister of Anyelo Sierra Cano, said in a message she was feeling “emotional, happy, truly something inexplicable.”

For some relatives, the news of the men’s return to Venezuela evoked more mixed feelings. Maria Quevedo, the mother of Eddie Adolfo Hurtado Quevedo, told Mother Jones she was feeling relieved but still scared. “Happy because God gave me the gift of seeing my son free on my birthday,” she said. “Scared because my son is going to Venezuela, where he was threatened by the [paramilitary group] colectivos.”

Dozens of Venezuelans sent to CECOT had pending asylum applications in US immigration courts when they were removed. In some instances, their cases have been dismissed by immigration judges. They could now be vulnerable to potential harm and persecution back in Venezuela.

“The bitterness is still there,” said a friend of one of the men sent to CECOT about the release. “The anger about what happened to him is still there.”

The men released today had been held at the maximum security prison since March, when the Trump administration sent more than 230 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador. At least 130 of them were removed without due process under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime power that Trump invoked for only the fourth time in US history. Investigations by Mother Jones and other publications revealed that many of the men had no connection to Tren de Aragua and appeared to have been targeted over benign tattoos—like Alvarado’s autism awareness ribbon. Most of them had no criminal history in the United States, according to ProPublica and Bloomberg. (The administration has repeatedly refused to provide evidence to support its assertion of gang affiliation.)

In a statement on Friday, the Venezuelan government said it had secured the release of 252 Venezuelan nationals who “remained kidnapped and subjected to forced disappearance in a concentration camp” in El Salvador. “Venezuela has paid a high price,” the statement continued, to free the men as part of an agreement with US government authorities. The deal also reportedly included the return to Venezuela of seven migrant children who had stayed behind in the United States after their parents were deported, according to the country’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

When María Daniela, Alvarado’s sister, spoke to Mother Jones on Friday, she and her family were about to make the roughly four-hour drive from their home to the Caracas area. Once there, they would finally be reunited with Alvarado, the brother and son they had no contact with for more than four months.

Related### “You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”

Juan Enrique Hernández, a US citizen who came to the United States from Venezuela nearly three decades ago, was Alvarado’s boss at the bakery in the Dallas area. The two became good friends, and Hernández visited Alvarado in detention in Texas multiple times following his February arrest.

Hernández said he did everything in his power to get Alvarado out. “I went to many lawyers here and none wanted to take the case,” he explained. “They said they didn’t have jurisdiction.”

“I have mixed feelings. I’m happy on one hand,” Hernández said on Friday about Alvardo’s imminent release. “But the bitterness is still there. The anger about what happened to him is still there.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

After Kashana Cauley earned her first television writing gig on the Hulu animated series The Great North, her media friends in New York were thrilled, in a jealous kind of way. “You did it!” they told her. “You made it out—you’re in a stable profession!” Cauley began her professional career in antitrust law, then built a following on Twitter that caught the attention of editors and producers who liked her pithy observations about race and gender. She grabbed bylines in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Esquire before landing a staff writing gig on the Daily Show With Trevor Noah. But Great North, a sitcom job, seemed like the start of a more stable career in Hollywood. And it was: The show ran for five seasons. Networks and streamers all wanted content—until they didn’t. “There is so much less TV on the air than there was, say, five or six years ago,” she told me.

Professional instability isn’t new for Cauley, and it’s at the heart of her second novel, The Payback, which published this week. The book’s main character is Jada, who is very good at her retail job that doesn’t pay her enough to make ends meet. Like Jada, Cauley worked a retail job too: six years at JCPenney. She was the first person in her family to go to college and wanted to pay her way through. She knew that going back to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was raised, to work on the General Motors assembly line like her dad was no longer an option. The closest plant closed in 2009. The money she earned at JCPenney was nowhere near what she really needed, and without anyone to help navigate the maze of college majors and white collar career prep, she landed in law school. She graduated with her law degree—and six figures of student loan debt.

As Hollywood pulled back on TV production, war broke out in Ukraine. Cauley watched it all.  She was fascinated with ethical hacking, the idea that small bands of Robinhood-minded techies could help even life’s uneven playing fields. She looked into zero-day hacks, which exploit gaps in software security systems, often of large private or government institutions. She thought about the people she had met across her many careers: the wardrobe folks at the Daily Show, the costume designers in late night television, the interns at Kenneth Cole. What might a revolution look like if it were led by the fashionable creatives of the world?

“In America, if you have financial problems, there isn’t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own solutions to these big societal issues.”

In The Payback, Jada leads a trio of down-on-their-luck retail workers in a fight against the fictitious Debt Police. It’s Cauley’s second work of speculative fiction; her first book, The Survivalists, followed another woman’s perilous journey up the corporate ladder. Her new book is an action-packed thriller for everyone who’s fed up with our current political situation. “What if we looked beyond the realm of what’s happening and toward the future of possibilities?” she asks. “In this era, that’s a good place to put your head.”

I recently talked with Cauley about living with debt, leaving Twitter, and finding humor in dark times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired The Payback‘s Debt Police?

I compare it to the Department of Education, which has been really enforce-y lately. All of a sudden, they can garnish wages, they can yank your driver’s license if you’re not paying back your student loans. In America, if you have financial problems, there isn’t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own individualistic solutions to these big societal issues. I drew up three girls who were just like, “We are all we have.”

On top of that, it was important for me to include some Debt Police who were Black, because there are plenty of Black people who have bought into ideas of policing and enforcement—it’s an American value.

You fought those battles yourself, working for at JCPenney to help pay for college and law school. These days, how do you actually afford to be a writer?

I have a very financially and emotionally supportive husband. I ended up paying off my loans with TV money, but I don’t think you should have to win the lottery—which is basically what I did—to better yourself.

My husband is my support, along with my book advances, but I have definitely had periods where I’ve been the top earner in my house. It’s hard to think of a stable industry in American culture right now. We’ve all got to learn how to roll and take the punches.

A lot of folks first encountered your work via your hilarious social media presence. Why did you decide to leave Twitter and embrace Bluesky?

I was cutting down on my time there for most of 2023 after they changed the algorithm and I stopped getting responses and seeing my friends. We had an unsatisfying group of social media sites that rose up in the interim. Bluesky is the first that really feels like a place where a lot of people have joined and stayed. They post and they hang out, and I see a lot of the people I used to see on Twitter.

“I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.”

I’m sad about that transition. Twitter was a great place to hang out. Every once in a while, there were, like, missing Black people, and we found them! I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to find missing Black people again.

Who are the funniest Black women who inspire your writing?

I am an enormous Danzy Senna fan. She is so funny and is a really good observer of contemporary Black life. She wrote a book called New People, where one of her characters works on a dissertation about Jonestown. I didn’t know it was a thing where older Black women from the South, largely, were trying to find their way to equality through singing and alternative religion. All these people born in, like, 1915 in Alabama and they end up with Jim Jones drinking the Kool-Aid in Guyana. I was crushed.

I also got to work with Dulcé Sloan on The Great North, and she’s just fabulous—great energy, great vibe. And then everybody cites Fran Ross, who wrote Oreo. She tears your chest open and goes right to the heart of the joke. I love her for that. She was basically the only woman in the Richard Pryor Show writers’ room. Comedy is still trying to work out its relationship with women. She was not afraid of swinging. I love Black women like that. They are my idols.

What’s the importance of humor in this political moment?

Sometimes I cannot listen to things being told seriously. I need a new angle. Humor shakes me out of the constant depression that is the news and our politics. I live in LA, where we’ve had the National Guard in town for a few weeks, and it’s terrifying. You can’t live life on sheer terror. You will have a panic attack and die.

I mean, the Defense Department is taking the Blackness out of Jackie Robinson’s biography. The fact that he broke the color barrier was why he is on the dod’s history page. It’s important to be able to make fun of some of these folks in our public life. There’s a lot of incompetence there. I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.

Back in the day, I volunteered for Howard Dean and then the Obama campaign. I called swing voters in Ohio back when that was less terrifying. I did Kamala [Harris] stuff, too. I understand that things are sad and they’re bad, but humor is how I get people to listen to me. I’m tricking folks.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

AI is “not my thing,” President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI.

“You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that,” Trump said, recalling a conversation with “David”—most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. “I said, what, are you kidding? That’s double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it.”

At the high-profile summit on Tuesday—where, in addition to Sacks, panelists and attendees included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat, and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods—companies announced $92 billion in investments across various energy and AI-related ventures. These are just the latest in recent breakneck rollouts in investment around AI and energy infrastructure. A day before the Pittsburgh meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared on Threads that Meta would be building “titan clusters” of data centers to supercharge its AI efforts. The one closest to coming online, dubbed Prometheus, is located in Ohio and will be powered by onsite gas generation, SemiAnalysis reported last week.

For an administration committed to advancing the future of fossil fuels, the location of the event was significant. Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which supercharged Pennsylvania’s fracking boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The state is still the country’s second-most prolific natural gas producer. Pennsylvania-based natural gas had a big role at the summit: The CEO of Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, Toby Rice—who dubs himself the “people’s champion of natural gas”—moderated one of the panels and sat onstage with the president during his speech.

All this new demand from AI is welcome news for the natural gas industry in the US, the world’s top producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. Global gas markets have been facing a mounting supply glut for years. Following a warm winter last year, Morgan Stanley predicted gas supply could reach “multi-decade highs” over the next few years. A jolt of new demand—like the demand represented by massive data centers—could revitalize the industry and help drive prices back up.

“I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

Natural gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are “why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast—responding, they say, to data center demand.

The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI as a lever to open up opportunities for fossil fuels, including a well-publicized effort to resuscitate coal in the name of more computing power. The summit, which was organized by Republican senator (and former hedge fund CEO) Dave McCormick, clearly reflected the administration’s priorities in this regard: No representatives from any wind or solar companies were present on any of the public panels.

Tech companies, which have expressed an interest in using any and all cheap power available for AI and have quietly pushed back against some of the administration’s anti-renewables positions, aren’t necessarily on the same page as the Trump administration. Among the announcements made at the summit was a $3 billion investment in hydropower from Google.

This demand isn’t necessarily driven by a big concern for the climate—many tech giants have walked back their climate commitments in recent years as their focus on AI has sharpened—but rather pure economics. Financial analyst Lazard said last month that installing utility-scale solar panels and batteries is still cheaper than building out natural gas plants, even without tax incentives. Gas infrastructure is also facing a global shortage that makes the timescales for setting up power generation vastly different.

“The waiting list for a new turbine is five years,” Williams-Derry says. “If you want a new solar plant, you call China, you say, ‘I want more solar.’”

Given the ideological split at the summit, things occasionally got a little awkward. On one panel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who headed up a fracking company before coming to the federal government, talked at length about how the Obama and Biden administrations were on an “energy crazy train,” scoffing at those administrations’ support for wind and solar. Speaking directly after Wright, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted that solar would likely support dispatchable gas in powering AI. Incredibly, fellow panel member Woods, the ExxonMobil CEO, later paid some of the only lip service to the idea of drawing down emissions heard during the entire event. (Woods was touting the oil giant’s carbon capture and storage business.)

Still, the hype train, for the most part, moved smoothly, with everyone agreeing on one thing: We’re going to need a lot of power, and soon. Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray said that AI could help drive “40 or 50 percent more power usage over the next decade,” while Porat, of Google, mentioned some economists’ projections that AI could add $4 trillion to the US economy by 2030.

It’s easy to find any variety of headlines or reports—often based on projections produced by private companies—projecting massive growth numbers for AI. “I view all of these projections with great skepticism,” says Jonathan Koomey, a computing researcher and consultant who has contributed to research around AI and power. “I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

In February, Koomey coauthored a report for the Bipartisan Policy Center cautioning that improvements in AI efficiency and other developments in the technology make data center power load hard to predict. But there’s “a bunch of self-interested actors,” Koomey says, involved in the hype cycle around AI and power, including energy executives, utilities, consultants, and AI companies.

Koomey remembers the last time there was a hype bubble around electricity, fossil fuels, and technology. In the late 1990s, a variety of sources, including investment banks, trade publications, and experts testifying in front of Congress began to spread hype around the growth of the internet, claiming that the internet could soon consume as much as half of US electricity. More coal-fired power, many of these sources argued, would be needed to support this massive expansion. (“Dig More Coal—The PCs Are Coming” was the headline of a 1999 Forbes article that Koomey cites as being particularly influential to shaping the hype.) The prediction never came to pass, as efficiency gains in tech helped drive down the internet’s energy needs; the initial projections were also based, Koomey says, on a variety of faulty calculations.

Koomey says that he sees parallels between the late 1990s and the current craze around AI and energy. “People just need to understand the history and not fall for these self-interested narratives,” he says. There’s some signs that the AI-energy bubble may not be inflating as much as Big Tech thinks: in March, Microsoft quietly backed out of 2GW of data center leases, citing a decision to not support some training workloads from OpenAI.

“It can both be true that there’s growth in electricity use and there’s a whole bunch of people hyping it way beyond what it’s likely to happen,” Koomey says.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Over the past few weeks, you might have noticed a renewed flare-up in a yearslong liberal freakout: Where is Barack Obama?

That was the headline of a provocative essay in the Atlantic, which concluded that Obama had entered “the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.” Cue the discourse: articles, interviews, TikTok clapbacks, and everything in between. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what the 44th president of the United States should be doing to defend democracy—just as they have, periodically, since Trump succeeded him in 2017.

So, I asked him about it—directly.

Last month, I sat down for an exclusive interview with the former president to talk about the 10-year anniversary of a tumultuous week near the end of his time in office. But, of course, I couldn’t help but ask him about the growing calls for him to do more. His response was simple:

“I’m out here!”

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Obama went on to acknowledge the unease that many Americans are feeling right now.

“You know, look, times are challenging,” he told me. He said that during his presidency, Americans “had a sense of things maybe being a little more stable,” and warned, that now, “for a lot of people, there’s a sense that anything can happen.”

In his post-presidency, Obama has been picking his spots strategically if rarely, careful to avoid diluting his voice in the fast-paced media environment. But behind the scenes, this argument goes, the former president and first lady have been focused on something far less headline-grabbing, but arguably more enduring.

“One of the things that I spend most of my time now doing is working through the Obama Foundation,” he told me. “Our goal is to train the next generation of leaders, to recognize the power they’ve got and the voice they have and to use it strategically—not just sink back in despair or cynicism but say, you know what, I can have an impact. I can have a difference.”

More recently, Obama used a fundraiser in New Jersey to scold Democrats, telling them to “toughen up,” arguing that “it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions.” He called out allies he sees as being “cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from just asserting what they believe.”

It was the kind of fighting language that many of Obama’s critics have been clamoring for. But the truth, in my opinion, is that Democrats who want more from Obama may misunderstand what they need from Obama.

In my new video, I contend that what Democrats need now, if anything, is the kind of broad political and cultural infrastructure that conservatives have been perfecting for decades: leadership pipelines, an influential media apparatus, and international allies. The stuff that takes time, in other words, that isn’t flashy and rarely trends, but wins in the long run. At least, that’s the goal.

From the outside looking in, it seems the Obamas are trying to play exactly that kind of long game. The question that remains—one Obama himself acknowledged recently—is whether democratic institutions can hold off autocracy long enough for that long game to play out.

Watch my longer interview with Obama here.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Back in 2013, the Obama administration introduced a low-profile but deeply impactful rule for federal contractors: to remain compliant with Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, the legions of firms contracting with the federal government would have to work towards a staff that was at least 7 percent disabled. That target, which went into effect in March 2014, was designed to address hiring disparities and biases that factored into disabled people’s disproportionate unemployment rate.

For more than a decade, those Obama-era targets led to more hiring of disabled employees, countering wage and employment gaps and bringing disabled workers more economic independence. Now, that’s likely to change.

On July 1, the Department of Labor under Trump nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer introduced a proposed rule that would both end the disability hiring goal for federal contractors and the practice of collecting information about it—supposedly on the basis that those practices violate Americans with Disabilities Act “restrictions on pre-conditional job offer disability inquiries.”

The public comment period for the Labor Department’s proposed rule ends on September 2, after which the department appears likely to put it in practice.

“Instead of expanding opportunities for people with disabilities, we’re rescinding them.”

Anupa Iyer Geevarghese, who was the deputy director of policy in the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs until January, disagrees with the Trump Labor Department’s assessment, calling the move “tragic.” “Instead of expanding opportunities for people with disabilities, we’re rescinding them,” she said.

“When you strip those two provisions away, what is left of [Section] 503, and what are they actually enforcing?,” Geevarghese said. “Anything that gives you a strong basis for enforcement is sort of whittled away.”

Geevarghese’s other question: where this rule is coming from, given the lack of lobbying against it. “The contractor community wasn’t coming out there and opposing 503,” she said.

A 7 percent goal for workers with disabilities is reasonable, not burdensome, Geevarghese said, and hasn’t drawn wide objections from employers—especially given the growing number of people with disabilities who work.

But the Trump administration, especially in its second term, has been persistently hostile to disabled people across the board, from immigration and education to labor and civil rights, sometimes in high-profile attacks but often through procedural changes that slip under the radar. The rule to end disability contracting goals was introduced during a frenetic period when disability advocates were trying to prevent major cuts to Medicaid. (Nor was it lost on Geevarghese that the department’s proposed rule was introduced on the first day of Disability Pride Month.)

Sarah von Schrader, of Cornell University’s Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability, surveyed the implementation of Section 503 rules in a 2018 report, finding that it led to the expansion of disability-focused hiring and recruitment programs, partly through new partnerships with community organizations.

That also incentivized workers to acknowledge disabilities, a valuable step in securing accommodations and better working conditions—otherwise a challenge in an environment where “there’s really no benefit to the individual to self-identifying,” von Schrader noted.

Other Trump administration attacks that harm disabled people, like its plans to gut Medicaid, are longstanding goals that date back to the president’s first term; attacks such as the current one, targeting hiring opportunity programs, have become a more defining characteristic of his second. During Trump’s first term, Geevarghese said, the Department of Labor Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs director Craig Leen “did these in-depth assessments of employer practices,” even including “areas where compliance needs to be improved.”

There’s nothing stopping federal contractors from continuing to try to meet such targets. “I would think a smart employer would want to continue with some of those with some of those practices that they’ve seen be successful,” said Cornell’s von Schrader.

Such programs, von Schrader contends, are “always about merit.” “Nobody’s hiring people just out of the goodness of their heart,” she continued. “They’re doing it because they want really good, qualified employees.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Even before Donald Trump retook the White House, US policymakers had created a paradox of plenty in the nation’s agricultural system: environmentally destructive overproduction of a few major food commodities, combined with stubbornly high and rising hunger rates, particularly among children. Now, the Trump administration and its congressional allies have found a way to intensify and prolong both crises at once, with a radical reshaping of food and farm policy nestled within their Big Beautiful Bill.

The consequences promise to be devastating for the economy, the environment, and public health.

The BBB slashes food aid for poor people while showering cash on already lavishly subsidized farmers, mainly corn and soybean producers. These food and farm programs normally get funded in a once-every-five-years legislative ritual known as the farm bill that, however imperfect, embodied the kind of bipartisan compromise that has been largely abandoned in American politics.

In 1964, Congress mashed food aid and farm aid together, hoping to protect the flagship US food-aid initiative, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), from budget-cutting conservatives. The idea was that urban congressional members would support farm subsidies in exchange for preserving SNAP, and rural members would support SNAP in exchange for votes for farm subsidies. The compromise has worked ever since, though it began to fray with the rise of the Tea Party in the early 2010s. By bypassing the farm bill—which has been overdue to be reauthorized since 2023—and slipping its biggest programs into Trump’s Big Beautiful one, the GOP leadership has vaporized the old coalition, literally taking food off the tables of poor people and handing much of the savings to large-scale commodity farmers. One more headstone in the teeming graveyard of the Trump era’s shattered norms.

Jonathan Coppess, a former US Senate and Department of Agriculture staffer who now directs the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois, calls the move a “smash and grab” of anti-poverty resources on behalf of agribusiness. Under the farm bill, if agribusiness lobbyists or farm-state members of Congress wanted to boost subsidies, he says, they didn’t do it by raiding SNAP. And vice versa for anti-hunger proponents.

The end of the farm bill compromise couldn’t have come at a worse time. During the Covid-19 pandemic, food insecurity fell (after an initial surge) as the federal government poured money into relief efforts, bolstering local food-aid projects across the country. But Congress withdrew the extra funding in 2022 and 2023, and hunger has been rising ever since. Today, 20 percent of American kids regularly have trouble getting enough to eat, according to Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks and pantries. It’s not hard to see why. Food prices have risen more than 25 percent since 2020, about 10 percentage points higher than the overall rate of inflation, pinching low-income families who spend a larger portion of their income on food than wealthier families.

Even before his signature bill, Trump was already hacking away at anti-hunger spending. In March, the USDA cut $1 billion in congressionally allocated funds to buy produce and meat from local farmers and ranchers from two institutions crucial to keeping hunger at bay: school cafeterias and food banks.

The Big Beautiful Bill revolved around Trump’s fixation on extending $4.5 trillion in tax cuts—passed during his first term—that accrue mostly to the wealthy, while also pumping fresh money into the military and giving hundreds of billions to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Desperate for spending cuts to offset at least some of the deficits generated by these moves, House leadership looked to SNAP, which provides food aid to 40 million people, including 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 4 million non-elderly adults with disabilities, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of Congressional Budget Office projections. Raiding SNAP had been a dream of congressional Republicans of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus variety since at least the early 2010s. But because of the old farm bill quid pro quo, even many of the most right-wing farm-state Republicans in Congress declined to go along. Now, under pressure from Trump, which included threats to primary anyone who refused to get on board, almost all of them caved.

The new law slashes $185.9 billion from SNAP over the next 10 years, a 20 percent reduction. It does so by imposing red tape-laden work requirements on some SNAP recipients (including parents with children 14 years old or older) and by shifting as much as 15 percent of the spending burden to the states—knowing full well that many states will fail to take it on. “If a state can’t make up for these massive federal cuts with tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in its budget, it would have to cut its SNAP program (such as by restricting eligibility or making it harder for people to enroll),” the CBPP analysis states. “Or it could opt out of the program altogether, terminating food assistance entirely in the state.”

The cuts can be expected to end food aid for more than 2 million current recipients nationwide, including 270,000 veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth, Jacob Kaufman-Waldron, the CBPP’s director for media relations, wrote in an email.

The nation’s food banks, already pushed to the hilt by growing demand for their services and the earlier Trump cuts, will face another surge of people in need of aid once the SNAP rolls are purged starting later this year. The megabill also cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid and other healthcare resources for low-income people over the next decade. That will further stress grocery budgets, as paying for doctor visits and medicine means less money for food.

“Food banks say they are wholly unprepared to feed millions of Americans when Republicans’ cuts to traditional federal safety net programs take effect,” *Politico’*s Marcia Brown reported recently. “Those food banks would need to double their operations to close the gap SNAP leaves behind.” There’s little hope they can.

While low-income people got kicked in the teeth, large-scale commodity farmers cashed in from Trump’s bill. Driven largely by billions of dollars of annual incentives for all-out production embedded in decades of farm bills, farmers in the upper Midwest have maximized corn and soybean production in ways that have pushed this vital growing region to its ecological limits. Soil is rapidly eroding away there, and pollution from agrichemicals fouls drinking-water sources and feeds harmful algae blooms from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The rapidly warming climate makes both problems worse.

The new bill is projected to lavish an additional $66 billion on commodity growers through 2034, according to an analysis by the University of Illinois Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, thus accelerating these deleterious trends over the next decade.

The bounty of corn and soy the bill triggers won’t improve the dietary prospects for low-income people hurt by the SNAP cuts. The Midwest’s commodity farmers produce little healthy food for people to eat. The great bulk of what these subsidies churn out ends up as feed in vast industrial-meat operations and fuel for cars, in the form of ethanol and biodiesel.

The rest is transformed into a stunning array of sweeteners, fats, and additives that suffuse the ultra-processed foods that form the basis of the American diet. A growing body of science indicts this packaged fare as a major driver of the epidemic of diet-related diseases afflicting Americans, including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has lambasted their ubiquity on our plates, but any notion that he might influence farm policy to move away from propping them up with subsidies crumbled with the Big Beautiful Bill’s passage.

In short, despite the very-online agitations of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy movement, the Trump administration successfully rammed through a bill that will likely make the least-healthy food even cheaper, rendering it even more attractive to millions of cash-strapped Americans whose food budgets the same bill has cut. And the bill’s massive increase in immigration-enforcement spending will likely target the undocumented people who harvest the bulk of US fruits and vegetables, making healthier choices even more expensive.

“This is a new era of farm bill policy and politics,” says Coppess. SNAP has taken what could be a permanent hit, he says, because it’s designed to help 40 million politically marginal recipients receiving “really small” benefits, while commodity subsidies accrue to a few hundred thousand farmers, backed by a potent agribusiness lobby, receiving “really big” annual payouts.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Jordan Lasker, an X user who goes by the username Crémieux, recently made news by providing the New York Times with hacked data that showed New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his undergraduate application to Columbia University. While Lasker quickly celebrated his time in the spotlight, critics were appalled that the Times was relying on a source they described as a “eugenicist.”

But Lasker, according to interviews with people who know him, appears to have a more worrisome history than the current backlash might suggest.

A Reddit account named Faliceer, which posted highly specific biographical details that overlapped with Lasker’s offline life and which a childhood friend of Lasker’s believes he was behind, wrote in 2016, “I actually am a Jewish White Supremacist Nazi.” The Reddit comment, which has not been previously reported, is one of thousands of now-deleted posts from the Faliceer account obtained by Mother Jones in February. In other posts written between 2014 and 2016, Faliceer endorses Nazism, eugenics, and racism. He wishes happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, says that “I support eugenics,” and uses a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

“He’s a pathological liar,” said a person who knew Lasker in college.

“Low IQ savages have NOTHING to contribute to the West,” Faliceer wrote in a representative 2016 post. “If you want them to degenerate anyone’s heritage don’t make it someone else – fuck yourself up. Go have kids with a n—-r but do not push your race traitor propagandism on the masses.”

In the comments, the account used the name “Jordan” on one occasion, made clear that Lasker was a family surname, and posted an internet IP address associated with Lasker’s hometown of Macon, Georgia. There are at least two websites on which a “Jordan Lasker” has used the Faliceer handle. Additionally, a “Zlatan Lasker” of Atlanta has used the Faliceer handle on Chess.com. (On Reddit, Faliceer claimed the German Jewish chess grandmaster Emanuel Lasker was one of his ancestors.)

Lasker’s childhood friend also told Mother Jones that Lasker, who is now 29, according to public records, used the handle Faliceer while playing video games online. After Lasker’s Facebook posts seemed to take a strange turn in college, the friend searched to see whether Lasker was writing anything online as Faliceer. They came across the Reddit account and concluded that their old friend was posting “race science” as Faliceer. (Mother Jones obtained the Reddit posts independently of the friend.)

Numerous personal details shared by the Faliceer account also correspond with Lasker’s own biography. Both became Eagle Scouts around the same time, shared an interest in 5K road races in Macon, and were members of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, during the 2014–2015 academic year. (Lasker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Lasker could easily be ignored during the period that Faliceer was posting. That is no longer the case. On Substack, Crémieux has more than 23,000 subscribers—good enough for 14th in the science category. On X, his account has more than 260,000 followers. One is Vice President JD Vance. Others are major figures in the right-wing tech world (Joe Lonsdale, Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Andreessen) or members of the Trump administration (FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, White House crypto and artificial intelligence “czar” David Sacks, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill).

Lasker’s ties to the current administration are unclear. He claimed last month to be a friend of O’Neill’s, who used to be the chief executive officer for the foundation of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. And a post from February indicated inside knowledge about the administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. During that time, Musk was frequently amplifying Crémieux’s posts on X.

The New York Times story about Mamdani’s 2009 application to Columbia was quickly seized upon by Mamdani’s detractors, who argued that he was trying to take advantage of affirmative action for Black applicants. Mamdani has said he was trying to capture the complexity of his identity as someone who was born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent.

An early version of the Times article stated that the hacked application data was obtained via an “intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X and who is an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.” A later version of the article added that Crémieux “writes often about I.Q. and race.” The Times also agreed to withhold Crémieux’s real name, even though it was already publicly known. The Guardian reported in March that Lasker was behind the account.

Lasker has been cagey about his connection to Crémieux—even when on camera. During a recent in-studio interview, right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk asked Lasker if he could identify him as Jordan. “Oh, Jay is probably better,” Lasker replied, appearing surprised to hear his real name. Kirk then asked his production team to “restart” because he wanted to “make sure I protect however you want to be presented.” (In keeping with Lasker’s request, a chyron identified Crémieux as “Jay Lasker.”)

These days, Lasker writes about a range of things as Crémieux, such as weight loss drugs, probability markets, and data analysis. Since gaining a following on X, Lasker has called Holocaust deniers “some of the dumbest people around” and has praised Adolphe Crémieux—the 19th-century French politician his account is named after—for promoting “classical liberal” principles. His account now appears to be popular with not only members of the tech right, but also some liberals and self-styled rationalists.

But it is clear that he remains interested in race science. Following the Times story, the Atlantic published a piece by former Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland about Lasker under the headline, “A Race-Science Blogger Goes Mainstream.” (Lasker wrote a detailed response on X containing his objections to the article in which he stated that he had “never supported racist policymatter, been hostile to members of any race for reasons of race, or anything that genuinely qualifies as racism.”)

Crémieux has alsoposted many times on X about Black people having lower IQs. In 2022, Lasker’s first article on Substack as Crémieux concluded with the claim that “whatever travails American Blacks suffered during slavery no longer matter for their socioeconomic attainment today.” Under his own name, Lasker has co-written papers with titles like “Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis” and “Global ancestry and cognitive ability.” (The authors concluded in the latter that “European ancestry was a consistent predictor of cognitive ability, even after entering various controls into our models.”)

Another commonality between Lasker and the Faliceer account is a penchant for making outlandish claims about their relationship to Judaism. Specifically, the account claimed at different points to be an “atheist Jew” who was proficient in German, Yiddish, and Ladino; an Israeli with “a place in Eilat”; and “58% Ashkenazi.” (The claim about being majority Ashkenazi would have had a clear benefit for Faliceer, who argued the group has a genetic advantage when it comes to IQ.)

Despite the many claims about his Jewish identity, Faliceer self-identified as a Nazi. “I’m Jewish and a National Socialist,” Faliceer wrote. He claimed in 2016 that some of his own ancestors fit the same mold: “My family were considered to be Edeljude [noble Jews] because we were some of the first German nationalists and Hitler loved Germany so he declared us Aryan.”

Claims like these appear to have made Faliceer notorious on some parts of Reddit. In posts that are still available online, one Reddit user described Faliceer as “a ‘Jewish’ Nazi apologist,” a second user called out Faliceer for an alliterative post attacking a “Coalition of Kikes,” and a third user flagged a post from Faliceer that included the line: “Does this person not realize the huge negatives to racemixing or are they just ignorant?” (Faliceer posed the last question in a subreddit devoted to discussing the Gamergate online harassment campaign.)

Faliceer was also known to some members of the r/Judaism subreddit. As one user wrote about Faliceer’s posts on the notoriously racist r/European subreddit, “That user is probably the worst one on there. He actually claims to be Jewish.”

According to his childhood friend, Lasker was raised as a Christian and appeared to convert to Judaism in college. The friend found out after seeing on Facebook that Lasker’s display name was in Hebrew and discovered he had joined a Jewish fraternity. A second person told Mother Jones that Lasker’s parents are not Jewish and are of a Christian background.

A person who knew Lasker in college said Lasker rushed for Alpha Epsilon Pi wearing a kippah, adopted a Hebrew pronunciation of his first name, and would try to go “toe to toe” about his knowledge of the Torah with fellow members of the fraternity. “He would try to out-Jew some of the guys,” the person said. They added that Lasker is a “pathological liar” and doubt that he ever formally converted to Judaism.

The childhood friend said Lasker always wanted to be the “smartest person in the room” and had a reputation for being a “liar.” That appears to have included Lasker falsely telling people that he got what they considered to be a suspiciously high SAT score. “One of my friends asked for proof and [Lasker] just showed an image that looked like it had probably been saved from the internet,” the childhood friend said.

According to the friend, Lasker also told people that he had been admitted to Georgia Tech, the most competitive public school in the state. They added that the story fell apart when someone from their high school ended up in a freshman seminar with Lasker at another school, Georgia Southern University.

Lasker later moved on to a second college before ultimately graduating from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in southern Georgia. He then appears to have enrolled in a PhD program at Texas Tech University. It is unclear whether he graduated or is still affiliated with the university. An assistant vice president at Texas Tech told Mother Jones that in “accordance with federal privacy law, we are unable to provide any information regarding the referenced individual.”

Offline, Lasker appears to still be making false claims about his relationship to Judaism. Two people told Mother Jones that Lasker, at recent in-person events, has claimed to have been raised Jewish.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

As President Donald Trump takes a beating from his own MAGA crowd for his handling of the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophile and sex trafficker, his State Department pulled a surprising move: It decimated its office combating human trafficking.

As part of a downsizing, the Trump administration on Friday cut 1,353 positions at State, about 15 percent of its Washington-based staff, and the largest reduction in decades. This Reduction in Force (RIF) targeted foreign policy goals that don’t align with MAGA values. This included closing or eviscerating entire offices that promote democracy, combat genocide and violent extremism, help resolve armed conflicts, and supported women’s rights. Among them was the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as the TIP Office.

Politically, the timing of these cuts is ironic.

For 25 years, the TIP Office has worked to combat human sex and labor trafficking around the world. Its remit includes producing an annual report, as required by Congress, that grades every country on the issue. Those that fail can face economic repercussions from the US, putting teeth into the government’s efforts to end trafficking. This year’s report was due on June 30, but has not been released.

The TIP Office also works with local partners around the world to strengthen civil society groups, train prosecutors, and help other countries combat trafficking. The office’s mission, including managing tens of millions of dollars for these programs, has always had bipartisan support.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio submitted his reorganization plan for the State Department to Congress in April, but stopped its implementation after a federal judge in California halted such plans across 22 agencies. Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court lifted that injunction, and State rushed ahead with its reduction in force (RIF) on Friday.

According to reorganization plans shared ahead of time with State employees, workers in the TIP Office expected few job cuts, but believed their office would be demoted from a stand-alone entity into a component of the Office for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

Perhaps the fact that the plans indicated they were being lumped into the category of democracy and human rights—ideas the Trump administration has sought to remove from the federal government’s foreign policy and had targeted in the departmental reorganization—should have been a sign that things would not go well. Still, workers there were blindsided when about half of the office’s full-time civil and foreign service employees received RIF notices Friday. When combined with Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program, the office now has about a third of the full-time staff it had in January.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office.”

“Everyone was caught off guard,” according to someone familiar with the cuts. Many of the approximately 35 workers who didn’t get laid off received notices late Friday that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut. The RIFs appeared to target employees with the shortest tenures, which meant there was no attempt to strategically preserve experience or expertise across the office’s projects. After Friday, for example, it appeared that just six of the 24 people responsible for researching andproducing the congressionally required report remained.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office,” says the source. “With that goes all of the expertise and connections and understanding” of each foreign country the office worked with. “That takes years to build up. It’s not like you can just reassign a few people in the office and somehow it’s going to work.”

A State Department spokesperson defended the cuts: “The world has changed. As we looked comprehensively across the Department, we saw that many of these offices had served an outdated purpose, had strayed from their original purpose, or were simply duplicative.”

Politically, the timing of the cuts is ironic. The Trump administration is battling perhaps its biggest intra-MAGA struggle over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. President Donald Trump came into office promising to reveal the truth about the billionaire pedophile who killed himself in federal prison in 2019 while under federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Through a series of missteps, the Trump administration over-promised on its ability to release a rumored Epstein’s client list, then received blowback from the MAGA crowd when the Department of Justice tried to close the books on the case earlier this month without delivering any list or juicy new information. Moreover, thanks to the QAnon conspiracy that many of Trump’s supporters have embraced, the president’s base has been primed to believe that sex trafficking is rampant among America’s elite and that Trump alone can stop it.

But neither Trump’s reputation among QAnon followers for fighting sex trafficking, nor the fact that the Epstein debacle risks compromising that reputation, not to mention that trafficking prevention is a bipartisan priority, were enough to spare the TIP Office from crippling cuts.

Perhaps, the person familiar with the cuts wonders, the office had gained a reputation for being an aggressive “human rights gadfly,” producing an annual report that got in the way of other diplomacy efforts around the world.

“It was pushing back against other voices in the State Department,” they said. “That maybe made some enemies.”

On Tuesday, Michael Rigas, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, seemed to confirm the sentiment when he appeared before Congress and defended cuts to programs like the TIP Office: “For too long, single-issue offices have mushroomed in number and influence, often distorting our foreign policy objectives to serve their parochial interests and slowing down our ability to function.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

So often when Donald Trump is cornered, he manages to escape thanks to a simple tactic: He cries hoax. With his latest troubles—caused by his administration’s declaration that there’s nothing new to see or investigate regarding deceased pedophile and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—Trump is once again screaming “hoax.” Yet it is not quite doing the trick.

One of Trump’s brilliant moves as a demagogic politician was to train his supporters to believe that he was the target of conspiratorial forces and “fake news.” So whenever he was hit by a critical news report or investigation, he could explain it away by declaring that he was a victim of evil forces that aimed to destroy the nation.

This began in the earliest days of his first presidency. As the press, the FBI, and congressional committees investigated Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and interactions between Trump’s campaign and Russia, Trump tried to swat all that away by declaring it was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”—a product of “fake news.” No matter that the intelligence community, a special counsel, and congressional committees repeatedly confirmed the basic facts of that scandal—Vladimir Putin launched a covert operation to try to help Trump win, and Trump and his campaign aided and abetted that attack by repeatedly echoing Putin’s false denials—Trump consistently repeated these catchphrases. “Russia, Russia, Russia” became the derisive nickname he deployed to obliterate a significant reality of the 2016 election.

It worked.

His devotees fully embraced his characterization. Right-wing media constantly cast the Russia investigation as a scheme orchestrated by Democrats, something called the Deep State, and mainstream media. For Trumpland, it was indeed a “hoax.” For instance, Kash Patel, now Trump’s FBI director, has routinely asserted that the Russia inquiry was “the greatest political scandal” in US history, describing it as a con job entirely cooked up by spooks, Dems, and journalists. He has gone so far as to claim absurdly that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election.

Once Trump established this Russia hoax narrative, he found he could apply it to other jams. When he was impeached for the first time for having threatened to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, launched an investigation of Joe Biden, Trump called this affair a “hoax,” comparing it to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It was also a “witch hunt,” a “scam,” and a “sham.” Once more, Trump was the victim of diabolical plotting. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s Republican defenders tried to deflect from the topic at hand by tossing out conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.

When Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, it was, in his view, another “hoax.” The Deep State—along with China, Venezuela, Dominion Voting Systems, the media, Italian satellite operators, and election workers in Atlanta—had rigged the election. Trump’s assaults on the news media for covering up the purported theft of the election were a callback to his “Russia, Russia, Russia” rhetoric.

After the insurrectionist January 6 riot that Trump incited, as the House moved toward a second impeachment of Trump, he again hurled the same charge: “The impeachment hoax is a continuation of the greatest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of our country.” For Trump, every new political or legal threat he faced was an extension of the vicious and underhanded war against him that began with the Russia investigation.

When the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, his spokesman declared, “The Democrats have spent seven years fabricating hoaxes and witch hunts against President Trump, and the recent unprecedented and unnecessary raid is just another example of exactly that.” Trump called the prosecution that ended with him being convicted of 34 felony counts a “scam” and a “sham.” And E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing Trump of sexual assault? “It is a hoax and a lie just like all the other hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years,” Trump said in a deposition. At her one debate with Trump during the 2024 election, Kamala Harris slammed Trump for having said there were “very fine people on both sides” following the 2017 rally in Charlottesville organized by white supremacists that became violent; two days later, Trump called this the “Charlottesville hoax.”

In each of these episodes, the hoax strategy succeeded. At least with his people. MAGA World stood by him, and the right-wing media embraced his false accusations. So much so he won his way back to the White House.

Now he’s facing a tsunami of outrage and criticism from Republicans and MAGA champions for sitting on Epstein material that they assume would bolster their long-running QAnon-ish conspiracy theories. And Trump, yet again, is turning to his standby sidestep. He’s calling this a “hoax.”

As the anger swelled among his flock this past weekend, on his social media platform, Trump compared the fuss to the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” He complained that “selfish people” were trying to “hurt” his “PERFECT Administration” over Epstein. He asserted that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” That is, he was advancing another conspiracy theory: His enemies had concocted fake Epstein files. That didn’t make much sense. But Trump was trying to rope this latest hullabaloo into his long-running “hoax” narrative.

That post did not stem the fury from the right. Many replies to it were from self-declaredTrump backers who expressed dismay that Trump was not keeping what they believed was a promise to tell all about Epstein. MAGA influencers called for firing Attorney General Pam Bondi. Congressional Republicans urged the release of files from the Epstein case.On Wednesday, Trump tried again withanother post. He once more proclaimed the whole Epstein thing was a hoax akin to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He brayed, “these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at – It’s all they have… Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.” He pulled out his classic pushback: the “Fake News” and Democrats were orchestrating “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”

Talking to reporters in the Oval Office later in the day, Trump reiterated his new mantra: “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats. It’s been run by the Democrats for four year….Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net… I call it the Epstein hoax.”Factcheck: Trump was not telling the truth. Most of the noise about the Epstein files has arisen not from Democrats but from MAGA—people who Trump now denounces as idiots and “past supporters.” And Trump, no surprise, did not specify what he means by “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” There’s no question that his Justice Department and FBI released a memo declaring that Epstein had committed suicide and that there were no new and undisclosed revelations—and no so-called clients list—within the files of his two criminal cases. Where’s the hoax? It looked as if Trump believed that after all these years of pushing the “hoax” button, he could do so once again as a getaway. Drop the H-word and—presto!—his believers will fall in line.

But the MAGA crowd wants more. After years of the right promoting conspiracy theories that demonized Democrats and elites as cannibals and pedophilic globalists—see Pizzagate and QAnon—Trumpers expected the Trump administration to finally produce the goods with presumed evidence from the Epstein case. Patel, Donald Trump Jr., deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and other MAGA leaders had long demanded the Epstein files be released. Trump himself had indicated he would do that if elected to a second term.

Instead, nothing has been revealed, and Trump is saying it’s time to move on and castigating his fans who feel betrayed. That’s not playing well. There’s no telling yet if his familiar move of yelling “hoax” will work this time. His steady shouts of “hoax” over the years have themselves been a long-running hoax. Usually, his voters responded as he wished. This time they may see the real hoax.

If you enjoy David Corn’s kick-ass journalism and analysis, you can sign up for a free trial subscription to his Our Land newsletter here.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

The Miccosukee Tribe in Florida joined environmental groups on Tuesday to sue the federal and state agencies that constructed an immigrant detention center known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” and located in the Everglades National Park.

In a motion to join a lawsuit, as one of the first tribes to potentially sue against the detention center, the case argues that the Department of Homeland Security, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not seek an environmental review.

The filing alleges the center’s proximity to Miccosukee villages, ceremonial sites, and access to traditional hunting grounds, and “raises significant raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts.”

“We are going to make sure that we fight this facility on whatever front is available to us,” said William “Popeye” James Osecola, who is the secretary of the Miccosukee tribal council. He hopes the lawsuit will “signify that the tribe will continue fighting to do what it’s always done, which is protect the land and save the land that saved us.”

According to Osecola, since the facility’s operation began, tribal members have been restricted from gathering plants and roots for uses such as medicine. “Obviously, that’s not an option for us right now,” he said. “At the moment, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen gates like that there, so it’s very jarring for us.”

Nearby the facility, 15 active tribal villages reside inside Big Cypress National Preserve, located within the Everglades.

During the 19th century, the Seminole Wars, which the Seminole Nation and Miccosukee Nation view as one continuous conflict against the United States, many members fled into the wetlands and used their natural environment as refuge.

In a press conference at the detention center last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said there would be  “zero impact” on the wetland’s environment. The site is located on an abandoned airstrip, once a controversial project that aimed to be the world’s largest airport. Observers outside the facility said they could see lights on at all hours, attracting mosquito swarms. Recent satellite images also reveal that a freshly paved road has been laid down.

Last year, the tribe and the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement for Everglades National Park. The partnership aimed to collaborate on protecting tribal practices, restoration efforts for the land’s vegetation, and protection.

In these cypress swamps and toothy sawgrass marshes, wildlife alongside alligators includes bats, turtles, and panthers. Because species such as the panther are critically endangered, Osecola implied that the continuous traffic at Alligator Alcatraz will “see more deaths with the wildlife.”

“It’s taken decades just to get Everglades restoration going like it is now,” he said.

While the Department of Homeland Security distanced itself after promoting the facility for weeks, claiming Florida controls the facility under state hands, critics are not convinced. Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that filed alongside Friends of the Everglades in the case last month, noted that “setting aside the funding for detaining immigrants is essentially a federal function. This is a federal project, regardless of what they say in their court filings.”

Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal notice with an intent to sue that the construction also violates the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, raising concerns such as light pollution and the use of insecticide to mitigate mosquitoes on-site that could affect the area’s wildlife and surrounding water.

Each day since its opening, protestors and groups have noticed trucks coming in carrying diesel, generators, and caged vehicles holding detainees. There are currently 3,000 beds inside the facility and at least 400 security personnel on-site.

After state legislators were blockedfrom entering the Alligator Alcatraz’s premises, Gov. DeSantis invited legislators and the state’s members of Congress to tour the facility over the weekend. According to Osecola, the governor did not extend that invitation to tribes.

Some Republican members claimed that the detention center was clean and safe. Others, such as Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, reported that, “The environmental impact of this facility cannot be overstated—there is new asphalt, thousands of gallons of water used every day, and gas tanks powering generators. No alligators seen, but plenty of mosquitoes.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The recent, nationwide phenomenonof Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showing up at federal courthouses to arrest undocumented people after their immigration hearings has inspired an outpouring of volunteers who come to observe the hearings and assist the immigrants and their families.

ICE personnel in Sacramento, California, clearly aren’t happy about this. Volunteers say agents there have been obstructing their work andharassing them, even though court hearings are open to the public under federal law and the First Amendment.

They “have been taking photos of our volunteers and have made threatening comments,” says Autumn Gonzalez, a volunteer with the nonprofit NorCal Resist. “People have been pushed, shoved. Officers have locked people in an elevator and pushed all the buttons. There’s very open hostility from the ICE agents toward people who are just community volunteers trying to make sure that nobody disappears and gets lost in the system without anyone knowing.”

NorCal Resist was established in 2018, during the first Trump administration. It accompanies immigrants to court appearances and ICE check-ins, runs a hotline to report ICE activity, offers legal assistance to asylum seekers who can’t afford attorneys, and operates a bail fund.

In May, it added a “court watch” program that will typically send a couple of volunteers to each courtroom to obtain an immigrant’s contact information before their hearing begins, enabling the volunteers to reach out to the person’s family or help them find legal counsel if they are taken into custody afterward. Sometimes the immigrants, fearing the masked agents in the hallways, ask the volunteers to escort them to and from the courtroom.

On June 12, volunteer Morgan Murphy was escorting immigrants into an elevator at the Sacramento courthouse when two ICE agents got in with them, rode with them down to the lobby, and then, before they could get out, “proceeded to push every single elevator button” and say, “‘We’ll just go for a little ride,'” she recalls.

“It was just an intimidation thing, to scare us and the other immigrants in the waiting room,” says Heidi Phipps, another volunteer who witnessed the incident. As the elevator stopped at every floor, one of the agents, a white man, joked that his ICE colleague, who had darker skin, had an immigration hearing coming up himself and didn’t know how to speak English, Murphy told me.

“It was jarring,” she said. “They have handcuffs hanging out of their pockets; I didn’t feel safe.”

The federal agents also have been photographing them escorting families, volunteers say, and sometimes threaten to use facial recognition tech to identify them, which they view as another intimidation tactic. One of the agents from the elevator incident,Phipps says, has even been sexually harassing her—she now asks colleagues to escort her to her car at day’s end. “It’s sexualized, flirtatious, unwarranted attention that I do not like, and I will turn my back when that agent is around, and it’s just nonstop,” she says.

Murphy corroborates this: “It’s a look in his eyes—he came in the waiting room recently and he’ll just stare at the women,” she says. He won’t reveal his name or badge number, the volunteers told me. Phipps says she hasn’t filed a formal complaint because she doesn’t think ICE would take it seriously.

In another troubling incident about a week after the elevator ride, two female volunteers were escorting a man from his hearing when “more than a dozen plainclothes ICE officers swooped in, pulling up their masks to hide their faces and forcefully snatching the man out of the grasp of the women,” wrote Robin Epley, an opinion contributor for the Sacramento Bee who witnessed the encounter. The agents shoved the volunteers to the ground and against the wall, leaving them with bruises and welts on their arms, she wrote: “I find myself struggling to describe just how terrible the situation truly was.”

These sorts of things arehappening regularly in Sacramento, according to Gonzalez. “They will start yelling and screaming at people that they are interfering with an arrest, that they will be arrested,” she says. “There’s usually one or two, maybe three, volunteers up there and 12 giant ICE agents. Our volunteers tend to be small women, some of them are older retired women. They can’t go up against 12 big guys. It’s not that kind of situation.”“They don’t want anyone to see how they treat people,” she adds. “They want to be doing this”—their deportations—”with no witnesses.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, a Justice Department office that oversees immigration courts, declined to comment. In a written response, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, seemed to lump together court watchers and protesters, calling them “rioters.”

“We are so glad Mother Jones is covering rioters at courthouses who have actively obstructed law enforcement as they enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email. “While the media is trying to paint a sob story for these rioters, many of them have assaulted law enforcement.”

“Our observers,” responds Gonzalez of NorCal Resist, are “everyday community members who want immigrant families to feel safe in court. To call them ‘rioters’ or claim that they are assaulting ICE agents, who have guns and are in tactical gear, is absurd.”

The complaints aren’t limited to Sacramento.In San Diego last week, federal officers handcuffed a 71-year-old volunteer who had come to observe the court proceedings and detained her for eight hours. An ICE agent accused the volunteer, Barbara Stone, of pushing her. “Individuals like Ms. Stone are not innocent observers,” wrote DHS’s McLaughlin.

Stone disputes the agent’s account. “She is a soft-spoken person who was here to protect innocent refugees, and she is the last person in the universe who would hit an agent or interfere with their work,” her husband, Gershon Shafir, told local TV news affiliate NBC 7. ICE didn’t press charges against Stone, but her phone was confiscated and she was bruised by the handcuffs. “I feel mentally and physically traumatized,” she told the reporter.

In Denver, volunteer court watchers have been handcuffed and detained “without justification,” according to the ACLU of Colorado. They’ve also been “denied entry to the courthouse without explanation” and prevented from entering courtrooms due to “space constraints” when there are clearly empty seats. They’ve even been prohibited from taking notes, and have been “silenced” in the lobby and hallways, where “quiet and nondisruptive conversation has been permitted for years,” the ACLU adds. “We condemn this brazen abuse of power,” Tim Macdonald, ACLU of Colorado’slegal director, said in a statement last month. “Detaining, arresting, and handcuffing legal observers reflects the aggressive and violent tactics that the government is using to try to limit due process and remove our immigrant neighbors without public awareness.” In San Francisco, community court watchers report thatsecurity has gotten tighter. “They don’t want us to sit in the waiting room at times, don’t want us to be in the hallway, and that hasn’t always been the case,” says Sanika Mahajan, director of community engagement and organizing at the nonprofit Mission Action. (ICE agents often initiate arrests in the hallways.) Part of the heightened security may be in response to the testiness of recent protests. Last week, agents clashed with activists who tried to block an arrest outside a San Francisco courthouse. After the agents loaded a detained immigrant into a van, protesters blocked the vehicle’s path, but the van drove off anyway, dragging a protester down the block. (Protests were continuing peacefully at the courthouse when I stopped by Tuesday morning.)

For about a week in June, federal authorities in Sacramento cut off public access to the courthouse altogether,prompting a response from Sacramento Assemblywoman Maggy Krell. “Everyone has a right to a fair process, and we need an open courthouse to assure that,” she told the Bee.

More recently, “no loitering” signs haveappeared in courthouse hallways, further discouraging volunteers who say agents have sometimes physically blocked them from interacting with the immigrants who show up for a hearing.

Limiting access is just one way the Trump administration has tried to shield itself from accountability while pursuing its mass deportations. The officers arresting immigrants out in the community now routinely wear masks and sunglasses to hide their faces. (Democratic senators introduced a bill last week that would ban the practice, but it is unlikely to win any Republican support.) In New York City, an immigration judge even allowed lawyers for ICE to keep their names off the record during court proceedings, according to a report by the Intercept. The San Diego activists worry that ICE’s tactics will discourage volunteers from signing up to watch court hearings. Following Stone’s arrest, Ruth Mendez, a member of the group Detention Resistance, told NBC 7 that ICE was sending a message: “For us to be afraid to come back and do the work that we’re doing.”“They’re just using any method possible to make us uncomfortable, thinking maybe that will keep us away,” Murphy says of the Sacramento situation. But “we’re still showing up,” adds Phipps, and “overcoming what they’re dishing out.”

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