Erstwhile GOP presidential candidate and current vice-presidential hopeful Ben Carson has joined right-wing peers like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in supporting the end—or at least the rolling back—of no-fault divorce laws across the nation.  

“For the sake of families,” the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development wrote in his book, The Perilous Fight, released Tuesday, “We should enact legislation to remove or radically reduce incidences of no-fault divorce.” 

Over the past year, I have been tracking the rise of men on the right, both elected and civilian, who think it ought to be harder to get divorced in this country. These men often cite family values, their religious beliefs, or women’s changing desires to justify rolling back the current no-fault system that exists in all 50 states.  

Since 1969, when then–California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law—granting couples a separation without having to prove that one side had committed wrongdoing—these statutes have provided a way out of both banal and toxic relationships. Though Reagan, per his son, would later call backing no-fault divorce his “greatest regret” in life, these laws have had a positive impact on women’s lives and autonomy. A 2003 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when states allowed one partner alone push for divorce, there was a 20 percent decline in female suicide. As I have reported previously, no-fault divorce laws are often essential to those attempting to escape domestic violence. 

While some people have been clamoring about rolling back no-fault divorce laws for decades—read Sen. Tom Cotton’s 1997 article in the Harvard Crimson for his thoughts on the matter—there has been a marked increase in disdain both online and in places of power, about states’ current divorce laws. These men—Johnson, failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Oklahoma State Sen. Dusty Deevers, Sen. J.D. Vance, right-wing activist and influencer Steven Crowder, and PragerU host Michael Knowles, to name a few—are normalizing attacks on whether and how people should be able to separate.

“The reason this matters is that no-fault divorce legally allows marriages to end much more quickly than in previous decades,” Carson wrote in the book.  

Should Carson be chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate, and should he further become second in line for the presidency come November, it’s unclear if and how he’d attempt to limit access to divorce. These kinds of laws are handled state-by-state, and an overwhelming majority of Americans think that divorce is “morally acceptable.” 

This isn’t the first time Carson has written about divorce, either.

Throughout Carson’s books, he references difficulties from his childhood. He details growing up in Detroit, speaking fondly of the rug he sat on in kindergarten to learn new songs. “I was an average student, and life was peaceful,” Carson wrote in his 2011 book America the Beautiful.

That changed when he turned eight years old and his parents divorced. According to Carson, “it wasn’t his job that had kept my father away from our family. He had been living a double life for years—complete with a second wife and another set of children.” 

He, his mom, and his brother moved to Massachusetts. “There were four grades in each classroom, and all eight grades were taught by only two teachers,” Carson wrote. “By the time … I moved back to Detroit, I had essentially lost a year of school while in Boston, my academic performance lagging far behind that of my new classmates.  

Carson laments seeing his mother Sonya go through this time in his 2007 book Take the Risk. “She suddenly found herself all alone in the world, devastated and disillusioned by the end of her marriage,” he wrote. In a section of his 1992 book Think Big dedicated to his mother, she described the financial difficulties that arose after the divorce. “At one point we did get food stamps, but only for a few months. I wanted to be independent and pay my own way. According to the divorce decree, Mr. Carson was supposed to support our sons, but he provided very little money.”  

Fast forward to Carson’s book released this week, in which he writes, “When there are relatively few legal or financial consequences connected with divorce, it’s natural for people to gravitate toward that option when their marriage hits a rough patch.”

“What those people often don’t consider, however,” he goes on, “is the harm—both present and future—inflicted on their children once a divorce is finalized.”

Where to begin? 

The most obvious place is with another cup of coffee, and November’s election. 

This is Mother Jones, after all, and doing investigative journalism that can advance democracy and justice is why we exist and what we’ve been doing for 48 years. You can bet we have much to say (and report on) about the battle between authoritarianism and democracy that’s playing out before our eyes. From fundamental civil rights to war and peace, almost any issue you might care about is on the line this year.

Also top of mind for us: the challenged (shall we say) state of journalism. That means the brutal economics that have forced so many outlets to shutter or shrivel, but also the cowardice on display when big national outlets cave to bullies. This is not fine, as David Corn writes.  

It’s a lot. It’s stressful. When we recently asked how the MoJo community was feeling about the election, so many responses included varying states of anxiety, terror, or disgust. Same for us, honestly.

How about doing something different? 

Mother Jones did: We just took a huge step forward by bringing the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones together as one newsroom, one investigative journalism nonprofit, to better confront some of the big challenges we face. It’s been inspiring meeting our new colleagues and seeing how they go about this work. We’re barely 100 days in, and already we have some ambitious full-court press projects to share with you. It’s an exciting time around here.  

So now seems like a great time to talk about optimism and hope, and what we’re doing instead of what we’re dreading. As a MoJo reader and retired teacher told us in response to the same question that elicited so much despair: “I see optimism as a political choice and necessity.” That landed as we thought about the high stakes ahead—and how to kick off our first big fundraising push since joining forces with CIR in February. It’s a big one!  

The brass tacks first: We need to raise $500,000 in online donations by June 22, and hitting that number is vitally important. It’s also a higher number than normal, because normal isn’t enough right now. And with the presidential campaign at a fever pitch this fall, we can’t count on a lot of fundraising at that time. You told us so, and we’ll do our best to honor that. We have to get started in a major way now. 

We don’t usually name our fundraising campaigns either, but we’re calling this one the First $500,000 because it’s literally a first: We are a new, more ambitious and impactful organization thanks to having Reveal, CIR Studios, and Mother Jones under one big community-supported tent. 

Something else different about what we’re doing: We respect your intelligence, which is why we always take a pass on the overwrought tone and downright manipulative fundraising BS that we all see too much of. It can be so gross, so void of an actual argument for something. Crisis drives fundraising (and algorithms), but there’s only so much crisis anyone can take.   

Trust is harder won, but way more durable. For 48 years, our newsroom has survived by trusting that somehow, enough people will support us to go after essential stories that others don’t, and to tell them fairly and well. Right now, we’re trusting that level-headedly discussing this wild moment, and how we’re laying it all out there to rise to it, will inspire more people to pitch in than if we were to take another lap around the doom loop. 

There are so many great new things to share with you today, but spoiler: Wiggle room in our budget is not among them. We can’t afford missing these goals. If you already know MoJo and CIR means a lot of great journalism and opportunities to have an even bigger impact, a First $500,000 donation of $500, $50, or $5 would mean the world to us—a signal that you believe in the power of independent investigative reporting like we do.

Can’t afford to donate? We appreciate you just the same. Below, there are exciting things worth knowing for everyone—and even a free Strengthen Journalism sticker so you can help us spread the word and make the most of this moment. Reaching more people about who we are and what we do is vital right now. We also need to know what you think: Please be generous with your feedback, questions, or ideas as we start talking about the new organization we’re becoming. 

Because none of this works without you—a community consisting of all types of people who share a common belief in the power of great journalism to help bring about change. 

Quick links: Become a First $500,000 donor. Skip to an awesome video summary. Let the journalism speak for itself. Get your free Strengthen Journalism sticker to help us spread the word.

This is a huge, defining moment for Mother Jones  

In a moment like this, when it feels like the very notion of truth and accountability is at risk, there are two paths. Hunker down and retrench, or try to bust out and do something new. You will absolutely not be surprised that Mother Jones chose the latter. Because that’s what you, our readers, have always chosen. Take a risk that seems worth taking when it can lead to something big. 

We have a real chance, right now, to prove there are ways to strengthen journalism at a time when it’s desperately needed. And sorry for the all-caps, but THIS IS NOT ANOTHER STARTUP THAT PROMISES TO FIX JOURNALISM ONLY TO END UP LIGHTING MONEY ON FIRE. 

Honestly, if you asked us to sketch out a modern news operation that has a chance of sustainability, it would probably look a lot like Mother Jones and CIR. This combo checks so many of the unglamorous but super-important boxes: solid journalism ; an engaged and passionate audience ; journalists calling the shots instead of profit-driven corporations or power-driven billionaires ; a hybrid, well-balanced business model so the inevitable hits are less likely to knock us out completely ; big reach on multiple platforms, to become less algorithm-dependent and more able to reach unique audiences . 

It’s an awesome starting point. 

But it’s also a kind of terrifying road ahead—overnight, going from a team of 87 to 116, from an already sweat-inducing budget of $19 million per year to $26 million. The honest-to-goodness truth is that we don’t know yet whether we can sustain a bigger, bolder newsroom for the long haul when the forces in media are pulling so hard toward contraction and closure. But one tough road is a little less scary when two tough newsrooms face it together, and it becomes downright doable when we have enough people helping us along. 

We have a lot riding on this First $500,000 fundraising push—the first time we’re asking you to back this new organization we’re creating. We need to break through to more people who care about this work but have never donated before. It would be utterly devastating if this falls flat. As we hit publish on this post, we have no idea how it might go. But we know this: If we can get you half as excited as we are, we’ll be okay. A First $500,000 donation of $500, $50, or $5 would mean a lot right now. 

A newsroom to meet the moment

Like peanut butter and chocolate, Mother Jones and CIR work so damn well together. Unlike peanut butter and chocolate, the energy we’re feeling isn’t from a sugar high—there’s real sustenance here. 

It starts with solid journalism: in-depth investigations; beats and big projects that prioritize underreported topics and seek out overlooked voices; reporting that gets out ahead of the big stories and sticks with them; journalism that adds something to the day’s news and is meant to bring about change. That’s what Mother Jones and CIR have always done. Combining forces makes us more impactful and a bit more resilient. It gets more journalism to more people. It’s the best path ahead.  

CIR is best known for Reveal, the weekly investigative radio show and podcast, hosted by Al Letson, heard on more than 500 public radio stations, covering 98 percent of the US. It’s so good! So good that the pilot episode, back in 2013, won a Peabody Award—talk about nailing it from the start. 

When we asked Al why he loves audio storytelling and what it brings to the table, without hesitation, he said “intimacy.” “I get to talk to you one on one: If I can tell the story right, modulate my voice, talk the right way, it can reach people on a more emotional level than print. Telling a story to someone can cut through the noise.” Reader, it does. You can hear and feel the empathy and care alongside the indignation and discomfort in Al’s voice. If you want to experience how powerful it can be, listen to Mississippi Goddam, a seven-part series investigating the death of a kid named Billey Joe Johnson. This project made good on a promise Al gave a decade ago, and he and the team spent a lot more effort looking for answers than it seems officials in Mississippi ever did. 

“You have what everyone wants” is a nice thing to hear on the job—and it’s what documentary producers and directors tell Amanda Pike, who leads CIR Studios. They’re after IP, intellectual property, but we’ve always just called them stories—well-crafted, deeply reported stories with resonance and impact. 

Victim/Suspect was the team’s first feature documentary. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was the most-watched documentary on Netflix the week it was released last May. It follows reporter Rachel de Leon over four years as she unearths a chilling trend: how police bully young sexual assault survivors into retracting their allegations, then charge them as the criminals. It’s blood-boiling. And so well done: After a screening a few weeks ago in Washington, DC, senior editor Jeremy Schulman raved: “The interview with the detective was one of the most amazing feats of journalism I’ve seen. Can’t believe he agreed to do that on camera.” The next big project, The Grab, debuts in theaters and video on demand on June 14. 

Impressive, huh? 

Now add in what Mother Jones is best known for. Our print magazine is perhaps more ambitious than ever, with special issues over the last two years exposing how private equity is upending so much in our daily lives, what it will take to actually decarbonize the economy, and our most recent one calling it what it is: American Oligarchy. 

And our large, highly engaged digital and social presence isn’t about exploding watermelons. It’s about putting the journalism first, as we did when we first invested in going digital nearly 20 years ago, when we built out a DC bureau led by David Corn to start reporting the untold stories of our national politics. And just as we did then, we work hard to get on every digital channel where people need to hear the truth.

Radio and podcast, documentaries, a beautiful print magazine, and one helluva digital footprint: What do you get when you add it all up? 

You get one of the feistiest investigative operations out there, because donations big and small from more than 50,000 people make it possible. You get to partner with newsrooms and reporters who have great stories but need our wraparound investigative support and big reach. You get trustworthy journalism out to 10 million people at a time when it’s so needed. Whether someone scrolls through TikTok, turns on the radio, watches TV, opens their mailbox, peruses a newsstand, clicks on a website, pulls up a podcast, or enjoys email newsletters, our reporting can find them. 

And different ways to tell a story can make it land differently. Case in point: Here’s video correspondent Garrison Hayes, late last year, explaining why we’re so excited about joining forces with CIR. It’s way more powerful than any number of pages we could have written. 

If you’re feeling it, a donation of $500, $50, or $5 would be a powerful symbol that you’re on board, and the cold, hard cash we also very much need as we kick off this exciting new chapter.

Let the journalism speak for itself

None of this means a thing if it’s not about powerful stories with powerful impact—so as we wrap this up, let’s take a quick look at some current projects and priorities that get at what makes our work unique and hopefully worth supporting. 

When it comes to the mind-bogglingly high-stakes election in less than six months, our coverage starts with acknowledging the generational attack on democracy we’re living through, and rejecting the insidious view from nowhere and false equivalency that helped get us here in the first place. This is not politics as usual. 

One of our big priorities is going deep on voting rights, how minority rule is the story behind the headlines, and, importantly, what can be done to fight back and protect the right to vote and have representation. These stories aren’t going to be told as factually and forcefully as they need to be, if at all, by most of the big national media right now. They will be by Mother Jones. 

We’ll also be focusing on the Supreme Court and the huge decisions, past and present, that are shaping the race and could affect the outcome—Citizens United, Bush v. Gore, and how the fight for reproductive rights makes this election different. We’ll be looking at Trump world characters, and we’re figuring out which places we can send reporters to, because boots on the ground matter. A First $500,000 donation will help us do all of this. 

We also have to cover stories outside of the political realm and in communities that don’t often get national media attention. In Mother Jones’ most recent cover story, senior reporter Samantha Michaels dug deep into the death of a teenage boy, Braven Glenn, on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana involving a member of an under-resourced police force; when the grieving mother went to ask questions at the police department afterward, she found that it had closed up shop and disappeared. After Sam’s story was published, she received the following message from a friend of the teen’s family:  

“I wanted to say a HUGE thank you for pursuing Braven’s story…The depth and care you put into it were incredible. This is such an important story for Braven’s family, but also for so many others who face similar injustices. It’s so rare that these stories get the kind of platform you provided, and I truly appreciate you shining a light on them.”

Like so much of our reporting, the story of Braven is not over; its impact may just be getting started. Along with a cover story in our magazine and on our website, Sam told the story on a gripping episode of Reveal and in a moving short film. 

Sometimes our reporting changes laws. In March, Utah enacted legislation allowing clergy members who learn of ongoing child abuse during a confession to report it to police without fear of legal retaliation. The legislature had tried for years to get this passed without success. So what changed?

It was the journalism. 

In December, our Reveal radio show, in collaboration with the Associated Press, exposed how Mormon church policies protected alleged abusers, including a man accused of sexually assaulting his daughter. The story reached listeners on more than 500 stations in all 50 states. The bill was passed and signed within months. And the former Mormon bishop at the center of the investigation was arrested after being indicted on felony child sex abuse charges.

Holding the powerful to account is at the core of democracy, and that’s exactly what our journalism was designed to do. When there is corruption in the very institutions designed to protect us, investigative reporting can make a big difference—and so can you.

Being optimistic doesn’t mean putting blinders on, promising easy fixes, or going too hard on the hopium. All this awesome work adds up to $26 million a year, and it’s still going to be hard as hell getting to the break-even point every December 31. When it comes to our finances and budget, our CFO, Madeleine “MacGyver” Buckingham, put it this way on our monthly all-hands call last week: “We budget aggressively and spend much time on cash management—there is no room for error.”

Operating a newsroom right now is like walking a tightrope…or actually riding a unicycle on a tightrope, while balancing 100 spinning plates, juggling half a dozen flaming bowling pins, getting knocked around by wind gusts from all directions, unsure if your hair is on fire again or maybe it’s just the dumpster fires you smell, and oops, you’ve been muted on your Zoom call this whole time—and you know there’s still a long way to go. But at least we’re not blindfolded.

We don’t have The Next New Thing that will make journalism profitable, but we know a thing or two about staying alive. We have a combined 95-year track record of reporting that punches above its weight, is well respected by our peers, and most importantly is trusted by an audience that helps keep it going—and keep it free for everyone, because quality information shouldn’t be just for those who can afford it. That’s something.

Or rather, it’s everything. Being focused on mission, not on profit, keeps solid information accessible for everyone. It lets you go where others don’t, free from corporate pressure. It lets us say, “Yeah, let’s go big on this,” which is the best gift a team of journalists can ask for. We can do all of that because of you. 

As we double down on what we know works, keep trying all sorts of new things big and small, and bring you all along like this, we’re also hoping there might be pieces other newsrooms can adapt. Because nonprofit or for-profit, billionaire-backed or corporate-controlled, paywalled or a few freebies to use judiciously, glossy and perfumed or DIY and sweaty, no matter the model, more people trusting where their news comes from and more newsrooms trusting their audiences is part of what we need to strengthen journalism. 

That’s our big bet in 2024 at least, and we’ll find out soon enough.

It starts with the First $500,000 in donations we need right now. We’re going to learn so much in these next few weeks and in the months ahead. Including, of course, from the questions and feedback you share with us here. (And by the way, if you hear both from us and from our colleague Missa Perron from the Reveal team, please know that we’re doing our best to avoid duplication—but all donations go to the same place and we’re grateful.)

The plan after the First $500,000: not always earnestly asking for money, but keeping right at it to get our journalism and our vision to people in ways we haven’t before. Because that’s how we’ll be able to sustain the bigger, bolder newsroom we now are for the long haul: by getting more journalism to more people in more ways. By expanding the community of people who share a common belief in the power of great journalism to help bring about change.   

It’s not rocket science—any billionaire can do that. The work here on Earth is about making meaningful connections with other humans around meaningful journalism. Whether decades or just moments ago, something about our work spoke to you and everyone reading this. Mother Jones and CIR are about creating a lot more of those moments for a lot more people well into the future. That’s reason for optimism.  

Help us spread the word!

A summary if you skipped down to the free sticker: We just took a big step by joining forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting and bringing Reveal, CIR Studios, and Mother Jones together as one ferocious, independent, investigative journalism nonprofit. It’s a great combination and sets us up to better confront some of the big challenges we face in journalism. But it definitely won’t be easy—never has been, never will be. To make the most of this moment, beyond the First $500,000 in donations we need right now, we also need to start reaching more people who care about quality journalism but might not know about our work or vision. So please help us celebrate our momentous merger and help us spread the word!

Sign up for the Mother Jones Daily newsletter below (if you already get it, confirm your email anyway), and we’ll follow up so you can tell us where to send your free Strengthen Journalism sticker. We’ll be using StrenghtenJournalism.com to point to (shorter!) posts like this, so we always have a welcome mat out for curious onlookers or new readers, and a welcome hug (an update on how things are going) for people who come by often. 

Get the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and your free sticker.

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And an enormous thank you to the talented Kyle Letendre, who designed this sticker.

After officials repeatedly warned that they would consider stopping the flow of weapons to Israel if it pressed forward with a ground invasion into Rafah, the Biden administration announced it would nonetheless attempt to send more than $1 billion in additional weapons to Israel, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night, citing congressional officials.

The Journal reports that the latest package “includes the potential transfer of $700 million in tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles, and $60 million in mortar rounds.” Congress will have to approve the latest package.

The latest announcement comes as something of an about-face for the White House: Just last week, President Biden made headlines after he told CNN that he would stop shipping certain weapons to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeds with a major ground invasion of Rafah—which Israeli forces have already seemingly begun, leading nearly 450,000 people to flee the area since May 6, according to the latest numbers from the United Nations. 

White House Spokesperson John Kirby added Thursday that Biden does not believe “smashing into Rafah” will help take out Hamas. Nonetheless, Israel is reportedly moving in. The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that Israeli tanks are coming closer to urban areas; yesterday, State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters, “We do not want to see a major operation into Rafah, and we have not seen one yet that we would take issue with.”

On Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken confirmed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the US recently halted the delivery of 3,500 so-called “dumb bombs” to Israel. But Blinken made clear that the administration was still allowing most weapons exports.

Representatives for the State and Defense departments, and the White House, did not immediately respond to requests for comment and questions about how they will ensure Israel uses the latest round of weapons in compliance with international humanitarian law and President Biden’s recent comments.

Last Friday, the State Department released a delayed report examining the Israeli army’s conduct and use of US provided-weapons. The department found that “it is reasonable to assess” that Israel has deployed the weapons “in instances inconsistent with its [international humanitarian law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” That report also said American officials “do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance” to Gaza—though that’s at odds with the experiences of more than 20 humanitarian organizations operating on the ground.

Netanyahu, for his part, refuses to face the reality of the humanitarian toll of the war on civilian Palestinians, arguing that a continued military operation is essential to defeat Hamas. “The humanitarian catastrophe that has been spoken of has not been realized, nor will it,” he said in a statement today. 

Workers on the ground paint a different picture. Twenty aid groups signed onto a letter today condemning world leaders’ failures to act to stem the humanitarian crisis and halt the Israeli invasion into Rafah, writing that “further advancement of the military invasion…will lead to the total collapse of lifesaving services.”

The International Rescue Committee said Tuesday that its emergency medical team was supposed to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing on Monday but was unable. “What we are witnessing in Rafah is nothing less than a humanitarian catastrophe,” Kiryn Lanning, IRC team lead for the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement. “The ongoing Israeli bombardment, combined with the closure of the Rafah crossing, has led to critical fuel shortages and severe movement restrictions, paralyzing all humanitarian operations.”

The U.N. Secretary-General called yesterday for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and for the release of all hostages,” and said the Rafah crossing should be re-opened immediately to allow for “unimpeded humanitarian access throughout Gaza.” 

In the meantime, as a volunteer nurse at Rafah’s only maternity hospital told me last week, medical professionals are scrambling to care for injured patients, pregnant people, and vulnerable newborns with a shortage of basic supplies and fears for their safety.

“There is no safe place in Gaza from a healthcare perspective—and beyond,” she said.

Growing up, Myles Markham always felt like an outsider. Markham was multiracial in small, mostly white Florida towns. And they were queer. “I was swimming in water that told me that who I was, what I was, needed to change if I wanted to be safe,” they say. “I really believed, ‘I am a problem. I need to be fixed.’” 

As a teen, a friend got them interested in evangelical Christianity, which seemed to offer the promise of ­transformation. They joined a church youth group and began studying the Bible. Soon after, Markham found an online forum for a ministry that supports “those affected by unwanted homosexuality.” Markham didn’t identify as transgender at the time, but to their mentors in the conversion therapy program, Markham says, sexuality was inextricable from gender identity. “A woman being attracted to women—she was confused about her gender identity, confused about what it means to be a godly woman,” they explain. “And so what they end up doing, therapeutically, is attempting to police and reform your gender presentation.”

Markham’s experience is far from unique. As professional and legal objections to conversion therapy grew in the 2000s, such “change efforts” were migrated from the clinical realm into religious settings. The vast majority of people who have gone through conversion therapy received it from a religious leader, according to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. The practice remains shrouded in secrecy, says Simon Kent Fung, a conversion therapy survivor and creator of an award-winning podcast on the subject, Dear Alana. “In religious settings, homosexuality is not just a pathology, but a spiritual brokenness,” he explains. “Conversion therapy today is psychologically manipulative.”

Markham’s time in the ministry’s forums made their emotional state even more fragile. They started experiencing panic attacks almost every day. They would be reading or riding the bus and then be overcome by waves of nausea, a racing heartbeat, and the sense of paralysis. “Something was happening to me internally, where I was [feeling] I was about to die,” they remember. At night, they had terrors of demons suffocating or drowning them.

Related

First They Tried to “Cure” Gayness. Now They’re Fixated on “Healing” Trans People.

The worse Markham’s anxiety got, the more they became convinced that only God could save them. They enrolled at a small Christian college and found an outside church that offered group therapy. Other members of the group were there to overcome a variety of issues: eating disorders, alcoholism, or depression. “I was there talking about ‘gay,’” Markham recalls bitterly. The counselor, in training to become a licensed practitioner, told Markham to “write out every single same-sex ­attraction or ­gender confusion–related thought, dream, action, behavior that had ever materialized in my life per my memory, and describe the way that it hurt me, it hurt God, and hurt other people.” When they sought help from college administrators, they required Markham to attend biweekly sessions with a women’s chaplain who counseled them on “biblical womanhood” and made them read a book called God’s Little Princess.

At the end of their senior year, Markham received a class assignment to create a plan to convert an “unreached group” to Christianity. They chose LGBTQ people. Conducting interviews with queer students and community members, Markham says, was the first time in their life they developed relationships with out, self-­affirming queer and trans people. 

 




“I fell in love with everybody who consented to doing these interviews with me,” they remember, cracking a smile.




“I just found myself experiencing a sense of comfort, ease, and possibility in the company of other queer people that I did not expect to feel.”

 

Myles Markham in Los AngelesChloe Aftel

When Markham tried to share their feelings, their classmates immediately ostracized them. Markham was banned from participating in school groups, forbidden from leading church services, and pressured to find new housing.

The hostility only deepened their resolve to live an openly queer life. After graduating, Markham took a job living and working at the Equality House, the rainbow-painted protest house across the street from the notoriously anti-LGBTQ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. They started organizing to pass discrimination protections and prevent youth suicides and met with countless LGBTQ community members. Everything immediately changed. “The night terrors were the first thing that ended,” they say. The panic attacks faded too, eventually. “I was finally in an environment that just allowed me to be who I was.”

They also found a supportive therapist. “It wasn’t just the tools I developed in therapy that [resulted in] this constitutional shift,” they say. “It was once I was comfortable being who I am and being able to share that with other people, and not having to hide, ignore it, or try to diminish it.”

Now, some 10 years later, Markham feels as though the torments of the past are finally put to rest. “I went from a place of constant, albeit quiet, torment into one of vitality,” Markham remembers. “I was able to wake up grateful for my life. I wanted to be alive, and that was something that took me most of my life at that point to be able to say with sincerity.”

The conversion therapists met last November at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of a Hampton Inn conference room, a middle-aged woman wearing white stockings and a Virgin Mary blue dress issued a call to arms to the 20-some people in attendance. “In our current culture, in which children are being indoctrinated with transgender belief from the moment they’re out of the womb, if we are confronted with a gender-confused child, you must help,” declared Michelle Cretella, a board member of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. “We must do something.”

Cretella was delivering a keynote speech at the first in-person conference in four years of the Alliance, which describes itself as a “professional and scientific organization” with “Judeo-Christian values.” Its purpose: to defend and promote the practice of conversion therapy by licensed counselors.

Not that they’d call what they do “conversion therapy.” That term lacks a precise definition, but it is used colloquially to describe attempts to shift a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. In the 1960s, some psychologists tried to make gay men straight by pairing aversive stimuli, like electric shocks or chemically induced nausea, with images of gay porn—techniques that ran the risk of causing serious psychological damage even as they failed to change participants’ sexual orientation, researchers eventually concluded. Today, “conversion therapy” generally takes the form of verbal counseling. Participants are typically conservative Christians who engage voluntarily—motivated by internalized stigma, family pressure, and the belief that their feelings are incompatible with their faith. Others are children, brought into therapy by their parents.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has concluded that conversion therapy lacks “sufficient bases in scientific principles” and that people who have undergone it are “significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression.” Similarly, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a report concluding that “none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation. Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation…are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

Related

Learning to Love My Trans Self After Conversion Therapy

Accordingly, the Alliance and the ideas it promotes have been relegated to the scientific and political fringes. In the 2010s, as acceptance of gay rights grew rapidly, 18 states and dozens of local governments passed laws forbidding mental health professionals from attempting conversion therapy on minors.

Yet by 2020, a new front had opened in the war against LGBTQ people. Republican state legislatures started passing laws targeting transgender and nonbinary children at school—restricting their access to bathrooms, barring them from participating in sports, and stopping educators from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity. The most intense attacks have banned doctors from providing the treatments for gender dysphoria backed by all major US medical associations. Nearly 114,000 trans youth live in states where access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy has been wiped out.

Last year, I received leaked emails illustrating how these laws are crafted and pushed by a network of anti-trans activists and powerful Christian-right organizations. The Alliance is deeply enmeshed in this constellation of actors. Although small, with an annual budget of under $200,000, it provides both unsubstantiated arguments suggesting LGBTQ identities are changeable and a network of licensed counselors to lend their credibility to these efforts. Among the collaborators were David Pickup, the Alliance’s president-elect; Laura Haynes, an Alliance advocate; and Cretella, the former executive director of an anti-trans pediatrics group who described gender-affirming medical care at the Las Vegas conference as “evil” and part of a “New World Order.” (“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” she assured attendees. “I’m just someone who has been in the battle of the culture of life versus the culture of death long enough to see the big picture.”) All three have testified before state legislatures against gender-affirming care. When a US senator introduced a pair of bills to restrict trans youth health care in 2021, his press release quoted Cretella calling gender-affirming treatments “eugenics.”

What I couldn’t see from those leaked emails was how the Alliance is resurrecting conversion therapy from the ash heap of history. Its signature fight, to overturn laws prohibiting conversion therapy for minors, is being fueled by the rise of anti-trans politics, which maintains that trans teenagers are simply troubled and need help to embrace the sex they were assigned at birth. In a handful of states, they’ve started winning: Conversion therapy bans have been blocked in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Indiana. Nebraska now requires minors interested in transitioning to undergo therapy that doesn’t “merely affirm” their gender identities.

The Alliance has “suddenly become a more prominent force in the anti-LGBTQ movement again,” says Emerson Hodges, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which documents extremism of various sorts. Backers of anti-trans laws have adopted “the conversion therapy premise,” he says, “that being LGBTQ means you experienced some terrible trauma, or some sort of aberrant disorder, and therefore, it’s an illness—which means we can cure it.”

I wanted to get a deeper insight into those who not only see transness as a problem, but also see conversion therapy as a solution. How have they shifted their approach, given the wealth of professional literature undermining their practices? What is their “treatment” like for trans youth? And who are these people?

So when I saw that the Alliance was holding a one-day conference, it seemed like an opportunity to find some answers. I requested media credentials; receiving no response, I bought a regular $203.98 ticket using my Mother Jones contact information. The day before the conference, I received a packet of materials from Alliance board member Keith Vennum, a psychiatrist who specializes in “helping men develop their heterosexual potential,” according to his profile on Focus on the Family’s Christian Counselors Network. They included an article by a gender care specialist who turned against youth medical transition, reading suggestions from Cretella on how to “heal” “transgender belief” in children, and an essay by Fresno psychiatrist Avak Howsepian arguing that supporting “diversity and inclusion” means supporting pedophilia. I packed my bag and flew to Las Vegas.

When I first arrived at the Hampton Inn, a woman smiled and welcomed me to a quiet meeting room where mostly white men in businesswear chatted in small groups like old friends. I signed in and sat next to a large camera pointed at a lectern. The day’s presentations would be available for purchase online and count toward continuing education credits for licensed counselors.

Not that the education on offer would be seen as credible by most therapists. Since the group’s beginnings in 1992, the Alliance has rejected the now-dominant understanding of LGBTQ identities as normal, healthy expressions of human diversity. Its trio of founders includes psychiatrist Charles Socarides, who helped lead the unsuccessful campaign to keep homosexuality classified as a mental illness in the DSM, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses; psychiatrist Benjamin Kaufman, who’d pushed for nonconsensual, nonconfidential HIV testing in Sacramento, California, during the height of the AIDS epidemic; and psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, who ran a clinic in Los Angeles that specialized in “curing” gayness. They started the Alliance, then named the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), to fight what they called the “scientific censorship” imposed by the “pro-gay lobby.” “As clinicians, we have witnessed the intense suffering caused by homosexuality, which we see as a ‘failure to function according to design,’” one of NARTH’s early policy statements said. “Homosexuality…works against society’s essential male/female design and the all-­important family unit.”

Within a few years, NARTH was claiming hundreds of members. In conferences and publications, it used its members’ status as licensed clinicians to project an ethos of scientific expertise, helping to prop up the “ex-gay” movement of religious groups like Exodus International, which urged LGBTQ Christians to “pray away the gay” in support groups and counseling. Nicolosi, in particular, brought anti-gay pseudoscience to the public, publishing books like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. He proclaimed that same-sex attraction came from childhood trauma, distant fathers, and overbearing mothers, and called his work “reparative therapy.”

The veneer of scientific rigor was peeling by 2009, when the APA published a landmark report finding no compelling evidence supporting the idea that sexual orientation could be altered with psychological interventions. Robert Spitzer, a leading psychiatrist, apologized for a major study he’d authored that had claimed to show NARTH’s and Exodus’ methods were effective, admitting that he didn’t really know whether anyone in his study had changed their sexual orientation. Then, NARTH board member George Rekers was caught in the Miami airport returning from a vacation to Europe with a gay sex worker he’d hired on Rentboy.com. (He resigned from NARTH and insisted that he had “not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever.”)

Public awareness was growing about the damage conversion therapy could inflict. In a lawsuit against a New Jersey clinic called Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, former clients alleged that they’d been made to strip naked, touch themselves in front of a counselor, or reenact sexual abuse scenes as part of their treatment. (A jury would eventually hold the clinic and its NARTH-affiliated founder liable for consumer fraud and “unconscionable commercial practice.”) In 2012, California passed the country’s first ban on conversion therapy for minors. Exodus President Alan Chambers acknowledged that its methods had hurt people and that “the majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9 percent of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation.” Exodus folded soon after.

Yet NARTH persisted. In 2014, it rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. The group soon began to shed loaded terminology for more neutral euphemisms about its work. “The board has come to believe that terms such as reorientation therapy, conversion therapy, and even sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are no longer scientifically or politically tenable,” Christopher Rosik, a clinical psychologist in Fresno, California, wrote in an Alliance statement in 2016. These descriptors sounded too coercive and categorical, he wrote, and “imply that sexual orientation is an actual entity.” Instead, the board endorsed a new phrase: “Sexual Attraction Fluidity Exploration in Therapy”—a.k.a. the inelegant backronym SAFE-T.

Getting the new name to stick has been a losing battle. During a presentation at the Las Vegas conference, Rosik—a small, intense, bespectacled man who speaks at a rapid clip—shared that he couldn’t get the term SAFE-T published in an APA journal. Mainstream psychologists tend to use a technically accurate term for conversion therapy, “sexual orientation change efforts,” which Rosik has appropriated into “self-initiated sexual orientation change efforts,” to underscore that the individuals he studies are choosing to participate.

During Rosik’s talk, Joseph Nicolosi Jr., the son of the Alliance’s now-deceased co-founder, was seated in the front row in a sharp black suit. At his side was his wife, with whom he occasionally held hands. “We shouldn’t even use the word ‘orientation,’” he argued when Rosik finished. Sexual orientation couldn’t be measured or disproved, he continued, but sexual attractions or feelings could. “They talk about pseudoscience. That term—orientation—is a pseudoscience.”

“I agree,” Laura Haynes, the Alliance advocate, broke in from the back. “We should not reify it.”

“Could the same thing be said of the term ‘gay’?” someone else wondered.

“Possibly,” Nicolosi Jr. said. “At what point is a person gay? Do they have one homosexual thought a year? Fifty? One thousand?”

Earlier in the day, Nicolosi Jr. had told colleagues that he’d registered his own term, Reintegrative Therapy®, with the US Patent and Trademark Office. His website contains a 12-point chart on how Reintegrative Therapy® differs from conversion therapy. The chart makes clear that changing sexual orientation is not the objective; rather, the goal is to “resolve trauma.” “Spontaneous” changes in sexuality are a “byproduct,” the website says. In 2021, Nicolosi Jr. sued a pair of Canadian academics for defamation over a paper that listed “reintegrative therapy” as one of several pseudoscientific practices that fell under the conversion therapy umbrella. (The suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. He is appealing. Neither Nicolosi Jr. nor anyone else from the Alliance responded to my requests for comment on how this article characterizes their work.)

Yet Nicolosi Jr.’s website is full of testimonials about clients’ sexual attractions changing. And it repeatedly cites a study that purports to show Reintegrative Therapy® decreasing clients’ same-sex attractions and improving their overall­ ­wellbeing.­ The study’s publisher? The Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality.

Another euphemism in Alliance circles is “change allowing therapy”—a phrase whose gentle ambiguity suggests openness to personal growth. In a similar vein, Michael Gasparro, one of the youngest Alliance board members, told attendees about a technique he and Nicolosi Jr. called “mindfulness,” which they became interested in “because of its ubiquitousness in the mental health field as a term that is generally just accepted carte blanche,” Gasparro explained.

They then showed us a “mindfulness” video in which a young adult client, played by an actor, sits nervously across from Nicolosi Jr. in a room filled with books. Nicolosi Jr. asks him to describe his ideal sexually attractive man. The client responds that the man would be strong, confident, informal. “I would definitely say a guy who’s like, um, on the taller side,” he says.

Then, Nicolosi Jr. asks the client what he would change about himself: Shorter or taller? Stronger or weaker arms? More or less confident? He urges the client to compare himself to the imagined man, and the client says he feels inadequate. “How do you feel about the fact that you feel that inferiority, weakness?” Nicolosi Jr. asks.

“Sadness,” the client says.

“Feel your sadness as you continue looking at that guy,” Nicolosi Jr. urges. “And as you hold them together right now, zero to 10, how strong is your sexual attraction toward him?”

It was Nicolosi Jr.’s dad who championed the idea that queerness comes from childhood trauma, one of the same narratives weaponized today to explain why kids come out as trans. The APA has slammed both ideas as unfounded.

Yet these kinds of claims are familiar to trans survivors of conversion therapy interviewed by Mother Jones. “The idea was that you don’t find boys and men to be safe, and so in order to protect yourself, you want to become a boy or a man,” recalls Myles Markham, who participated in group conversion therapy in high school and college, when they were struggling with their feelings around sexuality and gender. Yet to Markham, those explanations “never resonated,” they say: “I’m not a person who has experienced acute or direct misogynistic violence. I grew up with emotionally intelligent and gentle masculine figures.”

Other survivors say their therapists tried to attribute their transness to negative childhood experiences. “For me, it was daddy issues,” says Arielle Rebekah, a diversity, equity, and inclusion trainer in Chicago, recounting how counselors at a residential boarding school for troubled teens tried to force them to abandon their trans identity. “They basically tried to pin it on, ‘You’ve never had a positive male role model.’” Lillian Lennon, a 25-year-old organizer in Alaska, says her parents sent her to a similar residential program after she told them she was trans at age 14. According to an affidavit she filed in a custody lawsuit involving another LGBTQ student, the therapist Lennon was paired with at the school said her transness was a form of “lashing out” and “seeking attention” in the face of turmoil at home, such as financial problems and her parents separating.

None of this therapy “worked.” Today, Lennon, Rebekah, and Markham have all transitioned and have become activists or consultants supporting other LGBTQ people. Yet they all still deal with nightmares, panic, and other mental health struggles they attribute to the conversion efforts. “A lot of thoughts [were] placed into my head about how disturbing and gross and creepy people like me were,” Lennon says. “I internalized a lot of these projections.” Today, she deals with depression and loneliness. “I’ve never shaken the consequences of my time there,” she says.

Still, multiple counselors I met at the Alliance conference endorsed the concept that queerness and transness are the result of trauma or bad parenting. After the morning’s sessions, David Pickup, a towering man who identifies as a “reintegrative” therapist, approached the table where I was sitting with a group of clinicians. Pickup mainly practices in Texas and says he only works with clients who truly want to change their sexuality or gender identity. He has publicly attributed his own same-sex attractions and discomfort with his gender in part to sexual abuse. Pulling aside a chair from a neighboring table and folding his lanky frame into it, he patiently explained his belief that being trans is the same as being gay, except with “more severe” trauma, from earlier in life, and worse family environments. “I have yet to see one case where there’s not been trauma underneath every single homoerotic or transgender issue.” His theory on trans youth: “Basically, what happens is those kids don’t attach to their same-sex parent, and so they don’t attach to themselves in their own biological sex.”

At her session, “Healing Gender Incongruence in a Hostile Environment,” Cretella also urged attendees to focus on parenting and underlying trauma when working with trans teenagers. She described trans identity as a “maladaptive defense mechanism” in response to events like divorce and sexual abuse.

Her evidence: a 2018 Pediatrics study that examined medical records from youth enrolled in Kaiser Permanente health plans in California and Georgia. The researchers identified 1,082 minors between the ages of 10 and 17 whose records indicated that they were trans. Some 70 percent had mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and attention disorders that predated the first sign of gender dysphoria in their medical record. “They are not suicidal because of us,” Cretella said, giggling before hitting a somber note, “but because they are traumatized beforehand.”

Cretella’s interpretation of the research—that poor mental health led people to identify as trans—relies on a “fundamental” error, according to Michael Goodman, an Emory University professor and one of the study’s authors. Researchers, himself included, didn’t know when their subjects first identified as trans, only when they talked to their doctors about it. “It takes years, usually, before the child or adolescent, or an adult, presents to the health care provider with gender dysphoria issues,” Goodman told me. “It might as well be the other way around: The gender dysphoria leads to all of those mental health problems, which is a far more reasonable interpretation.”

Yet Alliance affiliates have been using Goodman’s research to lobby against conversion therapy bans and gender-affirming care. In 2019, Laura Haynes distributed his paper to colleagues working on anti-trans legislation. “It may be the first research that found onset dates of psychiatric disorders and first-evidence date of gender non­conforming identity,” she emphasized.

“Laura, thank you! I’m testifying soon for a case in Colorado and this data will be very useful,” replied psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, a senior fellow at the anti-trans group Do No Harm. A group co-founded by Pickup called the National Task Force for Therapy Equality drafted letters to legislators citing Goodman’s study to claim that “gender dysphoria may have pathological causes.” And when Pickup testified in support of an early gender-affirming care ban in South Dakota, he said there was a “rapidly growing body of literature suggesting that psychological issues play a crucial role in many young people’s trans identification.”

This isn’t the only example of scientific spin from Alliance figures. Last year, in what he called an “adversarial collaboration” with queer researchers, Rosik got a study published in the peer-reviewed APA journal Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. The paper looked at attempts to “reduce, change and/or eliminate” same-sex attractions, behavior, or orientation, either on one’s own or with a counselor, and found that 326 people currently undergoing conversion therapy had greater depression than those who’d stopped or never tried it. Yet Rosik and his co-authors concluded that the differences “may be of uncertain practical significance and interpretive meaning.”

It didn’t take long for others to point out the contradiction. “Basically, what they were saying is that even though there’s [evidence] of harm, the harm isn’t grave enough to be concerned about,” explains David Rivera, a psychology professor at Queens College in New York who co-authored a rebuttal to the Rosik paper. Soon, with the authors’ agreement, the journal retracted the study, saying it wanted to provide “greater accuracy and interpretive clarity to sensitive findings that might be misused.”

Rosik is used to fighting criticism: He edits the Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality. The very first issue, in 2009, was devoted to rebutting the APA report on the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation change efforts. Since then, its articles, interviews, and book reviews have defended “SAFE-T” and attacked the anti–conversion therapy consensus. At the conference, Rosik asserted that mainstream research institutions are “ideologically captured.”

Indeed, many of the Alliance speakers seemed to take it as a given that the medical and scientific communities were in thrall to LGBTQ activists. In a question that seemed intended to ridicule, Pickup asked during one of Cretella’s talks if the doctors who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth are personally “suffering from a disorder of some kind.” Appreciative laughter scattered throughout the room.

“Yes,” she replied, becoming serious. “Many of the physicians who are in leadership positions are themselves on the LGBTQ spectrum.” Then she referred to the disorder in which a caregiver imposes an ailment on a child to gain attention for themselves: “I would hypothesize that we were dealing with Munchausen by proxy in many cases.”

Outrageous claims like these are a common weapon among anti-trans activists and their right-wing political allies, who often describe trans health doctors as butchers mutilating kids. In 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton classified gender-affirming care for minors as a form of child abuse and equated parents who sought such care for their children with those suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Using this theory, Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services opened at least nine investigations into parents before an ACLU lawsuit put a halt to them.

Similarly extreme language also comes from the small cohort of paid expert witnesses often called upon to support gender-affirming care bans—like endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, who compared such care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee syphilis study when testifying for anti-trans legislation in South Dakota. (In a court case about Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care in Florida, a federal judge concluded that Laidlaw was “far off from the accepted view” on transgender issues, in part because Laidlaw had said he wouldn’t use patients’ correct pronouns.)

To Cretella, the solution to gender dysphoria is obvious: Transition people’s minds, not their bodies. She described this project in religious terms. “In a Judeo-Christian worldview,” she explained during her talk, “one of the functions of the brain is to accurately perceive” the physical reality created by God.

“If my thinking is contrary to physical reality, that’s the abnormality that must be understood,” she continued. “We try to ­understand the abnormal thinking and come to help the person attain flourishing, by analyzing and shaping thinking to embrace the physical reality.”

In other words, if a person’s sense of self doesn’t match their physical body, their sense of self requires fixing.

During the break after Cretella’s presentation, I overheard two women chatting on their way into the restroom. “Talk about a wealth of knowledge,” one remarked.

“True science will always back up true religion,” the other replied. “God’s truth and science, if it’s true, will always match up. That’s what I tell my students.”

If the Las Vegas conference made one thing clear, it’s that conversion therapy is alive and well, even in places where it’s been banned. One counselor told me he makes it a habit not to document his treatment plans in writing to avoid getting in trouble and simply treats “family dynamics” in states with conversion therapy bans.

In a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans adults, nearly 1 in 7 said that a professional, such as a therapist, doctor, or religious adviser, had tried to make them not transgender; about half of respondents said they were minors at the time. By applying this rate to population estimates, the Williams Institute at UCLA projects that more than 135,000 trans adults nationwide have experienced some form of conversion therapy.

Despite the data, lawmakers frequently don’t believe that conversion therapy is still happening in their community, says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide prevention group. “We’re constantly running up against this misconception that this is an artifact of the past,” she says. So, five years ago, the Trevor Project began scouring psychologists’ websites and books, records of public testimony, and known conversion therapy referral services, looking for counselors who said they could alter someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

As the research stretched on, Pick noticed webpages being revised to reflect changing times. “We saw many folks who seemed to leave the industry entirely,” she says. “But others changed their website, changed their keywords, [from] talking about creating ex-gays to talking about ex-trans.” Last December, Pick’s team published their report documenting active conversion therapists. They found more than 600 were licensed health care professionals and an additional 716 were clergy, lay ministers, or other unlicensed religious counselors.

According to Pick, some conversion therapists have embraced a new label for what they do: “gender exploratory therapy.” It’s a term that Cretella used to describe the approach she recommended, and unlike the other euphemisms thrown around at the conference, this has gained traction. In 2021, a group of therapists, who ranged from conflicted about medical interventions for kids with gender dysphoria to skeptical of the very concept of transgender identity, formed the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA) to promote an approach they characterize as neither conversion nor affirmation.

Some current and former leaders of the group, which claims a membership of 300 mental health providers, have been involved in influential organizations lobbying against gender-affirming care across the world, such as the Ireland-based Genspect and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a nonprofit registered in Idaho. They’ve notched some big wins: In November 2023, the UK Council for Psychotherapy—the nation’s top professional association—declared that it was fine for counselors to take GETA’s “exploratory” approach to gender. This April, a long-awaited review of gender-related care for youth in England’s National Health Service endorsed exploratory therapy, according to Alex Keuroghlian, an associate psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. And in the United States, in cases in which families of trans children have sued states for banning gender-affirming care, the state often calls expert witnesses who endorse “exploratory” psychotherapy as their preferred alternative treatment.

After all, the idea of “exploring” one’s gender identity sounds benign. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which issues guidelines on gender-­affirming treatment, recommends that clinicians working with teens “facilitate the exploration and expression of gender openly and respectfully so that no one particular identity is favored.” Yet, as with mindfulness, “that term has now been hijacked by folks on the other side,” says Judith Glassgold, a clinical psychologist who chaired the APA task force that in 2009 documented the lack of science behind conversion therapy.

GETA’s guidelines instruct therapists to dig deep into “the entire landscape of the young person’s life and subjective experience,” probing all possible reasons they might identify as transgender. The catch, says Glassgold, is that “exploration” means “trying to find negative reasons why someone’s diverse.” Last year, SAMHSA issued a report saying that “approaches that discourage youth from identifying as transgender or gender-diverse, and/or from expressing their gender identity” are sometimes “misleadingly referred to as ‘exploratory therapy.’” These approaches are “harmful and never appropriate,” the report concluded.

GETA rebranded as Therapy First late last year, saying exploratory therapy was really no different from standard psychotherapy. The group’s membership statement still disavows conversion therapy. But its co-founder Stella O’Malley told me she believes bans on conversion therapy should apply only to sexual orientation. And in Las Vegas, Cretella drew a direct connection between the old work of the Alliance and the new work of gender-exploratory therapists. “It truly is very similar to how the Alliance has always approached unwanted SSA [same-sex attraction],” she told the assembled therapists. “You approach it as ‘change therapy’—or, even less triggering, ‘exploratory therapy.’”

At lunch, I headed over to a discussion convened by Robert Vazzo, a red-faced man with a buzz cut. While picking at his rice pilaf, he recalled working with a trans-feminine 14-year-old. Vazzo referred to them as a “young man” who “complained of being trans.” He complimented their biceps and tried to get them to be “more assertive” with their mother. The goal, he explained, was to get the teen to connect with some inner masculinity. “The bulk of our work is trying to get people to value who they really are,” Vazzo told me. “Who they really are,” in this view, is cisgender.

In 2017, Vazzo filed a lawsuit against the city of Tampa, Florida, after it imposed a fine on licensed counselors who attempt conversion therapy on minors. Vazzo says he was represented pro bono by the Christian-right law firm Liberty Counsel, which also represented Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses for gay couples in 2015. Liberty Counsel argued that the city was infringing on Vazzo’s right to free speech, because his treatment consists of talk therapy. In late 2019, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump agreed with Vazzo and overturned the Tampa ordinance, concluding that the state, not the city, should determine health care regulations and discipline.

Between 2012 and 2023, the Alliance and connected groups filed a combined 11 federal lawsuits challenging conversion therapy bans in eight states. Vazzo’s was the first to succeed. The next year, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals shut down a similar ordinance in Boca Raton, Florida, which had been challenged by former Alliance President Julie Hamilton and another therapist. The court concluded that it violated the First Amendment. The decision blocked youth conversion therapy bans in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

So far, the 11th Circuit is the only federal appeals court to agree with the idea that conversion therapy is protected by the First Amendment, says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Minter notes that federal courts have previously considered clinicians’ words in mental and medical health care settings to be a form of professional conduct and fair game for state regulation.

At the time of the conference, the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear a similar case brought by Brian Tingley, who sued Washington state with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful conservative Christian legal organization behind many recent anti-trans bills and attacks on abortion, in order to practice conversion therapy. The Supreme Court declined to take the case, but a similar lawsuit, also filed by ADF, is making its way through the Colorado court system.

In his dissent to the court’s decision not to take the Tingley case, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, described bans on conversion therapy for minors as “viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.” Thomas even foreshadowed a future ruling overturning conversion therapy bans: “Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again. When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here…consider what the First Amendment requires.”

Meanwhile, the fight over conversion therapy bans is continuing in state legislatures. In 2023, Indiana passed a law halting enforcement of local bans. This year, legislators in two more states, Iowa and West Virginia, introduced similar bills.

The West Virginia bill went further than the one in Indiana—attempting to stop mental health professionals from providing anything except conversion therapy to trans minors. The bill, which suggested trans people have “delusion[s],” would have prohibited providers “from attempting to induce or exacerbate gender dysphoria in a minor…with no intent of cure or cure-pursuing recovery.”

That measure failed. But in Nebraska, a similar—though less explicit—bill has already become law. The “Let Them Grow Act,” passed last year, mandates that trans kids receive therapy before they get any medical treatments for gender dysphoria. On its face, the law appears to preserve some access to treatments; its language emphasizes the need to protect kids. “What we got was a version that ends up sounding more compassionate,” says Abbi Swatsworth, the executive director of OutNebraska, an organization that coordinated community opposition to the bill. “But in actuality, it is much worse.”

After it passed, Nebraska’s health department was tasked with issuing guidelines on implementing it. The state’s chief medical officer, Timothy Tesmer, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, assembled a team of “experts”—but didn’t include anyone who specialized in transgender medical care, local practitioners and advocacy groups say.

The rules crafted by Tesmer’s department require that trans kids receive 40 hours of therapy that “do not merely affirm the patient’s beliefs” before the kids can move forward with medical interventions like puberty blockers. The therapy recommendations are “not in the standard of care, they’re not in any of the pediatrics or psychiatry literature,” says Alex Dworak, a pediatrician who works with trans youth in Nebraska. Florence Ashley, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto who focuses on trans issues, points to the regulations’ instruction not to “merely affirm” a client. “What does that mean, in the actual therapy room?” Ashley asks. “Does that mean they can’t use your name and pronouns? Because then that’s very much privileging a specific outcome.”

Camie Nitzel, the founder of Kindred Psychology in Lincoln, is wondering the same thing. “If the artwork in my office reflects gender-­diverse faces, is that overly affirming?” she asked Tesmer in a letter opposing the regulations. Nitzel, who has been working with trans Nebraskans for 29 years, uses the clinical approach recommended by the APA. Under the Nebraska regulations, therapists “are going to be forced to choose between practicing ethically and practicing legally,” she warns. Already, some other providers have begun to refuse to see trans youth because of the risk. “We’re now getting referrals from providers who have worked with trans youth before, but they’re sending their clients here because they don’t feel comfortable,” Nitzel says. “Providers are faced with the decision about the safety of continuing to do work.”

Meanwhile, the trans community in Nebraska is just plain scared. Andrew Farias, a lobbyist in Lincoln, is so worried about the possibility of future restrictions on adult trans health care that he temporarily stopped testosterone just to see if he could bear it. “I want to make sure that I’m prepared in terms of my own safety and mental health,” he says. “I wanted to test myself and see: Could I do this?…Or do I have to move?”

I left the last session of the conference with my head spinning. In the world of the Alliance, down was up, harm was help, expert conclusions were lies—or were they? As I made my way out of the hotel lobby, where the therapists were gathering to walk together to a nearby diner, I had the feeling of exiting an alternate reality.

No one had distilled that feeling better than the Alliance’s incoming leader, David Pickup. “There is such a thing as a man born in a woman’s body,” he’d declared in a speech, delivering the line with sarcastic bravado. “There is such a thing as homosexual marriage.” Then he parodied what was happening in the Hampton Inn: “The small conferences that are held by these fringe groups across the country are all right-wing, unscientific, no-research-given, closeted Christians who try to prod and force people to do therapy.” The audience laughed with uncertainty. Had their comrade gone soft on them?

No one need worry; Pickup cut to his point: “The Alliance tells you the truth. And none of those statements I just said—even though the world tends to now believe in that—has anything to do with truth,” he assured them. In Pickup’s view, “the transgender movement is actually crumbling. In part, that’s due to the Alliance.” Then he asked the audience to take out their phones and laptops to donate. “Good things are coming,” he promised. “I think the truth will one day win out, more than ever.”

There is an urgency behind Pickup’s words. His truth must win out because the opposite would be devastating. To concede that trans people are real, let alone happy, would strip away the Alliance’s last best hope of a comeback. 

Read more about Myles Markham’s story of surviving conversion therapy—and finding self-love—here.

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

West Virginia voters had an unenviable choice of congressional candidates in the GOP primary Tuesday: a guy who stormed the Capitol on January 6, or an incumbent who, after having to evacuate the Capitol during the riot, went back to vote against certifying the election. Voters chose the incumbent.

Rep. Carol Miller trounced “J6 prisoner” Derrick Evans by almost 30 points, in the race to represent West Virginia’s first district. She will likely win the general election in November. The campaign has been viewed as something of a litmus test of how voters view the January 6 insurrection three years later.

Evans had just been elected to the state legislature when he livestreamed himself breaching the US Capitol along with the angry mob. He announced his candidacy for Congress soon after leaving prison, where he had served a 90-day sentence after pleading guilty to a felony for obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder. He made his January 6 conviction a centerpiece of his energetic campaign. He was endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn appeared with him in Charleston last week, saying, “I want people of high moral character, people who are incorruptible, who are willing to lead our country forward against this tyrannical overreaching political establishment that we have.”

Miller mostly ignored Evans throughout his long campaign. She refused to debate him this weekend, leaving Evans to talk to an empty chair. And when USA Today recently asked Miller what she thought about whether he should be on the ballot given his felony conviction, she replied, “I don’t think about him at all.”

Carol Miller (WV) refused to show up to the debate tonight. With her voting record, I don’t blame her. pic.twitter.com/Mdv9vwRBM1

— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) May 12, 2024

But in the past month, as his campaign gained traction, she clearly started to think about him a little more. In early April, for the first time, campaign finance records show she spent $40,000 on polling. During the last quarter, her fundraising shot up by $370,000, fueled by lots of donations not from West Virginia voters but from inside the Beltway lobbyists happy to ante up for a member of the powerful House Ways and Means committee.

On April 11, Miller’s campaign spent $313,580 on an ad buy, the first she’d done since kicking off her reelection campaign. Until then, her largest expenditures had been donations to the National Republican Campaign Committee and $36,000 for an event last year during the LIV golf tournament at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

Despite having abundant material with which to attack Evans—whose felony conviction prevents him from voting until he’s completed three years of probation—Miller’s ads targeted Evans for having once been a Democrat. It looked like pretty weak sauce in a state where the current governor, Jim Justice, who just won the GOP primary to fill the seat of retiring Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, also used to be a Democrat.

But the ads reflected the fine line Miller had to walk in trying to campaign against a January 6 rioter and MAGA die-hard in a state where, as Evans’ campaign consultant Noel Fritsch, told me recently, “Eighty percent of the voting electorate thinks that whatever happened on January 6 was warranted and 70 percent think the Feds did it.” (Polls back him up on some of this.)

Democracy advocates had argued that Evans should not even have been allowed on the ballot to begin with because the Constitution bars former elected officials who participated in an insurrection from holding federal office. An Evans victory would have put Congress in the very awkward position of having to decide whether to enforce the Constitution or respect the will of West Virginia voters. As I wrote recently:

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era provision, prohibits anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, such as state legislators like Evans, from serving in federal office if they “engaged in insurrection.” Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), says the state should not have allowed Evans on the ballot at all, but no one filed a legal challenge. “I think he didn’t look like a contender a year ago when he announced,” Sherman said. “He might have flown under the radar for some folks.”

Now, only Congress can decide whether Evans could join their ranks, thanks to the March US Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Anderson, which held that Colorado could not take Trump off the ballot because of his involvement in January 6. The court said that the states cannot enforce Section 3 against federal candidates; only Congress can. “There are not that many people with a stronger case for disqualification under Section 3 than Mr. Evans,” Sherman said. “I think ultimately if he prevails it will come down to whether Congress will enforce the provision of the Constitution against an insurrectionist.”

Most political observers thought it would have been highly unlikely that Congress would have tried to prevent Evans from taking his seat if he’d won. Miller’s victory leaves that hypothetical untested. She issued a bland statement after the race was called Tuesday night that reflected her anodyne campaign and her intention to continue ignoring her opponent, whom she didn’t mention.

“It has been the honor of my life to represent West Virginia in Congress, and I am grateful to have won the Republican primary in West Virginia’s First Congressional District tonight. Over the past few years, I have ensured that the Mountain Valley Pipeline will be completed, worked on legislation that will lower taxes for West Virginians, and held the Biden Administration accountable,” Miller said. “While the Republican House Majority has accomplished great work, we still have more to deliver for the American people. I’m thankful to represent my wild and wonderful state in Washington, and I will continue to work to make West Virginia the best place to live, work, and raise a family.”

Evans waited until Wednesday morning to publicly concede the race. “The sun came up, God is still good, & I’m blessed with a beautiful & healthy family,” he tweeted. “Congrats to Carol on the win. I hope you realize 38k people in your district do not feel represented by you, & you start to vote more conservative. To the swamp. We are still coming for you.”

May 15: This story has been updated to include Evans’ concession.

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

House Democrats have launched an investigation into a meeting between oil company executives and Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home and club last month, following reports that the former president offered to dismantle Biden’s environmental rules and requested $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign.

Democrats on the House oversight committee late on Monday evening sent letters to nine oil executives requesting information on their companies’ participation in the meeting.

“Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions,” the Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in the letters.

Donald Trump’s criminal trial for engineering a hush money scheme—to save his 2016 campaign from a slew of stories about his infidelities—entered its dramatic final stages on Tuesday, as his former fixer, Michael Cohen, completed his testimony for the prosecution. Then, just as Trump’s attorneys seemed poised to attack, the former president’s defense team was surprisingly ginger when finally given a chance to strike back. Tuesday began, as Monday ended, with prosecutors walking the normally voluble and combative Cohen through his story, calmly explaining how Trump okayed every step of the scheme to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a sexual encounter she testified to having with Trump. As the prosecution’s case wound down, tension was high in the courtroom. Trump’s lawyers were expected to come out swinging at Cohen, attacking Cohen’s credibility and long history of lying (much of it for Trump’s benefit, he has said).

Trump attorney Todd Blanche started with a sneering jab at Cohen, asking him if they had ever met—and when Cohen said they hadn’t, asking if Cohen had indeed once described Blanche as “a crying little shit” on TikTok. Cohen agreed it was the type of thing he would say, and that was as hostile as the afternoon got. Blanche seemed to wobble through a series of questions designed to make Cohen confirm that he had previously lied, and did, indeed, harbor a deep dislike for his former employer. Among other odd bits of testimony that Blanche elicited from Cohen were confirmations that:

• Cohen would like to see Trump go to jail.
• Cohen has referred to Trump as a “boorish cartoon misogynist” and “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.”
• Cohen is selling merchandise on his website, including t-shirts that show Trump in a orange prison jumpsuit, and others that say “Convict 45.”

The cross-examination will continue on Thursday, but so far has been a far cry from the Trump team’s attack on Cohen during last fall’s civil fraud trial—where Cohen also testified, and where Trump’s lawyers didn’t hold back, repeatedly trying to provoke Cohen and even taunting him about whether he lied to his wife. In that case, Trump’s attorneys repeatedly engaged in shouting matches with Cohen, who quickly became flustered. On Tuesday, however, Cohen remained calm throughout his testimony, answering slowly and methodically as Blanche probed.

Even Trump, who at the fraud trial was a noisy presence while his ex-fixer testified, sat quietly, eyes mostly closed, as Cohen—whom several judges have had to issue gag orders to keep Trump from attacking outside court—spoke. 

The trial will likely finish up next week. Cohen is the linchpin of the prosecution’s case against Trump, and prosecutors said on Tuesday that he would be their final witness. Trump’s attorneys told Judge Juan Merchan that they have very limited plans for calling witnesses, but are still undecided on having Trump take the stand in his own defense.

Despite the subdued cross-examination, on Tuesday morning, Cohen repeatedly delivered for prosecutors, with testimony that flowed smoothly from the previous day. Cohen testified on Monday how he orchestrated payoffs to adult film star Stormy Daniels and others who, in the closing weeks before the 2016 election, threatened to go public with embarrassing stories about Trump. In Daniels’ case, it was a story of a sexual encounter at a golf tournament which, on the stand, she refused to call either a relationship or romantic. Despite reaching an agreement to pay Daniels $130,000, and Trump insisting that the deal get done, Cohen couldn’t get Trump to pay out the money in the final days before the election, and opted to supply it himself. On Tuesday, he detailed his efforts to get repaid, testifying that, while in the White House, Trump personally signed off on payments to reimburse Cohen in the guise of legal fees. Cohen barely did any legal work, he said.  

Cohen also testified that when word leaked out about the coverup in 2018, Trump urged him to stay loyal and keep his mouth shut.

“‘Don’t worry. I’m the President of the United States. There’s nothing here. Everything’s going to be OK. Stay tough,'” Cohen said Trump told him the last time they spoke. “You’re going to be okay.'”

But, Cohen said, he wasn’t okay when he became a target of then–FBI Director Robert Mueller’s investigation. At that point, Cohen said, turning to jurors and appearing emotional, he had a conversation with his family, who questioned why he was clinging to his allegiance to his old boss, who had done so little for him since taking office.

“Why are you holding onto this loyalty? What are you doing? We’re supposed to be your first loyalty,” Cohen said his family asked him. 

Prosecutors also guided Cohen through some of his lowest moments—his plan to use his once-close relationship with Trump to sell access to him after he was elected, his repeated and flagrant lying on the former president’s behalf, and his conviction for making the payments to Daniels and another woman, for which he served a year in prison. Discussing those low points was part of a strategy by prosecutors to get ahead of attacks by Trump’s legal team—which, at least initially, did not come. 

Ultimately, the case may come down to which version of Cohen jurors believe: the temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who Trump’s attorneys tried to draw out with their barbed attacks, or a formerly temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who now professes remorse for his subservience to Trump. Cohen, for his part, seemed very willing to confess his sins under direct examination from prosecutors. Over the course of his day-and-a-half of testimony, Cohen described how he sought Trump’s attention, buying properties in his buildings and then offering his services as a hyperbolic attack dog who would rage against anyone threatening Trump’s success—long before he ran for president. Cohen also talked, at length, about how he constantly returned to Trump to detail his exploits in what he acknowledged were desperate attempts to win approval and affection. 

By the time Blanche got his turn to attack Cohen and his credibility, Cohen seemed to have confessed to almost everything Blanche tried to ask about. One of the biggest revelations from the initial cross-examination may be that, despite Trump’s repeated efforts to portray the case against him as a conspiracy closely controlled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Cohen testified that he has never personally met Bragg. 

Before the day’s testimony began, excitement for the expected drama was running high outside the court. There were no signs of any protesters—either for Trump or against him—but a crowd of over one hundred curious members of the public began lining up as early as 4 a.m. to secure a coveted seat in the courtroom, or a nearby overflow courtroom where the trial is being shown live. Many of the hopefuls appeared older or retired, and seemed most excited to see liberal commentators passing by on their way into the courthouse. But most of those in line were disappointed, with only about 20 tickets handed out for admission to the courtrooms; several dozen journalists were left without a ticket as well. One man, who seemed to be a Trump supporter, was berated for cutting the line and refusing to give up his ticket. 

As it became clear that only a few would be able to attend, at least one person towards the back of the queue paid a woman at the front $350 in cash to get in—she had earlier rejected an offer of $80. Given the anti-climactic tone of the afternoon’s testimony, the buyer may regret his largesse. 

West Virginia voters had an unenviable choice of congressional candidates in the GOP primary Tuesday: a guy who stormed the Capitol on January 6, or an incumbent who, after having to evacuate the Capitol during the riot, went back to vote against certifying the election. Voters chose the incumbent.

Rep. Carol Miller trounced “J6 prisoner” Derrick Evans by almost 30 points, in the race to represent West Virginia’s first district. She will likely win the general election in November. The campaign has been viewed as something of a litmus test of how voters view the January 6 insurrection three years later.

Evans had just been elected to the state legislature when he livestreamed himself breaching the US Capitol along with the angry mob. He announced his candidacy for Congress soon after leaving prison, where he had served a 90-day sentence after pleading guilty to a felony for obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder. He made his January 6 conviction a centerpiece of his energetic campaign. He was endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn appeared with him in Charleston last week, saying, “I want people of high moral character, people who are incorruptible, who are willing to lead our country forward against this tyrannical overreaching political establishment that we have.”

Miller mostly ignored Evans throughout his long campaign. She refused to debate him this weekend, leaving Evans to talk to an empty chair. And when USA Today recently asked Miller what she thought about whether he should be on the ballot given his felony conviction, she replied, “I don’t think about him at all.”

Carol Miller (WV) refused to show up to the debate tonight. With her voting record, I don’t blame her. pic.twitter.com/Mdv9vwRBM1

— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) May 12, 2024

But in the past month, as his campaign gained traction, she clearly started to think about him a little more. In early April, for the first time, campaign finance records show she spent $40,000 on polling. During the last quarter, her fundraising shot up by $370,000, fueled by lots of donations not from West Virginia voters but from inside the Beltway lobbyists happy to ante up for a member of the powerful House Ways and Means committee.

On April 11, Miller’s campaign spent $313,580 on an ad buy, the first she’d done since kicking off her reelection campaign. Until then, her largest expenditures had been donations to the National Republican Campaign Committee and $36,000 for an event last year during the LIV golf tournament at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

Despite having abundant material with which to attack Evans—whose felony conviction prevents him from voting until he’s completed three years of probation—Miller’s ads targeted Evans for having once been a Democrat. It looked like pretty weak sauce in a state where the current governor, Jim Justice, who just won the GOP primary to fill the seat of retiring Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, also used to be a Democrat.

But the ads reflected the fine line Miller had to walk in trying to campaign against a January 6 rioter and MAGA die-hard in a state where, as Evans’ campaign consultant Noel Fritsch, told me recently, “Eighty percent of the voting electorate thinks that whatever happened on January 6 was warranted and 70 percent think the Feds did it.” (Polls back him up on some of this.)

Democracy advocates had argued that Evans should not even have been allowed on the ballot to begin with because the Constitution bars former elected officials who participated in an insurrection from holding federal office. An Evans victory would have put Congress in the very awkward position of having to decide whether to enforce the Constitution or respect the will of West Virginia voters. As I wrote recently:

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era provision, prohibits anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, such as state legislators like Evans, from serving in federal office if they “engaged in insurrection.” Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), says the state should not have allowed Evans on the ballot at all, but no one filed a legal challenge. “I think he didn’t look like a contender a year ago when he announced,” Sherman said. “He might have flown under the radar for some folks.”

Now, only Congress can decide whether Evans could join their ranks, thanks to the March US Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Anderson, which held that Colorado could not take Trump off the ballot because of his involvement in January 6. The court said that the states cannot enforce Section 3 against federal candidates; only Congress can. “There are not that many people with a stronger case for disqualification under Section 3 than Mr. Evans,” Sherman said. “I think ultimately if he prevails it will come down to whether Congress will enforce the provision of the Constitution against an insurrectionist.”

Most political observers thought it would have been highly unlikely that Congress would have tried to prevent Evans from taking his seat if he’d won. Miller’s victory leaves that hypothetical untested. She issued a bland statement after the race was called Tuesday night that reflected her anodyne campaign and her intention to continue ignoring her opponent, whom she didn’t mention.

“It has been the honor of my life to represent West Virginia in Congress, and I am grateful to have won the Republican primary in West Virginia’s First Congressional District tonight. Over the past few years, I have ensured that the Mountain Valley Pipeline will be completed, worked on legislation that will lower taxes for West Virginians, and held the Biden Administration accountable,” Miller said. “While the Republican House Majority has accomplished great work, we still have more to deliver for the American people. I’m thankful to represent my wild and wonderful state in Washington, and I will continue to work to make West Virginia the best place to live, work, and raise a family.”

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

House Democrats have launched an investigation into a meeting between oil company executives and Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home and club last month, following reports that the former president offered to dismantle Biden’s environmental rules and requested $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign.

Democrats on the House oversight committee late on Monday evening sent letters to nine oil executives requesting information on their companies’ participation in the meeting.

“Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions,” the Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in the letters.

Donald Trump’s criminal trial for engineering a hush money scheme—to save his 2016 campaign from a slew of stories about his infidelities—entered its dramatic final stages on Tuesday, as his former fixer, Michael Cohen, completed his testimony for the prosecution. Then, just as Trump’s attorneys seemed poised to attack, the former president’s defense team was surprisingly ginger when finally given a chance to strike back. Tuesday began, as Monday ended, with prosecutors walking the normally voluble and combative Cohen through his story, calmly explaining how Trump okayed every step of the scheme to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a sexual encounter she testified to having with Trump. As the prosecution’s case wound down, tension was high in the courtroom. Trump’s lawyers were expected to come out swinging at Cohen, attacking Cohen’s credibility and long history of lying (much of it for Trump’s benefit, he has said).

Trump attorney Todd Blanche started with a sneering jab at Cohen, asking him if they had ever met—and when Cohen said they hadn’t, asking if Cohen had indeed once described Blanche as “a crying little shit” on TikTok. Cohen agreed it was the type of thing he would say, and that was as hostile as the afternoon got. Blanche seemed to wobble through a series of questions designed to make Cohen confirm that he had previously lied, and did, indeed, harbor a deep dislike for his former employer. Among other odd bits of testimony that Blanche elicited from Cohen were confirmations that:

• Cohen would like to see Trump go to jail.
• Cohen has referred to Trump as a “boorish cartoon misogynist” and “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.”
• Cohen is selling merchandise on his website, including t-shirts that show Trump in a orange prison jumpsuit, and others that say “Convict 45.”

The cross-examination will continue on Thursday, but so far has been a far cry from the Trump team’s attack on Cohen during last fall’s civil fraud trial—where Cohen also testified, and where Trump’s lawyers didn’t hold back, repeatedly trying to provoke Cohen and even taunting him about whether he lied to his wife. In that case, Trump’s attorneys repeatedly engaged in shouting matches with Cohen, who quickly became flustered. On Tuesday, however, Cohen remained calm throughout his testimony, answering slowly and methodically as Blanche probed.

Even Trump, who at the fraud trial was a noisy presence while his ex-fixer testified, sat quietly, eyes mostly closed, as Cohen—whom several judges have had to issue gag orders to keep Trump from attacking outside court—spoke. 

The trial will likely finish up next week. Cohen is the linchpin of the prosecution’s case against Trump, and prosecutors said on Tuesday that he would be their final witness. Trump’s attorneys told Judge Juan Merchan that they have very limited plans for calling witnesses, but are still undecided on having Trump take the stand in his own defense.

Despite the subdued cross-examination, on Tuesday morning, Cohen repeatedly delivered for prosecutors, with testimony that flowed smoothly from the previous day. Cohen testified on Monday how he orchestrated payoffs to adult film star Stormy Daniels and others who, in the closing weeks before the 2016 election, threatened to go public with embarrassing stories about Trump. In Daniels’ case, it was a story of a sexual encounter at a golf tournament which, on the stand, she refused to call either a relationship or romantic. Despite reaching an agreement to pay Daniels $130,000, and Trump insisting that the deal get done, Cohen couldn’t get Trump to pay out the money in the final days before the election, and opted to supply it himself. On Tuesday, he detailed his efforts to get repaid, testifying that, while in the White House, Trump personally signed off on payments to reimburse Cohen in the guise of legal fees. Cohen barely did any legal work, he said.  

Cohen also testified that when word leaked out about the coverup in 2018, Trump urged him to stay loyal and keep his mouth shut.

“‘Don’t worry. I’m the President of the United States. There’s nothing here. Everything’s going to be OK. Stay tough,'” Cohen said Trump told him the last time they spoke. “You’re going to be okay.'”

But, Cohen said, he wasn’t okay when he became a target of then–FBI Director Robert Mueller’s investigation. At that point, Cohen said, turning to jurors and appearing emotional, he had a conversation with his family, who questioned why he was clinging to his allegiance to his old boss, who had done so little for him since taking office.

“Why are you holding onto this loyalty? What are you doing? We’re supposed to be your first loyalty,” Cohen said his family asked him. 

Prosecutors also guided Cohen through some of his lowest moments—his plan to use his once-close relationship with Trump to sell access to him after he was elected, his repeated and flagrant lying on the former president’s behalf, and his conviction for making the payments to Daniels and another woman, for which he served a year in prison. Discussing those low points was part of a strategy by prosecutors to get ahead of attacks by Trump’s legal team—which, at least initially, did not come. 

Ultimately, the case may come down to which version of Cohen jurors believe: the temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who Trump’s attorneys tried to draw out with their barbed attacks, or a formerly temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who now professes remorse for his subservience to Trump. Cohen, for his part, seemed very willing to confess his sins under direct examination from prosecutors. Over the course of his day-and-a-half of testimony, Cohen described how he sought Trump’s attention, buying properties in his buildings and then offering his services as a hyperbolic attack dog who would rage against anyone threatening Trump’s success—long before he ran for president. Cohen also talked, at length, about how he constantly returned to Trump to detail his exploits in what he acknowledged were desperate attempts to win approval and affection. 

By the time Blanche got his turn to attack Cohen and his credibility, Cohen seemed to have confessed to almost everything Blanche tried to ask about. One of the biggest revelations from the initial cross-examination may be that, despite Trump’s repeated efforts to portray the case against him as a conspiracy closely controlled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Cohen testified that he has never personally met Bragg. 

Before the day’s testimony began, excitement for the expected drama was running high outside the court. There were no signs of any protesters—either for Trump or against him—but a crowd of over one hundred curious members of the public began lining up as early as 4 a.m. to secure a coveted seat in the courtroom, or a nearby overflow courtroom where the trial is being shown live. Many of the hopefuls appeared older or retired, and seemed most excited to see liberal commentators passing by on their way into the courthouse. But most of those in line were disappointed, with only about 20 tickets handed out for admission to the courtrooms; several dozen journalists were left without a ticket as well. One man, who seemed to be a Trump supporter, was berated for cutting the line and refusing to give up his ticket. 

As it became clear that only a few would be able to attend, at least one person towards the back of the queue paid a woman at the front $350 in cash to get in—she had earlier rejected an offer of $80. Given the anti-climactic tone of the afternoon’s testimony, the buyer may regret his largesse. 

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

The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7 trillion in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement on carbon emissions, according to research.

In 2016, after talks in Paris, 196 countries signed an agreement to limit global heating as a result of carbon emissions to at most 2°C above preindustrial levels, with an ideal limit of 1.5°C to prevent the worst impacts of a drastically changed climate.

Many countries have since promised to reduce carbon emissions, but the latest research shows private interests continued to funnel money to oil, gas, and coal companies, which have used it to expand their operations.

Eight in 10 of the world’s most eminent climate scientists now foresee at least 2.5°C of global heating, according to the results of a Guardian survey published last week—an outcome expected to lead to devastating consequences for civilization.

Researchers for the banking on climate chaos report, now in its 15th edition, analyzed the world’s top 60 banks’ underwriting and lending to more than 4,200 fossil fuel firms and companies causing the degradation of the Amazon and Arctic.

Those banks, they found, gave $6.9 trillion in financing to oil, coal and gas companies, nearly half of which—$3.3 trillion—went towards fossil fuel expansion. Even in 2023, two years after many large banks vowed to work towards lowering emissions as part of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, bank finance for fossil fuel companies was $705 billion, with $347 billion going towards expansion, the report says.

US banks were the biggest financiers of the fossil fuel industry, contributing 30 percent of the total $705 billion provided in 2023, the report found. JP Morgan Chase gave the most of any bank in the world, providing $40.8 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2023, while Bank of America came in third. The world’s second biggest financier of fossil fuels was the Japanese bank Mizuho, which provided $37.1 billion.

London-based Barclays was Europe’s biggest fossil fuel financier, with $24.2 billion, followed by Spain’s Santander at $14.5 billion and Germany’s Deutsche Bank with $13.4 billion. Overall, European banks stumped up just over a quarter of the total fossil fuel financing in 2023, according to the report.

Tom BK Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which co-authored the study, said: “Financiers and investors of fossil fuels continue to light the flame of the climate crisis. Paired with generations of colonialism, the fossil fuel industry and banking institutions’ investment in false solutions create unlivable conditions for all living relatives and humanity on Mother Earth.

“As Indigenous peoples, we remain on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe, and the fossil fuel industry targets our lands and territories as sacrifice zones to continue their extraction. Capitalism and its extraction-based economy will only perpetuate more harm and destruction against our Mother Earth and it must come to an end.”

Critics of the report said its methodology, which relied on investigating deals reported by financial market data companies such as Bloomberg and Refinitiv, meant researchers did not have a detailed view of what was being financed, and by whom.

Specifically, syndicated loans, bond issues, and underwriting arrangements often involved several banks with varying levels of exposure. And financing to fossil fuel companies to fund transition technology projects could not be distinguished from financing for new oil wells, they said.

Spokespeople for Barclays, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Santander all emphasised that their organizations were supporting energy sector clients’ transitions toward more sustainable business models. Mizuho declined a request for comment.

Former President Donald Trump faced off with his onetime fixer Michael Cohen in court on Monday, and for the most part, Cohen delivered a persuasive indictment. Even though the two men have had an openly antagonistic relationship for years, Trump appeared to be very performatively ignoring his former attorney, as Cohen methodically testified about Trump’s close involvement with a scheme to cover up his alleged extra-marital affairs, including one with adult film star Stormy Daniels, in the runup to the 2016 election. 

Cohen took the stand on Monday in the criminal trial against Trump in Manhattan, accusing Trump of more than 30 counts of filing false business documents concerning the cover-up scheme. It’s the fourth trial that Trump has faced in just over a year—two defamation cases filed by writer E. Jean Carroll and a financial fraud case filed by the state of New York. Trump did not attend the first Carroll case but continually threatened to. During both other cases, he often behaved poorly in court, expressively waving his arms, talking noisily to his attorneys, laughing derisively, cursing, being disciplined by the judges, and sometimes storming out. So far in this criminal trial, Trump has been relatively subdued, often genuinely appearing to doze off, but mostly sitting with his eyes closed. During last week’s testimony, he appeared to mutter “bullshit” while Daniels testified and was scolded by the judge. 

During Monday’s testimony, Trump seemed determined to show that he did not care about Cohen’s appearance in court. When Cohen entered the courtroom, all eyes were on him making his way to the witness stand, but Trump sat petulantly looking in the other direction. For most of Cohen’s morning testimony, Trump sat silently, with his eyes closed, but occasionally looked up, rolling his eyes and whispering to his attorneys. After a morning break, Trump sat down with a large stack of papers—possibly news clippings his staff printed out for him—and began leafing through them. 

Cohen appeared tired and nervous but quickly settled into his testimony. Because of the courtroom setup, neither man could see the other. When asked to identify Trump as the defendant, Cohen had to stand in the witness box and crane his head to spot him.

Cohen’s testimony was straightforward, and he came across as meek and polite—a stark contrast to his often abrasive persona on television, his Mea Culpa podcast, or his new TikTok account. Cohen’s testimony may become more complicated when Trump’s defense team has an opportunity to cross-examine him—during the fraud trial that centered on Trump lying to banks and insurance companies about his net worth, Cohen was easily flustered and had engaged in shouting matches with Trump’s attorneys. Today, on direct examination, Cohen’s message was very specific and concise: he had helped set up payments to kill the release of negative stories about Trump, in response to the direct request of Donald Trump. 

His testimony was not restricted to the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels alone. When a former Trump Organization doorman threatened to go public with a story that Trump had a love child with a woman in the building, Cohen says Trump told him, “You handle it.” Trump was pleased, Cohen testified, when he was told that the doorman had been paid $30,000 not to go public. Cohen added that Trump gave him similar instructions when, in the weeks before the 2016 election, the campaign received word that Stormy Daniels and another woman, Karen MacDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, were possibly ready to go public with stories they had had affairs with Trump.

“Just do it,” Cohen testified Trump told him in October 2016, when they were discussing whether Trump would pay Daniels $130,000 to keep her story quiet. Cohen eventually paid the $130,000 himself but was later reimbursed by Trump, who subsequently claimed the payments were legal bills, not reimbursements.

Trump has continued to insist that Daniels and the others were trying to extort him. The prosecution must prove that Trump made these payments for political reasons. Bragg must show that the lies about the payments were done in service of a campaign finance crime; hiding the payments was explicitly planned by Trump to help his campaign. According to Cohen, when Trump was told that Daniels’ story might become public, he was livid.

“This is is a disaster, a total disaster,” Cohen testified Trump said to him. “This is really a disaster. Women are going to hate me, guys may think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”

Cohen said he also asked Trump how his wife, Melania Trump, would handle the story of an affair between Trump and Daniels. Even as he has denied making the payments, Trump has insisted that any efforts were not politically motivated but to protect his wife who had just given birth to their son Barron at the time of the affair. Cohen said Trump was dismissive of his wife.

“Don’t worry, how long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long,” Cohen said Trump told him. “He wasn’t thinking about Melania, this was all about the campaign.”

Cohen’s story about Melania elicited a rare reaction from Trump; he shook his head while Cohen spoke. 

Cohen will return to the stand tomorrow where he likely will face a brutal cross-examination from Trump’s attorneys. Cohen served a year in federal prison for lying to Congress under oath—though notably, lying on behalf of Trump, which he now openly admits he did. This makes Cohen vulnerable to being attacked for his lack of credibility as well as his demeanor. For years, before turning against Trump, Cohen was known as a snarling, vitriolic defender of his boss, who didn’t hesitate to call journalists who wrote negative stories about Trump and scream at them while making various threats. Prosecutors have attempted to head off the onslaught of attacks under cross-examination by asking previous witnesses to share their opinions of Cohen, which have almost universally been negative. Under direct examination by prosecutors, one witness, Keith Davidson, an attorney for Stormy Daniels, said Cohen was “kind of a jerk” and said he went out of his way to avoid dealing with him. 

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

“I had the hormonal urges,” said Camille Parmesan, a professor and leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”

Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.

Such decisions were extremely difficult, they said. Shobha Maharaj, an expert on the effects of the climate crisis from Trinidad and Tobago, has chosen to have only one child, a son who is now 6 years old. “Choosing to have a child was and continues to be a struggle,” she said.

Maharaj said fear of what her child’s future would hold, as well as adding another human to the planet, were part of the struggle: “When you grow up on a small island, it becomes part of you. Small islands are already being very adversely impacted, so there is this constant sense of impending loss and I just didn’t want to have to transfer that to my child.”

“However, my husband is the most family-oriented person I know,” Maharaj said. “So this was a compromise: one child, no more. Who knows, maybe my son will grow up to be someone who can help find a solution?”

The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard of climate knowledge. Of the 843 contacted, 360 replied to the question on life decisions, a high response rate.

Ninety-seven female scientists responded, with 17, including women from Brazil, Chile, Germany, India, and Kenya, saying they had chosen to have fewer children. All but 1 percent of the scientists surveyed were over 40 years old and two-thirds were over 50, reflecting the senior positions they had reached in their professions. A quarter of the respondents were women, the same proportion as the overall authorship of the IPCC reports.

The findings were in response to a question about major personal decisions taken in response to the climate crisis by scientists who know the most about it, and who expect global temperatures to soar past international targets in coming years. Seven percent of the male scientists who responded said they had had either no children or fewer than they would otherwise have had.

Most of the female scientists interviewed had made their decisions about children in past decades, when they were younger and the grave danger of global heating was less apparent. They said they had not wanted to add to the global human population that is exacting a heavy environmental toll on the planet, and some also expressed fears about the climate chaos through which a child might now have to live.

The role of rising global population in the destruction of nature and the climate crisis has been a divisive topic for decades. The publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, mentioned by several of the scientists in their survey responses, was a particular flashpoint. The debate prompted past allegations of racism, as nations with fast-rising populations are largely those in Africa and Asia. Compulsory population control is not part of today’s population-environment debate, with better educational opportunities for girls and access to contraception for women who want it seen as effective and humane policies.

Parmesan, at the CNRS ecology center in France, said: “When I was making my choice, it was very clear in the ecological community that human population growth was a problem: preserving biodiversity was absolutely dependent on stabilizing population.”

Prof Regina Rodrigues, an oceanographer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, who also chose not to have children, was influenced by the environmental destruction she saw in the fast-expanding coastal town near São Paulo where she grew up.

“The fact of the limitation of resources was really clear to me from a young age,” she said. “Then I learned about climate change and it was even more clear to me. I’m totally satisfied in teaching and passing what I know to people—it doesn’t need to be my blood. [My husband and I] don’t regret a moment. We both work on climate and we are fighting.”

Professor Lisa Schipper, an expert on climate vulnerability at the University of Bonn in Germany, chose to have one child. She said that coming from the global north, where each person’s carbon footprint is much bigger than those living in the global south, there is a responsibility to think carefully about this choice.

“It is honestly only now that I am starting to panic about my child’s future,” she said. “When she was born in 2013, I felt more optimistic about the possibility of reducing emissions. Now I feel guilty about leaving her in this world without my protection, and guilty about having played a part in the changing climate. So it’s bleak.”

An Indian scientist who chose to be anonymous decided to adopt rather than have children of her own. “There are too many children in India who do not get a fair chance and we can offer that to someone who is already born,” she said. “We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”

She said rich people who choose to have large families were “self-centered and irresponsible in current times,” citing low infant mortality and the huge gap between the emissions of the rich and the poor.

The links between environmental concerns and fertility choices are complex and research to date has found little consistency across age groups and nationalities. According to a recent review, choosing to have fewer or no children for environmental reasons could be the result of fears about the future, population levels or not having the resources needed to raise the children.

A study of Americans aged 27 to 45—younger than the IPCC scientists surveyed—found concern about the wellbeing of children in a climate-changed world was a much bigger factor than worries over the carbon footprint of their offspring. However, a focus group study in Sweden across all ages found few had changed or would change their plans for children owing to climate fears.

There has been almost no research in the global south. Many researchers noted that some women do not have the freedom or ability to choose if they have children, or how many.

On the debate on the role of population growth in environmental crises, Schipper said: “How many people we have is irrelevant if only a small percentage are doing most of the damage.” Parmesan disagreed, saying the total impact is the combination of people’s level of consumption and the total number of people: “Don’t cherrypick half of the equation and ignore the other half.”

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

The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7 trillion in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement on carbon emissions, according to research.

In 2016, after talks in Paris, 196 countries signed an agreement to limit global heating as a result of carbon emissions to at most 2°C above preindustrial levels, with an ideal limit of 1.5°C to prevent the worst impacts of a drastically changed climate.

Many countries have since promised to reduce carbon emissions, but the latest research shows private interests continued to funnel money to oil, gas, and coal companies, which have used it to expand their operations.

Eight in 10 of the world’s most eminent climate scientists now foresee at least 2.5°C of global heating, according to the results of a Guardian survey published last week—an outcome expected to lead to devastating consequences for civilization.

Researchers for the banking on climate chaos report, now in its 15th edition, analyzed the world’s top 60 banks’ underwriting and lending to more than 4,200 fossil fuel firms and companies causing the degradation of the Amazon and Arctic.

Those banks, they found, gave $6.9 trillion in financing to oil, coal and gas companies, nearly half of which—$3.3 trillion—went towards fossil fuel expansion. Even in 2023, two years after many large banks vowed to work towards lowering emissions as part of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, bank finance for fossil fuel companies was $705 billion, with $347 billion going towards expansion, the report says.

US banks were the biggest financiers of the fossil fuel industry, contributing 30 percent of the total $705 billion provided in 2023, the report found. JP Morgan Chase gave the most of any bank in the world, providing $40.8 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2023, while Bank of America came in third. The world’s second biggest financier of fossil fuels was the Japanese bank Mizuho, which provided $37.1 billion.

London-based Barclays was Europe’s biggest fossil fuel financier, with $24.2 billion, followed by Spain’s Santander at $14.5 billion and Germany’s Deutsche Bank with $13.4 billion. Overall, European banks stumped up just over a quarter of the total fossil fuel financing in 2023, according to the report.

Tom BK Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which co-authored the study, said: “Financiers and investors of fossil fuels continue to light the flame of the climate crisis. Paired with generations of colonialism, the fossil fuel industry and banking institutions’ investment in false solutions create unlivable conditions for all living relatives and humanity on Mother Earth.

“As Indigenous peoples, we remain on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe, and the fossil fuel industry targets our lands and territories as sacrifice zones to continue their extraction. Capitalism and its extraction-based economy will only perpetuate more harm and destruction against our Mother Earth and it must come to an end.”

Critics of the report said its methodology, which relied on investigating deals reported by financial market data companies such as Bloomberg and Refinitiv, meant researchers did not have a detailed view of what was being financed, and by whom.

Specifically, syndicated loans, bond issues, and underwriting arrangements often involved several banks with varying levels of exposure. And financing to fossil fuel companies to fund transition technology projects could not be distinguished from financing for new oil wells, they said.

Spokespeople for Barclays, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Santander all emphasised that their organizations were supporting energy sector clients’ transitions toward more sustainable business models. Mizuho declined a request for comment.

Former President Donald Trump faced off with his onetime fixer Michael Cohen in court on Monday, and for the most part, Cohen delivered a persuasive indictment. Even though the two men have had an openly antagonistic relationship for years, Trump appeared to be very performatively ignoring his former attorney, as Cohen methodically testified about Trump’s close involvement with a scheme to cover up his alleged extra-marital affairs, including one with adult film star Stormy Daniels, in the runup to the 2016 election. 

Cohen took the stand on Monday in the criminal trial against Trump in Manhattan, accusing Trump of more than 30 counts of filing false business documents concerning the cover-up scheme. It’s the fourth trial that Trump has faced in just over a year—two defamation cases filed by writer E. Jean Carroll and a financial fraud case filed by the state of New York. Trump did not attend the first Carroll case but continually threatened to. During both other cases, he often behaved poorly in court, expressively waving his arms, talking noisily to his attorneys, laughing derisively, cursing, being disciplined by the judges, and sometimes storming out. So far in this criminal trial, Trump has been relatively subdued, often genuinely appearing to doze off, but mostly sitting with his eyes closed. During last week’s testimony, he appeared to mutter “bullshit” while Daniels testified and was scolded by the judge. 

During Monday’s testimony, Trump seemed determined to show that he did not care about Cohen’s appearance in court. When Cohen entered the courtroom, all eyes were on him making his way to the witness stand, but Trump sat petulantly looking in the other direction. For most of Cohen’s morning testimony, Trump sat silently, with his eyes closed, but occasionally looked up, rolling his eyes and whispering to his attorneys. After a morning break, Trump sat down with a large stack of papers—possibly news clippings his staff printed out for him—and began leafing through them. 

Cohen appeared tired and nervous but quickly settled into his testimony. Because of the courtroom setup, neither man could see the other. When asked to identify Trump as the defendant, Cohen had to stand in the witness box and crane his head to spot him.

Cohen’s testimony was straightforward, and he came across as meek and polite—a stark contrast to his often abrasive persona on television, his Mea Culpa podcast, or his new TikTok account. Cohen’s testimony may become more complicated when Trump’s defense team has an opportunity to cross-examine him—during the fraud trial that centered on Trump lying to banks and insurance companies about his net worth, Cohen was easily flustered and had engaged in shouting matches with Trump’s attorneys. Today, on direct examination, Cohen’s message was very specific and concise: he had helped set up payments to kill the release of negative stories about Trump, in response to the direct request of Donald Trump. 

His testimony was not restricted to the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels alone. When a former Trump Organization doorman threatened to go public with a story that Trump had a love child with a woman in the building, Cohen says Trump told him, “You handle it.” Trump was pleased, Cohen testified, when he was told that the doorman had been paid $30,000 not to go public. Cohen added that Trump gave him similar instructions when, in the weeks before the 2016 election, the campaign received word that Stormy Daniels and another woman, Karen MacDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, were possibly ready to go public with stories they had had affairs with Trump.

“Just do it,” Cohen testified Trump told him in October 2016, when they were discussing whether Trump would pay Daniels $130,000 to keep her story quiet. Cohen eventually paid the $130,000 himself but was later reimbursed by Trump, who subsequently claimed the payments were legal bills, not reimbursements.

Trump has continued to insist that Daniels and the others were trying to extort him. The prosecution must prove that Trump made these payments for political reasons. Bragg must show that the lies about the payments were done in service of a campaign finance crime; hiding the payments was explicitly planned by Trump to help his campaign. According to Cohen, when Trump was told that Daniels’ story might become public, he was livid.

“This is is a disaster, a total disaster,” Cohen testified Trump said to him. “This is really a disaster. Women are going to hate me, guys may think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”

Cohen said he also asked Trump how his wife, Melania Trump, would handle the story of an affair between Trump and Daniels. Even as he has denied making the payments, Trump has insisted that any efforts were not politically motivated but to protect his wife who had just given birth to their son Barron at the time of the affair. Cohen said Trump was dismissive of his wife.

“Don’t worry, how long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long,” Cohen said Trump told him. “He wasn’t thinking about Melania, this was all about the campaign.”

Cohen’s story about Melania elicited a rare reaction from Trump; he shook his head while Cohen spoke. 

Cohen will return to the stand tomorrow where he likely will face a brutal cross-examination from Trump’s attorneys. Cohen served a year in federal prison for lying to Congress under oath—though notably, lying on behalf of Trump, which he now openly admits he did. This makes Cohen vulnerable to being attacked for his lack of credibility as well as his demeanor. For years, before turning against Trump, Cohen was known as a snarling, vitriolic defender of his boss, who didn’t hesitate to call journalists who wrote negative stories about Trump and scream at them while making various threats. Prosecutors have attempted to head off the onslaught of attacks under cross-examination by asking previous witnesses to share their opinions of Cohen, which have almost universally been negative. Under direct examination by prosecutors, one witness, Keith Davidson, an attorney for Stormy Daniels, said Cohen was “kind of a jerk” and said he went out of his way to avoid dealing with him. 

At a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey on Saturday, former President Donald Trump made many questionable comments.

He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “Fat Alvin.” He claimed migrant children “don’t speak English.” And he said that, if he’s re-elected, he will deport pro-Palestinian, antiwar protesters.

“When I’m president, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals, and if you come here from a violent country and try to bring jihadism, or anti-Americanism, or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you. You’ll be out of that school,” Trump said, to the crowd’s cheers. (You can watch the full comments for yourself at the 1:30:41 mark.) 

This is not the first time Trump has made similar promises: Back in the fall, he said he “will implement strong ideological screening for all immigrants,” and that those who “sympathize with jihadists” and “want to abolish Israel…[are] not coming into our country.” He added: “We aren’t bringing in anyone from Gaza.” 

Trump vows to deport pro-Palestinian college campus protesters pic.twitter.com/lEeZpdHW3l

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2024

The comments come amid Republican-led efforts to brand all anti-war protesters as supporters of terrorism and a continued push to criminalize protest. 

Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) re-upped an effort he first made last fall to deport protesters who have “endorsed or espoused the terrorist activities of Hamas” or other anti-Israel terrorist organizations. Rubio wrote a letter to the secretaries of the State and Homeland Security departments to initiate “expedited deportation proceedings” for participants in “antisemitism and pro-Hamas protests.” Earlier this month, Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Tx.) introduced what her office calls the “Hamas Supporters Have No Home Here Act,” which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow for the deportation of people “charged with any crime related to their participation in pro-terrorism or antisemitism rallies or demonstrations.” 

These efforts seem to ignore the reality on the ground: As my colleagues and I have reported, many protesters and organizers have said they condemn antisemitism and have insisted that gatherings on campuses—including some in which administrators have called the cops—have been peaceful. 

Some of those on the right condemning all anti-war protesters have gone beyond calling for enforcement. Last month, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said people “who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic” should “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.” (He later claimed he wasn’t endorsing violence.) And earlier this month, Cotton introduced a bill called the “No Bailouts for Campus Criminals Act” that would make anyone convicted of a crime in connection with a campus protest ineligible for student loan relief.

It’s hard not to see these latest measures as more bad faith attempts by the right to criminalize protest, as my colleague nia t. evans has written, and to  dismiss participants as “outside agitators.” But the real danger this time lies in the fact that the presumptive GOP nominee is also in on it—and that the latest efforts fit squarely within his extremist anti-immigrant agenda.

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

“I had the hormonal urges,” said Camille Parmesan, a professor and leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”

Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.

Such decisions were extremely difficult, they said. Shobha Maharaj, an expert on the effects of the climate crisis from Trinidad and Tobago, has chosen to have only one child, a son who is now 6 years old. “Choosing to have a child was and continues to be a struggle,” she said.

Maharaj said fear of what her child’s future would hold, as well as adding another human to the planet, were part of the struggle: “When you grow up on a small island, it becomes part of you. Small islands are already being very adversely impacted, so there is this constant sense of impending loss and I just didn’t want to have to transfer that to my child.”

“However, my husband is the most family-oriented person I know,” Maharaj said. “So this was a compromise: one child, no more. Who knows, maybe my son will grow up to be someone who can help find a solution?”

The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard of climate knowledge. Of the 843 contacted, 360 replied to the question on life decisions, a high response rate.

Ninety-seven female scientists responded, with 17, including women from Brazil, Chile, Germany, India, and Kenya, saying they had chosen to have fewer children. All but 1 percent of the scientists surveyed were over 40 years old and two-thirds were over 50, reflecting the senior positions they had reached in their professions. A quarter of the respondents were women, the same proportion as the overall authorship of the IPCC reports.

The findings were in response to a question about major personal decisions taken in response to the climate crisis by scientists who know the most about it, and who expect global temperatures to soar past international targets in coming years. Seven percent of the male scientists who responded said they had had either no children or fewer than they would otherwise have had.

Most of the female scientists interviewed had made their decisions about children in past decades, when they were younger and the grave danger of global heating was less apparent. They said they had not wanted to add to the global human population that is exacting a heavy environmental toll on the planet, and some also expressed fears about the climate chaos through which a child might now have to live.

The role of rising global population in the destruction of nature and the climate crisis has been a divisive topic for decades. The publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, mentioned by several of the scientists in their survey responses, was a particular flashpoint. The debate prompted past allegations of racism, as nations with fast-rising populations are largely those in Africa and Asia. Compulsory population control is not part of today’s population-environment debate, with better educational opportunities for girls and access to contraception for women who want it seen as effective and humane policies.

Parmesan, at the CNRS ecology center in France, said: “When I was making my choice, it was very clear in the ecological community that human population growth was a problem: preserving biodiversity was absolutely dependent on stabilizing population.”

Prof Regina Rodrigues, an oceanographer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, who also chose not to have children, was influenced by the environmental destruction she saw in the fast-expanding coastal town near São Paulo where she grew up.

“The fact of the limitation of resources was really clear to me from a young age,” she said. “Then I learned about climate change and it was even more clear to me. I’m totally satisfied in teaching and passing what I know to people—it doesn’t need to be my blood. [My husband and I] don’t regret a moment. We both work on climate and we are fighting.”

Professor Lisa Schipper, an expert on climate vulnerability at the University of Bonn in Germany, chose to have one child. She said that coming from the global north, where each person’s carbon footprint is much bigger than those living in the global south, there is a responsibility to think carefully about this choice.

“It is honestly only now that I am starting to panic about my child’s future,” she said. “When she was born in 2013, I felt more optimistic about the possibility of reducing emissions. Now I feel guilty about leaving her in this world without my protection, and guilty about having played a part in the changing climate. So it’s bleak.”

An Indian scientist who chose to be anonymous decided to adopt rather than have children of her own. “There are too many children in India who do not get a fair chance and we can offer that to someone who is already born,” she said. “We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”

She said rich people who choose to have large families were “self-centered and irresponsible in current times,” citing low infant mortality and the huge gap between the emissions of the rich and the poor.

The links between environmental concerns and fertility choices are complex and research to date has found little consistency across age groups and nationalities. According to a recent review, choosing to have fewer or no children for environmental reasons could be the result of fears about the future, population levels or not having the resources needed to raise the children.

A study of Americans aged 27 to 45—younger than the IPCC scientists surveyed—found concern about the wellbeing of children in a climate-changed world was a much bigger factor than worries over the carbon footprint of their offspring. However, a focus group study in Sweden across all ages found few had changed or would change their plans for children owing to climate fears.

There has been almost no research in the global south. Many researchers noted that some women do not have the freedom or ability to choose if they have children, or how many.

On the debate on the role of population growth in environmental crises, Schipper said: “How many people we have is irrelevant if only a small percentage are doing most of the damage.” Parmesan disagreed, saying the total impact is the combination of people’s level of consumption and the total number of people: “Don’t cherrypick half of the equation and ignore the other half.”

More than 100 million Americans have medical debt, with half owing more than $2,000; disabled people are twice as likely to have it than those without disabilities. Annually, around half a million Americans are pushed into bankruptcy by health care costs. That’s understandably made medical fundraising through websites like GoFundMe appealing, with Americans seeking a combined $10 billion from 2010 to 2018 for health expenses. But publicly asking for financial support can also be a hindrance, affecting how crowdfunders are seen and treated by the wider public—even in a country where most are acutely aware of how health insurance is tied to jobs, and how insurers can fight not to cover many procedures and medications. 

Between 2016 and 2020, only 12 percent of United States–based GoFundMe medical fundraising campaigns met their goals, according to a 2022 study. More than that, 16 percent of campaigns received no donations at all. One of the study’s authors, University of Washington professor Nora Kenworthy, has taken a dive into the landscape of US medical fundraising in a new book, Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare. 

Kenworthy talked to Mother Jones about how the US private health insurance model fuels medical debt, biases that shape who people consider worthy of donations, and what medical fundraising could look like in the future—even if Congress did listen to its constituents and pass legislation enacting a more socialized healthcare system.

How has the American private insurance model contributed to the rise of medical fundraising sites like GoFundMe? 

Crowdfunding for healthcare expenses exists in lots of parts of the world—there are places like the UK and Canada, that have better health systems than we do, where people still rely on crowdfunding for a lot of uncovered healthcare and expenses associated with [it], like child care, that are still hard to pay for. But in the United States, we have a tremendous amount of crowdfunding. That seems to really arise from either things that are not covered by insurance, are covered inadequately, out-of-pocket costs that are incredibly high, or from people who are not insured, or underinsured, when they experience illness or accidents.

We live in a very capitalistic country. How does that shape people’s feelings about their own medical debt, asking for help with it, and contributing to other people’s medical expenses? Is it a source of shame, or has it been normalized?

Some of the kinds of social norms that really are deeply rooted in the United States both push people towards crowdfunding and also make it a really difficult thing for people who most need it to use successfully. We have a very extreme idea of individualism, like, “If you can’t fix it, you’re kind of on your own.” Or that the person with the most merit should win out, even when a lot of the ways that we measure merit are very much linked to privilege and racial identity and class identity and things like that. I write about the way that all these play out in the marketplace of crowdfunding, and get projected onto people’s crowdfunding campaigns.

Feelings of shame, particularly about having to start a campaign for yourself,  are exceedingly common. In interviews, I’ve also talked with people about the very acute shame that they felt in terms of having to ask for help. On the other hand, starting campaigns for other people is seen as less shameful. If someone starts a campaign for you, then that taps more into this idea of wanting to help each other, and we are also a very charitable society. That is also a result of our very capitalist and neoliberal systems: we rely a lot on each other in order to meet basic needs because so many of us are made vulnerable by these economic systems.

As you note in your book, white people’s medical campaigns tend to go viral more often than people of color’s. Can you speak to that? 

It’s important to say that the top level of racism that’s operating here is really structural racism, and the racial wealth gap, which is enormous in the United States. The way that that comes into play is that campaigns started by or on behalf of people of color, but particularly Black people, tend to do less well than campaigns for other people. There’s also an interpersonal racism and racial bias element that is playing out here, particularly with campaigns that go viral or get lots of exposure. That’s the kind of internalized biases and overt racism that we might bring to the way that we regard and read and look at campaigns that can translate as people viewing campaigns with more suspicion, more tendency to think about them as fraudulent, or more likely to blame the person who’s in need.

We see that especially with viral campaigns. I did a research project with some amazing researchers, Aaron Davis and Shauna Elbers Carlisle. What we looked at the top most viral medical campaigns in GoFundMe’s history, and so that was about 900 campaigns that had raised over $100,000. In that group of 900, we found only five were on behalf of Black women, and of those five, two had been started by white people. That, to us, speaks to these incredibly huge disparities that are happening at that more viral level of campaigns, and how people’s campaigns are being treated very differently by the crowd.

Genetics, environmental exposure, and poverty can all contribute to the development of chronic health conditions. Yet, it can be harder to fundraise for conditions where some people blame the patient, like those who have Type II Diabetes. How does that shape crowdfunding efforts?

The really large structural factors—the neighborhood you live in, or how much money you have, or the air around you—shape the the likelihood of your becoming ill over your lifetime. Particularly when it comes to chronic health conditions, whether that’s diabetes, or congestive heart disease, or cancer; these chronic conditions are very much shaped by big factors that are out of our control. When we’re crowdfunding, we’re often looking for the solvable problem, right? For an individual, [that means] “If I can just give you this one thing, then you’ll be okay.” That’s really hard to deal with in chronic conditions.

I talked to a lot of people with diabetes, both Type I and Type II, who are reliant on insulin to survive. It’s really hard to crowdfund for insulin every month. Even when we know that the cost of insulin is absurdly high, and we understand that people need it, and if they don’t get it, they’re truly not going to survive. It’s really hard for people to find ways to use crowdfunding to solve those kinds of ongoing chronic issues. People talk to me about exactly what you’re describing: feeling blamed for their conditions, and feeling like they’re being judged by the crowd for what has happened to them. We see crowdfunding reinforcing and amplifying, and almost kind of fueling, these individual-level judgments of who’s deserving and who’s not. 

Legislation like Medicare for All could reduce further medical debt—but would it get rid of the need for medical fundraising? Where could we still see it?

What we think of as a universal health coverage system not only reduces future medical debt, but could also reduce the amount that people have to pay for certain things like insulin. A more universal system can protect people better in those periods of vulnerability. But we know that illness, particularly acute or severe illness episodes, requires lots of different kinds of social support. There are things that even very well-funded universal health systems do not cover, whether that’s experimental treatments, childcare, or perhaps specialized foods that you might be forced to take. I don’t think we should think of all crowdfunding as bad. It has the potential to meet some important needs that fall outside of formal systems.

At the same time, I think we need to remain aware of the ways that crowdfunding in its current form in the US is actually undermining the efforts that are being made to move towards more universal healthcare systems, because it’s reinforcing these ideas that not everyone deserves the same thing. That we’re all individuals, and we’re on our own when we get sick, or the idea that a marketplace mentality can be the best option for fixing these kinds of societal challenges.

All of those ideas really run completely counter to the moral ideas that undergird a more universal medical coverage system. Medicare for All is based on the idea that when people are sick, they deserve help, regardless of how good a person they are, what the color of their skin is, or how much they make. It’s the idea that we have a safety net that actually catches everyone. And that idea is just not there in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is really kind of undermining our commitment to some of these more universal ways of supporting each other.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.