This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
As a teenager growing up in Nigeria, Helen Onyeaka was obsessed with microorganisms. The tiny lifeforms, which include bacteria and yeast, can be grown quickly and in huge quantities. Onyeaka wondered if that abundance could be harnessed to feed people in conflict zones where children were suffering from malnutrition, their distended stomachs a clear sign of protein deficiency. “I used to dream microbes as food,” she recently recalled.
Today, Onyeaka is an industrial microbiologist and a deputy director of the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action, at the University of Birmingham in the UK. In her lab, she is testing her decades-old hypothesis, trying to identify microorganisms that could one day serve as an alternative protein source while using a fraction of the land, water, and industrial fertilizer needed to support traditional crops and livestock.
She’s not the only person studying what are sometimes called single-cell proteins or edible microorganisms. While human diets have long included relatively small quantities of microbes—think of the live bacteria in yogurt, or the oven-killed yeast in bread—researchers at universities and dozens of startups across the globe are now investigating whether some microbes could serve as a caloric substitute for a wide range of foods and ingredients, including eggs, milk, meat, and flour.
Some products have already been cleared for sale in the US. And, late last year a Finnish company called Solar Foods completed requirements, outlined by the Food and Drug Administration, that allow the company to sell a powdery protein made of pasteurized bacteria.
Edible microbes face considerable hurdles to going mainstream, however. Would-be producers need to ensure that their organisms are safe to eat in large quantities and amenable to mass production. And ideally, any new product should look, feel, and taste as good as the food it replaces—and be able to overcome any skepticism from consumers uncertain about using bacteria in their kitchen.
For now, few edible microbes are ready for primetime, according to Onyeaka and other experts. Still, said Onyeaka, “the potential is there.”
According to a report from the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for alternative proteins, at least 80 companies are focused on producing food from yeast, bacteria, fungi, certain strains of algae, and other microorganisms. Some products are already on the market, wrote Adam Leman, a GFI scientist. In an email to Undark, he pointed to Quorn, a meat substitute made from fungal cells that was launched in 1985.
Over the past decade, a boomlet of new companies has emerged. Among them is Solar Foods. Prior to co-founding the company in 2017, CEO Pasi Vainikka worked for a government-owned research center, where he oversaw the largest renewable energy program in Finland. Agriculture is responsible for a large portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, said Vainikka. Cow burps and deforestation are particularly problematic.
One solution, Vainikka continued, is to replace livestock with an organism that doesn’t produce much greenhouse gas or require fertile land. His company selected a bacterium from nature that doesn’t eat sugar or perform photosynthesis. Instead, it gets its energy from hydrogen. At the company’s factory in Finland, carbon dioxide is captured from the surrounding air. Electricity is used to split water molecules, freeing up hydrogen atoms. The microbes multiply in a fermentation machine as they consume the hydrogen, the carbon dioxide, and a few additional nutrients, such as calcium and phosphorous. The microbes multiply as they consume the hydrogen, the carbon dioxide, and a few additional nutrients, such as calcium and phosphorous.
Eventually, the bacteria are removed from the fermenter, pasteurized, and dried. The final product—dubbed Solein—is about 75 percent protein, has a yellow hue, and tastes a bit like mushrooms. Solein has been used in restaurants in Singapore, said Vainikka, including as a milk substitute in ice cream. The company recently filed paperwork with US regulators saying that the ingredients are generally recognized as safe, and according to Vainikka, the goal is to introduce Solein as an ingredient in packaged goods at some point in 2025.
In her UK lab, Onyeaka is growing Chlorella vulgaris, a green single-celled algae about 2 to 10 microns in diameter—roughly the width of a strand of spider silk. She and a graduate student feed the algae different nutrients to influence its protein content. The end goal, said Onyeaka, is to grow nutritious algae in quantities large enough to be used as flour by the baking industry. “At the end of the work, we’re going to be making green bread, green cakes—so watch out,” she said with a laugh.
Onyeaka readily admits her Chlorella has a long way to go. Last November, she co-authored a review article noting the significant challenges along that path—including high production costs and the organism’s capacity to accumulate heavy metals from the surrounding environment. She and her team will eventually have to ensure that the microbe is safe for human consumption by testing it for potential toxins and allergens, among other risks.
Another issue highlighted in the review paper: Chlorella doesn’t taste very good. (The researchers describe “an earthy, strong flavor and smell” that is “quite unpleasant” to some consumers.) The product may need to be blended with other strong-flavored ingredients, the paper suggests, or perhaps researchers might look for new, more mild strains.
Some people are finding ways to make microbes delicious. Chef Greg Baxtrom was initially approached to see if he’d be interested in serving a meal featuring Solein at his Brooklyn restaurant, Olmsted. He didn’t want to force the new product onto the menu, he said, but was curious to see if he might be able to use the protein-rich powder to create egg- or dairy-free versions of some of the restaurant’s classic dishes.
He couldn’t get the Solein to work as an egg substitute in his carrot crepe. But he could get it to replace the crepe’s butter and milk. And Solein did work as an egg substitute in a beer batter for squash rings. Ultimately, he found it worked particularly well as a milk substitute in spaetzle, a German noodle traditionally made from milk, flour, and eggs.
Baxtrom said he planned to experiment with the product a bit more in January. “I’m not going to try to force it, but if it works, then great,” he said. “I can accommodate more allergies.”
Vainikka said that he frequently consumes Solein in dishes served at the small restaurant located within Solar Foods’ headquarters. In the long run, he said, he sees the business as “an organism company with a selection of different strains for different purposes.” A person might balk at glass of yellow milk made from Solein, he pointed out, but perhaps there’s a white microbe that would be less visually objectionable. The company could also supply microbes with different tastes, textures, and nutritional profiles, said Vainikka.
For her part, Onyeaka is looking beyond academia, communicating with companies that share her interest in Chlorella. Using advanced molecular tools, one Chinese company has learned that the typically green microbe can change colors, depending on what it’s fed, she said.
As he ran for a second term, President Donald Trump promised to impose sweeping tariffs. On Saturday, he pressed the launch button. In three executive orders, Trump placed 25 percent tariffs onalmost all imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on goods from China. In response, Canada announced its own 25 percent tariff on more than $100 billion in American goods. Mexico and China similarly promised retaliation.
The trade war that mostdismissed as too economically disastrous to actually undertake is nowhere. In a lesson many analysts and commentators fail to learn over and over, it is wise to take Trump both seriously and literally.
With the economies of the US and its two neighbors tightly intertwined, imposing tariffs will not just raise prices but also disrupt manufacturing. According to economist Paul Krugman, the tariffs represent the end of an integrated North American manufacturing hub that mutually benefited all three nations. “Now we have a US president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on—that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it,” Krugman wrote on his Substack. “And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate—that is, dis-integrate—reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.”
Immediate effects loom. The National Homebuilder Association warned Trump that the tariffs will raise building costs, worsening the nation’s housing crisis by slowing construction and pushing home prices upward. Automobile costs, already high, will likely rise, as auto parts cross both the northern and southern border multiple times in the process of manufacturing American cars.
Economically, a trade war seemed like such a bad idea that financial institutions and individuals didn’t really believe it would happen. Less than two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs put the likelihood of Trump’s promised tariffs at 20 percent. The staunchly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board on Friday called the tariffs “The Dumbest Trade War in History.”
Canada quickly announced a retaliatory 25 percent tariffs on US goods, with an emphasis on products from Republican-controlled states, possibly a savvy way to apply pressure on Trump. Among those goods now taxed at 25 percent are Florida orange juice, Tennessee whiskey, and Kentucky peanut butter, according to the New York Times, as well as clothing, shoes, furniture, appliances. Canada is coordinating its strategy with Mexico, according to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trump has said he would impose further tariffs if Canada and Mexico retaliate, raising the possibility that these are merely the opening shots in a new trade war.
While Trump long promised tariffs on China, it’s noteworthy thaton Saturday, he saved his highest tariffs for America’s closest trading partners, neighbors, and allies. China facesonly a 10 percent tariff so far. China promised retaliation as well.
Voter discontent over inflation was one of Trump’s biggest political advantages in the 2024 election, but the pain from his tariffs is likely to be passed on to consumers. (Trump admitted in a social media post on Sunday that Americans will feel pain from his tariffs and that it “will be worth the price that must be paid.”) Perhaps most immediately, economists warn, food costs are likely to rise. The price of cars, electronics, including cell phones, and clothing will also go up if the tariffs remain in place.
If you searched “transgender” on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website on January 19—the day before President Donald Trump took office—you’d find helpful information about HIV, gender-affirming resources, and the high rate of diabetes among the LGBTQ+ community.
If you make the same web query on the CDC.gov now, those webpages bring you an error message: “The page you’re looking for was not found.”
Information about trans people, gender identity, and disease prevention was edited or removed from the CDC’s website by Friday, according to the Washington Post. The removals coincided with the CDC and other government agencies—the Departments of Transportation and Energy—instructing employees last week to remove their pronouns from email signatures. An employee of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also told Mother Jones they were told verbally to remove their pronouns.
Both efforts were spurred by an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office, in which he declared, “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” The memo included several directives for government agencies, including instructions for them to cease issuing passports with the “X” gender-marker, “to remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology,” and to “take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.”
These changes won’t just make it harder for individuals to seek information they can use in their personal lives, but they may also stifle research that helps identify links between age, race, gender, socioeconomic status and public health risks. For example, data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a national survey conducted every two years (I personally remember taking it in school) among high school students, is currently not available on the CDC site. Data from that survey previously has been used to understand children’s’ use of weapons and drugs, as well as suicidality.
In the first two weeks of his second presidential term, Trump has also directed his attorney general to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” According to the executive order, reported by my colleague Madison Pauly, possible offenses include an educator calling a student by their trans name and pronouns or allowing a student to use the restroom aligned with their gender identity. Yet another executive order instructs federal agencies to start taking steps to eliminate gender-affirming treatments for individuals up to the age of 19.
The Trump Administration’s obsession with this issue is disproportionate to the number of Americans and children who identify as non-binary or seek gender-affirming healthcare. Fewer than 2 percent of adults in the US say their gender is different from their assigned sex at birth, according to Pew Research Center. Moreover, a recent survey of 5.1 million kids in JAMA-pediatrics found that only 0.017 percent of youth were coded as trans and received puberty blockers, while 0.037 percent were trans and accessed hormone therapy.
Mackenson Remy didn’t plan to bypass security when he drove into the parking lot of a factory in Greeley, Colorado. He’d never been there before. All he knew was this place had jobs…lots of jobs.
Remy is originally from Haiti, and in 2023, he’d been making TikTok videos about job openings in the area for his few followers, mostly other Haitians.
What Remy didn’t know was that he had stumbled onto a meatpacking plant owned by the largest meat producer in the world, JBS. The video he made outside the facility went viral, and hundreds of Haitians moved for jobs at the plant.
But less than a year later, Remy—and JBS—were accused of human trafficking and exploitation by the union representing workers at the plant.
“This is America. I was hoping America to be better than back home,” says Tchelly Moise, a Haitian immigrant and union rep. “Someone needs to be held accountable for this, because this is not okay anywhere.”
This week on Reveal, reporter Ted Genoways with the Food & Environment Reporting Network looks into JBS’ long reliance on immigrant labor for this work—and its track record of not treating those workers well. The difference this time is those same workers are now targets of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
President Donald Trumpannounced punitive tariffs Saturday on American allies and rivals—25 percent on imported goods from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent on Chinese imports in addition to any preexisting tariffs—a move the Wall Street Journal‘s conservative editorial board deemed “the dumbest trade war in history.” Energy products from Canada were assigned a lower duty of 10 percent. We don’t yet know exactly how the targeted countries will respond, but the expert consensus is that the tariffs will drive up prices for American companies and, in turn, consumers.
That’s particularly unwelcome news for the Floridians and North Carolinians whose homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Milton and Helena, the thousands of Los Angelenos who lost everything in the recent fires, and any American community, now or in the near future, that is compelled to rebuild in the face of ever more frequent and destructive climate-change-driven disasters.
Trump’s tariffs will “fan the flames of the already challenging environment that Californians face in recovering from the LA fires,” says Ann Harrison, an economist at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who specializes in international trade. “A tariff of 25 percent levied on foreign imports would likely be paid by domestic California businesses and residents consuming lumber, food, cement, plastics, and other necessities. If the tariffs are passed through to importers of these goods, then rebuilding homes could be much more expensive.”
Consider the vulnerabilities: In 2022, according to visual data compiled by the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), Canada was the source of almost half of the roughly $35 billion worth of wood products imported into the United States, with China second.
The US imported nearly $3 billion worth of plastic building materials in 2022. Here’s where they came from:
What about the $2.3 billion worth of cement America imports? Turkey is the biggest source, but the runners up are Canada and Mexico.
It goes on like this. The majority of imported gravel and crushed stone is from Canada and Mexico. Nearly a quarter of imported bricks are supplied by China and Canada. The United States took in $43.2 billion worth of steel in 2022, and about 37 percent came from the three countries Trump is targeting.
As the Guardian‘s Nina Lakhani reported a few days ago, Trump’s deportation orders are already posingproblems for communities stricken by fires and floods. Clearing toxic debris in a disaster’s wake is difficult and dangerous work, and with unemployment hovering around 4 percent, it’s hard to find people willing to do it. For better or worse, America dependson immigrants, often undocumented, for work that is low-paid and unpleasant, albeit essential.
At the best of times, the construction industry depends heavily on immigrants, from grunt laborers to contractors and skilled tradespeople, including carpenters electricians, landscapers, masons, plumbers, roofers, tilers, and welders. In some states, including California and Florida, an estimated 40 percent of construction industry workers are immigrants. Some have green cards, legal work permits, or, until last week, temporary deportation protections—which President Biden granted but Trump has since rejected. Others are in the United States illegally and are therefore at the mercy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
As the administration pursues its deportation agenda, which experts predict will be economically destructive, even legal immigrants will be reticent to make themselves vulnerable to getting swept up in ICE raids. Any worker fearful of la migra may well choose to avoid disaster recovery zones, lest those areas prove too tempting a target for immigration enforcement.
Any labor shortages that result from deportations, or the fear of deportation, will inevitably slow the pace of recovery and drive up the costs. The double-whammy of deportations and tariffs could prove devastating for recovery efforts. “Trump’s tariffs are insane, not to put it into too-technical language. And the timing couldn’t be worse,” says Joseph Stiglitz, a prominent economist at Columbia University who was awarded the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for economics.
“Combined with labor shortages that may arise from his immigration policies, they are even worse. And with the climate-related disasters, such as the wildfires in LA, there will be an even greater need both for construction workers and materials. Like it or not, we are heavily dependent on both from outside our borders, and changing that can’t occur overnight.”
This article was updated with details of Saturday’s White House announcement.
In what is believed to be the first criminal case of its kind in the post–Roe v. Wade era, a New York-based telemedicine provider has been indicted in Louisiana—which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country—for supplying the abortion pill to a teenage patient in that state.
The Louisiana indictment against Dr. Margaret “Maggie” Carpenter signals a major escalation in legal challenges by red states against telemedicine providers in blue states who are dispensing abortion drugs under shield laws meant to protect them from prosecution. As my Mother Jones colleagues have reported, those shield laws—which are on the books in 22 states and the District of Columbia—are a major reason why the number of abortions has continued to rise despite the overturn of Roe in June 2022.
The Louisiana case involves a pregnant minor whose mother allegedly purchased abortion medications from Carpenter’s business, Nightingale Medical PC, in April 2024, The Advocate reported. In addition to Carpenter, a grand jury in West Baton Rouge Parish also indicted the mother for allegedly coercing her to take the medicine to terminate the pregnancy. The felony charge against the two women carries a sentence of up to five years in prison and up to $50,000 in fines, WWNO reported.
The indictment comes as the anti-abortion movement has ramped up attacks on the abortion pill on multiple fronts—from pressuring the new Trump administration to reconsider the safety of mifepristone and use the Comstock Act to institute a federal abortion ban, to filing lawsuits challenging the FDA’s regulation of the drug, to introducing a flurry of new bills targeting medication abortion in numerous states. These include Louisiana, which last year became the first state to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs commonly used in medication abortions, as “controlled dangerous substances.” As my colleague Julianne McShane reported:
To say that this designation—the same one applied to opioids and other addictive drugs—is without scientific or medical merit is an understatement. More than 100 studies have found that mifepristone and misoprostol offer a safe and effective way to terminate a pregnancy.
Abortion foes have also begun to challenge the shield laws that blue states have been enacting to protect telemedicine abortion providers operating from within their borders. In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought a civil suit accusing the same New York doctor—Carpenter—of prescribing abortion pills to a 20-year-old woman near Dallas. But the Texas case doesn’t involve criminal charges; instead, Paxton is seeking an injunction against Carpenter, $100,000 in civil penalties for each violation of Texas law, and legal costs.
Officials in New York, which enacted its abortion shield law in 2023, immediately criticized today’s indictment. “This cowardly attempt out of Louisiana to weaponize the law against out-of-state providers is unjust and un-American,” New York Attorney General Leticia James said in a statement. Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul promised to “never back down from this fight…. We will remain a safe harbor.”
But Louisiana prosecutors defended the charges, which were brought under a 2022 statute that makes it a crime to“knowingly [cause] an abortion to occur by means of delivering, dispensing, distributing, or providing a pregnant woman with an abortion-inducing drug.” Tony Clayton, district attorney of an area that includes West Baton Rouge Parish, told The Advocate, “The daughter wanted the pregnancy and had a reveal party planned.”
“The allegations in this case have nothing to do with reproductive health care,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill echoed in a statement. “This is about coercion. This is about forcing somebody to have an abortion who didn’t want one.”
Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban, which doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest, targets physicians in the state with up to 15 years in prison, $200,000 in fines and the loss of their medical licenses. Last year’s law reclassifying abortion medications as controlled substances carries penalties of up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Both laws specifically exempt pregnant women.
This story has been updated to correct Carpenter’s name.
In August 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law that allowed the development of state-level programs to help disabled people live outside institutions like nursing homes. Known as Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) waivers, the programs—now in their fourth decade—are funded by Medicaid and run by each individual state. With potential cuts to Medicaid a priority for the Trump administration, the future of HCBS remains in limbo. Donald Trump’s recently confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to directly answer questions about whether he’d fall in line with attacks fielded by Republican politicians and Project 2025 by offering a recommendation to cut Medicaid.
Reagan couldn’t be described as an advocate for disabled people’s rights—just over a year into his first term, 130,500 people had already been dropped from Social Security Disability Insurance, then and now a lifeline for millions. Like Donald Trump, Reagan wanted to slash government spending at the expense of Americans’ wellbeing. But while the politics of the time forced Reagan’s GOP to field a compromise with some benefits for disabled people—which yielded HCBS—the Trump White House hopes to gut even that, leaving hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, without the option of community care.
Today, roughly 4.5 million people use Medicaid-funded HCBS as an alternative to institutionalization; the waivers help pay for home healthcare workers, durable medical equipment, career coaching, case management and other services. No one claims that the program is perfect—but most criticism has come on the basis of shortfalls, not overspending. More than half a million disabled people remain on waitlists for HCBS, often waiting years for a waiver, and inconsistent requirements across states can make the process confusing and challenging.
“It’s a bit of a mix between racism and ableism that believes that certain types of people are undeserving of assistance,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Center for American Progress’ disability justice initiatives, of ongoing attacks on Medicaid.
Ives-Rublee said that Project 2025 includes a push to end Medicaid exception waivers—programs that allow states to modify and add to standard Medicaid services, which “specifically implies HCBS funding”—on the grounds that the government is spending too much money on them.
About half of disabled children in the United States currently rely on Medicaid, says Jenny McLelland, director of HCBS policy for Little Lobbyists, an organization that advocates for kids with complex health needs. That includes McLelland’s son James, who spent the first year of his life in an institution; the private insurance McLelland’s family then had, like many plans, did not cover long-term home-based care. Only a Medicaid waiver allowed him to go home.
McLelland’s HCBS waiver “pays for a nurse who manages his ventilator and breathing while he’s asleep or while we are away from the house to work,” she said. “Medicaid home and community-based services make it possible for my son to have an integrated, joyful life,” taking part in school theater and bringing home straight-A grades.
Advocates are worried about the fate of HCBS, which would be relatively easy for states to abandon under the new administration—and which helps millions of people stay out of hospitals, nursing homes, and group homes, which McLelland says frequently deliver “lower-quality care, often at a higher cost.”
The GOP has put forth several proposals promoting Medicaid per-capita spending, which would change current spending practices by limiting funds through a formula that doesn’t take into consideration the needs of disabled people. Nicole Jorwic, Caring Across Generations‘ chief of advocacy and campaigns, said that what such changes “would ultimately do is cut the amount of money that the federal government is sending to states per person…just on the consumer price index.”
Changes to Medicaid per-capita spending, Jorwic says, “means waiting lists would grow” and that “the types of services being offered are going to narrow” as funding is reduced or withdrawn. Given that federal Medicaid funds already make up, on average, one-third of state budgets, Jorwic believes that state governments coughing up the extra cost “is never going to happen.” She notes that health funding is a popular target even in blue states like Maryland, where a $3 billion state funding shortfall has put hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for its human services department funds—where Medicaid is housed—on the chopping block.
Another attack on Medicaid incorporated into Project 2025 has involved lifetime caps on the support of people on Medicaid—caps that many disabled people may hit at a young age. “A state will have to take up the rest of that spending,” said Ives-Rublee, “or they will reduce the coverage of an individual, either by saying we won’t cover these services or by saying we won’t cover you at all.”
McLelland is also concerned that attacks on the Affordable Care Act could lead to further damage: disabled people who qualify for Medicaid only due to ACA expansions could be kicked off HCBS as a result. There’s “no ethical way” to deprive people of Medicaid, McLelland says.
An ulterior motivation for Republicans’ push to cut Medicaid, Jorwic says, is the Trump administration’s need to cut costs in order to finance an extension—or expansion—of Trump’s first-term tax cuts for the richest Americans and corporations, which Jorwic finds “even more upsetting and ableist.”
Ives-Rublee also foresees bleak outcomes if HCBS waivers are defunded or dropped: “That’s going to result in more people either ending up in institutions or ending up dead.”
Three days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared an early accomplishment: the arrest, and deportation, of hundreds of immigrants she alleged were convicted of crimes. “We’re getting the bad, hard criminals out,” Trump told reporters the next day.
This has been the refrain from all corners of the administration. On multiple TV appearances, Trump’s faithful border czar Tom Homan has described US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations taking place across the country as precisely orchestrated roundups of criminals. “I wouldn’t call them raids,” Homan told CNN’s Dana Bash. “They’re targeted enforcement operations. They know exactly who they’re looking for.”
So far, the numbers tell a different story.
As NBC News first reported, almost half of the roughly 1,200 arrests ICE conducted on Sunday didn’t fall under “criminal arrests.” Instead, agents targeted hundreds of undocumented immigrants who had committed nonviolent crimes or had crossed the border in violation of immigration laws, which is a civil, not criminal, offense. And it didn’t take long for news to surface of US citizens getting caught in the dragnet and immigrants facing deportation as a result of routine traffic stops.
“They are arresting more people today than last year, I believe them when they say that,” says Jason Houser, who served as chief of staff for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Biden presidency. “But nobody’s showing me that there are more convicted criminals. Nobody’s showing me that there are more removable people coming into custody. Nowhere in the first 12 days have you seen one tangible step to fix the system.”
In an interview with Mother Jones on Thursday, Houser slammed the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and explained why it would do little to improve public safety.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
From what you’ve observed so far, has there been anything unprecedented about the scale or scope of these ICE operations compared to the previous administration? Or do they strike you as business as usual?
The media bluster. The steps I’ve seen over the first 12 days, ICE operations are just doing some collateral arrests to jack up the arrest number because that seems to be the narrative that the White House wants to give. They’re [saying] mass deportation has begun and here’s these arrests—and the media has lost its mind [with] these numbers that Trump keeps giving them. But flashy media hits and Kristi Noem in the Bronx doesn’t do anything.
What I see operationally is ICE staff being pulled from doing arrests in their home areas and condensed in these large cities for larger-scale operations for public media campaigns. That doesn’t help ICE do its work day to day. Strategically, I’ve seen probably the most anti-law enforcement steps, anti-public safety threats of any president.
How so?
We saw them do away with the [CHNV parole] pathway program at the border. That’s a law enforcement program that pre-vets people through law enforcement, national security data when they enter the asylum process. That’s more public safety. Now those people are going to go back to the border and potentially come illegally putting more pressure on border patrol.
And they’ve redeployed ATF, FBI, DOJ to not do national security and public safety, but to go out and arrest non-criminal migrants. That’s less public safety.
They also froze all the grants that support state and local law enforcement to counter drugs—homeland security grants, the things that fund rural law enforcement. How the hell is any of this helping to make us more safe?
Both the Obama administration, in its later days, and the Biden administration had enforcement priority policies in place instructing ICE to focus on public safety threats and immigrants with serious criminal convictions. What do we know about the Biden presidency’s record on detention and deportation of immigrants with criminal records?
During Biden, criminally convicted individuals coming to ICE for removal were gone. So the more volume of convicted serious, violent offenses that I have in custody the more likely I am to remove them. But ICE only has 11 planes that hold 135 seats, and each country allows for X number of flights per month. Some of them have restrictions. Based on that calculus, you bring people into custody that are removable: they have final orders and they are from a country that takes removals. And let’s make sure the biggest public safety threats are on those seats. I don’t know what the administration is doing now, because they’re not talking about that piece. What they’re talking about is the arrest piece. They’re ranking up the volume of potential arrests or bookings.
The Washington Post reported that ICE officials have been instructed to establish daily arrest quotas—between 1,200 and 1,500 in total, or 75 per field office. What effect do you expect that to have on the agency’s work and staff morale?
The men and women that I was proud to work with are used to being the political football. That’s the space this has become. No one’s looking for the real answers. They’re just looking for a quick political solution. It’s going to make ICE take more people into custody and take in fewer public safety threats. And potentially doing it just for show because a lot of them don’t have final orders [of removal] or are from countries we don’t have removal flights to. You’re just going to be taking up a lot of their time with stuff that is not going to keep us more safe.
You are making ICE’s job harder and they have the hardest job in law enforcement. That’s the part where I will defend them. ICE’s staff wants to go after violent criminals. There are people that are taking advantage of our system that they need to go get and that’s who they should be focused on.
Border czar Tom Homan often talks about how sanctuary cities obstruct ICE’s work and force agents to conduct operations in apartment buildings or other areas instead of jails, therefore causing more “collateral arrests.” What do you make of that assertion?
People keep calling Tom Homan the “border czar.” What the hell does he have to do with the border? He is a deportation coordinator.
There’s a middle path here that is getting lost. ICE can still go arrest people in sanctuary cities and do at-large arrests. They’re just not getting the information sharing from the law enforcement agency in that sanctuary area. And that does make ICE’s work harder. It takes up their resources when they could be going after other things. I think it’s a political back-and-forth right now.
On Wednesday, President Trump signed the Laken Riley Act into law. It requires mandatory detention for undocumented immigrants merely accused of theft, shoplifting, and other related crimes. What do you anticipate the impact to be on ICE’s work?
Remember, ICE only has so many beds. In Rhode Island, for example, they have 980 ICE beds. How do you want to use them? Do you want to have Providence call and say, “Hey, I have a convicted rapist with a final order. Do you want to tell me to get him and put him in that bed?” Or do you want ICE going out and there’s a guy that’s been checking in for 10 years, had a petty theft offense a decade ago, and now ICE has to mandatorily put him in that bed? So convicted rapist not in bed; a theft offender from 10 years ago is in a bed. And if I have to bring in people that I can’t remove [from countries that don’t take deportees back, for example], somebody’s going to have to come out of ICE custody. It’s upside down.
All it’s going to do now is exacerbate DHS resources where they’re going to have to cut things like transportation security, potentially reprogram money from the border, turn off cyber security activity.
President Trump also said that he would be sending 30,000 of the “worst criminal illegal aliens” to Guantanamo Bay. What did you make of that?
The operationalization of that is farcical. We have a Navy base that was built in the 60s and that’s dilapidated and we’re now going to ferry 30,000 migrants there to live in soft-sided tents? We’re going to remove them to where? Who’s going to house them? Who’s going to feed them? Who’s going to give them sanitation? And when a hurricane hits, who’s going to secure them? Where’s the staff going to live? What status do they have? This is drool bait for people who want to be punitive to migrants. You’re politicizing ICE’s work.
We didn’t demystify in the Biden years the work that ICE does that keeps people safe. We just made it kind of this thing we did and we had to keep it quiet. I think we have to show that if we’re able to go after violent offenders who are taking advantage of our immigration system, that’s going to keep an immigration system for those that really need it. With the displacement that we see across the Western Hemisphere, and the volume of people that are dealing with life-and death-situations in these countries, and the fact that we have a need for immigration into our country: we have to message this better.
What do you expect to see in the coming weeks and months as the Trump administration continues to push for more arrests and deportations?
If the view is in the near term that all they want to do is give the show of force, the punitiveness of the system, the dismantling of the immigration system, and how arrest and enforcement are going to deter people, you’re going to see more of that in different ways. Sooner or later, they’re going to go do work site raids at some chicken plants in Arkansas or meat processingplants in Kansas or Tennessee. Then they’re going to start doing a family separation, arresting the head of the household, and saying you can voluntarily remove yourself or we’re just going to remove the breadwinner of the family and we’re going to separate you. You’re going to see permutations of these ideas because they believe that that will stop encounters at the border.
I think you’re going to see an expansive use of state and local law enforcement. If they do invoke the Alien and Sedition Act, they’ll move military equipment into large cities and just have it it there as a show of force. Indicators of change are family arrests, family detention, more collateral arrests, and worksite raids.
They see everything as: Are we winning the media today? Right now their program is let’s go to Aurora [in Colorado], let’s do the road show of enforcement. When we have no more blue cities to do that in, then we’ll pull up the worksite raids. This is about a messaging campaign. They’re going to continuously show the drumbeat that they’re doing what they said they are. Some of this is not pro-law enforcement, it is not pro-public safety, it is not back the blue.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has admitted to the US Senate that he has reached at least one settlement agreement in which he was accused of misconduct or inappropriate behavior.
After the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday completed its confirmation hearing for Kennedy’s appointment to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Democrats on the committee sent Kennedy a set of follow-up questions. The list included these two queries:
Yes or no, have you ever reached a settlement agreement with an individual or organization that accused you of misconduct or inappropriate behavior?
Yes or no, have you ever agreed to or been subject to a non-disclosure agreement with any individual or organization?
Kennedy answered “yes” to each question. He did not provide any further details.
During Kennedy’s second confirmation hearing, held on Thursday by the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) raised the issue of personal misconduct. She referred to the allegation that Kennedy had once groped a babysitter. Kennedy denied the accusation. She then asked, “Are there any other instances where you have made sexual advances toward an individual without their consent?” Kennedy replied, “No.”
On Friday morning, Kennedy did not respond to a query from Mother Jones asking, “Will you disclose what those agreements were? What was the misconduct? Who were the individuals or organizations that accused you? Did this involve women who accused you of personal misconduct? Will you release anyone who has an NDA with you related to any of those settlements from that NDA?”
Katie Miller, who has served as a spokesperson for Kennedy, replied, “As a matter of policy, we don’t respond to Mother Jones.”
As of Friday morning, it was unclear whether the Democrats would press Kennedy to disclose more information about any such settlement or NDA.
This story was originally published by theGuardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Trump’s immigration crackdown could cause chaos for communities trying to rebuild after devastating wildfires and floods, as the vast majority of skilled disaster-restoration workers are immigrants, a leading expert has warned.
Republican and Democratic voters across the US are reeling from climate-fueled disasters, with thousands of homes and businesses destroyed and damaged by the ongoing fires in Los Angeles, as well as major hurricanes in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia last year.
In each place, recovery depends on restoration or resilience workers, who travel from disaster to disaster cleaning up and rebuilding American communities while facing hazards such as unstable buildings, ash and other toxins, and water-borne diseases.
“Like farm workers in the fields, immigrants are indispensable to fire, flood, and hurricane recovery in the US. There is absolutely no rebuilding without them,” said Saket Soni, director of Resilience Force, a labor organization with almost 4,000 members, who are primarily immigrant workers.
“Mass deportations would completely upend the ongoing recovery in Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina from last year’s hurricanes. It would stall the rebuilding of LA after fires…and at this point, anyone anywhere is at risk of having their home impacted by a climate disaster. So everyone needs these skilled workers.”
The disaster industry is growing in the US, as climate-fueled extreme weather events become more intense and destructive—and as rebuilding becomes more profitable.
While there is no official count, the current resilience workforce includes tens of thousands of mostly foreign-born workers from across Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as India and the Philippines, among other countries. It is a diverse mix of skilled workers that includes undocumented immigrants as well as many documented asylum seekers, settled refugees, and those with work permits through temporary protected status.
Trump’s flurry of executive orders and policy ambitions threaten to upend the entire immigration and asylum system. Expanding workplace raids and mass deportations may temporarily satisfy Trump’s anti-immigrant base, but the knock on labor shortages will likely be felt across multiple sectors including construction, food, hospitality, and disaster work.
“The deportations plan is so out of touch with the reality of the victims, who without immigrants will continue to spend months, maybe years in hotels living out of pocket. Recovery often makes the poor even poorer and getting back into your home is the key safeguard against spiraling inequality,” said Soni, who has been involved in 25 disaster-recovery efforts over the past two decades.
“We’re headed for a moment where there’ll be a reckoning between such political ploys and reality. And at some point this will become a moral question rather than a political one.”
Among the biggest obstacles facing families after a destructive fire, tornado or flood are labor shortages—and funding. Trump’s policy pledges will make both worse.
On Friday, Trump announced his desire to potentially shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during a visit to North Carolina, where rural Republican-voting communities faced some of the worst damage from Hurricane Helene—one of the most destructive and deadly storms to hit the US mainland in years. Helene was among 27 separate billion-dollar disasters to hit the US in 2024.
The estimated cost of the damage in North Carolina from Helene, which hit six states across southern Appalachia all of which voted for Trump, is almost $60 billion. Here, four months after the floods, there is much work still to do—from debris removal and mold remediation to roof replacements and geological repairs to hillsides.
Also on Friday, Trump visited Los Angeles, where more than 11,000 homes have been destroyed and the damage caused by just two of the blazes—the Palisades and Eaton fires—is now estimated at $275 billion. At least 150,000 people have been displaced, and many have applied to FEMA for help. “You don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government, you fix it yourself,” said Trump, after touring some of the fire-ravaged area.
FEMA provides emergency assistance for temporary accommodation, food and unemployment benefits, as well as reimbursing individuals and states for clean-up and rebuilding costs, which are not covered by private insurance.
“Abolishing FEMA would invite a pretty major response over the next few years because no state will absorb that amount of responsibility or spending. The states would rise up—especially the very red states like Florida, Texas, and Louisiana that this administration counts on for its constituents and where disasters happen again and again,” said Soni.
“We will need FEMA to be bigger, not smaller. Any resident who’s been through a hurricane or wildfire, whether Democrat or Republican, will agree with that. Fires aren’t making a distinction between political parties. We have Republicans in California who need FEMA just as much as the Democrats.”
On Monday, it emerged that the Trump administration had issued new quotas to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up raids and arrests, the Washington Post reported.
The expansion of workplace raids could force some restoration workers underground—as happened in 2022 after Hurricane Idalia when Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis passed draconian anti-immigrant legislation. “Immigrant workers put their tools down and left in fear, leaving homes to be rebuilt and families in limbo. That was very bad for Floridians who were depending on those workers, but the workers needed to be careful,” said Soni, speaking from North Carolina, where he was meeting homeowners desperate to repair and return to their homes.
“Even among those who are documented, many restoration workers have a tenuous foothold in America—people who are not yet citizens and are being threatened by Trump. People are scared, and yet these workers have a deep sense of vocation. There’s something sacred about working after a fire or a hurricane so that a family can come home. What is more important than that?”
The resilience workforce has grown massively since Katrina flattened New Orleans in 2005, after which the city was rebuilt by mostly undocumented Latino workers. Since then, the industry has consolidated, with private equity firms buying up small businesses, with minimal protection for workers and little regulatory oversight.
The working and living conditions can be brutal for the immigrant workers, many of whom come from countries hit hard by the climate crisis caused by planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions—of which the US is the largest historic contributor.
“We have workers from Honduras who right now are rebuilding the homes of Floridians—and are in Florida because a hurricane destroyed their home and forced them to leave. Do you know how much grace it takes to replace someone else’s roof while your own home is uninhabitable? And yet the workers persevere with grace and persistence,” said Soni, author of The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, which chronicles the story of Indians lured to the US to help rebuild New Orleans.
“Volunteer efforts in Appalachia and Los Angeles have been extraordinary, but the truth is that the scale of damage we’re seeing across the US requires a skilled, scaled workforce,” Soni said. “If you deport one generation of restoration workers, you can’t just add water and have another generation appear. It’s taken two decades to build the workforce that we have. And without them, everyone’s at risk.”
The science world is in disarray. In just the last 10 days, the Trump administration has paused external communication and most travel for staffers within the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); froze NIH grant review panels—and therefore, new funding; and instructed employees across the federal government to report their colleagues for attempting to “disguise” DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—programs, sparking confusion. International HIV/AIDS aid was also put on hold, and then reinstated, at least in part. The result, researchers say, has been a chilling effect on science, both inside and out of federal agencies.
This week, Robert F Kennedy Jr., the founder of anti-vaccine non-profit Children’s Health Defense, is up for Senate confirmation to lead HHS. To get a better sense of what his nomination and the Trump administration’s crackdown on science mean for federal researchers—and by extension, the health of all US residents—I thought it’d be helpful to hear straight from one of those scientists themselves. Agreeing to speak on the condition of anonymity, one NIH researcher described the “chaos” of the Trump administration’s first days. Here’s what they’ve seen, in their own words, below.—Jackie Flynn Mogensen
There are few places like the NIH. It’s unique because clinical care is tied in with research. Independently, the two things are great, but when you put them together, it’s something completely different. We sometimes say, “Our cells have faces”—we know who they are. It’s special to be able to take things from the patient’s bedside to the [lab] bench—and from the bench to the bedside.
Before the election, it was hard to predict what would happen. After Trump got elected and RFK Jr. was announced as the potential HHS director, there was a quote that I remember seeing—my jaw just dropped—where he had said something like, “We’re going to take a break from infectious disease research for the next few years.” And I thought, what an irresponsible thing for somebody to say who would be in charge of keeping us safe and healthy.
Infectious diseases like COVID and HIV, they don’t care what your political party is. They’re not going to wait for us to figure things out. They’re just going to keep killing people.
Last week, I got an email that said something like, “All travel is canceled. We’re awaiting further information.” And that was pretty much it. And so we’re like, Okay, does this apply to patient travel?Can patients still come to clinic today? There was essentially no information beyond that.
I got another email indicating all communication with the public had been cut off. There weren’t any instructions on what that meant either. So everyone had a different interpretation. We didn’t even know if we could communicate to others that the communication pause was happening. They have since clarified that we are allowed to publish original research, but we’re not supposed to publish any reviews or commentary. But even this week, people were still confused: “Can we submit manuscripts for publication right now, or is that forbidden?”
We also got an email that said all purchasing has been halted. That caused so much panic. People were like, “Can we order food for [lab] animals?” Is the pharmacy able to place orders with suppliers for medications?”
Matt Memoli, a vaccine researcher, was named the acting director of the NIH. We’ve since been told that on February 1, there will be new guidance regarding travel. Current travel restrictions do not apply to research participants traveling to NIH, and spending is not frozen for keeping people and animals alive.
But between banning travel, banning communication, and banning spending, it felt like all functions of our job had just been completely stripped away, like the system had been completely crippled. There was no central, clear message. It felt a little bit like that was part of the plan.
People are scared. It’s palpable. Normally, for the most part, people at NIH are cheerful. And for the past week, when you ask how people are doing, nobody’s saying, “I’m good.” They’re just like, “Oh, I’m okay, I’m here.” I think a lot of people are scared about their jobs.
On top of feeling scared, I think people feel underappreciated and almost villainized. Everyone at the NIH is so different than what has been portrayed as the “lazy government worker.” I honestly have never met more hard-working people in my life.
I think some of it is on us—we have done a poor job of communicating to people what we do. It’s not just pushing around papers and meetings about grants. There is true patient care that occurs here. There’s both basic science and clinical research. NIH worked on the Covid vaccine in collaboration with Moderna, for instance. We’re able to study things that aren’t feasible to study elsewhere due to a lack of funding, like rare diseases—inborn errors of immunity, chronic granulomatous disease, lymphangioleiomyomatosis—and undiagnosed diseases.
It’s not completely unheard of for there to be communication pauses like this. But with no clear guidance, everything has just been complete chaos. Every day there’s something new, some new curveball. The NIH produces incredible research, and I know a lot of people want to continue that work. But I think a lot of people are worrying, what is my backup plan?
This story has been edited and condensed for clarity.
President Trump’s baseless claims that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are responsible for the tragic, late-night plane collision in Washington, DC are not the first time he’s peddled conspiracy theories as the nation reels from a crisis.
In the past, Trump has also boosted false and disproven claims in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, a national pandemic, police brutality, natural disasters and more. We took a disturbing and conspiratorial trip down memory lane so you don’t have to.
9/11
Trump has promoted a lot of falsehoods and unfounded claims about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that killed more than 2,900 people and injured thousands more: He claimed in 2015 that he saw “thousands and thousands” of Arab people in New Jersey celebrating the attacks, a claim for which there is no evidence; he also claimed that from his apartment in Trump Tower—located four miles from the World Trade Center—he watched people jump from the burning towers.
He also said he “helped clear the rubble” at Ground Zero and that he lost “hundreds of friends” in the attacks—but there is no evidence to support either statement.
In 2022, he claimed, “Nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately”—despite the fact that the FBI characterizes its investigation into 9/11 as its most ambitious ever, and says that it involved more than 4,000 special agents and 3,000 professional employees.
And, of course, last September, he brought Laura Loomer—an avowed 9/11 conspiracy theorist—to a somber memorial to commemorate the tragedy, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis reported at the time.
Central Park Five case
After the brutal rape and assault of a 28-year-old female jogger in Central Park in 1989 that made headlines across the country, Trump took out a full-page ad in four major New York newspapers suggesting that the five Black and Latino teenagers who were accused of the crime should face the death penalty. The wrongly accused men spent between 6 and 13 years in prison.
A convicted murderer and rapist eventually admitted, in 2002, to being responsible for the attack—and DNA evidence corroborated the confession. But that didn’t stop Trump from doubling down on his beliefs that the Central Park Five, as the wrongly accused men came to be known, were guilty during his 2016 presidential campaign. Around the same time, Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerees who has since been elected to the New York City Council, toldMother Jones that he believed Trump played a role in their conviction, adding that his newspaper ad facilitated “the conviction that was going to happen in the public arena prior to us even getting into the courthouse.”
Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi attack
During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that after the September 2012 attacks by an Islamic militant group on US government facilities in Benghazi, Libya—which killed four Americans, including the US Ambassador—then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to sleep rather than help lead the American response.
But Clinton testified before a House Select Committee in 2015 that she “did not sleep all night”—and as the nonpartisan FactCheck.org points out, evidence shows she was fully engaged in the immediate response.
Hurricane Sandyand birtherism
After Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard in October 2012, devastating New York and New Jersey and killing at least 147 people, Trump claimed that it was “good luck” for then-President Obama, who was running for reelection: “He will buy the election by handing out billions of dollars,” Trump wrote on X, presumably referring to disaster aid.
Not only that, Trump also used it as an opportunity to again promote the racist birther conspiracy theory he originally pioneered, falsely claiming that Obama was not born in the US. Just a week earlier, Trump had claimed he would make a $5 million donation to a charity of Obama’s choice if the president released his “college records and applications…and passport applications and records” by Oct. 31—even though Obama had released his longform birth certificate the year before, which showed he was born in Hawaii. After Hurricane Sandy hit, on Oct. 30, Trump posted on X, “Because of the hurricane, I am extending my 5 million dollar offer for President Obama’s favorite charity.” Obama does not appear to have responded.
In September 2016, while running for president, Trump finally admitted Obama was born in the US—then promptly, and falsely, claimed it was histhen-opponent, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who started the conspiracy theory.
Death tolls in Hurricanes Irma and Maria
A year after Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, leading to more than 3,000 deaths, Trump rejected the death toll and said that it was “done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.” The nonpartisan fact-checking website Politifact states that researchers warned the preliminary estimates of death tolls from the Puerto Rican government—ranging from 16 to 64 people dead—were undercounts, and that the higher numbers came from indirect deaths, caused by something like the loss of electricity for someone who relies on medical devices, for example.
COVID-19 and…a lot
Who could forget Trump’s litany of unhinged and disproven theories about COVID-19? He initially downplayed the danger of it, claiming in February 2020 that it was “very much under control in the USA.” But just a few months later, he was wondering aloud at a press briefing if people could cure themselves of the coronavirus by injecting themselves with disinfectant or exposing the insides of their bodies to ultraviolet light, as my colleague Madison Pauly covered. (The next day, following an outcry, the White House walked back Trump’s claims, saying Americans should consult with their doctors to treat COVID-19; Trump also claimed the comments were “sarcastic.”)
Trump also promoted the drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential COVID-19 treatment—though leading medical organizations, including the World Health Organization and the Mayo Clinic, recommend against using it as a treatment for, or form of prevention against, COVID-19. (That didn’t stop Trump from taking it—though he still got the virus months after doing so.)
Trump also reposted false claims from other accounts on X stating that the COVID-19 death toll was vastly overblown, which Anthony Fauci promptly shut down. Trump and his son, Eric, also claimed that Democratic officials were prolonging lockdowns to prevent him from being able to hold in-person campaign rallies.
All this makes it no surprise that, as my colleague David Corn reported back in 2020, a Cornell University study analyzing 38 million English-language articles about the coronavirus concluded that Trump was the largest driver of the so-called “infodemic,” or COVID-19-related misinformation. “The biggest surprise,” Sarah Evanega, the study’s lead author, told the New York Times, “was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid.”
Protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police
After George Floyd‘s murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020 sparked nationwide protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality, Trump promoted a variety of baseless claims about the protesters, calling them “thugs” who were being funded by Democrats and billionaire George Soros, and threatening them. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he said at the time.
In just one example, Trump claimed a 75-year-old Buffalo man who was hospitalized after police shoved him to the ground “could be an ANTIFA provocateur” and alleged it “could be a setup”—despite there being no evidence for these claims. The man, Martin Gugino, reportedly spent about a month in the hospital for his injuries; the police officers involved were suspended without pay and then arrested, but the charges were dropped after a grand jury declined to indict them in 2021.
LA wildfires
After devastating wildfires broke out in Los Angeles earlier this month, killing at least 29 people and destroying thousands of structures, Trump boosted a variety of baseless claims—including that Gov. Newsom (D-Calif.) was to blame for a water shortage, though state officials have shut that down. More recently, Trump tried to fashion himself as a savior again, claiming that under his direction the US military “turned on the water” supply from the Pacific Northwest; in an epic clap back, the California Department of Water Resources said that never happened. “The military did not enter California,” the agency posted on X. “The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful.”
On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Wednesday evening, Vice PresidentJD Vance held forth about what he called an “old-school, very Christian concept.”
You love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your community, then you love you fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.
These may sound like familiar anti-liberal talking points, but one particular corner of the internet was ecstatic about Vance’s words: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.
After Vance’s Hannity appearance, Andrew Isker, a reformed preacher and co-author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, was triumphant in a post to his 37,000 followers on X. For years, Isker wrote, people had called him “‘racist’ for speaking about the ancient, traditional Christian idea of ordered loves.”But now, he wrote, “To see it articulated clearly by the Vice President of the United States shows that we are winning and the postwar liberal rejection of all unchosen bonds is on its last legs. Our fathers will be honored once again.”
In response to a post on X that was critical of Vance’s remarks about the supposed Christian hierarchy of love, Andrew Torba, Isker’s co-author and CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, posted to his 469,000 followers on X: “The Vice President of the United States is talking about rightly ordered loves…and you’re blackpilling?” (In other words, he suggested, it was ridiculous to complain about such a happy turn of events.)
Indeed, what is known as the Christian order of loveis one of the TheoBros’ favorite topics. One key element of this doctrine for them is that it’s un-Christian to love foreigners as much as you love your countrymen. Yet for many of them, this idea is more than just an expression of patriotism. Rather, it’s rooted in the concept of kinism—a white nationalist term, popularized a few decades ago, that nations should be ethnically and racially pure and that the United States specifically is the domain for white Christians.
Which was the quiet part that some of the TheoBros said out loud after Vance’s remarks.
“Any Christian who denies ‘hierarchy of loves’ has white men at the lowest level of their hierarchy of loves,” posted Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism.
William Wolfe, no relation to Stephen, served in the previous Trump administration both as deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of legislative affairs at the State Department. He posted, “Liberal Christians really are like: ‘There is no such thing as a hierarchy of love and also all white men are the worst.’”
This isn’t the first time Vance has amplified ideas from the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last fall, he touched on similar themes in his address in July at the Republican National Convention:
Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.
Vance’s connections to the TheoBros are well documented. Not only has he been photographed posing with them, he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, who serves on the board of the TheoBro magazine American Reformer. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has connections to the TheoBros movement.
The TheoBros have noticed the new vice president’s embrace of their ideas, and they’re delighted. “JD Vance and [former Fox News host] Tucker Carlson definitely have been reading reformed right wing X,” one anonymous TheoBro X account gushed to its 67,000 followers Thursday. “I’m convinced that J.D. Vance has an alt and reads our tweets,” posted Brian Sauvé, a TheoBro in Ogden, Utah. “And there’s nothing you can do to convince me otherwise.”
Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, published a book that included a list of political enemies he characterized as Deep Staters. He called for the prosecution of law enforcement officials who investigated President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. He hailed January 6 rioters convicted of violence against police officers as “political prisoners.” On social media, he amplifieda meme celebrating violence against Trump critics.
Yet when Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday for his confirmation hearing, he refused to acknowledge many of the over-the-top statements he has made and actions he has taken as a fierce pro-Trump warrior. He was trying to hide the real Patel.
Of all of Donald Trump’s high-level appointments, Patel has the record most replete with remarks and actions in sync with MAGA extremism. Throughout the hearing, Democrats confronted him with examples of his far-right soldiering for Trump—social media posts, quotes from his media interviews, passages from his book—and he kept dodging the questions, claiming the comments were taken out of context or “partial,” insisting that he could not recall them, or pleading ignorance.
When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) questioned Patel, he cited a statement Patel made on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media…We’re going to come after you.” To this, Patel said, “That’s a partial quotation.” (The intent of Patel’s statement did not differ in the remark’s fuller form.)
Whitehouse pointed out that Patel had published in a book what has been widely characterized as an “enemies list” of 60 so-called Deep State figures who ought to be investigated and had reposted a video depicting him taking a chainsaw to Trump’s political enemies (including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff).
As an aide held up a photo of that particular social media post, Whitehouse asked, “Is that you reposting that?” Patel replied, “Senator, I had nothing to do with the creation of that meme”—a statement did not address his amplification of the violent imagery.
When Whitehouse noted that Patel had pushed the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had instigated the January 6 riot, Patel replied, “That’s completely incorrect.” (He had.) And when the senator recounted that Patel once said judges who rule against Donald Turmp should be impeached because they are “political terrorists,” Patel just stared at him.
Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Patel to explain his support of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and referred to a 2023 interview: “You said that Donald Trump has every right to tell the world that in 2020, 2016, and every other election in between was rigged by our government, because they were.” Patel responded, “I don’t have that statement in front of me.”
When Klobuchar noted Trump’s claims of election fraud had been rejected by numerous courts, Patel would not accept that. “I don’t have enough of the facts in front of me,” he commented.
Klobuchar queried Patel about a statement in which he had declared that after a Trump victory there would be prosecutions of Justice Department officials for rigging the 2020 presidential election. “You’re reading a partial statement so I’m unable to respond,” Patel said.
Klobuchar asked Patel to comment on his suggestion that the FBI headquarters should be shut down and “reopened as a museum of the Deep State.” Patel didn’t explain this remark. Instead, he complained he was a victim of “false accusations and gross mischaracterizations.”
Several Democrats pressed Patel on his work with the J6 Prison Choir, a group of January 6 rioters who recorded a version of the national anthem mashed up with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The song became a mainstay at Trump’s campaign rallies.
Patel told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that he promoted the song to raise money for the families of January 6 attackers. But when Durbin asked “who sings on this recording,” Patel claimed that he didn’t know. Asked if the singers were January 6 rioters, Patel said, “I’m not aware of that.” That was a ludicrous answer.
In fact, in a May 10, 2023 post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, Patel said the song came from “political prisoners still locked in jail without trial following the January 6th protest in 2021. J6 Prison Choir consists of individuals who have been incarcerated as a result of their involvement in the January 6, 2021 protest for election integrity.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked Patel if the choir members were “political prisoners,” as Patel had described them. “I don’t know everyone in the J6 choir,” Patel answered. The senator then asked Patel about specific members of the choir, including Ryan Nichols, who was convicted of spraying police officers with pepper spray on January 6, and James McGrew, who was imprisoned for crimes that included throwing a wooden handrail at police officers on January 6 after punching others. Patel said he wasn’t familiar with them.
Blumenthal cited another choir member: Ronald Sandlin, who pleaded guilty after he was accused of shouting “you’re going to die” at police in the Capitol rotunda.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Patel said.
Throughout the hearing, Patel downplayed his association with the J6 Prison Choir members and did not acknowledge that his work promoting its song glorified these Trump supporters who had engaged in horrific violence.
Late in the hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), honed in on Patel’s claim that he “didn’t have anything to do with” the creation of the J6 choir song. Schiff highlighted an interview with Bannon in which Patel, using the word “we,” claimed credit for producing the recording of the song. Patel said he had been using “the proverbial we” and maintained he had not helped arrange the recording.
Schiff then asked if Patel had bothered to vet the members of the choir to determine if any of them had engaged in violence against police officers. He replied, “I didn’t record it myself.”
Democratic senators questioned Patel about his promotion of a line of pills that supposedly would help people “detox” from Covid vaccines. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel wrote in one post, NBC News reported. Did Patel, Klobuchar inquired, perform clinical trials before claiming the pills cured vaccine side effects? “I’m not a doctor, so no,” Patel said.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Patel if he made money from the pills. Patel said she should consult his financial records. “I don’t have those statements in front of me,” he said.
In one weird exchange, Durbin asked Patel if he was familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for false claims about Covid.
“Not off the top of my heard,” Patel said.
“You made eight separate appearances on his podcast,” Durbin responded. (This proved too much even for Peters. “Clearly Kash Patel is lying,” the host said after the hearing. “He absolutely does know who I am.”)
Again and again, Patel sidestepped his well-documented past as a Trump extremist who has advocated for vengeance against Trump’s political foes. He insisted he would be a neutral enforcer of the law if confirmed as FBI director. The statements, tweets, and quotes that he refused to acknowledge told a different story.
This story was originally published by Capital B, a nonprofit newsroom that centers Black voices. To read more of Adam Mahoney’s work on climate change, visit Capital B.
As Los Angeles battled its largest wildfires in history, parts of the southern U.S. faced a very different kind of disaster — record-breaking snowstorms not seen in over 125 years.
In LA, the Benn family didn’t lose their home to the flames, but they did lose access to their livelihood. Their screen-printing business, which they’ve run in Altadena since 2007, is now in limbo. Before the fires, their community boasted the second-highest concentration of Black-owned businesses in LA County. Now, with no clear timeline for reopening the area, the Benns are struggling to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, Quelly, a hairstylist and mother of young children, lost three days of income when the snowstorm shut down her city for half a week. For someone self-employed, it’s a blow that’s hard to afford.
Since January 2024, extreme weather events have hit harder and cost more than ever before. Disasters like these are piling up at an unprecedented rate. A new analysis puts the damage and economic losses at $799 billion — around 3% of the U.S. economy — thanks to wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and winter storms. And while these crises affect everyone, Black Americans are feeling the impact the most. Underfunded communities are struggling to recover, jobs are disappearing, and insurance premiums are skyrocketing as the risk of displacement grows.
These extreme weather events are disrupting industries you wouldn’t normally associate with disasters, making it harder for Black families to access basic necessities like food and water. A recent report warns that without swift action to limit the impact of severe weather, it will cost children born in 2024 at least $500,000 up to $1 million over their lifetime. That’s from higher living costs — like soaring housing costs and strained food supplies — and lower earnings from missed work.
“Quite clearly, if you’re awake, everybody should understand, we’re living in very dangerous times, and Black folks and people who are economically vulnerable, they’re already facing heightened exposures to these events,” explained Lemir Teron, an associate professor in Howard University’s Department of Earth, Environment, and Equity. “Our resilience gets curtailed when we don’t have the policies or the money to better protect ourselves.”
In Florida, this month, Black farmers are grappling with the aftermath of an unprecedented winter storm that dumped record snow, sleet, and freezing rain across the region. Farmers say they’ve never faced such devastation — not even from Category 5 Hurricane Michael in 2018 — as 10 inches of snow leveled greenhouses and shattered irrigation systems. The fallout will be felt nationwide when the fruits and vegetables we depend on don’t make it out of the Sunshine State.
“The cold snap and the snow showed us we have to be ready, and I don’t think our states — the Southern states — are ready,” said Trenise Bryant, who is a food-service manager for Florida elementary-age children and a housing advocate across the state. “I don’t know if our infrastructure and ecosystems can withstand what’s to come.”
She said last year’s hurricanes and this record storm showed the importance of government and community groups working together because “if we can’t get that funding for people that don’t have access, people that are living on the street, that means no access to housing, food, and water for them.”
Trump’s attempt to revamp disaster recovery
“It’s the worst series of disasters since the Dust Bowl,” said Joel Myers, the founder of AccuWeather, the group that conducted the $799 billion damage and economic loss analysis. The fallout, he said, could drive a new wave of migration. For Black communities already facing systemic barriers, the road to recovery is anything but even, and as we’ve reported, migration doesn’t always guarantee protection from these climate threats.
In Detroit, Sandra Turner-Handy has had to clean out bacteria-filled floodwaters from her home twice in recent years. Flooding has become more common in recent years due to much greater rainfalls than normal, leaving many residents dealing with the financial burdens of home improvements, loss of work, and mold-induced illnesses.
“We have experienced so much in the last year with the extreme heat, the cold, and the flooding,” Turner-Handy said. “We can’t escape it.”
The Trump administration is taking aim at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is largely responsible for how America responds to weather events. During his first week back in office, he signed an executive order calling for a sweeping review of the agency and floating the idea of shutting it down altogether.
In the executive order, Trump accused FEMA of political bias and mishandling disaster aid, claiming it’s leaving Americans vulnerable. Last year, when Hurricane Helene dismantled the Southeast, Trump spread rumors that the agency was deliberately not giving aid to white conservatives. In reality, studies show that Black neighborhoods receive an estimated 10% less recovery aid than white ones. The aid discrepancy has substantially contributed to the racial wealth gap in the South.
The Trump administration is also pushing to shift more disaster response costs to states, a move that critics warn could leave under-resourced communities, particularly Black and low-income areas, even more exposed to climate disasters.
Trump has also paused spending benefitting Black and “disadvantaged” communities from the Biden administration’s two key spending pots: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. These funds had been used to do things like replace lead pipes, improve access to electricity in Black rural communities, and fortify buildings and roads against flooding across the South. Analyses have shown that Trump-stronghold states like Georgia and the Carolinas benefited the most from this spending.
“We had started to understand that climate change has an impact [on] our city and that these issues relate not just to the heat and the cold, but can bring more illnesses and affect the amount of money in our pockets,” said Turner-Handy, who was awarded a grant through the IRA last fall, but was told last week that she will not be receiving the money under the Trump administration. The funding was meant to be used to install air quality monitors in her community.
“We’re left ripe for more harm,” she said.
With a leadership shake-up and the potential for states to shoulder a bigger burden, the debate over FEMA’s future and climate spending comes as the country faces increasingly devastating hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. With more weather events on the horizon, Black Americans and other marginalized groups are still struggling to bounce back from previous disasters.
“Eventually, climate denialism is going to harm us all in the same way. Folks who have means will be exposed to things that they don’t presently deal with,” said Teron, the professor who also pointed out how America’s inability to address climate change will result in global issues like sea level rise in West Africa.
“These rollbacks on the federal level, the severity of extreme weather, it’s going to harm us all,” he said.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “to combat anti-Semitism” that allows for a broad crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, including deporting demonstrators on student visas.
The order, titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” asks federal agencies to report within 60 days all ways to combat antisemitism, including identification of “all civil and criminal authorities or actions.” Definitions in the order are vague: It re-establishes a prior Trump push on antisemitism from 2019 and implies antisemitism includes expressions of anti-Zionism.
Trump was more blunt in an attached fact-sheet released with the executive order. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Notably, in a section titled “Additional Measures To Combat Campus Anti-Semitism,” Trump recommends that colleges and universities be “familiarized” with American law on “inadmissible aliens.” The order then says these “institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove.”
The order does not explicitly require schools to deport anyone—nor does it immediately cancel anyone’s visa. Instead, it puts the ball in the universities’ court: Will they collaborate in the deportation of Trump’s political enemies, or will they stand up for their students?
Dima Khalidi, of the advocacy organization Palestine Legal, said in a statement the order is meant to intimidate, “aimed at enforcing an ideological strangulation on schools by attempting to scare students into silence about Israel’s genocide in Gaza with threats of prosecution and deportation.”
“The implications of this executive order go far beyond the Palestine movement,” Khalidi added. “It encourages government agencies to find ways to target any dissent from Trump’s agenda, and aims to enlist universities themselves as its censors and snitches.” Some students who participated in pro-Palestine protests quietly locked their social media accounts on Wednesday. Others asserted that they would not be intimidated.
This order “effectively illegalizes criticism of Israel for non-citizens, [including] green card holders,” Michigan immigration attorney Eric Lee said on X. “This will impact what students say in class, what they write in essays, what they tell their professors in office hours. This chills the speech of the entire population.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Health and Human Services could have been a window into Kennedy’s beliefs and how he’d run one of the largest departments in the U.S. government. Instead, Kennedy spent much of the two days he was questioned before two different Senate committees denying his past comments, obfuscating his long record as an anti-vaccine activist, and, in some cases, flatly denying things he’s previously said publicly. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of places where Kennedy reversed his previous positions, denied something he’s previously said, or presented a misleading picture of past actions.
Characterized himself as not anti-vaccine but pro “strong science”
Kennedy’s clear record is that of a man who stokes suspicion and distrust towards vaccines at every turn, and has done so for almost 20 years. Nonetheless, throughout the hearing, Kennedy insisted that he’s not a vaccine opponent, saying that he and his children are vaccinated against some illnesses, and that he simply wants good science and data.
But the fact is that since 2005, with the publication of “Deadly Immunity,” his now-retractedRolling Stone article, a cornerstone of Kennedy’s public career has been casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense from 2015 to 2023, through which he spent countless hours making misleading claims about vaccines. The original name of the organization, the World Mercury Project, stemmed from the false claim that vaccines contain a harmful form of mercury. In 2016, Kennedy accused Congress of allowing “mercury-contaminated vaccines that other countries have long outlawed.” This statement misrepresented thimerosal, a preservative that’s been demonized by the anti-vaccine movement for decades, and which has, in any case, been removed from most vaccines since 2001.
Kennedy has also expressed unqualified support for Andrew Wakefield, who authored the retracted study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism, an association that has been disproven and debunked many times over. (During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy also suggested that the Institute of Medicine—a non-profit advisory organization now known as the National Academy of Medicine—needed to look into the purported vaccines-autism connection. But the IOM already did in 2011, and issued a report, hundreds of pages long, conclusively finding that vaccines do not cause autism.
“If the science says I’m wrong about what I’ve said in the past,” Kennedy proclaimed at one in the hearing, “as I said, I will apologize.”
This is a common talking point for Kennedy—that he’s not anti-vaccine, but merely pro-science—but that doesn’t make it true.
Offered a misleading picture of why he traveled to Samoa
Kennedy repeatedly distorted his infamous trip to Samoa in the run up to a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them unvaccinated children.
During his visit, he spoke to the prime minister about vaccines and met with two anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy has acknowledged in the past that he went to Samoa at the invitation of one of them, “medical freedom” campaigner Edwin Tamasese; as NBC recently reported, an explicit goal of the trip was for the two men to discuss vaccines.
Kennedy, however, insisted at the hearing that he was there to attend an independence celebration and introduce a “medical informatics” system, adding, “I never thought gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who will say ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.’”
Claimed an apology he gave to a woman who accused him of sexual harassment was for “something else”
In July, Vanity Fairreported allegations from Eliza Conney that Kennedy had groped her during her time working as a caregiver for his children. Cooney told Reuters that Kennedy apologized to her over text after the story came out. According to Reuters, the text read, “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”
When questioned about the alleged incident during the hearing by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Kennedy denied sexually harassing or assaulting Cooney. When asked if he’d apologized to her, he said he had not, adding, without elaboration, “I apologized to her for something else.”
Denied claiming Lyme disease is a bioweapon
When Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) suggested on Wednesday that Kennedy had claimed Lyme disease was a “miltary-engineered bioweapon,” Kennedy responded, “I probably did say that.”
Yet on Thursday, when Sen. Susan Collins of (R-Maine) asked him about his statements on Lyme disease as a bioweapon, he changed his story. “I’ve never believed that, Senator,” he said. “What I said is, we should always follow the evidence.”
Denied saying Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon
Kennedy claimed in the summer of 2023 that Covid was a bioweapon, telling an Upper East Side audience, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
But in what represented a bit of an emerging pattern, when questioned about these remarks during the hearing, Kennedy claimed he “didn’t say it was deliberately targeted.”
There is also no proof that Covid is an ethnic bioweapon, a theory so fringe that few people besides Kennedy have even promoted it.
Flip-flopped on Ozempic
During Thursday’s hearings, Kennedy told Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), “The GLP-1 drugs—class of drugs—are miracle drugs.” That’s a departure from his previous comments on Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs of its class. In October, he said on a Fox News appearance, “They’re counting on selling [Ozempic] to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” He also claimed at the time that the European Union “is right now investigating Ozempic for suicidal ideation”—even though the EU’s report, published in April, had already found no relationship.
Cast himself as a staunch opponent of abortion
During the hearings, Kennedy said repeatedly that he agrees with President Trump that “every abortion is a tragedy,” as he put it, and that the state “should control abortion,” presenting this as a long-held position. But it isn’t: Kennedy previously said on his own 2024 presidential campaign’s website he would have, as president, restored Roe vs. Wade, adding, “Body sovereignty must be protected.”
Denied calling antidepressant users “addicts”
“You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said during Wednesday’s hearings. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy then denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”
Yet as Mother Jonesreported in July, when he made a podcast appearance to unveil a plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs during his 2024 campaign, Kennedy described a vision of opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
Denied suggesting pesticides could cause children to become transgender
On Wednesday, Bennetasked Kennedy, “Did you say exposure to pesticides causes children to be transgender?” Kennedy replied, “No, I never said that.” But in July, a report by CNN found dozens of instances of Kennedy spreading the notion. In a 2022 episode of his podcast, for example, Kennedy said, “If you expose frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually bear young…and so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society.”
Although the hearings questioning Kennedy have concluded, it’s unclear when the Senate will schedule a vote on his confirmation. Several senators indicated they’d follow up with further questions over the weekend. Clearly, they’ll have a lot to ask about.
On Monday, workers at Philadelphia’s Center City Whole Foods Market voted 130–100 to be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. It marks the first time an Amazon-owned Whole Foods store has voted to unionize—and it is one of the first major union elections of the second Trump presidency.
The organizing effort, which workers say has been in the works for over a year, went public in November. Workers say it was driven by myriad demands, including a push for increased pay. The base wage at the Center City Whole Foods is $16 per hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single person in Philadelphia, without dependents, is over $22 per hour. (Amazon, which has owned Whole Foods since 2017, is worth about $2.5 trillion.)
Whole Foods workers told me the low pay means they have to work multiple jobs to manage their bills. Khy Adams, 32, makes $16.50 an hour in the hot foods department but has to work as a culinary instructor on the side. She said she often logs well over 50 hours per week between her two jobs.
Mase Veney, 26, has worked in the produce department for three years. Mostly, he said, that means “lifting heavy boxes” in a freezing cooler. About a year and a half ago, at the end of his shift, Veney emerged to talk to a friend in another department. “I just came out to take a break because I was freezing cold,” he said. But for this break, he was castigated for wasting time. Then, he said, some of his shifts mysteriously disappeared from the calendar.
After that incident, Veney joined forces with four other workers to figure out how to start a union.
Almost immediately after going public, they faced opposition. Fliers reading, “Stay Whole, Vote No,” circulated around the store. Managers whom Veney and his co-workers were used to working with were transferred to other store locations. “The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks,” Adams said.
During the first week of January, UFCW Local 1776 filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that at least one worker was fired as retaliation for union activity and that “supervisors coercively told employees that they would not be getting wage increases because of their union activities and made promises of wage increases if they did not vote to unionize.” (Amazon disputes these assertions. A Whole Foods representative said the company will implement a raise when it is legal to do so.)
Strange faces started showing up around the store, workers said, as the unionization vote approached. “They started bringing in people from Texas, people from Florida—a lot of people from New York. There was one person who was there from California,” Adams told Mother Jones.
The new people, who wore “Culture Champion” merchandise, never told her their job title. They were oddly gregarious, Adams remembered. “We’re here to help with anything you need,” she recalled them saying. And the new colleagues were especially eager, Adams said, to talk about why unionizing could be harmful to workers. Yet when she tried to assign them tasks, they were nowhere to be found. “On any given day, I would see maybe four or five people that would have ‘Culture Champion’ merch on, but they wouldn’t necessarily be performing a job,” she said.
Meanwhile, her department was chronically understaffed. Dishes regularly piled up because too few people were hired to wash them. Adams often tried her best to manage preparing the rotisserie chickens, operating the hot bar, and tending to the soups all at the same time.
On Monday, when the results began to come in, Adams almost could not believe it. “The propaganda machine wanted us to believe that we were isolated, that no one wanted this, that we were just on an island all by ourselves,” she said. “But I’m not the only person who wants this—we aren’t the only group of people who want this.”
In a statement, the company said: “We are disappointed by the outcome of this election, but we are committed to maintaining a positive working environment in our Philly Center City store.”
Now, the challenge for the newly unionized Whole Foods workers is to negotiate with their employer. Amazon has been more than willing to deploy anti-union tactics in the past. In October, the company received a complaint from the NLRB over its refusal to negotiate with unionized delivery drivers employed by a third-party company. And when an Amazon warehouse in New York’s Staten Island voted to unionize nearly three years ago, the company refused to come to the bargaining table. While refusing to bargain is illegal, the penalties are minimal.
The unionized Whole Foods workers will also face a much more anti-union NLRB—just hours after their election, President Donald Trump fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who was well known for going after Amazon.
Now, “we have to certify these votes to make sure that everything goes through and that Amazon doesn’t try to throw a wrench in that plan, which they are very much known for,” Adams said. During the vote certification process, Amazon has a chance to challenge any ballots filed.
“I feel like it’ll make Amazon fight harder, because they know that Trump’s in office,” Veney said. “But we have a lot of people behind us, backing us up, and I think we can make this thing happen.” The unionized workers, knowing they won’t be supported on the federal level by Trump, are looking to local and state-level politicians for backup.
Their first challenge, Veney said, is simple. Earlier this month, the Center City store was reportedly exempted from a regionwide wage increase. Workers said they were told this was because Amazon didn’t want to sway the outcome of the election.
“The vote is now over,” Adams said. “So where are our wage increases that you said you were going to give us?”
On Wednesday, an Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a commercial American Airlines flight as it was in the process of landing at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC. Officials believe that there were no survivors among the 67 people on both craft.
After tragedies like these, it’s typical for American presidents to address the grieving public. What’s not typical of presidents is to blame issues with, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration on disabled people and people of color. Prior to diving into a bigoted speech at a next-day press conference on the crash, Trump claimed to have “pretty good ideas of what happened,” suggesting disabled people, people of color, Barack Obama, and ex-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were to blame for the tragedy.
In his speech, Trump rattled off a long list of the disabilities he said the Biden FAA had allowed air traffic controllers to have—citing, among others, dwarfism—poising hiring them as a negative move. There is nothing to confirm the air traffic controllers, who attempted to intervene at least twice prior to the crash, were even disabled. In addition, disabled people are not hired if they cannot perform the duties of their job.
And he gave himself a pat on the back for his executive order ending equitable hiring processes, issued last week, which claimed that the FAA “specifically recruited and hired individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric issues, and complete paralysis.” Trump has a history of attacking disabled people and of insulting his political opponents by asserting that they are “mentally disabled.”
Trump then segued to blasting former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, claiming that Buttigieg had run the FAA “right into the ground with his diversity” during his time at the helm. It is unclear whether Trump is referring to Buttigieg’s own sexuality, the FAA pushing for more equitable hiring processes, or the ex-secretary’s groundbreaking rulemaking and actions—which included taking steps to make airlines more accountable for breaking disabled people’s wheelchairs.
It is also impossible to separate Trump’s attacks on intellect—he centered his speech on a fixation with air traffic controllers as “naturally talented geniuses”—from his previously expressed racist views, or from his fixation on hiring processes in the FAA that tried to recruit more workers of color.
This is allegedly the person, after all, who told his ex-fixer Michael Cohen that “Black people are too stupid to vote for me.” He cast blame on the FAA’s “diversity and inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel—I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”
And even though Barack Obama has been out of office for more than eight years, Trump—who boosted his political prominence by pushing racist birther conspiracy theories against the former president—found time to attack him for FAA hiring changes. “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best,” he said. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first.”
“African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in another bizarre segue. But the FAA “determined that the workforce was too white,” he claimed. “Too white—and, uh, we want the people that are competent. But now we mourn.”
At her first White House press briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the Trump administration had paused $50 million in funding for “condoms in Gaza.” Leavitt called the money a “preposterous waste” and the pause an example of how the new administration is safeguarding “tax dollars.” The next day, President Donald Trump repeated the point.
But there is no evidence to support the claim that the United States was going to send $50 million in aid for condoms in Gaza.
In response to a request for comment, a State Department official told Mother Jones on condition of anonymity that the “Trump administration stopped two $50 million buckets of ‘aid’ for Gaza via the International Medical Corp [sic].” The official said some of this money would have gone to family planning “including emergency contraception; Sexual healthcare including prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs); and Adolescent sexual and reproductive health.” The official added that “Condoms have traditionally always been used for family planning in developing countries by USAID.”
To summarize: Funding was set to go to Gaza to assist International Medical Corps, some unspecified portion of it was for family planning and contraceptives, and condoms are “traditionally always” part of that. That is radically different from what Leavitt said Tuesday. And it does not appear to be true, either. International Medical Corps said in a press release, “No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms, nor to provide family-planning services.”
It also is not correct that condoms are “traditionally always” distributed to support US government reproductive health programs, particularly in the Middle East. A report from the US Agency for International Development covering the 2023 fiscal year stated that the agency has not provided any funding for condoms in the Middle East in recent years. (As CNN and the Guardian have made clear, the only contraceptive funding for the region was less than $50,000 that went to Jordan for oral and injectable birth control.)
Leavitt’s claim also leads to preposterous conclusions. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Postshowed that the United States has spent 3.3 cents per condom on average in recent years. For Leavitt to be right, USAID would have been planning to send more than 1.5 billion condoms to Gaza. That works out to more than 700 condoms per person there.
While there is no evidence the United States was about to pay for condoms in Gaza, there would be good reasons for doing so. “Notwithstanding the absurdity of this particular claim, contraceptive access *is* an important health issue in crisis settings like Gaza,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, wrote on X. “Unplanned pregnancies in a context of starvation and displacement can be hugely challenging and carry health risks.”
More importantly, the funding pause Leavitt touted at the press conference could have devastating consequences for Gazans in desperate need of medical attention.
Among other things, International Medical Corps said the money helps maintain one of only three neonatal intensive care units operational in Gaza and supports the delivery of 20 babies per day. The group added about its work in Gaza:
International Medical Corps has received $68,078,508 from USAID to support our operations in Gaza since October 7, 2023. With the generous support of USAID and the American people, we’ve used these resources to operate two large field hospitals currently located in central Gaza—one in Deir Al Balah and one in Al Zawaida—offering a combined total capacity of more than 250 beds, including 20 in the emergency room and 170 in the surgical department. These facilities provide 24/7 lifesaving medical care to roughly 33,000 civilians per month, in a highly dangerous and insecure environment where healthcare infrastructure has been decimated.
If the USAID stop-work order is kept in place, the group has said it will be able to continue providing lifesaving aid in Gaza for only about a week.
On Fox News on Tuesday, host Jesse Watters retroactively claimed another reason for the funding stop: “They are making condom bombs.” Trump echoed that claim Wednesday, saying “condoms to Hamas” had to be stopped because “they’ve used them as a method for making bombs.” (In past years, Israeli media sources have reported that militants in Gaza allegedly used condoms to make improvised incendiary devices.)
That makes it even less likely that the United States was planning to send condoms to Gaza. In reality, the Trump administration is using a made-up premise of vast condom spending to block lifesaving medical work.
On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Wednesday evening, Vice PresidentJD Vance held forth about what he called an “old school, very Christian concept.”
You love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your community, then you love you fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.
These may sound like familiar anti-liberal talking points, but one particular corner of the internet was ecstatic about Vance’s words: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.
After Vance’s Hannity appearance, Andrew Isker, a reformed preacher and the author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, was triumphant in a post to his 37,000 followers on X. For years, Isker wrote, people had called him “‘racist’ for speaking about the ancient, traditional Christian idea of ordered loves.”But now, he wrote, “To see it articulated clearly by the Vice President of the United States shows that we are winning and the postwar liberal rejection of all unchosen bonds is on its last legs. Our fathers will be honored once again.”
In response to a post on X that was critical of Vance’s remarks about the supposed Christian hierarchy of love, Andrew Torba, Isker’s co-author and CEO of the far-right social media platform, Gab, posted to his 469,000 followers on X. “The Vice President of the United States is talking about rightly ordered loves… and you’re blackpilling?” (In other words, he suggested, it was ridiculous to complain about such a happy turn of events.)
Indeed, what is known as the Christian order of loveis one of the TheoBros’ favorite topics. One key element of this doctrine for them is that it’s unchristian to love foreigners as much as you love your countrymen. Yet for many of them, this idea is more than just an expression of patriotism. Rather, it’s rooted in the concept of Kinism—a white nationalist term, popularized a few decades ago, that nations should be ethnically and racially pure and that the United States specifically is the domain for white Christians.
Which was the quiet part that some of the TheoBros said out loud after Vance’s remarks.
“Any Christian who denies ‘hierarchy of loves’ has white men at the lowest level of their hierarchy of loves,” posted Stephen Wolfe, the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism.
William Wolfe, no relation to Stephen, served in the previous Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He posted, “Liberal Christians really are like: ‘There is no such thing as a hierarchy of love and also all white men are the worst.’”
This isn’t the first time that Vance has amplified ideas from the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last fall, he touched on similar themes in his address last July at the Republican National Convention:
Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.
Vance’s connections to the TheoBros are well-documented. Not only has he been photographed posing with them, he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, who serves on the board of the TheoBro magazine American Reformer. Pete Hegseth, now President Trump’s Secretary of Defense, also has connections to the TheoBros movement.
The TheoBros have noticed the new vice president’s embrace of their ideas, and they’re delighted. “JD Vance and [former Fox News host] Tucker Carlson definitely have been reading reformed right wing X,” gushed one anonymous TheoBro X account to its 67,000 followers on Thursday. “I’m convinced that J.D. Vance has an alt and reads our tweets,” posted Brian Sauvé, a TheoBro in Ogden, Utah. “And there’s nothing you can do to convince me otherwise.”
Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, published a book that included a list of political enemies he characterized as Deep Staters. He called for the prosecution of law enforcement officials who investigated President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. He hailed January 6 rioters convicted of violence against police officers as “political prisoners.” On social media, he amplifieda meme celebrating violence against Trump critics.
Yet when Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday for his confirmation hearing, he refused to acknowledge many of the over-the-top statements he has made and actions he has taken as a fierce pro-Trump warrior. He was trying to hide the real Patel.
Of all of Donald Trump’s high-level appointments, Patel has the record most replete with remarks and actions in sync with MAGA extremism. Throughout the hearing, Democrats confronted him with examples of his far-right soldiering for Trump—social media posts, quotes from his media interviews, passages from his book—and he kept dodging the questions, claiming the comments were taken out of context or “partial,” insisting that he could not recall them, or pleading ignorance.
When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) questioned Patel, he cited a statement Patel made on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media…We’re going to come after you.” To this, Patel said, “That’s a partial quotation.” (The intent of Patel’s statement did not differ in the remark’s fuller form.)
Whitehouse pointed out that Patel had published in a book what has been widely characterized as an “enemies list” of 60 so-called Deep State figures who ought to be investigated and had reposted a video depicting him taking a chainsaw to Trump’s political enemies (including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff).
As an aide held up a photo of that particular social media post, Whitehouse asked, “Is that you reposting that?” Patel replied, “Senator, I had nothing to do with the creation of that meme”—a statement did not address his amplification of the violent imagery.
When Whitehouse noted that Patel had pushed the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had instigated the January 6 riot, Patel replied, “That’s completely incorrect.” (He had.) And when the senator recounted that Patel once said judges who rule against Donald Turmp should be impeached because they are “political terrorists,” Patel just stared at him.
Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Patel to explain his support of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and referred to a 2023 interview: “You said that Donald Trump has every right to tell the world that in 2020, 2016, and every other election in between was rigged by our government, because they were.” Patel responded, “I don’t have that statement in front of me.”
When Klobuchar noted Trump’s claims of election fraud had been rejected by numerous courts, Patel would not accept that. “I don’t have enough of the facts in front of me,” he commented.
Klobuchar queried Patel about a statement in which he had declared that after a Trump victory there would be prosecutions of Justice Department officials for rigging the 2020 presidential election. “You’re reading a partial statement so I’m unable to respond,” Patel said.
Klobuchar asked Patel to comment on his suggestion that the FBI headquarters should be shut down and “reopened as a museum of the Deep State.” Patel didn’t explain this remark. Instead, he complained he was a victim of “false accusations and gross mischaracterizations.”
Several Democrats pressed Patel on his work with the J6 Prison Choir, a group of January 6 rioters who recorded a version of the national anthem mashed up with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The song became a mainstay at Trump’s campaign rallies.
Patel told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that he promoted the song to raise money for the families of January 6 attackers. But when Durbin asked “who sings on this recording,” Patel claimed that he didn’t know. Asked if the singers were January 6 rioters, Patel said, “I’m not aware of that.” That was a ludicrous answer.
In fact, in a May 10, 2023 post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, Patel said the song came from “political prisoners still locked in jail without trial following the January 6th protest in 2021. J6 Prison Choir consists of individuals who have been incarcerated as a result of their involvement in the January 6, 2021 protest for election integrity.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked Patel if the choir members were “political prisoners,” as Patel had described them. “I don’t know everyone in the J6 choir,” Patel answered. The senator then asked Patel about specific members of the choir, including Ryan Nichols, who was convicted of spraying police officers with pepper spray on January 6, and James McGrew, who was imprisoned for crimes that included throwing a wooden handrail at police officers on January 6 after punching others. Patel said he wasn’t familiar with them.
Blumenthal cited another choir member: Ronald Sandlin, who pleaded guilty after he was accused of shouting “you’re going to die” at police in the Capitol rotunda.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Patel said.
Throughout the hearing, Patel downplayed his association with the J6 Prison Choir members and did not acknowledge that his work promoting its song glorified these Trump supporters who had engaged in horrific violence.
Late in the hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), honed in on Patel’s claim that he “didn’t have anything to do with” the creation of the J6 choir song. Schiff highlighted an interview with Bannon in which Patel, using the word “we,” claimed credit for producing the recording of the song. Patel said he had been using “the proverbial we” and maintained he had not helped arrange the recording.
Schiff then asked if Patel had bothered to vet the members of the choir to determine if any of them had engaged in violence against police officers. He replied, “I didn’t record it myself.”
Democratic senators questioned Patel about his promotion of a line of pills that supposedly would help people “detox” from Covid vaccines. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel wrote in one post, NBC News reported. Did Patel, Klobuchar inquired, perform clinical trials before claiming the pills cured vaccine side effects? “I’m not a doctor, so no,” Patel said.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Patel if he made money from the pills. Patel said she should consult his financial records. “I don’t have those statements in front of me,” he said.
In one weird exchange, Durbin asked Patel if he was familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for false claims about Covid.
“Not off the top of my heard,” Patel said.
“You made eight separate appearances on his podcast,” Durbin responded. (This proved too much even for Peters. “Clearly Kash Patel is lying,” the host said after the hearing. “He absolutely does know who I am.”)
Again and again, Patel sidestepped his well-documented past as a Trump extremist who has advocated for vengeance against Trump’s political foes. He insisted he would be a neutral enforcer of the law if confirmed as FBI director. The statements, tweets, and quotes that he refused to acknowledge told a different story.
This story was originally published by Capital B, a nonprofit newsroom that centers Black voices. To read more of Adam Mahoney’s work on climate change, visit Capital B.
As Los Angeles battled its largest wildfires in history, parts of the southern U.S. faced a very different kind of disaster — record-breaking snowstorms not seen in over 125 years.
In LA, the Benn family didn’t lose their home to the flames, but they did lose access to their livelihood. Their screen-printing business, which they’ve run in Altadena since 2007, is now in limbo. Before the fires, their community boasted the second-highest concentration of Black-owned businesses in LA County. Now, with no clear timeline for reopening the area, the Benns are struggling to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, Quelly, a hairstylist and mother of young children, lost three days of income when the snowstorm shut down her city for half a week. For someone self-employed, it’s a blow that’s hard to afford.
Since January 2024, extreme weather events have hit harder and cost more than ever before. Disasters like these are piling up at an unprecedented rate. A new analysis puts the damage and economic losses at $799 billion — around 3% of the U.S. economy — thanks to wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and winter storms. And while these crises affect everyone, Black Americans are feeling the impact the most. Underfunded communities are struggling to recover, jobs are disappearing, and insurance premiums are skyrocketing as the risk of displacement grows.
These extreme weather events are disrupting industries you wouldn’t normally associate with disasters, making it harder for Black families to access basic necessities like food and water. A recent report warns that without swift action to limit the impact of severe weather, it will cost children born in 2024 at least $500,000 up to $1 million over their lifetime. That’s from higher living costs — like soaring housing costs and strained food supplies — and lower earnings from missed work.
“Quite clearly, if you’re awake, everybody should understand, we’re living in very dangerous times, and Black folks and people who are economically vulnerable, they’re already facing heightened exposures to these events,” explained Lemir Teron, an associate professor in Howard University’s Department of Earth, Environment, and Equity. “Our resilience gets curtailed when we don’t have the policies or the money to better protect ourselves.”
In Florida, this month, Black farmers are grappling with the aftermath of an unprecedented winter storm that dumped record snow, sleet, and freezing rain across the region. Farmers say they’ve never faced such devastation — not even from Category 5 Hurricane Michael in 2018 — as 10 inches of snow leveled greenhouses and shattered irrigation systems. The fallout will be felt nationwide when the fruits and vegetables we depend on don’t make it out of the Sunshine State.
“The cold snap and the snow showed us we have to be ready, and I don’t think our states — the Southern states — are ready,” said Trenise Bryant, who is a food-service manager for Florida elementary-age children and a housing advocate across the state. “I don’t know if our infrastructure and ecosystems can withstand what’s to come.”
She said last year’s hurricanes and this record storm showed the importance of government and community groups working together because “if we can’t get that funding for people that don’t have access, people that are living on the street, that means no access to housing, food, and water for them.”
Trump’s attempt to revamp disaster recovery
“It’s the worst series of disasters since the Dust Bowl,” said Joel Myers, the founder of AccuWeather, the group that conducted the $799 billion damage and economic loss analysis. The fallout, he said, could drive a new wave of migration. For Black communities already facing systemic barriers, the road to recovery is anything but even, and as we’ve reported, migration doesn’t always guarantee protection from these climate threats.
In Detroit, Sandra Turner-Handy has had to clean out bacteria-filled floodwaters from her home twice in recent years. Flooding has become more common in recent years due to much greater rainfalls than normal, leaving many residents dealing with the financial burdens of home improvements, loss of work, and mold-induced illnesses.
“We have experienced so much in the last year with the extreme heat, the cold, and the flooding,” Turner-Handy said. “We can’t escape it.”
The Trump administration is taking aim at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is largely responsible for how America responds to weather events. During his first week back in office, he signed an executive order calling for a sweeping review of the agency and floating the idea of shutting it down altogether.
In the executive order, Trump accused FEMA of political bias and mishandling disaster aid, claiming it’s leaving Americans vulnerable. Last year, when Hurricane Helene dismantled the Southeast, Trump spread rumors that the agency was deliberately not giving aid to white conservatives. In reality, studies show that Black neighborhoods receive an estimated 10% less recovery aid than white ones. The aid discrepancy has substantially contributed to the racial wealth gap in the South.
The Trump administration is also pushing to shift more disaster response costs to states, a move that critics warn could leave under-resourced communities, particularly Black and low-income areas, even more exposed to climate disasters.
Trump has also paused spending benefitting Black and “disadvantaged” communities from the Biden administration’s two key spending pots: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. These funds had been used to do things like replace lead pipes, improve access to electricity in Black rural communities, and fortify buildings and roads against flooding across the South. Analyses have shown that Trump-stronghold states like Georgia and the Carolinas benefited the most from this spending.
“We had started to understand that climate change has an impact [on] our city and that these issues relate not just to the heat and the cold, but can bring more illnesses and affect the amount of money in our pockets,” said Turner-Handy, who was awarded a grant through the IRA last fall, but was told last week that she will not be receiving the money under the Trump administration. The funding was meant to be used to install air quality monitors in her community.
“We’re left ripe for more harm,” she said.
With a leadership shake-up and the potential for states to shoulder a bigger burden, the debate over FEMA’s future and climate spending comes as the country faces increasingly devastating hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. With more weather events on the horizon, Black Americans and other marginalized groups are still struggling to bounce back from previous disasters.
“Eventually, climate denialism is going to harm us all in the same way. Folks who have means will be exposed to things that they don’t presently deal with,” said Teron, the professor who also pointed out how America’s inability to address climate change will result in global issues like sea level rise in West Africa.
“These rollbacks on the federal level, the severity of extreme weather, it’s going to harm us all,” he said.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “to combat anti-Semitism” that allows for a broad crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, including deporting demonstrators on student visas.
The order, titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” asks federal agencies to report within 60 days all ways to combat antisemitism, including identification of “all civil and criminal authorities or actions.” Definitions in the order are vague: It re-establishes a prior Trump push on antisemitism from 2019 and implies antisemitism includes expressions of anti-Zionism.
Trump was more blunt in an attached fact-sheet released with the executive order. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Notably, in a section titled “Additional Measures To Combat Campus Anti-Semitism,” Trump recommends that colleges and universities be “familiarized” with American law on “inadmissible aliens.” The order then says these “institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove.”
The order does not explicitly require schools to deport anyone—nor does it immediately cancel anyone’s visa. Instead, it puts the ball in the universities’ court: Will they collaborate in the deportation of Trump’s political enemies, or will they stand up for their students?
Dima Khalidi, of the advocacy organization Palestine Legal, said in a statement the order is meant to intimidate, “aimed at enforcing an ideological strangulation on schools by attempting to scare students into silence about Israel’s genocide in Gaza with threats of prosecution and deportation.”
“The implications of this executive order go far beyond the Palestine movement,” Khalidi added. “It encourages government agencies to find ways to target any dissent from Trump’s agenda, and aims to enlist universities themselves as its censors and snitches.” Some students who participated in pro-Palestine protests quietly locked their social media accounts on Wednesday. Others asserted that they would not be intimidated.
This order “effectively illegalizes criticism of Israel for non-citizens, [including] green card holders,” Michigan immigration attorney Eric Lee said on X. “This will impact what students say in class, what they write in essays, what they tell their professors in office hours. This chills the speech of the entire population.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Health and Human Services could have been a window into Kennedy’s beliefs and how he’d run one of the largest departments in the U.S. government. Instead, Kennedy spent much of the two days he was questioned before two different Senate committees denying his past comments, obfuscating his long record as an anti-vaccine activist, and, in some cases, flatly denying things he’s previously said publicly. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of places where Kennedy reversed his previous positions, denied something he’s previously said, or presented a misleading picture of past actions.
Characterized himself as not anti-vaccine but pro “strong science”
Kennedy’s clear record is that of a man who stokes suspicion and distrust towards vaccines at every turn, and has done so for almost 20 years. Nonetheless, throughout the hearing, Kennedy insisted that he’s not a vaccine opponent, saying that he and his children are vaccinated against some illnesses, and that he simply wants good science and data.
But the fact is that since 2005, with the publication of “Deadly Immunity,” his now-retractedRolling Stone article, a cornerstone of Kennedy’s public career has been casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense from 2015 to 2023, through which he spent countless hours making misleading claims about vaccines. The original name of the organization, the World Mercury Project, stemmed from the false claim that vaccines contain a harmful form of mercury. In 2016, Kennedy accused Congress of allowing “mercury-contaminated vaccines that other countries have long outlawed.” This statement misrepresented thimerosal, a preservative that’s been demonized by the anti-vaccine movement for decades, and which has, in any case, been removed from most vaccines since 2001.
Kennedy has also expressed unqualified support for Andrew Wakefield, who authored the retracted study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism, an association that has been disproven and debunked many times over. (During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy also suggested that the Institute of Medicine—a non-profit advisory organization now known as the National Academy of Medicine—needed to look into the purported vaccines-autism connection. But the IOM already did in 2011, and issued a report, hundreds of pages long, conclusively finding that vaccines do not cause autism.
“If the science says I’m wrong about what I’ve said in the past,” Kennedy proclaimed at one in the hearing, “as I said, I will apologize.”
This is a common talking point for Kennedy—that he’s not anti-vaccine, but merely pro-science—but that doesn’t make it true.
Offered a misleading picture of why he traveled to Samoa
Kennedy repeatedly distorted his infamous trip to Samoa in the run up to a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them unvaccinated children.
During his visit, he spoke to the prime minister about vaccines and met with two anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy has acknowledged in the past that he went to Samoa at the invitation of one of them, “medical freedom” campaigner Edwin Tamasese; as NBC recently reported, an explicit goal of the trip was for the two men to discuss vaccines.
Kennedy, however, insisted at the hearing that he was there to attend an independence celebration and introduce a “medical informatics” system, adding, “I never thought gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who will say ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.’”
Claimed an apology he gave to a woman who accused him of sexual harassment was for “something else”
In July, Vanity Fairreported allegations from Eliza Conney that Kennedy had groped her during her time working as a caregiver for his children. Cooney told Reuters that Kennedy apologized to her over text after the story came out. According to Reuters, the text read, “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”
When questioned about the alleged incident during the hearing by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Kennedy denied sexually harassing or assaulting Cooney. When asked if he’d apologized to her, he said he had not, adding, without elaboration, “I apologized to her for something else.”
Denied claiming Lyme disease is a bioweapon
When Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) suggested on Wednesday that Kennedy had claimed Lyme disease was a “miltary-engineered bioweapon,” Kennedy responded, “I probably did say that.”
Yet on Thursday, when Sen. Susan Collins of (R-Maine) asked him about his statements on Lyme disease as a bioweapon, he changed his story. “I’ve never believed that, Senator,” he said. “What I said is, we should always follow the evidence.”
Denied saying Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon
Kennedy claimed in the summer of 2023 that Covid was a bioweapon, telling an Upper East Side audience, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
But in what represented a bit of an emerging pattern, when questioned about these remarks during the hearing, Kennedy claimed he “didn’t say it was deliberately targeted.”
There is also no proof that Covid is an ethnic bioweapon, a theory so fringe that few people besides Kennedy have even promoted it.
Flip-flopped on Ozempic
During Thursday’s hearings, Kennedy told Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), “The GLP-1 drugs—class of drugs—are miracle drugs.” That’s a departure from his previous comments on Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs of its class. In October, he said on a Fox News appearance, “They’re counting on selling [Ozempic] to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” He also claimed at the time that the European Union “is right now investigating Ozempic for suicidal ideation”—even though the EU’s report, published in April, had already found no relationship.
Cast himself as a staunch opponent of abortion
During the hearings, Kennedy said repeatedly that he agrees with President Trump that “every abortion is a tragedy,” as he put it, and that the state “should control abortion,” presenting this as a long-held position. But it isn’t: Kennedy previously said on his own 2024 presidential campaign’s website he would have, as president, restored Roe vs. Wade, adding, “Body sovereignty must be protected.”
Denied calling antidepressant users “addicts”
“You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said during Wednesday’s hearings. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy then denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”
Yet as Mother Jonesreported in July, when he made a podcast appearance to unveil a plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs during his 2024 campaign, Kennedy described a vision of opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
Denied suggesting pesticides could cause children to become transgender
On Wednesday, Bennetasked Kennedy, “Did you say exposure to pesticides causes children to be transgender?” Kennedy replied, “No, I never said that.” But in July, a report by CNN found dozens of instances of Kennedy spreading the notion. In a 2022 episode of his podcast, for example, Kennedy said, “If you expose frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually bear young…and so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society.”
Although the hearings questioning Kennedy have concluded, it’s unclear when the Senate will schedule a vote on his confirmation. Several senators indicated they’d follow up with further questions over the weekend. Clearly, they’ll have a lot to ask about.
On Monday, workers at Philadelphia’s Center City Whole Foods Market voted 130–100 to be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. It marks the first time an Amazon-owned Whole Foods store has voted to unionize—and it is one of the first major union elections of the second Trump presidency.
The organizing effort, which workers say has been in the works for over a year, went public in November. Workers say it was driven by myriad demands, including a push for increased pay. The base wage at the Center City Whole Foods is $16 per hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single person in Philadelphia, without dependents, is over $22 per hour. (Amazon, which has owned Whole Foods since 2017, is worth about $2.5 trillion.)
Whole Foods workers told me the low pay means they have to work multiple jobs to manage their bills. Khy Adams, 32, makes $16.50 an hour in the hot foods department but has to work as a culinary instructor on the side. She said she often logs well over 50 hours per week between her two jobs.
Mase Veney, 26, has worked in the produce department for three years. Mostly, he said, that means “lifting heavy boxes” in a freezing cooler. About a year and a half ago, at the end of his shift, Veney emerged to talk to a friend in another department. “I just came out to take a break because I was freezing cold,” he said. But for this break, he was castigated for wasting time. Then, he said, some of his shifts mysteriously disappeared from the calendar.
After that incident, Veney joined forces with four other workers to figure out how to start a union.
Almost immediately after going public, they faced opposition. Fliers reading, “Stay Whole, Vote No,” circulated around the store. Managers whom Veney and his co-workers were used to working with were transferred to other store locations. “The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks,” Adams said.
During the first week of January, UFCW Local 1776 filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that at least one worker was fired as retaliation for union activity and that “supervisors coercively told employees that they would not be getting wage increases because of their union activities and made promises of wage increases if they did not vote to unionize.” (Amazon disputes these assertions. A Whole Foods representative said the company will implement a raise when it is legal to do so.)
Strange faces started showing up around the store, workers said, as the unionization vote approached. “They started bringing in people from Texas, people from Florida—a lot of people from New York. There was one person who was there from California,” Adams told Mother Jones.
The new people, who wore “Culture Champion” merchandise, never told her their job title. They were oddly gregarious, Adams remembered. “We’re here to help with anything you need,” she recalled them saying. And the new colleagues were especially eager, Adams said, to talk about why unionizing could be harmful to workers. Yet when she tried to assign them tasks, they were nowhere to be found. “On any given day, I would see maybe four or five people that would have ‘Culture Champion’ merch on, but they wouldn’t necessarily be performing a job,” she said.
Meanwhile, her department was chronically understaffed. Dishes regularly piled up because too few people were hired to wash them. Adams often tried her best to manage preparing the rotisserie chickens, operating the hot bar, and tending to the soups all at the same time.
On Monday, when the results began to come in, Adams almost could not believe it. “The propaganda machine wanted us to believe that we were isolated, that no one wanted this, that we were just on an island all by ourselves,” she said. “But I’m not the only person who wants this—we aren’t the only group of people who want this.”
In a statement, the company said: “We are disappointed by the outcome of this election, but we are committed to maintaining a positive working environment in our Philly Center City store.”
Now, the challenge for the newly unionized Whole Foods workers is to negotiate with their employer. Amazon has been more than willing to deploy anti-union tactics in the past. In October, the company received a complaint from the NLRB over its refusal to negotiate with unionized delivery drivers employed by a third-party company. And when an Amazon warehouse in New York’s Staten Island voted to unionize nearly three years ago, the company refused to come to the bargaining table. While refusing to bargain is illegal, the penalties are minimal.
The unionized Whole Foods workers will also face a much more anti-union NLRB—just hours after their election, President Donald Trump fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who was well known for going after Amazon.
Now, “we have to certify these votes to make sure that everything goes through and that Amazon doesn’t try to throw a wrench in that plan, which they are very much known for,” Adams said. During the vote certification process, Amazon has a chance to challenge any ballots filed.
“I feel like it’ll make Amazon fight harder, because they know that Trump’s in office,” Veney said. “But we have a lot of people behind us, backing us up, and I think we can make this thing happen.” The unionized workers, knowing they won’t be supported on the federal level by Trump, are looking to local and state-level politicians for backup.
Their first challenge, Veney said, is simple. Earlier this month, the Center City store was reportedly exempted from a regionwide wage increase. Workers said they were told this was because Amazon didn’t want to sway the outcome of the election.
“The vote is now over,” Adams said. “So where are our wage increases that you said you were going to give us?”
On Wednesday, an Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a commercial American Airlines flight as it was in the process of landing at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC. Officials believe that there were no survivors among the 67 people on both craft.
After tragedies like these, it’s typical for American presidents to address the grieving public. What’s not typical of presidents is to blame issues with, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration on disabled people and people of color. Prior to diving into a bigoted speech at a next-day press conference on the crash, Trump claimed to have “pretty good ideas of what happened,” suggesting disabled people, people of color, Barack Obama, and ex-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were to blame for the tragedy.
In his speech, Trump rattled off a long list of the disabilities he said the Biden FAA had allowed air traffic controllers to have—citing, among others, dwarfism—poising hiring them as a negative move. There is nothing to confirm the air traffic controllers, who attempted to intervene at least twice prior to the crash, were even disabled. In addition, disabled people are not hired if they cannot perform the duties of their job.
And he gave himself a pat on the back for his executive order ending equitable hiring processes, issued last week, which claimed that the FAA “specifically recruited and hired individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric issues, and complete paralysis.” Trump has a history of attacking disabled people and of insulting his political opponents by asserting that they are “mentally disabled.”
Trump then segued to blasting former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, claiming that Buttigieg had run the FAA “right into the ground with his diversity” during his time at the helm. It is unclear whether Trump is referring to Buttigieg’s own sexuality, the FAA pushing for more equitable hiring processes, or the ex-secretary’s groundbreaking rulemaking and actions—which included taking steps to make airlines more accountable for breaking disabled people’s wheelchairs.
It is also impossible to separate Trump’s attacks on intellect—he centered his speech on a fixation with air traffic controllers as “naturally talented geniuses”—from his previously expressed racist views, or from his fixation on hiring processes in the FAA that tried to recruit more workers of color.
This is allegedly the person, after all, who told his ex-fixer Michael Cohen that “Black people are too stupid to vote for me.” He cast blame on the FAA’s “diversity and inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel—I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”
And even though Barack Obama has been out of office for more than eight years, Trump—who boosted his political prominence by pushing racist birther conspiracy theories against the former president—found time to attack him for FAA hiring changes. “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best,” he said. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first.”
“African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in another bizarre segue. But the FAA “determined that the workforce was too white,” he claimed. “Too white—and, uh, we want the people that are competent. But now we mourn.”
At her first White House press briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the Trump administration had paused $50 million in funding for “condoms in Gaza.” Leavitt called the money a “preposterous waste” and the pause an example of how the new administration is safeguarding “tax dollars.” The next day, President Donald Trump repeated the point.
But there is no evidence to support the claim that the United States was going to send $50 million in aid for condoms in Gaza.
In response to a request for comment, a State Department official told Mother Jones on condition of anonymity that the “Trump administration stopped two $50 million buckets of ‘aid’ for Gaza via the International Medical Corp [sic].” The official said some of this money would have gone to family planning “including emergency contraception; Sexual healthcare including prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs); and Adolescent sexual and reproductive health.” The official added that “Condoms have traditionally always been used for family planning in developing countries by USAID.”
To summarize: Funding was set to go to Gaza to assist International Medical Corps, some unspecified portion of it was for family planning and contraceptives, and condoms are “traditionally always” part of that. That is radically different from what Leavitt said Tuesday. And it does not appear to be true, either. International Medical Corps said in a press release, “No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms, nor to provide family-planning services.”
It also is not correct that condoms are “traditionally always” distributed to support US government reproductive health programs, particularly in the Middle East. A report from USAID covering the 2023 fiscal year stated that the agency has not provided any funding for condoms in the Middle East in recent years. (As CNN and the Guardian have made clear, the only contraceptive funding for the region was less than $50,000 that went to Jordan for oral and injectable birth control.)
Leavitt’s claim also leads to preposterous conclusions. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Postshowed that the United States has spent 3.3 cents per condom on average in recent years. For Leavitt to be right, USAID would have been planning to send more than 1.5 billion condoms to Gaza. That works out to more than 700 condoms per person there.
While there is no evidence the United States was about to pay for condoms in Gaza, there would be good reasons for doing so. “Notwithstanding the absurdity of this particular claim, contraceptive access *is* an important health issue in crisis settings like Gaza,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, wrote on X. “Unplanned pregnancies in a context of starvation and displacement can be hugely challenging and carry health risks.”
More importantly, the funding pause Leavitt touted at the press conference could have devastating consequences for Gazans in desperate need of medical attention.
Among other things, International Medical Corps said the money helps maintain one of only three neonatal intensive care units operational in Gaza and supports the delivery of 20 babies per day. The group added about its work in Gaza:
International Medical Corps has received $68,078,508 from USAID to support our operations in Gaza since October 7, 2023. With the generous support of USAID and the American people, we’ve used these resources to operate two large field hospitals currently located in central Gaza—one in Deir Al Balah and one in Al Zawaida—offering a combined total capacity of more than 250 beds, including 20 in the emergency room and 170 in the surgical department. These facilities provide 24/7 lifesaving medical care to roughly 33,000 civilians per month, in a highly dangerous and insecure environment where healthcare infrastructure has been decimated.
If the USAID stop-work order is kept in place, the group has said it will be able to continue providing lifesaving aid in Gaza for only about a week.
On Fox News on Tuesday, host Jesse Watters retroactively claimed another reason for the funding stop: “They are making condom bombs.” Trump echoed that claim Wednesday, saying “condoms to Hamas” had to be stopped because “they’ve used them as a method for making bombs.” (In past years, Israeli media sources have reported that militants in Gaza allegedly used condoms to make improvised incendiary devices.)
That makes it even less likely that the United States was planning to send condoms to Gaza. In reality, the Trump administration is using a made-up premise of vast condom spending to block lifesaving medical work.
For sixteen years, Eric Fatoma seldom ventured beyond the boundaries of Firestone’s 185 square mile property in Liberia, where he was employed at the American-founded tire company’s rubber plantation. Around 7,000 employees and their families live on what the company describes as the world’s largest contiguous natural rubber farm, relying on Firestone for food, education, and medical care. Generations of Liberian workers have done so, through a series of violent civil wars and a devastating Ebola epidemic.
Fatoma, 57, first worked as a “tapper,” extracting latex from rubber trees, before learning how to operate heavy machinery. At $8.50 (USD) a day, it was enough for a “comfortable” life, he said. He and his wife, who sometimes worked in maintenance, could support their eight children, and Fatoma had saved enough to buy a motorbike. They lived on the property in a small home, split between two cramped bedrooms.
In 2019, Fatoma was among eight hundred members of the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) who were laid off. Termination letters cited “economic challenges faced by the Company.”
Fatoma felt he had no choice but to accept a short-term contract through a third-party labor agency and become an office clerk. It came with a pay cut, to five dollars per day, and a newfound uncertainty—each contract lasted only a few months and had to be renewed. But in a country still recovering from war, there were few employment opportunities outside of the farm. Around 30 percent of the Liberian population live on less than $2.15 a day, and a significant portion, particularly women and young people, are employed informally in unreliable and unregulated work that is often paid under the table.
But FAWUL argues that, for the roughly two thousand people currently employed through third-party contractors on the farm, working conditions have become exploitative. A report published last month by the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW)argues that the precarious employment status of contract workers has made them vulnerable to abuse and that some of the conditions “amount to violations of international labor standards on forced labor.”
Near the end of last year, when FAWUL’s collective bargaining agreement was set to expire, the union began negotiating new terms with Firestone. In addition to bargaining for wage increases and better benefits for directly employed workers, they hoped that contract workers could join their union. But after a week of government-mediated negotiations in late January, when it seemed unlikely that the parties would come to an agreement, FAWUL’s parent union, the National Timber Wood, Construction & Allied Workers’ Union of Liberia, called for a strike, set to begin tomorrow. On Friday, six thousand employees will not show up to work on Firestone’s Liberia plantation.
In the century that Firestone has been in Liberia, its presence has reshaped the country—for better or worse. As the country’s largest agricultural employer, the company has invested heavily in developing its region of Liberia—building roads, schools, and hospitals. But concerns about working conditions on the plantation have long persisted and drawn international attention. At least since 2006, international unions such as the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers have bolstered FAWUL’s organizing efforts. Some observers see this as yet another chapter in a long history of extraction and exploitation.
“This is not a new story,” Deborah Greenfield, a co-author of the ILAW report and a former policy director at the International Labour Organization, told me. “Firestone Liberia has been under the microscope for 100 years now. In a sense, their practices haven’t changed that much, and their responses haven’t changed that much.”
Firestone, which is now owned by the multinational Japanese corporation Bridgestone, operates the Liberian plantation through a subsidiary. A Bridgestone Americas spokesperson said that the ILAW report includes “misleading and false statements regarding the company’s labor practices and commitment to workers’ rights.”
“Firestone Liberia is firmly committed to ethical business practices, transparency, and adherence to the laws of Liberia,” the statement read. “Firestone Liberia and our parent company, Bridgestone Americas, uphold a zero-tolerance policy against child labor, forced labor, and any practices violating human rights.” When reached for comment about the strike, the spokesperson said that Firestone “remains committed to resolving our differences at the negotiating table and requests that the union re-engage in discussions.”
The world’s rubber consumption will only continue to grow—it is used to make things like condoms, shoes, hoses, gloves, and, most of all, tires. But automating the extraction of natural rubber, which is more desirable than its synthetic counterpart for manufacturing, is difficult. This means that human labor is essential in order to make even cheap, disposable products.
Globalized trade can obscure what it takes to produce the things we buy. (Do you know the people who manufactured your sneakers?) In this way, modern supply chains—how raw materials are extracted, processed, and made into products that arrive at American doorsteps—create distance between the worker and customer.But the Liberian workers behind Firestone’s products are hoping that customers will recognize the human cost of their goods.
In December, the international workers’ rights group Solidarity Center hosted a public webinar about working conditions on the plantation for Firestone investors. During the presentation, Bongorlee, the union’s president, appealed to the international community to turn its scrutiny on Firestone. “We believe that you will be able to mount pressure based on… how the workers are suffering on the plantation, and why it is important for them to be covered by our union, so that they can be given dignity,” Bongorlee said.
The rubber trade isshrouded in a legacy of colonial exploitation. At the turn of the twentieth century, European settlers exported rubber trees from the Amazon rainforest and established large plantations in British Malaya, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies. Today, harvesting natural rubber remains grueling, low-wage work done in parts of Southeast Asia and West Africa. The process of extraction is similarly unchanged. Laborers make careful cuts to latex vessels that grow in spirals around the Pará rubber tree, collecting a slow trickle of the milky liquid in buckets. Work in sweltering tropical temperatures begins in the pre-dawn hours, with the threat of snakes underfoot.
These days, most of the world’s natural rubber comes from small, family-owned farms in Asia, which sell to a network of distributors. Firestone’s sprawling rubber plantation in Liberia, established a century ago, is a relic of a bygone era of the industry.
In July 2024, human rights lawyers and union experts visited Firestone Liberia and conducted interviews with workers, which formed the basis of the ILAW report co-authored by Greenfield and Lance Compa, a lecturer emeritus at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Contract workers interviewed by researchers described poor living conditions, unpaid mandatory overtime, and difficult-to-reach production quotas. According to the report, these workers lived in “constant fear of being disciplined or dismissed” if they spoke out, and some said that they had been retaliated against for even attending union meetings.
There are three types of jobs most commonly held on Firestone Liberia: “tappers” who extract latex, “cup washers” who clean the buckets used to collect latex, and “slashers” who clear underbrush. Contract workers, who are primarily employed as “tappers,” told researchers that they must work 50-60 hours per week to reach production quotas, or risk being fired. According to the report, workers are not paid for overtime, in defiance of Liberian law, which requires overtime pay after 48 hours of work. And because some workers are paid per pound of dried latex extracted, pay can fall below Liberia’s minimum wage of $5.50 a day.
International observers have long been concerned about demanding production quotas on the plantation. In 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund sued Firestone in a US District court on behalf of 23 Liberian child laborers and their guardians. The lawsuit claimed that the company was aware that children often worked alongside their parents “tapping” rubber trees to meet quotas. Firestone said that they do not directly employ children, and the lawsuit was eventually tossed out by an appeals court.
When we think of forced labor, we might imagine work done at the “point of a bayonet,” Greenfield, the report’s co-author, said at the presentation to shareholders. “(But) it’s really important to look at forced labor in the context of contemporary circumstances.”
The precarity of their employment, Greenfield and Compa argue in the report, “plunged” contract workers into “steadily worsening conditions” with no avenues of redress. The report claims that conditions under which contract workers must operate meet international standards of forced labor and violate Bridgestone’s own Global Human Rights Policy.
A Bridgestone spokesperson said that Firestone prohibits retaliation against employees who have grievances and that third-party contractors must comply with “rigorous training, safety, and code of conduct standards.” The spokesperson said that the company “(holds) contracting companies accountable, terminating those who we become aware of failing to meet these standards.”
As Liberia’s firstmajor foreign investor, Firestone has long framed itself as a vital partner in the country’s development.
Liberia was founded in 1822 by formerly enslaved Black people, who had been sent to the coast of West Africa by the American Colonization Society, an organization opposed to racial integration. Despite resistance from local leaders, the settlers established the colony with support from the US government and named its capital Monrovia, for the fifth American president James Monroe. In 1847, Liberia declared independence and became Africa’s first republic. But, for a century, the settlement struggled to be economically self-sufficient. Then cameHarvey S. Firestone, founder of the Ohio-based tire company,who had been searching for a place to develop a rubber plantation. In 1926, the company signed a 99-year lease for one million acres of Liberia, at an annual rent of six cents per acre. A subsequent agreement exempted Firestone and its foreign employees from taxes and duties.
In 1929, a US official in Liberia expressed concerns that Liberian elites were using force to recruit workers for plantations and farms, including Firestone’s. After American officials grew concerned, the League of Nations—of which the US was not a member—launched an investigation. It found that, though Liberian political elites may have coerced workers, there was “no evidence” that Firestone “consciously employs any but voluntary labour.”
Firestone remained a major player in the country, maintaining relationships with Liberian leaders throughout the 20th century—including, as detailed in a ProPublica investigation, the convicted war criminal Charles Taylor. (The company told ProPublica that it had never willingly assisted Taylor’s occupation of Liberia.) Another leader, Samuel Doe, described Liberia’s relationship with Firestone as a “contract of mutual survival.”
“Early on, Firestone sold itself on corporate social welfare,” said Gregg Mitman, an environmental history professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Empire of Rubber. It provided free housing, education, and medical care, and sold rice and palm oil to workers at subsidized rates. But, given its privileged tax status, Firestone’s presence in Liberia did not fundamentally transform the country’s economy. One economist estimated that, from 1926 to 1977, three out of every four dollars earned by Firestone in Liberia were transferred to its American headquarters. “You can ask yourself whether that is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Mitman said.
As the labor movement began gaining momentum in Liberia, Firestone saw its first employee walk-out in 1949, with workers demanding higher wages, improved living conditions, and better treatment by white management. A series of strikes followed throughout the 1950s, which were sometimes quashed by state police.
Between 1989 and 2003, the country was decimated by a series of civil wars, with fatalities estimated between 150,000 and 250,000—during which Firestone continued to operate. As Liberia struggled to rebuild, it once again turned to foreign capital, a strategy that has historically failed to create “sustainable infrastructure and basic social services,” said Robtel Neajai Pailey, a Liberian activist and professor of social policy at the London School of Economics. “The extractive nature of foreign direct investment (doesn’t lift) Liberian citizens out of multi-dimensional poverty.”
In 2007, after a series of wildcat strikes and with international observers present, FAWUL held what has been described as its first independent leadership elections. The new slate of leaders won wage increases and lower quotas in their next contract. At the time, a United Steelworkers official who had helped FAWUL organize wrote, “It is proof that they have a union now that requires management to treat them with dignity and respect.”
When I spoke to Fatoma in early January, over a WhatsApp video call, he told me that he had just been laid off. He thinks his termination is directly related to his recent election as a union representative. “When you advocate at Firestone, you are an enemy,” Fatoma said.
Firestone does not currently recognize FAWUL’s ability to negotiate on behalf of contract workers, despite the strong majority who voted for it in September. Firestone has said that it “recognizes the rights for workers to join a union,” but argues that contract workers cannot be represented by FAWUL because they are employed by third-party agencies.
Fatoma hopes that being represented by FAWUL will give contract workers enough leverage to change their working conditions.
But January’s negotiations, which were overseen by Liberia’s Ministry of Labour, were unsuccessful. Bongorlee, FAWUL’s president, said that Firestone would not allow contract workers to join FAWUL, but said that they could form their own. According to Bongorlee, the negotiations stalled on retirement benefits and sick pay for directly employed workers.
Even if FAWUL and Firestone ultimately reach an agreement, Greenfield says, the fight is far from over. “Companies don’t change their actions overnight,” Greenfield told me. “What you need is a fundamental shift of power, and that doesn’t come about easily, and it doesn’t come about quickly.”
Correction, January 30: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of the strike. It is set for January 31.
In the frenetic days following the November election, longtime abortion provider Amy Hagstrom Miller spent a lot of time in meetings—some in person, some on Zoom—rallying her troops. As one of the most prominent and tenacious independent abortion providers in the country, with six Whole Woman’s Health clinics in four states, it was a safe bet that she and her staff of 125 would find themselves in the crosshairs of a Donald Trump presidency and the anti-abortion extremists his second term will empower.
Hagstrom Miller could feel the alarm and dread that washed over some of her employees as they contemplated an America in which the 1873 Comstock Act might be enforced to institute a national abortion ban, the abortion pill would come under myriad other relentless attacks, federal appointees would use their bureaucratic powers to target providers in states where abortion remains legal, and patients would face new risks to their physical safety and constitutional rights.
But she also felt her employees’ determination, and even excitement, to double down on the part of their work that they like to call “kicking against the pricks.” Hagstrom Miller’s consistent message was sober without being defeatist. Prepare—but don’t panic. And above all, do not comply in advance.
“One of the first signs of authoritarianism is that people start to comply with things before they are actually enforced,” Hagstrom Miller told me repeatedly during a series of interviews since before the election. “We can prepare for different scenarios, but we are not going to stop doing what we do. Abortion was needed well before Trump was alive and will be needed well after he leaves office.”
As the new Trump administration takes power, Hagstrom Miller is uniquely positioned to guide abortion supporters through this terrifying crossroads for reproductive and gender rights. She spent 20-plus years in Texas battling the right-wing lawmakers and legal strategists working to pass some of the most draconian abortion laws in the country. The end of Roe v. Wade finally forced her to leave the state, but she did not go away. She has continued to be a thorn in the anti-abortion movement’s side, expanding the reach of her other clinics while counseling providers in blue states that are facing existential threats to abortion rights for the first time. Rather than succumbing to fear, Hagstrom Miller has been staying vigilant, being proactive, and reminding those in her orbit to do the same.
Her clinics in Minnesota, Maryland, and—most recently—Virginia and New Mexico have been stockpiling as much of the abortion drug mifepristone as they can in case shipping is disrupted by the Trump administration’s policies. They’ve been over-ordering medical supplies, from gloves to exam-table paper, in light of anti-abortion groups’ well-telegraphed plans to resurrect the Comstock Act to ban the shipping of all abortion-related supplies and equipment. Far from preparing to curtail their work, her clinics have been expanding services: raising the gestational limit for medication abortion from 11 weeks to 12 weeks for telemedicine appointments; mailing pills to a larger number of states, including New York, Colorado, and California; and exploring how to accept Medicaid patients from states that allow the program to reimburse telehealth abortion care. “People tell me, ‘Well, Trump is going to ban pills by mail,’ and I’m just like, ‘Well, people have threatened to do that stuff for my entire career, actually.’ It’s not going to stop us from doing what we can to help our patients now,” she says.
Their preparations aren’t just logistical, but also psychological, aimed at helping her team and their allies stay resilient amid all the attacks.
“They’ve talked about Comstock, they’ve talked about a national abortion ban,” Hagstrom Miller says. “But at the same time, we can’t just bow down and normalize it all. We can’t let extremists who want to revive a law from the 1800s have that kind of power over us. We need to proceed in a way that treats these threats as remarkably radical—not just as inevitable.”
Coming from someone else, that advice might feel like Pollyanna-ish platitudes out of sync with this political moment. From Hagstrom Miller, who has weathered countless storms as an abortion provider in the South, it’s a bracing reminder that the future is far from hopeless—if we can draw from the lessons of the past.
“I learned a lot while practicing in Texas, and I’ll leverage that experience to push back on the second Trump presidency, whether it be exploiting loopholes, filing lawsuits, or finding other creative ways of resistance,” she says. “We know how to protect ourselves while also being cautious.”
“It’s not necessarily wisdom we wanted,” Hagstrom Miller adds. “But we have it and we’re sure as hell going to use it.”
Hagstrom Miller grew up in a “fairly progressive” Christian family in what she calls “judgy progressive” Minnesota in the ’70s and ’80s. The attitude, she says, was, “We believe people should have [the right to] abortion.” But when it came to a woman’s decision to actually have one, “it was sort of talked about like it was still a mistake or a problem.” Majoring in religion and international studies in college, she traveled extensively and lived abroad, shaping a worldview that rejected, as she puts it, how the religious right sought to “weaponize” Christianity to attack reproductive rights and gender equality. After her first post-college job at a Minnesota Planned Parenthood, she moved to local independent abortion clinics. “I was drawn to the fact we could provide a sort of oasis where the patient could choose the course of their lives,” she says, “and we could help be their guide.”
She worked briefly at a provider in Texas in the early 1990s, then moved to New York City, where her time at high-patient-volume clinics taught her the business of abortion care. She appreciated how easy it was for abortion patients and providers to go about their business there, but also felt restless. “Abortion was on literally every corner, and it was paid for by Medicaid,” Hagstrom Miller recalls. “That’s how it should be, right?” But she missed the advocacy part of the work she’d gotten a taste of in Texas. So when she moved back to the state in 2000, she accepted an offer to run a small clinic; three years later, she bought two clinics and merged them when the doctor-owners retired—the start of her Whole Woman’s Health network. “Be careful what you wish for, right?” she says with a laugh.
Meanwhile, the conservatives who dominated Texas politics during the George W. Bush era were taking an even harder turn to the right—and using their powers to chip away relentlessly at abortion and reproductive rights. “It seemed like almost every single time the legislature met, from the moment I touched ground in Texas in 2000, a new restriction was passed,” Hagstrom Miller says: parental notification requirements; a 24-hour waiting period; mandatory ultrasounds; restrictions on insurance coverage; bans on abortion after 24 weeks, then 20 weeks; and on and on.
Hagstrom Miller became what she calls a “loophole archaeologist.” The 2003 waiting period law, for instance, required a doctor’s appointment 24 hours in advance of an abortion with the same physician who would perform the procedure—a rule designed to unnecessarily burden patients and clinics alike. Hagstrom Miller noticed that the text of the statute didn’t specify an in-person visit, so she allowed for phone consultations instead. “A lot of other providers were scared to do this,” she says. “I know what the law probably meant, but they didn’t write it that way.” Her clinic led the charge with this interpretation, and others eventually followed suit, forming a united front. The tactic bought her and other clinics’ patients another four years before lawmakers clarified the language, she says. It’s a strategy that she’s employed over and over, she adds: “Comply with the law,” but “in the most liberal, progressive way possible.”
Hagstrom Miller employed a similar strategy when navigating Senate Bill 8, also known as the Heartbeat Act, which banned abortions at around six weeks. Her clinics continued to provide abortion within the confines of the radical law, even as some clinics in the state halted all care. Hagstrom Miller consulted attorneys about how to follow the law while avoiding legal liability, boosting her staff’s confidence in treating patients, and changed the scheduling process to fit in more patients, which helped keep the clinics afloat even as they operated at 40 percent capacity. She shared these tactics with providers in Georgia and Florida who eventually faced similar bans and also urged them to pay attention to whether a law permits abortion through six weeks versus up to six weeks, a distinction that lawmakers might not notice but that would be critical to delivering care. “Sometimes the pockets of resistance are mundane legal jargon. But social change often relies on the mundane,” she adds. “The words ‘may’ and ‘shall’ or ‘through’ and ‘up to’ in a law can make all the difference in the world in whether we can see patients or not.”
Meanwhile, even as she was finding loopholes, Hagstrom Miller often used the legal system to fight the underlying restrictions, filing about a dozen lawsuits over the years, with varying degrees of success. The most high-profile case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, was a challenge to so-called TRAP (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws that required abortion doctors to obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a clinic and forced clinics to conform to the same building codes as ambulatory surgical centers. With a Republican-appointed majority on the US Supreme Court, “many people, even on our side, told us we were crazy to bring the Hellerstedt case, that we were taking too much risk and were never going to win,” Hagstrom Miller recalls. But in a surprising, and historic, 2016 decision, the high court deemed the TRAP laws an “undue burden” on abortion patients.
By contrast, Hagstrom Miller’s legal challenge to SB 8, the so-called Heartbeat Act, in 2021 was an unmitigated defeat, with the Supreme Court allowing the law to stand. “What’s the alternative?” she asks, referring to litigation even when victory is far from guaranteed. “Our backs are up against the wall. You can’t only do things if the odds are in your favor. You have to do what’s right, no matter what.”
Backing down under Trump’s second term isn’t an option either. “If they enforce Comstock,” she says, “we are going to sue them.”
The clever maneuvering and legal battles, even when successful, have been costly and draining. During the Hellerstedt lawsuit, for example, Hagstrom Miller was forced to temporarily close her five Texas clinics and permanently shutter two of them. Even with pro bono representation from the Center for Reproductive Rights, she still spent about $1 million on the case, she says. “Depositions and trial prep, all of that stuff takes a ton of time, and we need to make sure providers have resources to support them,” Hagstrom Miller says. But without the major-name ID and fundraising power of an organization like Planned Parenthood, independent abortion clinics—which historically have provided the majority of abortion care in the US—have always been at a disadvantage when it comes to financial support, with big funders directing their money elsewhere.
Hagstrom Miller recalls how, during a cocktail party in 2014, a Planned Parenthood executive mentioned receiving a million-dollar donation from the late billionaire (and onetime third-party presidential candidate) Ross Perot in response to the Hellerstedt lawsuit. She was “gutted.” While major reproductive health groups benefited from her Supreme Court case, her Whole Woman’s Health clinics were struggling. “I was just tired of Planned Parenthood raising money off of our lawsuit,” Hagstrom Miller says. “I love people at that organization, but here we were with no way to fundraise ourselves. I decided I’m not going to stay mad, I’m going to do something about it.”
So in 2015, she created Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, a nonprofit that allowed the group to accept donations and foundation grants to finance “non-revenue-generating” work, such as communications, advocacy, and sometimes legal fees. The alliance helped Hagstrom Miller keep her Texas clinics afloat and expand her network into a handful of friendlier states. “A lot of people reach out to me when they want to retire and sell their practices,” she says.
And then in 2022, the Supreme Court issued its Dobbsv. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. Texas swiftly enforced a criminal trigger ban that threatened providers with at least $100,000 in fines and up to life in prison for performing an abortion. Hagstrom Miller was forced to immediately shutter her four remaining clinics in McAllen, Fort Worth, McKinney, and Austin simultaneously and lay off half of her 45-person Texas staff, including 15 physicians.
“Everything collapsed all at once,” she says. “Dobbs devastated us—financially and emotionally. It was a traumatic and heartbreaking time.”
It wasn’t just the Supreme Court decision that was demoralizing, Hagstrom Miller says. She also felt “betrayed” by the wider national reproductive rights movement. When her practice collapsed in Texas, leaving her with huge financial burdens, major abortion-rights funders were missing in action. Hagstrom Miller says she asked multiple donors and foundations—including some of the movement’s biggest backers—for “clinic wind-down” resources to pay for everything from administrative overhead to severance for staff, only to be repeatedly turned down. As she recalls it, one funder told her: “Why would I invest in something that’s dying anyway? There’s no future there.”
“It felt like such disrespect to the clinic workforce,” Hagstrom Miller says. “We felt abandoned. When the movement needed us to fight these big Supreme Court battles, we were there. But when we needed them, they just cast us aside.”
Hagstrom Miller says she tried to appeal to the Biden White House directly about this issue, proposing something akin to FEMA support or Paycheck Protection Program loans for providers forced to move out of state. She had hoped to continue to lobby a Harris administration; now, under Trump, she worries about how independent clinics will fare if they must self-fund their efforts to relocate.
The lack of help for shuttered clinics is symptomatic of the reproductive rights movement’s broader failures, she says, including its unwillingness to channel resources to red states where abortion is banned and to local abortion funds that are suffering from major money problems. A growing chorus of state-level activists has stressed the deep and “alarming” disconnect between the priorities of powerful national abortion organizations and the actual needs of abortion providers and patients. Hagstrom Miller hopes movement leaders and funders will learn from their mistakes, fundamentally rethinking what they do and increasing their investment in grassroots groups on the ground.“When [the people] that say they are supporting the movement don’t do anything to actually help those of us working every day to help abortion patients, then something needs to seriously change.”
Amid the lack of institutional support in post-Dobbs Texas, Hagstrom Miller was thrust into one of the most chaotic periods of her career. What happened at her Whole Woman’s Health clinic in the town of McAllen, in the Rio Grande Valley, was a particularly painful lesson—one about which some reproductive health advocates around the country remain upset.
Community advocates wanted to buy the facility and turn it into a reproductive justice center, but fell far short of the money they needed, partly, they say, because a Whole Woman’s Health employee asked them to remove the clinic’s name from their fundraising campaign. Meanwhile, Hagstrom Miller was frantically negotiating lease buyouts for facilities in Austin and McKinney and trying to sell her clinic in Fort Worth (she had to pay the mortgage for a year before it finally sold).
In the fall of 2022, a father-daughter pair of doctors calling themselves the Peruvian Alliance made a $275,000 cash offer to buy the McAllen clinic, claiming it was for their own family medicine practice. Hagstrom Miller, her employees, and lawyers say that they researched the prospective buyers and that their backgrounds checked out. But just two weeks after purchasing the clinic, the new owners turned the deed over to the McAllen Pregnancy Center, an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center that had long targeted Whole Women’s Health. Reproductive advocates were understandably furious at Hagstrom Miller. “They were so easily able to Trojan Horse their way in there,” Noemi Pratt, then the board secretary for South Texans for Reproductive Justice, said at the time. “How did you so easily allow this to happen?”
Hagstrom Miller, on the other hand, says she felt “duped.” “We were completely stunned. This was such a huge and painful betrayal, I still have difficulty talking about it today,” she says. “It was hard not to internalize it and blame ourselves. We just felt such grief.”
After being pushed out of Texas, Hagstrom Miller decided to move to abortion-protective New Mexico. She initially hoped to establish her clinic somewhere near the Texas border. But those rural communities were prime targets for anti-abortion activists pushing for the passage of “sanctuary for the unborn” ordinances. “It just didn’t feel safe for our patients,” she says. So Hagstrom Miller turned her sights to Albuquerque, raising $450,000 on GoFundMe to help fund the new facility.
Since opening its doors in March 2023, the vast majority of the clinic’s patients originate from Texas. Just minutes from the airport, the facility includes a special waiting room for families and others accompanying patients from out of state. There are couches to sleep on and toys to keep children entertained.
In the coming years, Hagstrom Miller hopes to see more collaboration among providers nationwide to strategize and help each other out. “There is a legacy of wisdom and expertise with some of us abortion providers here in the South who have been doing this for decades,” she says. “It could be useful to not only people on the federal level, but people in states who haven’t yet needed to flex those muscles and may be afraid of what’s to come. There’s a lot to be learned.”
And a lot to fight for. Since taking office, Trump has already reinstated the global gag rule, a policy that restricts US funding for foreign organizations that advocate or even refer for abortions; scrapped the federal government’s reproductive rights website; and limited protections for abortion clinics against violent protesters (a development Hagstrom Miller predicted). He’s stacked federal agencies with anti-abortion appointees and faced a pressure campaign from activists to ban medication abortion. Hagstrom Miller’s mind races with some of the other, less obvious ways the new administration could target patients and providers, from shredding privacy protections like HIPAA to launching arbitrary Medicaid audits—and other possibilities she’d rather not discuss publicly even as she prepares for the worst.
“Some of these things are very behind the scenes,” she says. “A lot of people don’t understand how regulatory interference works because it feels largely invisible. But anti-abortion activists sometimes understand better than pro-choice advocates do. And these maneuvers could shut us down as easily as an abortion ban.”
Hagstrom Miller doesn’t sugarcoat how difficult the next four years are likely to be. She gets triggered when people reflexively refer to her and other providers as “resilient” or “tireless,” words that fail to acknowledge how deeply exhausting her work has become. (“Fuck you all, I’m very tired!” she says with a laugh.) “Sometimes we are just numb and have to stare off into space,” she admits. “You can’t immediately spring into action—it feels fake and forced. It’s okay to take time to mourn these huge losses and then act when we are ready.”
What continues to motivate her is the gratitude she receives from her patients, day in and day out. “This is still super-meaningful work,” Hagstrom Miller says. “I can directly see the value it brings to people’s lives, and that fills my cup and keeps me going. As long as I have that, I will keep fighting.”
Gabriel Filippelli opened up his email inbox on Monday to encounter some unexpected news: a notice that his $300,000 grant from the State Department was no more.
Filippelli is the Chancellor’s Professor of Earth Sciences and executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. Previously a senior science advisor to the State Department, he has dedicated his career to understanding and improving environmental health. “I work on issues related to pollution and air quality,” says Filippelli. Increasingly, he has worked on projects involving “climate and health in the present and the future.”
He’s also one of the many scientists whose research was thrown into disarray by the recent flurry of executive orders from the Trump administration. Filippelli is more exposed than most. In addition to the above-mentioned project, he had a pair of proposals up for review by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both of which have placed a “temporary” freeze on their grant processes.
His institute, meanwhile, relies on a $5 million grant via the Inflation Reduction Act, whose funding President Donald Trump has vowed to claw back. Nothing has yet been done to jeopardize his IRA funding, which Filippelli has already received, but he says the institute’s work, which centers on environmental justice, may be uniquely “vulnerable.”
“We recognized that there was a gap between what Midwestern communities need to build climate resilience and the resources available to them,” he explains. The Environmental Resilience Institute fills that gap for those communities, “both red and blue,” and helps train people for jobs in the clean energy and decarbonization sectors. I caught up with Filippelli earlier this week to discuss the details. Our conversation below was edited for length and clarity.
Tell us more about the project whose funding was eliminated.
It’s a really cool one. The embassy in Pakistan put out a call for projects to help build capacity by developing partnerships, and one of those areas was in climate and air quality. We built a team of folks—including Indiana University, two Pakistani universities, and one Pakistani tech company—to help acquire a set of air quality monitors and deploy them in Pakistan to train faculty and students in Pakistan on air quality and climate resilience, and also bring some of that expertise and partnerships to the US. It was funded in October and we’ve been working on it over the last year.
How were you informed that your funding was rescinded?
Over the weekend, the State Department notified universities around the country, including mine, that they were going to suspend awards effective immediately. That’s what the term is: “suspended.” At least in my case, the award no longer “effectuated the priorities of the State Department.” It was simply a form letter that just said that—and then warned that no further spending can be made on any of the awards.
And you had been actively working on this from the start?
We started in October. We just finished drafting our first quarterly report to the embassy in Pakistan. I just had to cancel a trip to Pakistan to run some on-the-ground workshops.
Will this project be able to continue in any way?
Not in it’s current form. I’m sure the networks and partnerships that we’ve built will continue. They can’t forbid us from working with the universities, but they can forbid us from being supported by [federal] funds. The future is kind of murky.
What was the reaction of your Pakistani partners?
I’ve only gotten one very brief message. [The news arrived in] the middle of the night there. I think they’ll just be waking up now. The one brief message was just like two words: “My goodness.” It was a shock response.
How will this loss affect you and your colleagues?
The impacts for Indiana University and me are that we’ve already built up structures to spend time in Pakistan to implement this. We have students and staff involved. We had already begun arranging for a visit by Pakistani colleagues to the US to learn from us, and also to teach us about their environmental work in Pakistan.
It’s going to be relatively devastating for Pakistan. They’d already begun the process of constructing some air quality monitors and recruiting a bunch of the team members. When the US fails to come through on a commitment, it’s pretty demoralizing, particularly for the international partners. They need answers badly. Their air quality is terrible. It’s not getting any better. They rate really poorly on climate resilience. They need these resources now.
Have you ever had funding pulled like this?
Never in my life. Nor, based on chatting with some colleagues, in theirs. Federal funding can easily and rightfully be pulled if there’s malfeasance on the part of the grantee, but I’d never experienced this. I’ve received 40 research awards in my career, and never once would it even cross my mind that something like this would happen.
You are one of many American scientists grappling with these directives. What is the atmosphere among the researchers you are in touch with?
Pretty much shocked. A bunch of these dominoes are falling. First NIH suspends their study sections, meaning that there can be no action taken on any proposal. Ironically, I have a proposal in front of the NIH right now. And then the NSF just announced they are pausing all of their panel reviews. I have a proposal in the panel that would have been meeting today and tomorrow.
The NIH is under HHS, so we can [understand] a pause in some of that funding, but the National Science Foundation is usually hands off by the administration, and so that’s particularly shocking to me.
What are those proposals you have in the works?
The NIH proposal was to work with communities in El Paso, Texas, and Indianapolis to determine the major sources of lead in their blood. What are the environmental sources and how do you engage with those communities to reduce lead poisoning? The one at the National Science Foundation is developing a new graduate program around environmental sustainability and urban sustainability.
Is there anything else you’d like to emphasize about all of this?
I don’t think that many people know—certainly the administration doesn’t seem to—how much investment the US government puts into science and how much those dollars actually accrue to where they’re being spent. My research projects at Indiana University support student training. They support undergraduate lab researchers to get inspired by science. They support new discoveries that have resulted in patents. They have included changing some recommendations at the national level.
They are investments—local investments. I fully expect congressional delegations to push back against a lot of that stuff, because this money is going into their districts, including some large grants. I hoped to see an uproar at that level and a restoration of some of these very imprudent decisions.
Universities are our discovery makers, but they also train the next generation of Americans. When you start providing this kind of uncertainty in universities, you’re imperiling many generations in the future.
Federal workers comprise less than one percent of the US population, but are responsible for facilitating programs that help all 330-plus million Americans have access to health care, veterans’ services, safe transportation, clean water, nutritional assistance, and so much more.
On Tuesday evening, a memo titled “Fork in the Road,” from a mysterious Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email address, began offering nearly all federal government workers—excluding members of the military, postal workers, immigration officers, and national security personnel—the option to leave their nonpartisan, bureaucratic posts. All they have to do is send the word “resign” in the body of a reply to hr@opm.gov by February 6.
In exchange for leaving of their own volition, the email claims federal workers taking the offer will be able to “retain all pay and benefits” and be “exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements” until eight months from now, on September 30. (Last week, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum requiring all federal workers to return to in-person work “as soon as practicable.”)
Workers who choose to resign could be placed on leave or see their duties reduced through September, the email says. Resigning would also, theoretically, save federal workers the anxiety of a looming layoff down the road, when Trump is expected to make good on his promise to decimate the current federal workforce. “The majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized,” the Tuesday email, reviewed by Mother Jones, says.“At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position.”
To federal employees who received it, the email “implied that anyone who didn’t resign must fall in line with the administration or their jobs could be at risk,” says one federal employee of the Department of Commerce. To the email’s authors, it’s an attempt to allow federal workers who don’t want to contribute to “making America great again” the ability to “choose a different line of work” and receive “a very generous payout of eight months,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC.
Union leaders, who represent about one in four federal workers, and labor lawyers are skeptical about the email’s terms and legality. Meanwhile, government employees are oscillating between shock and awe: Many expressed a genuine concern for their ability to continue serving Americans through their roles. Others are amused by the absurdity of suggesting millions of workers step aside via individual, one-word email replies. Mother Jones heard from roughly a dozen federal workers and union representatives for this story; most were granted anonymity to avoid workplace retaliation.
“It seemed like a scare tactic, like so much of what they’ve done so far,” said a USDA employee.
A civilian Army employee said that the email’s “composition and the ‘reply Resign’ line made it hard to take seriously.”
SomeTreasury workers represented by the National Treasury Employees Union even thought the email was a phishing attempt or spam.
“They did not believe it was really coming from the federal government,” says Doreen Greenwald, the union’s national president.
On Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before some USDA employees received the offer for paid resignation, their supervisors called them to convene about a different email. This one was incredibly vague, and a tad eerie: “Watch Your Emails,” it said. “Starting tonight, OPM will be sending out an important federal workforce announcement.”
USDA leaders seemed surprised by that OPM correspondence and the offer to resign that followed. “It’s clear [that] middle management and agency leadership were not aware this was coming,” said the USDA worker, adding that colleagues have set up means of communicating outside work channels to strategize with and support one another. “We have no idea whether OPM can legally authorize the terms, accept resignations, or even legally email us like this.”
For starters, it’s unclear whether the federal government is even able to place huge swaths of government workers on leave for several months, as the OPM email says it will. Current statute indicates that agencies can put employees on leave for “a period of not more than a total of 10 work days.”
Additionally, the maximum amount agencies that are downsizing or reorganizing can offer federal workers in exchange for resignation is $25,000, according to an OPM webpage about the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority, which stipulates voluntary separation payments for agencies that are “downsizing or restructuring.” The sum an average federal worker makes in eight months is at least double that.
“My initial interpretation was that it’s a scam,” said one foreign service officer. “The memo was so lacking in details, it couldn’t possibly offer what it claimed to. Nowhere does it actually say what will happen to anyone who replies.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) isn’t confident that employees who accept the offer will get anything. “There is no guarantee that the claims in the Program will be honored by the Government,” the union, which represents the rights of some 800,000 government employees, said in a statement Wednesday. “Employees who opt-in to the Program will be at the mercy of the administrators of the Program, whose claims contain inconsistencies and lack stated legal underpinning.”
Federal workers aren’t the only ones at risk of negative impacts resulting from mass government resignations: Anyone who requires safe medication, clean air, healthy produce, natural disaster aid, or anything else the federal government touches—so, all of us—could suffer, too.
Federal workers comprise less than one percent of the US population, but are responsible for facilitating programs that help all 330-plus million Americans have access to health care, veterans’ services, safe transportation, clean water, nutritional assistance, and so much more.
On Tuesday evening, a memo titled “Fork in the Road,” from a mysterious Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email address, began offering nearly all federal government workers—excluding members of the military, postal workers, immigration officers, and national security personnel—the option to leave their nonpartisan, bureaucratic posts. All they have to do is send the word “resign” in the body of a reply to hr@opm.gov by February 6.
In exchange for leaving of their own volition, the email claims federal workers taking the offer will be able to “retain all pay and benefits” and be “exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements” until eight months from now, on September 30. (Last week, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum requiring all federal workers to return to in-person work “as soon as practicable.”)
Workers who choose to resign could be placed on leave or see their duties reduced through September, the email says. Resigning would also, theoretically, save federal workers the anxiety of a looming layoff down the road, when Trump is expected to make good on his promise to decimate the current federal workforce. “The majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized,” the Tuesday email, reviewed by Mother Jones, says.“At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position.”
To federal employees who received it, the email “implied that anyone who didn’t resign must fall in line with the administration or their jobs could be at risk,” says one federal employee of the Department of Commerce. To the email’s authors, it’s an attempt to allow federal workers who don’t want to contribute to “making America great again” the ability to “choose a different line of work” and receive “a very generous payout of eight months,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC.
Union leaders, who represent about one in four federal workers, and labor lawyers are skeptical about the email’s terms and legality. Meanwhile, government employees are oscillating between shock and awe: Many expressed a genuine concern for their ability to continue serving Americans through their roles. Others are amused by the absurdity of suggesting millions of workers step aside via individual, one-word email replies. Mother Jones heard from roughly a dozen federal workers and union representatives for this story; most were granted anonymity to avoid workplace retaliation.
“It seemed like a scare tactic, like so much of what they’ve done so far,” said a USDA employee.
A civilian Army employee said that the email’s “composition and the ‘reply Resign’ line made it hard to take seriously.”
SomeTreasury workers represented by the National Treasury Employees Union even thought the email was a phishing attempt or spam.
“They did not believe it was really coming from the federal government,” says Doreen Greenwald, the union’s national president.
On Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before some USDA employees received the offer for paid resignation, their supervisors called them to convene about a different email. This one was incredibly vague, and a tad eerie: “Watch Your Emails,” it said. “Starting tonight, OPM will be sending out an important federal workforce announcement.”
USDA leaders seemed surprised by that OPM correspondence and the offer to resign that followed. “It’s clear [that] middle management and agency leadership were not aware this was coming,” said the USDA worker, adding that colleagues have set up means of communicating outside work channels to strategize with and support one another. “We have no idea whether OPM can legally authorize the terms, accept resignations, or even legally email us like this.”
For starters, it’s unclear whether the federal government is even able to place huge swaths of government workers on leave for several months, as the OPM email says it will. Current statute indicates that agencies can put employees on leave for “a period of not more than a total of 10 work days.”
Additionally, the maximum amount agencies that are downsizing or reorganizing can offer federal workers in exchange for resignation is $25,000, according to an OPM webpage about the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority, which stipulates voluntary separation payments for agencies that are “downsizing or restructuring.” The sum an average federal worker makes in eight months is at least double that.
“My initial interpretation was that it’s a scam,” said one foreign service officer. “The memo was so lacking in details, it couldn’t possibly offer what it claimed to. Nowhere does it actually say what will happen to anyone who replies.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) isn’t confident that employees who accept the offer will get anything. “There is no guarantee that the claims in the Program will be honored by the Government,” the union, which represents the rights of some 800,000 government employees, said in a statement Wednesday. “Employees who opt-in to the Program will be at the mercy of the administrators of the Program, whose claims contain inconsistencies and lack stated legal underpinning.”
Federal workers aren’t the only ones at risk of negative impacts resulting from mass government resignations: Anyone who requires safe medication, clean air, healthy produce, natural disaster aid, or anything else the federal government touches—so, all of us—could suffer, too.
During a campaign stop filmed by Fox News at a Bronx, New York, barbershop, Trump answered a voter’s question about failing school systems by saying, “No transgender, no operations—you know, they take your kid—there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.”
Obviously, this is untrue, but now, he’s trying to solve the problem he invented as part of his anti-trans campaign strategy—by going much, much further than the earlier lies, and threatening to prosecute teachers who take steps to acknowledge or support the identities of trans or nonbinary students.
In the executive order issued Wednesday evening, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump directs the attorney general to work with local and state officials to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” The order defines “social transitioning” to include using a trans student’s name and pronouns, recognizing a student as nonbinary, or allowing them to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity.
The same section of the order suggests that K-12 teachers and school officials who take action to support trans students’ identities be prosecuted under laws banning sexual exploitation of minors and practicing medicine without a license. There are 3.8 million public school teachers in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The threats don’t stop there. Federal funding for schools and programs that teach lessons about gender or race is also in jeopardy. Trump’s order instructs the Departments of Education, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to come up with an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within the next 90 days, identifying federal funding streams that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” in classrooms and teacher training.
But what does “discriminatory equity ideology” actually mean? The order defines it as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” In context, this seems to be Trump’s new phrase for what conservative activists used to call “critical race theory”—a term that itself mischaracterizes academic concepts around systemic and institutional racism as being anti-white.
Theorder is a transparent attempt to inject schools with whitewashed American history. It directs federal agencies to promote “patriotic education,” which it defines as teaching an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding.” To achieve that goal, it reestablishes the 1776 Commission, which Trump created during his first term to cultivate “patriotic citizens ready for the workforce, not political activists.” The original 1776 Commission’s report on US history identifies progressivism asone of the foremost threats to American principles and derides social justice policies as antithetical to the “color-blind civil rights” movement.
Wednesday’s order is the latest in a string of executive actions targeting diversity initiatives and trans rights that Trump has signed since taking office just over a week ago. These orders include redefining sex, banning trans people from the military, curtailing access to gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, and ending DEI initiatives in the federal workforce.
Trump provided the blueprint in his first term to target antiracism and LGBTQ inclusion. His 2020 executive order to abolish DEI initiatives from the federal government armed conservative organizations and politicians with the language to target government entities, particularly schools, at the local and state levels. While former President Joe Biden quickly undid that order, it became the catalyst for the introduction of nearly 900 similar anti-DEI policies across the United States.
Last Friday, my colleague Julianne McShane and I broke the news of a pair of letters sent by 30 prominent anti-abortion movement leaders to the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Justice, asking them to use the powers of their agencies to attack abortion pills.
During his contentious confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee for HHS secretary today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. signaled that he’d do exactly that. Under questioning from senators, Kennedy said that he would instruct the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to study the safety of mifepristone—a medication that has been FDA-approved to end pregnancies for 25 years, with vast amounts of research supporting its safety and effectiveness.
“President Trump has made it clear to me that one of the things he is not taking a position [on] yet [is] mifepristone,” Kennedy said. “But he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues. And I’ll ask NIH, FDA to do that.”
The “safety concerns” that anti-abortion activists like to raise about mifepristone are a thin pretext for their ideological efforts to end all abortions, everywhere. It’s efficient for them to attack medication abortion because it accounts for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions, according to the most recent research. Last year, I reported on a lawsuit by anti-abortion doctors attacking mifepristone’s FDA approval:
From the beginning, the anti-abortion doctors’ arguments have been cloaked in such faux concerns about mifepristone’s safety. In their original complaint, the doctors argued that the FDA hadn’t had enough evidence to approve the drug or loosen regulations on it, and they cited flimsy research to suggest mifepristone was harmful. Those claims have been roundly debunked by mainstream medicalassociations, which explain that mifepristone is backed by decades of data. Even before it came to the United States, the drug was used for years for abortions in Europe; since its approval here in 2000, around 6 million people in the US have taken it. As the New York Times reports, more than 100 scientific studies have concluded that mifepristone is a safe way to end a pregnancy.
Meanwhile. it turns out that some of the studies cited by the doctors weren’t scientific at all. One, relied on in Kacsmaryk’s decision, was based on anonymous blog posts from a site called “Abortion Changes You.” Last month, a journal retracted three other papers cited by ADF in the case, explaining that an independent review had found “fundamental problems,” “incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors,” and “misleading presentations.” Sage, the studies’ publisher, reported that nearly all their authors had affiliations with anti-abortion advocacy groups yet had not disclosed any conflicts of interest.
Of course, the real reason mifepristone is a target isn’t a result of science, but rather simple math: Medication abortions are immensely popular, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all abortions across the country. Thanks to recently enacted “shield laws” in a handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, providers there can now prescribe the pills to patients in states with abortion bans.
As McShane has noted, abortion rights could be undermined by Trump appointees throughout a number of government agencies. HHS, with its 80,000 people and responsibility to oversee the FDA, the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, among other offices could potentially wield enormous power over reproductive health care. But, she explains, Kennedy’s position on the issue until now has been ambiguous:
Like Trump, Kennedy has been inconsistent on his abortion stances. In 2023, for example, he said he backed a 15-week national abortion ban before subsequently walking that back. His campaign told the Washington Post in November 2023 that he supported codifying Roe v. Wade and maintaining the FDA’s approval of mifepristone—but these were positions he held before Trump named him as his HHS nominee. Since then, abortion opponents have reportedly asked that Kennedy appoint a high-ranking anti-abortion stalwart to HHS and publicly commit during his confirmation hearings to restoring anti-abortion policies within HHS from Trump’s first administration, such as preventing abortion pills from being mailed or distributed at pharmacies and rescinding a Biden-era rule that stipulated HIPAA privacy protections should apply to abortions. (In December, anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) claimed in a post on X that during a private meeting with him, RFK Jr. had committed to those measures and others.) Project 2025 also makes a litany of anti-abortion recommendations for the HHS secretary, including issuing guidance that states can defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans.
That ambiguity appears to have been resolved today.
Two decades ago, while serving in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, Steven Bradbury wrote a series of memos justifying waterboarding that former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called “permission slips for torture.”
Now, Bradbury is Donald Trump’s nominee for Deputy Transportation Secretary.
When it comes to writing about why the United States can torture, Bradbury is less well-known than his former Justice Department colleague John Yoo. Still, he played a key role. Bradbury wrote three top-secret legal memos in 2005 that were essential to providing the Central Intelligence Agency with legal cover for subjecting detainees to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. In the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 “torture report,” Bradbury’s name and memos appear 178 times.
In 2017, Trump picked Bradbury to be general counsel at the Transportation Department. After Trump left office, Bradbury served as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and played a key role in shaping the section of Project 2025 that covers the Department of Transportation. The president is now giving him a promotion. (The White House and Bradbury did not respond to requests for comment.)
Bradbury was confirmed in 2017 over the vehement objections of McCain, who was infamously tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The late Arizona senator argued about Bradbury’s legal opinions in a passionate floor speech in which he made that clear that the memos “provided a legal framework for the use of methods including waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture in which the victim suffers the terrible sensation of drowning.”
“We are speaking of an interrogation technique that dates from the Spanish Inquisition and has been a prosecutable offense for over a century,” McCain continued. “It is among the crimes for which Japanese war criminals were tried and hanged following World War II and was employed by the infamous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.” McCain stressed that “a more meticulous justification for torture is still a justification for torture—and arguably a more pernicious one.”
Bradbury included an often sickening level of detail to support his conclusions in the memos, one of which ran 46 pages. It sanctioned thirteen interrogation techniques including “Dietary manipulation,” “Nudity,” “Cramped confinement,” “Stress positions, “Sleep deprivation (more than 48 hours,)” and “Waterboard.” There is also a paragraph largely devoted to justifying the CIA’s decision to force detainees to wear only an adult diaper:
If the detainee is clothed, he wears an adult diaper under his pants. Detainees subject to sleep deprivation who are also subject to nudity as a separate interrogation technique will at times be nude and wearing a diaper. If the detainee is wearing a diaper, it is checked regularly and changed as necessary. The use of the diaper is for sanitary and health purposes of the detainee; it is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it is not considered to be an interrogation technique.
CIA records tell another story. They make clear that a central “purpose” of the diapers was to “cause humiliation” and to “induce a sense of helplessness,” according to the Senate torture report.
Bradbury also signed off on the CIA’s policy of forcing detainees to remain awake for potentially more thanone week at a time. He concluded that forcing detainees to appear naked before male and female interrogators was acceptable partly because “it is very unlikely that nudity would be employed at ambient temperatures below 75°F.” Bradbury wrote that giving detainees only “bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete” foods was permissible partly because detainees were weighed weekly to ensure they were not losing too much weight.The amount of time detainees could be doused with 41-degree water—an excruciatingly low temperature—was calculated down to the minute following a review of the medical literature on hypothermia.About waterboarding, Bradbury’s memo explained:
We understand that the effect of the waterboard is to induce a sensation of drowning. This sensation is based on a deeply rooted physiological response. Thus, the detainee experiences this sensation even if he is aware that he is not actually drowning. We are informed that based on extensive experience, the process is not physically painful, but that it usually does cause fear and panic.
In blending a desire for order and cleanliness with a willingness to sanction almost unspeakable acts, Bradbury evoked some of the most shameful chapters of modern history. As Marguerite Feitlowitz writes about Argentina’s Dirty War in her book A Lexicon of Terror, “Language helps to ritualize torture; it lends structure, provides a ‘reason,’ an ‘explanation,’ an ‘objective.'” She continues, “Moreover, the special idiom provided categories for practices otherwise out of bounds. It was enabling.”
In another memo, Bradbury took on a different legal question: If the 13 interrogation techniques did not count as torture when used on their own, did it constitute torture when they were used in combination? No, Bradbury concluded. It did not.
Bradbury went on in the memo to write about using “nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling and, at least at times, with use of a diaper), and dietary manipulation” to bring detainees to “‘a baseline dependent state.’” He frequently refers to his other writing in italicized shorthand: “As we discussed in Techniques…In Techniques, we recognized…In Techniques, we explained.”
He was using the royal we. Only Bradbury’s signature appears at the bottom of both memos.
McCain made his repulsion clear in his 2017 Senate speech. “The memos that bear his name made it possible for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—a monster and a murderer, to be sure, but a detainee held in US custody under the laws of armed conflict—to be water-boarded 183 times,” the senator said. “This technique was used so gratuitously that even those applying it eventually came to believe that there was no reason to continue. They were ordered to do so anyway.”
He continued: “The memos that bear Mr. Bradbury’s name also made it possible for a Libyan detainee and his wife to be rendered to a foreign country, where that woman was bound and gagged while several months pregnant, and photographed naked as several American intelligence officers watched…I am told that picture still exists, somewhere in the archives that record this shameful period in our history.”
A few hours into his confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, had a tense exchange with Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). The subject was Kennedy’s misleading claims that antidepressants caused teenagers to commit school shootings. As Smith pointed out, reams of evidence dispute that claim.
Yet Kennedy persisted in his crusade against SSRIs. “Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they did than people have getting off heroin,” he told Smith. (Kennedy himself was once addicted to heroin.)
When Smith brought up Kennedy’s controversial plan to treat SSRI “addicts” at government-sponsored wellness farms, he attempted to distance himself from that idea. “You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Smith said. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy promptly denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”
But as I reported in July, he actually did lump users of SSRIs and ADHD medications together with people who are dependent on opioids and benzodiazepenes, referring to that broad group as “addicts.” On an episode that month of the Latino Capitalist podcast that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” Kennedy unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. He described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
The farms would be funded, he said, with money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products. (As of now, cannabis is still illegal at the federal level; sales taxes are state and local.) “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” Kennedy said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”
More on Kennedy’s wellness farms plan here:
SCOOP: RFK Jr. suggests creating "wellness farms" to "reparent" those struggling with addiction by growing organic food and taking away screens.
But it's not just addiction. He says it'll also be a place for people with ADHD and depression to get off SSRIs and antidepressants. pic.twitter.com/3oUmznEGwP
Six minutes into his opening statement at his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services brazenly repeated a statement that has been cited as false multiple times.
“News reports claim I am anti-vaccine…I am not,” he said in his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee.
At that, a protester in the audience, shouted, “You lie.” She was removed from the hearing room by Capitol Hill police.
The protester was right. In July 2023, Kennedy told a podcaster, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” That same month, during an interview on Fox News with Jesse Watters, Kennedy said, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” That notion has long been scientifically debunked. In 2021, he told a podcaster that people should “resist” guidelines from the Centers for Disease and Control on vaccines. He added, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.” And the non-profit that he led promoted an anti-vaccine campaign with the slogan, “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
And then there are all the anti-vax books he has written that certainly convey the impression that vaccines are dangerous.
Yet at the hearing, Kennedy tried to run from his past. He claimed that when it comes to vaccines he was merely “pro-safety” and only has asked “uncomfortable questions.” He said that vaccines play a “critical role in health care” and noted that “all my kids are vaccinated.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, was determined not to let Kennedy slip by with his Big Lie about vaccines. He cited several of Kennedy’s past remarks. Referring to Kennedy’s comment that his kids were vaccinated, Wyden noted that during a 2020 podcast interview, Kennedy said he “would do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his kids.
Kennedy tried to weasel his way out, claiming that no vaccine is safe and effective “for everyone.” But that’s obvious, given that all vaccines can have adverse reactions. He did not bother to counter the other comments that Wyden referenced. He also dodged questions about the assertion in a 2021 book he wrote that parents have been misled to believe measles is a deadly disease and that the measles vaccine is safe and necessary. When Wyden asked whether measles is deadly, Kennedy refused to provide a yes or no answer. But he told the committee that he supports the measles and polio vaccines. Wyden scoffed at this remark.
Kennedy had to call on his powers of slipperiness to duck tough questions. Asked about the petition he filed in May 2021 with the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the authorization for the Covid vaccine and to block future access to it, he said he had only been focused on the use of vaccines for six-year-old children. That was highly misleading. Kennedy’s request to the FDA claimed the vaccine’s costs outweighed the benefits for everyone, not just children.
Kennedy’s penchant for sidestepping was on continuous display through the morning. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), asked him about a bonkers comment pertaining to Covid he uttered in 2023: “Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This remark had been widely interpreted as antisemitic and suggestive that the Covid was designed as bioweapon that would spare certain people.
Kennedy responded that he had not said “deliberately targeted”—and this silly dodge provoked laughter from the crowd. He said he had been merely referring to an NIH study. Bennet did not have the time during his five-minute allotment to look this up. But that NIHstudy—which Kennedy did not mention when he made those remarks in 2023—did not say this virus was designed to target certain demographic groups. It only noted that “genetic factors” might play a role in how the disease affects people.
This was classic Kennedy: Cite an informative-sounding source that does not actually say what he claims it says. In this instance, he had implied that Covid was a bioweapon, as he has said about other diseases, including Lyme disease. He had no proof for this—as with many of his conspiratorial claims—but when called out at this hearing he pointed to a study that does not confirm his outlandish allegation. Kennedy’s mastery of this methodology, when applied to issues of life-and-death, makes him a potentially dangerous appointment.
When Kennedy was asked by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the committee chair, if anything in his background “might present a conflict of interest,” he said no. That was misleading. In his financial disclosure filing, Kennedy revealed that he has earned millions of dollars by referring clients to personal injury law firms suing Merck in various courts on behalf of people who received HPV vaccines—which studies show help prevent cervical cancer. Despite his nomination, he indicated he plans to keep receiving fees from those lawsuits. That means he could receive a large sum if Merck loses the cases or settles them, a prospect that Kennedy, if confirmed, could potentiallyinfluence.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Kennedy on his financial stake in these lawsuits. Would Kennedy agree, she asked, not to pocket any money from these cases when he is secretary and for four years afterward? “There is a lot of ways that you could influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits,” Warren said, noting that Kennedy as HHS secretary could impact cases by publishing anti-vaccine claims in official government reports or by sharing FDA data with lawyers bringing the suits. Kennedy did not agree to eschew money from these lawsuits. Instead, he repeatedly misconstrued Warren’s request. “You are asking me not to sue vaccine companies,” Kennedy said. That was not what she was asking.
It was clear throughout the first hours of the hearing that none of Kennedy’s falsehoods and misrepresentations mattered to the Republican members of the committee. He was not meaningfully challenged by any of them. That was not surprising, for, as Kennedy displayed thoroughly, when it comes to adhering to the truth, his record on this front is similar to that of the fellow looking to hire him.