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Today — 31 January 2025News

With Trump’s Mass Deportations, Who Will Rebuild Our Disaster-Stricken Cities?

31 January 2025 at 11:00

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

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.

“We’re headed for a moment where there’ll be a reckoning between such political ploys and reality. “

“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.

“We have Republicans in California who need FEMA just as much as the Democrats.”

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.”

I Work at NIH. The Fear Among Staff Is Palpable.

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.

“Infectious diseases like COVID and HIV, they don’t care what your political party is.”

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.

“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, lymphangioleiomyomatosisand 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.

How Trump Makes Tragedies Worse, A History

30 January 2025 at 22:43

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.

Trump claims he helped clear rubble and search for survivors on 9/11: pic.twitter.com/G3yodnBMK2

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) April 19, 2016

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, told Mother 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 Sandy and 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 his then-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.”)

…WHAT pic.twitter.com/CCOYIsfSm7

— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) April 23, 2020

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.)

I have no words that can prepare you for what you're about to watch. pic.twitter.com/aov2F8DpRs

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) May 18, 2020

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 claimsincluding 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.”

Christian Nationalists Are Swooning Over JD Vance’s Remarks on Fox News

30 January 2025 at 22:15

On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Wednesday evening, Vice President JD 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 love is 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 Suddenly Can’t Seem to Remember His Long Record of Extremism

30 January 2025 at 22:02

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 amplified a 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.”)

Antisemitic far-right broadcaster Stew Peters responds to Kash Patel claiming that he is not familiar with Peters, despite appearing on his show multiple times: "Clearly, Kash Patel is lying. He absolutely does know who I am."

Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T20:47:10.221Z

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.

Severe Weather Is Increasing the Cost of Living for Black Americans

30 January 2025 at 21:57

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.

Trump Asks Schools to Report Activist Students for Deportation

30 January 2025 at 20:42

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.”

As usual, the meaning of “Hamas sympathizer” was left ill-defined, leaving many pro-Palestine protesters at risk.

“We will find you, and we will deport you.”

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. is Trying to Hide Who He Is

30 January 2025 at 20:22

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-retracted Rolling 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 Fair reported 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.” 

The idea that Lyme disease is a bioweapon has been thoroughly debunked

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 Jones reported 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. 

Inside the Fight for the First Whole Foods Union

30 January 2025 at 19:10

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.) 

A woman speaks into a microphone. Behind her, an assembled group holds signs that read, "Make Amazon pay Whole Foods workers!"
Khy Adams speaks to Whole Foods Market workers in Philadelphia. UFCW Local 1776

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.

“The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks.”

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.

Dozens of people march on the sidewalk outside the Whole Foods store.
Whole Foods workers march for unionization.UFCW Local 1776

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.

A woman holds up a tote bag that reads, "I stand with union workers." Next to her, a man holds a sign that reads, "Make Amazon pay Whole Foods workers!"
Whole Foods workers with union swagUFCW Local 1776

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.

Dozens of people stand in front of an entrance to the Whole Foods store.
After voting to unionize, Whole Foods workers hold a press conference outside the Philadelphia Center City Whole Foods store. UFCW LOCAL 1776

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?” 

Trump Responds to Washington Plane Crash With Racist, Ableist Diatribe

30 January 2025 at 18:29

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.”

There Is No Evidence the US Planned to Send $50 Million for “Condoms in Gaza”

30 January 2025 at 16:34

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.

“No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.” 

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 Post showed 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.

Yesterday — 30 January 2025News

Christian Nationalists Are Swooning Over JD Vance’s Remarks on Fox News

30 January 2025 at 22:15

On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Wednesday evening, Vice President JD 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 love is 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 Suddenly Can’t Seem to Remember His Long Record of Extremism

30 January 2025 at 22:02

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 amplified a 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.”)

Antisemitic far-right broadcaster Stew Peters responds to Kash Patel claiming that he is not familiar with Peters, despite appearing on his show multiple times: "Clearly, Kash Patel is lying. He absolutely does know who I am."

Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T20:47:10.221Z

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.

Severe Weather Is Increasing the Cost of Living for Black Americans

30 January 2025 at 21:57

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.

Trump Asks Schools to Report Activist Students for Deportation

30 January 2025 at 20:42

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.”

As usual, the meaning of “Hamas sympathizer” was left ill-defined, leaving many pro-Palestine protesters at risk.

“We will find you, and we will deport you.”

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. is Trying to Hide Who He Is

30 January 2025 at 20:22

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-retracted Rolling 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 Fair reported 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.” 

The idea that Lyme disease is a bioweapon has been thoroughly debunked

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 Jones reported 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. 

Inside the Fight for the First Whole Foods Union

30 January 2025 at 19:10

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.) 

A woman speaks into a microphone. Behind her, an assembled group holds signs that read, "Make Amazon pay Whole Foods workers!"
Khy Adams speaks to Whole Foods Market workers in Philadelphia. UFCW Local 1776

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.

“The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks.”

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.

Dozens of people march on the sidewalk outside the Whole Foods store.
Whole Foods workers march for unionization.UFCW Local 1776

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.

A woman holds up a tote bag that reads, "I stand with union workers." Next to her, a man holds a sign that reads, "Make Amazon pay Whole Foods workers!"
Whole Foods workers with union swagUFCW Local 1776

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.

Dozens of people stand in front of an entrance to the Whole Foods store.
After voting to unionize, Whole Foods workers hold a press conference outside the Philadelphia Center City Whole Foods store. UFCW LOCAL 1776

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?” 

Trump Responds to Washington Plane Crash With Racist, Ableist Diatribe

30 January 2025 at 18:29

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.”

There Is No Evidence the US Planned to Send $50 Million for “Condoms in Gaza”

30 January 2025 at 16:34

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.

“No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.” 

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 Post showed 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.

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