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Yesterday — 21 January 2025Mother Jones

The Anti-Trump Resistance Is Alive at This Historic Black DC Church

21 January 2025 at 20:52

When Donald Trump first took office, the streets of Washington, DC, and cities around the country, erupted in protest and resistance. The 2017 Women’s March, held the day after his inauguration, was heralded at the time as the biggest protest in U.S. history. This year, the crowds only measured in the thousands. Other day-of gatherings appeared similarly small, perhaps due to the blisteringly cold temperatures that drove the pageantry inside. The spontaneous panic that once gripped the mobilized masses seemed diluted.

Instead, Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes found vocal resistance in a historic place of protest that has endured many disappointing election results across decades: inside a Black church.

Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network hosted a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, which coincided with the inauguration, and used it as an opportunity to challenge Trump and embolden attendees. “We shed too much blood. We spent too many nights in jail to think that Trump can turn us around,” he said. “We are right here. We are not going back.”

Hayes also spoke to attendees. One, Alexa Donaphin, was wearing a sequined MLK Jr. shirt and described herself as a veteran defender of civil rights for the vulnerable.

“Even though I’m not gay, I’m not trans, I’m not poor, I’m not an immigrant, I’m not a migrant—I’m none of those things, but those people matter, and their rights matter,” she said. “I’ve been fighting since my hair was a different color than it is now,” she said, noting her gray hair.

“My whole life, I grew up in the segregated South. I know what it’s like to drink from a colored water fountain,” she continued. “I know how it feels to be othered. I know how it feels to be marginalized, and I can’t sit by idly and do nothing while that continues and, in fact, escalates.”

“If America is to survive the next four years,” Hayes concludes, “it could probably stand to take some notes.”

DeSantis Rushes to Use “Gulf of America”

21 January 2025 at 20:49

Leave it to Ron DeSantis to use an emergency weather advisory to showcase his unending allegiance to President Donald Trump.

In a Monday state executive order warning Floridians of a fast-approaching winter storm, the governor referred to the Gulf of Mexico, as it has been referred to for at least 353 years, as the “Gulf of America.” The usage made Florida the first state to fall in line with Trump’s plans to rename the ocean basin.

“An area of low pressure moving across the Gulf of America, interacting with Arctic air, will bring widespread impactful winter weather to North Florida beginning Tuesday, January 21, 2025,” the order read.

According to the New York Times, Florida’s emergency order came even before Trump had signed an executive making the rebrand official.

Trump’s desire to rename the Gulf of Mexico comes against a slew of expansionist plans. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote, Trump has spent the past month pushing for the US to buy Greenland, take back the Panama Canal Zone, and rename Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, to Mount McKinley—all sentiments he reiterated in his inauguration speech on Monday. (Trump didn’t technically mention Greenland in his speech, but brought up controlling the country for international security purposes while signing executive orders.)

After signing an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, federal agencies have 30 days to update their records accordingly.

As president, Trump does indeed have the authority to rename the gulf. But critically, other countries are not obligated to recognize it. There also might be pushback from the International Hydrographic Organization, the 100-member authority that aims to “ensure that all the world’s seas, oceans, and navigable waters are surveyed and charted.” (We’ve reached out to the IHO for comment.)

Of course, there was no such pushback among Florida Republicans. Since Florida’s weather advisory, GOP lawmakers celebrated the rebrand, including Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) who tweeted this charming map.

New map just dropped, and the GULF OF AMERICA has never looked better off of Florida’s shores! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/jXmlVTnHs1

— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) January 21, 2025

Trump’s Jan. 6 Pardons Come As a “Betrayal” to Former Capitol Police

21 January 2025 at 18:48

After President Donald Trump issued late-night pardons and commutations to every one of the 1,600 rioters who carried out the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, police officers who were there that day, and their loved ones, are calling out Trump’s betrayal. 

Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant who earlier this month recounted in a New York Times essay being “beaten and struck by raging rioters all over my body with multiple weapons until I was covered in my own blood,” posted on X on Sunday: “The law and order dude is about to pardon those who assaulted the police. Collectively more than 40 rioters attacked me that day.”

When Gonell testified before the House Select Committee that investigated the attacks, he described how he and his colleagues were “punched, pushed, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical irritants, and even blinded with eye-damaging lasers by a violent mob who apparently saw us law enforcement officers, dedicated to ironically protecting them as US citizens, as an impediment in their attempted insurrection.” He added he had sustained injuries all over his body that required surgeries.

Michael Fanone, a former DC police officer who previously testified about being “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country” on Jan. 6, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night: “I have been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump. Whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming, and here we are.”

He added that Trump’s pardons would free six of the people who attacked him on Jan. 6. “My family, my children, and myself are less safe today because of Donald Trump and his supporters,” Fanone told Cooper, echoing the concerns of those who turned in attackers to law enforcement, now worried that Trump’s pardons will prompt retaliation against them.

"I have been betrayed by my country": Former DC police officer Michael Fanone talks to Anderson after President Trump pardons more than 1,000 convicted of committing crimes during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/fhN3dhqbPz

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) January 21, 2025

“I think that Republican Party owns a monopoly on hypocrisy when it comes to supporting or their supposed support of law enforcement, because, tonight, the leader of the Republican Party pardoned hundreds of violent cop assaulters,” Fanone said.

And Craig Sicknick, the brother of Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who died a day after the Jan. 6 attack, reportedly of natural causes, told ABC News the pardons were “a betrayal of decency.”

“The man doesn’t understand the pain or suffering of others. He can’t comprehend anyone else’s feelings,” Sicknick told ABC. “We now have no rule of law,” he added. (The Capitol Police say Brian Sicknick was assaulted by rioters, including by being attacked with pepper spray. The medical examiner who determined his cause of death later told the Washington Post, “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”)

Trump’s pardons, and law enforcement’s condemnations of them, are especially rich considering that Trump has claimed to be “the law and order candidate.” As a reminder, the insurrectionists injured approximately 140 law enforcement officials on Jan. 6, 2021, including about 80 from the Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department, according to the Department of Justice. And five police officers who had been at the Capitol died, including four who died of suicide in the days and months after.

Spokespeople for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Tuesday.

Biden’s Preemptive Fauci Pardon Generates Fresh Conspiracies 

21 January 2025 at 17:16

Former President Joe Biden’s last-minute, preemptive pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci had an obvious and clearly stated purpose: protecting the elderly scientist from Biden’s successor.

For Donald Trump and much of the right wing, Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the peak of the Covid pandemic, has come to be a living symbol of what they see as the evils of the scientific establishment and the U.S. response to the virus. But the final-hour pardon is also being interpreted among Covid conspiracy theorists and in some corners of the mainstream right as an admission of guilt. In turn, that generated fresh calls for Fauci to be: “hunted down,” in the words of New Age conspiracy peddler David Avocado Wolfe, “and brought to justice.”  

A pardon might protect Fauci from Trump, but it doesn’t remove him from conspiracists’ pantheon of suspicion.

In the last moments of his presidency, Biden pardoned Fauci, members of his own family, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, people who worked on Congress’ January 6 committee, and police officers who testified before it. None of them have been accused of criminal wrongdoing, but all had reason to fear retaliation from Trump or those in his orbit.

In a statement to Politico, Fauci thanked Biden for the move, but stressed that “I’ve committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.” That said, he wrote, the “mere articulation of these baseless threats and the potential that they will be acted upon, create immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family.” 

Conservatives, most notably Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have persistently accused Fauci of supporting so-called gain-of-function research into viruses, suggesting that such research ultimately caused Covid-19 to be created and accidentally released from a lab. While a Republican-controlled congressional committee has insisted that Covid was likely created in a lab, any lab leak theory continues to be hotly contested. Most scientists still believe that Covid’s origins were natural, generated from sick animals at a wet market. The latest evidence shows that none of the viruses stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some believe the virus to have originated, closely resembled SARS-CoV-2.

Biden’s Fauci pardon was greeted by many in the vast and chaotic world of Covid suspicion as proof the scientist and retired public health official had been guilty of some poorly-defined crime all along. It also demonstrated how closely mainstream Republicans are aligned with the deepest reaches of the Covid conspiracy pool.

“There is now zero doubt that Fauci is a criminal,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok,  “guilty of crimes against humanity.” 

Paul struck virtually the same note, tweeting, “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal. As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed.” 

In a text message to NBC journalist Kristin Welker, Trump called the Biden pardons that included Fauci “disgraceful,” adding, “Many are guilty of MAJOR CRIMES!” His son Donald Trump Jr. specifically weighed in on Fauci, tweeting, “He doesn’t have to accept the pardon. If he did nothing wrong, be a man and turn it down… But you know he won’t because everyone knows he’s guilty of so much.”

Some online figures also suggested that, despite the pardon, something bad would befall Fauci, and that he’d be punished for his supposed crimes with death. On Telegram, QAnon figure Dustin Krieger, who uses the name Dustin Nemos online, called Fauci “a serial murderer,” adding, “Sooner or later God will cut him down.” 

As that invective makes clear, a pardon might protect Fauci from the worst excesses of the new Trump administration, but it doesn’t remove him from conspiracists’ pantheon of suspicion. He’ll always be at risk of other kinds of retaliation, from people who have been encouraged to view him as a murderer.

Going forward, the new administration and its empowered allies in Washington will only foster that view. Take Mary Holland, who is CEO of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. She suggested in an Inauguration Day press release that Congress and Paul would continue their war against Fauci:

“One of the things that’s positive here is that because he has been preemptively pardoned, he will not be able to assert a 5th Amendment protection in Congress when he is going to be investigated,” she said. “There’s no question that Senator Rand Paul, in particular, has every intention of going forward to investigate this man.” 

Actually, the 14th Amendment Still Exists

21 January 2025 at 02:51

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday declaring that the federal government would no longer recognize the US-born children of undocumented immigrants as American citizens. It’s a move that has been brewing for years. The Washington Post described the order as an effort to “reinterpret the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” and sure enough, the text includes a few paragraphs of legalese purporting to do just that.

The order itself goes into effect in 30 days, and specifically prohibits federal agencies from issuing citizenship documents (such as passports) to the—to be clear—citizens in question. It was part of a slate of executive orders Trump enacted on his first day in office, many of which were completed at a choreographed ceremony at DC’s Capital One Arena, in a display of strength meant to impose his will on national politics from day one.

You cannot simply blot out the Constitution. Laws still exist.

The executive order, which excludes anyone whose parents were not legal permanent residents, is an act of intimidation and a preview of a nativist crackdown to come. But I think it’s important to say what else it is: complete horseshit. The federal government cannot simply stop recognizing the citizenship of US-born children of undocumented immigrants, because those people are US citizens under the 14th Amendment, full stop. The president does not get to unilaterally “reinterpret” Constitutional amendments, and there is no compelling basis for doing so in this case, even if he could. Any attempt to implement the order would be an unconstitutional violation of American citizens’ civil rights. You cannot simply blot out the Constitution. Laws still exist.

Trump wants to do a lot of bad things as president, and in his first 24 hours he’s already accomplished quite a number of them—narrowing the definition of who matters in this country while signaling an era of decadence, corruption, and environmental degradation. But there are a lot of things he can’t just do. Sometimes he’ll be blocked. Sometimes he’ll be sued. And he will often lose, even with a judiciary that’s several degrees beyond pliant. If he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship, he has to do more than issue a press release; he will have to get the law of the land changed—or get the highest court in the land to effectively do the same for him. I wouldn’t bet against anything in the Trump era. But with the clock running on a lame-duck term, the last thing anyone should do is give him a victory before he’s earned it.

Trump Frees Violent January 6 Attackers

21 January 2025 at 01:58

President Donald Trump on Monday granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people who joined in the January 6 attack on Congress that he himself caused.

Hours after returning to office, Trump announced he was giving “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to nearly all “individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Trump also announced commutations of prison sentences for the handful of January 6 convicts not given full pardons—14 top members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and Proud Boys—freeing them from lengthy prison sentences.

These actions mean that Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader who was sentenced to 18 years in prison following his conviction for seditious conspiracy and other crimes for planning violence on January 6, is a free man.

Trump also freed Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader who was serving a 22-year sentence following his conviction for seditious conspiracy and other crimes for his role in planning the violence on January 6.

Tarrio was the “the ultimate leader, the ultimate person who organized, who was motivated by revolutionary zeal,” US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said in sentencing Tarrio in 2023 after applying an enhancement for terrorism.

Trump himself faced felony charges for allegedly conspiring to use a fake elector scheme as a means to remain in power in 2021. His election victory in November caused special counsel Jack Smith to drop that case to comply with a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

In pardoning or commuting the sentences of his insurrectionist supporters, Trump has used his newly restored power to extend to his followers the impunity the presidency gives to him. More broadly, Trump is using the clemency authority to try to erase the stain of his botched self-coup attempt as he continues to insist that he actually won in 2020.

In informal, rambling remarks that followed his mostly scripted inaugural speech Wednesday, Trump picked up where he left off four years ago. He called the 2020 election “totally rigged,” claimed the January 6 attack was largely nonviolent, and called the people prosecuted for their role in it “patriots” and “hostages.”

That language signaled that Trump’s clemency grants, more than just a legal effort, are part of a renewed campaign to force government institutions and the American public to accept his false and self-serving version of reality.

Trump’s sweeping actions Monday seemed to be a rejection of suggestions by advisers that he deny clemency to rioters who were convicted of violent acts and that he consider clemency applications on a case-by-case basis.

The pardons came after an inaugural speech in which Trump promised to restore “law and order” in American cities.

Earlier on Monday, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to public figures who Trump has threatened to use the Justice Department to target. These included former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci and members and staffers of the House January 6 committee, as well as Washington, DC, and Capitol police officers who testified before the committee about the attack. Minutes before leaving office, Biden also issued pardons for members of his family: his brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and their respective spouses. Those pardons follow Biden’s widely criticized pardon last month of his son Hunter, who was convicted last year of lying about his drug use and, through a guilty plea, of tax evasion.

“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement released Monday while Trump’s inauguration ceremony was underway. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”

Trump—who, during his first term, engaged in a historically unprecedented effort to use his pardon power to reward supporters and to undermine investigations into his own alleged crimes—had the chutzpah to crticize Biden’s pardons on Monday.

Taylor Budowich, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff, tweeted that Biden’s pardons “will go down as the greatest attack on America’s justice system in history.” (Budowich personally earned nearly $20,000 from helping to organize protest activity on January 6, I reported last year.)

Trump seemed especially irked that Biden’s pardons covered the two Republican lawmakers who served on the January 6 committee, both of whom he described as tearful. Former Rep. Liz Cheney is a “crying lunatic,” Trump said, adding that former Rep. Adam Kinzinger “is always crying.”

Trump repeated a false claim that the January 6 committee had destroyed evidence gather in its investigation. The committee’s final report, transcripts of hundreds of depositions and other investigative material remain available online—a reminder that Trump, for all his powers, cannot erase the history of January 6. His clemency actions, in fact, deepen his connection to that event.

Trump’s Wealth Spikes and Plummets on the Launch of His Meme Coin

20 January 2025 at 21:11

Donald Trump launched a multibillion-dollar meme coin just days before taking office and instantly saw his net worth balloon. But then, as the initial excitement passed, the value plunged and occasionally spiked again through the first roller-coaster hours of Trump’s second presidency. Despite the optimism of some crypto enthusiasts that the $TRUMP coin’s debut Friday heralded a new era of automatic crypto riches, the value of the coin had plummeted to around half of its weekend high of $72.62 by the time Trump was sworn in Monday.

Meme coins have no intrinsic value or particular usefulness as a currency but serve more as a cultural signifier. They usually are based on an internet joke, such as the internet’s fascination with the doge dog (Dogecoin), or make use of a celebrity’s image. While real money can be made riding the speculative highs and lows of meme coin trading, it’s also one of the sectors of the crypto world most prone to bubbles and subsequent collapses.

If the new $TRUMP coin is more of a way for crypto enthusiasts to signal their support for Trump—which might be the most coherent explanation for a type of crypto product that doesn’t have any point to it at all—the timing of this new Trump product was propitious. After announcing the coin’s creation Friday night at a party for the crypto industry to celebrate Trump’s inauguration, the price spiked to as high as $72.62. A total of 1 billion coins were created in an instant, so Trump’s ownership of an estimated 800 million of the new $TRUMP coins meant that his wealth almost instantly blew up from a bit less than $7 billion to possibly as much as $65 billion on the eve of his presidency.

But then the price started falling, and in the minutes shortly before Trump’s official inauguration, the price had fallen to just under $50. Following his inauguration at noon, the price plunged below $40, before rebounding slightly.

In theory, that’s still worth about $33 billion for Trump, but the volatility is a good indicator of how reliable of a source of wealth the coin really can be. With this product, no matter what the price, Trump’s holdings will have some value because there was no expense for him in creating it—and that value will be based on nothing but consumers’ interest in buying something (digital) with his name on it.

On Monday, the Trumps announced that first lady Melania Trump had also created her own meme coin, $MELANIA, which hit a high of $13.05 but by early afternoon on Inauguration Day had fallen to $5.27.

Not everyone was thrilled with the creation of the memes—ethics expert Norm Eisen told the Washington Post that the coin was “the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency.” Even some in the crypto community bristled at the idea, calling it a “horrible look” and “predatory,” noting that meme coins are generally speculative and essentially worthless.

Trump has promised to remake the US economy in the image of crypto, and his children have started a decentralized finance company—a platform for making financial transactions using crypto instead of a traditional banking institution—that Trump benefits from. However, as the websites for both $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins make clear, these are not serious investment vehicles.

“Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP,’” a disclaimer on the $TRUMP coin website reads, “and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.”

The Melania Memes website puts it even more bluntly: “Melania Memes are intended for collecting and entertainment purposes only. They are not financial instruments or investments. Always do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose.”

As TikTok Negotiates with Trump, Every Major Social Media Company Has Caved to the New President 

20 January 2025 at 20:34

Over the weekend, TikTok very briefly died in the United States before being reborn some 12 hours later, bearing a jaunty new banner. 

“As a result of President Trump’s efforts,” it read, in part, “TikTok is back in the U.S.”

The biggest tech and social media companies have consolidated behind Trump.

Trump was not yet president on Sunday, when TikTok began restoring U.S. access despite a Supreme Court ruling Friday upholding a law meant to ban it. But the deeper message was unmistakable: the Chinese-owned company ByteDance and its CEO Shou Zi Chew would do anything to placate Trump and keep its most profitable app online for American users. Trump also said on Sunday that he’d issue an executive order delaying the implementation of TikTok’s ban in the U.S.

As many pointed out, it was a long way from 2020, when Trump vowed to ban the app “immediately” as a threat to national security. On TruthSocial, Trump even suggested a deal to keep TikTok online that would involve the U.S. gaining “a 50% joint ownership” position. TikTok hasn’t yet responded to idea, but the Chinese government has signaled it wouldn’t object.

A day after the app’s American resurrection, Chew came to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, along with two other social media giants, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also present was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world and a booster of both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was also in the room.

All of this, of course, points to one simple fact: the total consolidation of the biggest tech and social media companies behind the new president. “What this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States, has been taken over by the right wing,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in a Sunday video posted—ironically, but unavoidably—to Meta-owned Instagram.

The conciliatory approach social media companies have taken to Trump caps a long process of retreat from the social media companies playing an active role in policing deceptive speech and false information, including Twitter’s rollback of enforcing rules around disinformation and continuing with Meta’s recent decision to replace fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes. Trump and conservative leaders have long claimed that such initiatives censored right-wing views. 

Besides its laudatory banner, on Sunday night TikTok also hosted the Power 30 Awards inauguration party, which paid tribute to conservative influencers who use the platform as the company handed out TikTok-branded swag and chocolates. Spotify and Google also hosted parties over the weekend celebrating Trump’s return to power.

The Stagecraft That Ushered in the Trump Oligarchy

20 January 2025 at 20:21

You could learn most of what you needed to know about the tone and tenor of Donald Trump’s second inauguration by the people who showed up to watch it. It was a perfectly 2025 mixture of influencers, fighters, billionaires, and bootlickers. Conor McGregor, a UFC star who was recently found guilty of sexual assault by an Irish jury, traveled to the ceremony in a party bus with the comedian Theo Von, influencer brothers Jake and Logan Paul, and “Nelk Boys” YouTuber Kyle Forgeard. Joe Rogan snagged a seat in the rotunda a few seats away from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Gianni Infantino—friend to dictators and president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA—seemed to be lurking in the background of every shot.

In the floor seats in front of the president-elect, you could find a who’s who of conservative luminaries and favor seekers. There was Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp baron whose company paid a $787 million settlement in a defamation case after Fox News accused voting-machine manufacturer Dominion of stealing the 2020 election, and Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host who once said of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” Crypto billionaire Brock Pierce, a former child actor who now resides in Puerto Rico, was skulking around somewhere. His good friend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking to get on Trump’s good side—and perhaps win a pardon—snagged a photo with the Pauls. So did Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.

But the image that will define the day, and perhaps this entire era of politics, was the rows of seats behind Trump. The front row was simple enough—that was reserved for past presidents and vice presidents and their families, and the Trump and Vance clans. In the back were members of his future cabinet (the wealthiest collection of bureaucrats ever assembled). Sandwiched between them was a pastiche of American oligarchy—a demonstration of both the influence and subservience of wealth in Trump’s second term.

The inclusion of Elon Musk (estimated net worth $449 billion) and Vivek Ramaswamy (about $1 billion) was no surprise. Their “Department of Government Efficiency” is, after all, a centerpiece of the new administration. But the world’s richest man, and the maybe future governor of Ohio, were joined by a selection of moguls who a few months, or a few years ago, might have avoided such an alliance with Trump. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos ($245 billion), joined the world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg ($217 billion), behind Trump’s right shoulder. They sat near Apple CEO Tim Cook ($2.2 billion), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (about $1 billion), and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, the world’s seventh-richest man ($163 billion). TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, whose company rang in the Trump presidency a full day early, attended church with the Trumps and his fellow tech titans on Monday morning. Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire former chairman of Marvel, sat near Musk.

These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government.

It wasn’t just tech, of course. Over Trump’s left shoulder—just in front of the Clintons—sat Miriam Adelson ($34.6 billion), the pro-Israel widow of Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, alongside the hedge funder John Paulson ($3.8 billion) and UFC CEO Dana White—a tycoon in his own right whose company may soon enter into a deal with the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Behind them was the fifth-richest man in the world, French billionaire Bernard Arnault (estimated net worth: $188 billion), along with his son Alexandre.

The concentration of wealth sitting behind Trump was staggering. If you add Trump’s roughly $10 billion cabinet to the people I just named, it adds up to a little more than $1.3 trillion. Trillion with a t. It was not just about the riches they brought to the table—and in some cases, brought to Trump’s campaign—but the symbolism of their presence. These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government. At the same time, it was an unmistakable and ominous display of contrition. 

The lasting image I’ll have of the event is of Bezos, owner of a newspaper that brought down a president, waving meekly at the president-elect, hoping for a bit of extra credit. After Trump spent his first term, and his four years out of power, seeking retribution against tech billionaires that he believed had stood in his way, he has seemingly offered to cut Silicon Valley’s titans in on his governing agenda in exchange for fealty. Their presence articulated more neatly the message the president, in so many words, laid out in his address: There’s a price to challenging his power. This time, they’re not willing to pay.

Biden Gives Parting Commutation to Prominent Native Activist

20 January 2025 at 17:55

On Monday, moments before Donald Trump’s inauguration, President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, who has been in prison for nearly 50 years, from two life sentences to home confinement. In a press release, Biden said: “This commutation will enable Mr. Peltier to spend his remaining days in home confinement but will not pardon him for his underlying crimes.”

An internal FBI memo from 1972 showed that the agency planned to target AIM activists, referring to them as “violence-prone individuals.” In 1977, Peltier, a member of the Lakota tribe who was a prominent activist for Native American rights, was convicted of killing two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, and given two life sentences. The agents died as the result of point-blank gunshots to their heads, which Peltier and his supporters have insisted that he was not responsible for.

Peltier’s imprisonment over the years has become, as Mother Jones reported in 2016, “an international symbol of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the US criminal justice system.” As we wrote then, Peltier detailed the following in a petition for clemency that was sent to then-President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in 2016:

After the FBI agents came on to the private property, “I heard shooting, grabbed my rifle, and ran towards a residence where there were women and children, but quickly ran in another direction because my presence had attracted additional gunfire to the area.” He says the area was surrounded by more than 100 FBI agents, SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, and members of the GOON squad.

“Along with many other American Indians who were present that day, I fired shots in the direction of men whom I later learned were federal agents,” Peltier notes in the petition. “At the end of extended gunfire, three men lay dead.”

Over the years, human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have urged that Peltier be released. In July, the organization sent a letter to Biden urging that the now-80-year-old be granted clemency, writing that “there are serious and ongoing concerns about the fairness of trial and conviction.” Amnesty International also noted that “the former US Attorney whose office handled the prosecution, James Reynolds, has since called for clemency.”

“Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason for continuing what looks from the outside to have become an emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta,” a former FBI agent told the Guardian in 2023 of the FBI blocking Peltier’s release in the past.

Peltier has also continued to speak about Indigenous rights while behind bars, saying in 2023: “Although we have made many gains and won some victories in the courts, we are still fighting against the large corporations for the theft of our lands and minerals.”

“It took nearly 50 years to acknowledge the injustice of Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration,” Kevin Sharp, who represented Peltier for five years, said in a press release, “but with the President’s act of mercy Leonard can finally return to his reservation and live out his remaining days.”

Video: Here’s What Trump’s Most Faithful Fans Want to See Next

20 January 2025 at 17:19

The weather in Washington, DC, has plunged into the 20s, with a 40 percent chance of snow showers—and a 100 percent chance of bumping into someone who voted for Donald Trump. Our DC bureau chief, David Corn, bundled up against the chill and braved the slushy queues to speak with ecstatic Trump supporters who began attending a series of celebrations in the capital Sunday. The events were moved indoors to protect against the extreme cold.

Thousands of MAGA faithful packed into the Capital One Arena for an inauguration eve event. David joined the lines.

While in line, David interviewed die-hard Trump supporters about their reasons for backing the president-elect. Among them was Andrew Williams, who praised Trump for not being like the other GOP war hawks. But what about Trump’s proposed military annexation of Greenland? David asked.

He also watched—and recapped—Trump’s victory rally, which included a long segment about Jesus from a duo of women who call themselves “Girls Gone Bible.”

Meanwhile, our video correspondent Garrison Hayes took to the streets to ask Trump supporters what they are looking forward to. Some gave specific answers, such as the erosion of DEI requirements, while others offered vague calls for “unity.” One woman shared more ambitious plans: “I would vote for him to be king,” she said—perhaps jokingly. Watch for yourself:

This post will be updated with dispatches from the day. Stay tuned.

Florida Man Unconditionally Discharged Into Oval Office

20 January 2025 at 17:16

The American people have spoken. Donald Trump is the 47th president of the United States.

At noon Monday, Trump himself spoke, swearing—not especially credibly—that he would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”

A lot of other Americans spoke to get us here, too. More than four years ago, at the very same Capitol where Trump was just sworn in, his supporters spoke. “Hang Mike Pence,” they said.

Just three weeks later, Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, spoke, journeying to Mar-a-Lago to talk directly to the disgraced former president and to pose obsequiously for the cameras.

Sen. Mitch McConnell spoke after Trump’s second impeachment trial, declaring that Trump’s actions had been a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” But the Senate minority leader kept speaking. He insisted that the Senate no longer had any power to convict Trump or to bar him from once again seeking office. Forty-two of McConnell’s Republican colleagues spoke in agreement, voting to acquit Trump and to allow his political career to continue.

Trump, of course, never stopped speaking, and he soon announced another run for president.

Then, in quick succession, the prosecutors all spoke. Merrick Garland announced he was appointing Jack Smith, who produced two speaking indictments against the former president. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg spoke, charging Trump with 34 felonies that may, or may not, have actually been felonies. “This office upholds our solemn responsibility to ensure everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg declared. In Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis spoke, charging Trump and his cronies in a 98-page RICO indictment.

The Colorado Supreme Court spoke, declaring Trump ineligible to run for president. The US Supreme Court spoke, and—unanimously—said the Colorado court was wrong. So then Republican primary voters spoke, choosing Trump as their nominee.

New York judges and juries spoke—declaring Trump liable of sexual abuse, defamation, and fraud, and convicting him in Bragg’s criminal hush-money case—but voters seemed not to be listening. In Georgia, a judge spoke, blasting that state’s prosecutors’ “tremendous lapse in judgment” and “odor of mendacity” in a ruling that would ultimately derail Trump’s trial there. SCOTUS spoke once again, awarding Trump broad immunity and sending Smith back to the drawing board. In Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon spoke, announcing that Smith’s appointment was, somehow, invalid from the very beginning.

In the meantime, another special counsel, Rob Hur, had spoken, explaining that he wasn’t going to charge Joe Biden with crimes because, in part, Biden seemed to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden’s supporters very much did not want to listen to that—at least until Biden himself spoke at a debate and removed all doubt.

Kamala Harris spoke, and briefly restored joy. But she’d spoken before, telling voters that “Bidenomics is working.” Voters disagreed, and they disagreed even more when Harris said there was “not a thing that comes to mind” that she would have done differently than Biden.

Even as Biden seemed to slowly disappear, he, too, kept speaking—at times in ways that were nearly impossible to comprehend. “We gotta lock him up,” Biden said about Trump. “Politically lock him up. Lock him out.” Days later, Biden called some number of Trump’s supporters “garbage.” Then Biden’s staff spoke about apostrophes, while Trump rode around in a garbage truck.

On Election Day, the voters finally spoke, and a plurality said that Trump should return to the White House. Most notably, the people of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona all spoke, supporting the former president whom they’d rejected four years earlier.

Smith spoke again, conceding that his cases against Trump were officially over.

In New York, Bragg—along with Judge Juan Merchan—pushed on, but there was little left for them to say. With SCOTUS’s blessing, Trump’s hush-money sentencing went forward. Sort of. Merchan granted the incoming president an “unconditional discharge,” allowing him to return to the White House with no criminal punishment whatsoever.

Which brings us back to Inauguration Day.

“The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Trump said to applause, shortly after taking the oath. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.”

We’ll soon discover whether he was speaking truthfully.

Cecile Richards, Former President of Planned Parenthood, Has Died

20 January 2025 at 15:42

Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood and a staunch advocate for reproductive rights, died Monday, according to a statement from her family. Since 2023, she battled glioblastoma, a form of terminal brain cancer. She was 67.

“This morning our beloved Cecile passed away at home, surrounded by her family and her ever-loyal dog, Ollie,” her family—husband Kirk and kids Lily, Hannah, and Daniel—wrote. “Our hearts are broken today but no words can do justice to the joy she brought to our lives.”

Richards led Planned Parenthood for a dozen turbulent years during which access to reproductive health care was being increasingly undermined and her organization, the largest provider of such care in the country, was targeted by Republicans. She transformed the organization into a political powerhouse, launching its first-ever primary endorsement for a political candidate in 2016, when Planned Parenthood backed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

“America has had few greater advocates for women and reproductive health than Cecile Richards,” Clinton said Monday. “Her legacy will be the countless lives she touched and the generations of women she inspired to follow in her footsteps.”

Upon announcing her departure from Planned Parenthood in 2018, Richards called the job “the honor of my lifetime.” She continued advocating for abortion access, most recently by launching a new initiative, an abortion storytelling platform called Abortion in America, meant to highlight stories about the fallout of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Even after her cancer diagnosis, Richards continued making appearances and speaking publicly in support of abortion rights, including at the Democratic National Convention in August in support of Kamala Harris.

In a 2018 interview with Mother Jones, upon the publication of her memoir Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead, Richards said:

I think one of the myths in the world is that somehow being an activist or a troublemaker is burdensome, or you’re always depressed. People would also walk up to me and say, “How are you doing?” Actually, I feel like being an organizer and an activist gives you such a chance to make a difference in the world. It’s really an incredible life, and so I hope that what this book also gives people is a sense of the joy that you can get from making a little bit of difference in the world and the amazing people you meet along the way.

“If you’d like to celebrate Cecile today,” her family said in the statement announcing her passing, “we invite you to put on some New Orleans jazz, gather with friends and family over a good meal, and remember something she said a lot over the last year: ‘It’s not hard to imagine future generations one day asking: ‘When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do?’ The only acceptable answer is: ‘Everything we could.’”

Before yesterdayMother Jones

Trump’s Wealth Spikes and Plummets on the Launch of His Meme Coin

20 January 2025 at 21:11

Donald Trump launched a multibillion-dollar meme coin just days before taking office and instantly saw his net worth balloon. But then, as the initial excitement passed, the value plunged and occasionally spiked again through the first roller-coaster hours of Trump’s second presidency. Despite the optimism of some crypto enthusiasts that the $TRUMP coin’s debut Friday heralded a new era of automatic crypto riches, the value of the coin had plummeted to around half of its weekend high of $72.62 by the time Trump was sworn in Monday.

Meme coins have no intrinsic value or particular usefulness as a currency but serve more as a cultural signifier. They usually are based on an internet joke, such as the internet’s fascination with the doge dog (Dogecoin), or make use of a celebrity’s image. While real money can be made riding the speculative highs and lows of meme coin trading, it’s also one of the sectors of the crypto world most prone to bubbles and subsequent collapses.

If the new $TRUMP coin is more of a way for crypto enthusiasts to signal their support for Trump—which might be the most coherent explanation for a type of crypto product that doesn’t have any point to it at all—the timing of this new Trump product was propitious. After announcing the coin’s creation Friday night at a party for the crypto industry to celebrate Trump’s inauguration, the price spiked to as high as $72.62. A total of 1 billion coins were created in an instant, so Trump’s ownership of an estimated 800 million of the new $TRUMP coins meant that his wealth almost instantly blew up from a bit less than $7 billion to possibly as much as $65 billion on the eve of his presidency.

But then the price started falling, and in the minutes shortly before Trump’s official inauguration, the price had fallen to just under $50. Following his inauguration at noon, the price plunged below $40, before rebounding slightly.

In theory, that’s still worth about $33 billion for Trump, but the volatility is a good indicator of how reliable of a source of wealth the coin really can be. With this product, no matter what the price, Trump’s holdings will have some value because there was no expense for him in creating it—and that value will be based on nothing but consumers’ interest in buying something (digital) with his name on it.

On Monday, the Trumps announced that first lady Melania Trump had also created her own meme coin, $MELANIA, which hit a high of $13.05 but by early afternoon on Inauguration Day had fallen to $5.27.

Not everyone was thrilled with the creation of the memes—ethics expert Norm Eisen told the Washington Post that the coin was “the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency.” Even some in the crypto community bristled at the idea, calling it a “horrible look” and “predatory,” noting that meme coins are generally speculative and essentially worthless.

Trump has promised to remake the US economy in the image of crypto, and his children have started a decentralized finance company—a platform for making financial transactions using crypto instead of a traditional banking institution—that Trump benefits from. However, as the websites for both $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins make clear, these are not serious investment vehicles.

“Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP,’” a disclaimer on the $TRUMP coin website reads, “and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.”

The Melania Memes website puts it even more bluntly: “Melania Memes are intended for collecting and entertainment purposes only. They are not financial instruments or investments. Always do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose.”

As TikTok Negotiates with Trump, Every Major Social Media Company Has Caved to the New President 

20 January 2025 at 20:34

Over the weekend, TikTok very briefly died in the United States before being reborn some 12 hours later, bearing a jaunty new banner. 

“As a result of President Trump’s efforts,” it read, in part, “TikTok is back in the U.S.”

The biggest tech and social media companies have consolidated behind Trump.

Trump was not yet president on Sunday, when TikTok began restoring U.S. access despite a Supreme Court ruling Friday upholding a law meant to ban it. But the deeper message was unmistakable: the Chinese-owned company ByteDance and its CEO Shou Zi Chew would do anything to placate Trump and keep its most profitable app online for American users. Trump also said on Sunday that he’d issue an executive order delaying the implementation of TikTok’s ban in the U.S.

As many pointed out, it was a long way from 2020, when Trump vowed to ban the app “immediately” as a threat to national security. On TruthSocial, Trump even suggested a deal to keep TikTok online that would involve the U.S. gaining “a 50% joint ownership” position. TikTok hasn’t yet responded to idea, but the Chinese government has signaled it wouldn’t object.

A day after the app’s American resurrection, Chew came to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, along with two other social media giants, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also present was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world and a booster of both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was also in the room.

All of this, of course, points to one simple fact: the total consolidation of the biggest tech and social media companies behind the new president. “What this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States, has been taken over by the right wing,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in a Sunday video posted—ironically, but unavoidably—to Meta-owned Instagram.

The conciliatory approach social media companies have taken to Trump caps a long process of retreat from the social media companies playing an active role in policing deceptive speech and false information, including Twitter’s rollback of enforcing rules around disinformation and continuing with Meta’s recent decision to replace fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes. Trump and conservative leaders have long claimed that such initiatives censored right-wing views. 

Besides its laudatory banner, on Sunday night TikTok also hosted the Power 30 Awards inauguration party, which paid tribute to conservative influencers who use the platform as the company handed out TikTok-branded swag and chocolates. Spotify and Google also hosted parties over the weekend celebrating Trump’s return to power.

The Stagecraft That Ushered in the Trump Oligarchy

20 January 2025 at 20:21

You could learn most of what you needed to know about the tone and tenor of Donald Trump’s second inauguration by the people who showed up to watch it. It was a perfectly 2025 mixture of influencers, fighters, billionaires, and bootlickers. Conor McGregor, a UFC star who was recently found guilty of sexual assault by an Irish jury, traveled to the ceremony in a party bus with the comedian Theo Von, influencer brothers Jake and Logan Paul, and “Nelk Boys” YouTuber Kyle Forgeard. Joe Rogan snagged a seat in the rotunda a few seats away from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Gianni Infantino—friend to dictators and president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA—seemed to be lurking in the background of every shot.

In the floor seats in front of the president-elect, you could find a who’s who of conservative luminaries and favor seekers. There was Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp baron whose company paid a $787 million settlement in a defamation case after Fox News accused voting-machine manufacturer Dominion of stealing the 2020 election, and Tucker Carlson, the onetime Fox News host who once said of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” Crypto billionaire Brock Pierce, a former child actor who now resides in Puerto Rico, was skulking around somewhere. His good friend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking to get on Trump’s good side—and perhaps win a pardon—snagged a photo with the Pauls. So did Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.

But the image that will define the day, and perhaps this entire era of politics, was the rows of seats behind Trump. The front row was simple enough—that was reserved for past presidents and vice presidents and their families, and the Trump and Vance clans. In the back were members of his future cabinet (the wealthiest collection of bureaucrats ever assembled). Sandwiched between them was a pastiche of American oligarchy—a demonstration of both the influence and subservience of wealth in Trump’s second term.

The inclusion of Elon Musk (estimated net worth $449 billion) and Vivek Ramaswamy (about $1 billion) was no surprise. Their “Department of Government Efficiency” is, after all, a centerpiece of the new administration. But the world’s richest man, and the maybe future governor of Ohio, were joined by a selection of moguls who a few months, or a few years ago, might have avoided such an alliance with Trump. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos ($245 billion), joined the world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg ($217 billion), behind Trump’s right shoulder. They sat near Apple CEO Tim Cook ($2.2 billion), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (about $1 billion), and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, the world’s seventh-richest man ($163 billion). TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, whose company rang in the Trump presidency a full day early, attended church with the Trumps and his fellow tech titans on Monday morning. Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire former chairman of Marvel, sat near Musk.

These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government.

It wasn’t just tech, of course. Over Trump’s left shoulder—just in front of the Clintons—sat Miriam Adelson ($34.6 billion), the pro-Israel widow of Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, alongside the hedge funder John Paulson ($3.8 billion) and UFC CEO Dana White—a tycoon in his own right whose company may soon enter into a deal with the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Behind them was the fifth-richest man in the world, French billionaire Bernard Arnault (estimated net worth: $188 billion), along with his son Alexandre.

The concentration of wealth sitting behind Trump was staggering. If you add Trump’s roughly $10 billion cabinet to the people I just named, it adds up to a little more than $1.3 trillion. Trillion with a t. It was not just about the riches they brought to the table—and in some cases, brought to Trump’s campaign—but the symbolism of their presence. These billionaires were propped between former heads of state and future cabinet officials, like benighted stewards of the American system—a special fourth branch of government. At the same time, it was an unmistakable and ominous display of contrition. 

The lasting image I’ll have of the event is of Bezos, owner of a newspaper that brought down a president, waving meekly at the president-elect, hoping for a bit of extra credit. After Trump spent his first term, and his four years out of power, seeking retribution against tech billionaires that he believed had stood in his way, he has seemingly offered to cut Silicon Valley’s titans in on his governing agenda in exchange for fealty. Their presence articulated more neatly the message the president, in so many words, laid out in his address: There’s a price to challenging his power. This time, they’re not willing to pay.

Trump Declares War on Transgender People

20 January 2025 at 20:16

Upon assuming the presidency Monday, Donald Trump is expected to immediately move to end the federal government’s recognition of transgender people, who have existed in hundreds of societies worldwide since ancient times.

In an executive order titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the full text of which has not been released, Trump will reportedly mandate that the federal government acknowledge only “biological sex”—specifically, whether an individual is born with eggs or sperm.

As Trump announced in his inaugural address, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

According to multiple reports from a briefing by unnamed White House officials, federal agencies will be instructed to classify people by biological sex on government IDs like passports, visas, and personnel documents. In a long-anticipated move, agencies also will be ordered to stop interpreting sex discrimination laws in ways that protect trans people—inviting federal workplaces, schools, and social service programs like shelters to misgender and discriminate against trans people. Transgender women in federal prison reportedly will be transferred to men’s prisons and no longer provided with gender-affirming medical treatments—potentially forcing up to 1,500 incarcerated trans women to medically detransition.

The order is expected to attempt to cut off federal funding for gender-affirming medical treatments like hormone therapy—a move that primarily affects transgender adults. About 276,000 trans adults are on Medicaid, which uses a combination of federal and state funding, raising the possibility that Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care will be preserved in the roughly half of states that cover it. Other trans adults rely on Medicare, which covers hormone therapy as well as surgery on a case-by-case basis, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which covers nonsurgical gender-affirming treatments. These treatments, which research suggests improve quality of life and mental health and reduce suicidality, are now in jeopardy.

Each of the new administration’s moves is expected to face immediate legal challenges. The ACLU has vowed to take the Trump administration to court “wherever we can” to defend LGBTQ rights. Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are already engulfed in legal battles over whether the Constitution, as well as federal anti-sex discrimination laws, implicitly protect people from anti-trans discrimination. In 2023, the Montana legislature passed a law purporting to define sex as binary and biological, erasing transgender people from whole swaths of state code, but a Montana judge swiftly blocked it, declaring that it violated the state constitution.

The executive orders “do not and cannot change the law,” Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, who last month became the first openly trans person to argue before the Supreme Court, wrote on Instagram. “They will be glorified press releases designed to create confusion and chaos.”

“Today’s expected executive actions targeting the LGBTQ+ community serve no other purpose than to hurt our families and our communities.”

“Today’s expected executive actions targeting the LGBTQ+ community serve no other purpose than to hurt our families and our communities,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement. “We are not going anywhere, and we will fight back against these harmful provisions with everything we’ve got.”

The announcement of the order Monday makes good on Trump’s campaign promises to fight so-called “gender ideology”—a term that allows him and his allies to frame their policies as attacking a belief system, rather than targeting a minority group that makes up roughly 1 percent of the population. As trans people gained more public exposure and media representation in the 2010s, and especially since the Supreme Court recognized the right to same-sex marriage in 2015, right-wing and religious conservative groups have poured time and money into turning transgender rights into a wedge issue—ultimately seeding hundreds of anti-trans bills in state legislatures over the last several years. After holding off in the 2020 election cycle, Republican politicians and PACs went all-in on anti-trans rhetoric focusing on trans athletes and pronouns.

Transgender individuals and families with gender-diverse children have been bracing themselves and preparing for the Trump crackdown. After his reelection in November, LGBTQ organizations and advocates urged transgender people to update their gender markers on documents like passports and Social Security cards. Many have rationed and stockpiled medications. Others have moved from conservative states to places like Colorado, where state law provides strong protection for queer and trans people.

On the morning of Inauguration Day, Renee, the mother of a trans teenager in Pennsylvania, woke up at 5 a.m. “shaking with anxiety and fear,” she said.

“It was already scary, even with the protections, but at least I knew that there were laws in place to protect her at school,” said Renee, who is using only her first name to preserve her daughter’s privacy. “If this executive order really goes into place, where are the safe spaces, other than home?” she wondered, her voice cracking. “I don’t have an answer, and it terrifies me.”

MLK Jr.’s Fight for Civil Rights Was an Environmental Battle as Well

20 January 2025 at 11:30

This story, first published in January 2022 bthe Inside Climate News, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Terms like “environmental racism” or “environmental justice” were not yet part of the national lexicon when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

And while insider records reveal that the nation’s oil and gas lobby was being briefed that same year on the dangers of rising greenhouse gas emissions, the term “global warming” wasn’t credited with being coined until 1975, seven years after the civil rights leader’s death.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote.

Yet leading climate scientists, theologians or environmental and climate justice activists today find much meaning and inspiration from what King wrote, said or did. In advance of this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, Inside Climate News reached out to scientists, theologians, ministers and environmental and climate justice advocates to reflect on King’s legacy, as seen through a climate and environmental justice lens more than a half a century after King’s death. Some said they see their work as a direct extension of King’s, while others said King’s teachings offer a global guide for a world that is struggling to address the climate crisis.

“MLK showed us the power of the voices of ordinary people—not the powerful or wealthy, but the underprivileged, the ordinary, and the oppressed,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, evangelical Christian and author of the book Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. “Their voices changed the world before, and I believe their voices will change the world again.

“That’s why I’m convinced the most important thing any of us can do about climate change is use our voices to advocate for change at every level, from our homes and our neighborhoods to our cities and our countries.”

King’s fight was for racial equality through nonviolent means. The movement that he led ultimately spurred passage of landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. King’s movement dismantled formal segregation over a 13-year arc, pushing for integrated public accommodations, workers’ rights and a respect for the dignity of all human life in ways that continue to resonate with proponents for social justice and scholars who study connections between faith, the environment and ethics.

King is one of the roots that fed into what has become an environmental movement that shifted away from an “almost exclusive focus on wilderness protection and preservation and toward urban life, public health, and Black experience,” said Norman Wirzba, a professor of theology at the Duke University Divinity School. In other words, the environment is wherever all people live and work, Wirzba said. 

“It isn’t just where a few privileged, mostly White people go to vacation and recreate,” he said. “King understood that the struggle for equality is expansive and all-inclusive.”  

That kind of thinking explains why King’s focus broadened to take in questions of sanitation workers, foreign wars, and working conditions, Wirzba added.

“My perception is that oftentimes, the Black fight was for equal rights. Ours is for liberation.”

King’s expansive perspective can be found in one of his most famous writings, the 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote after being incarcerated following nonviolent protests.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

One very direct connection between King and today’s environmental justice movement can be found in the life of the Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr., said the Rev. Michael Malcom, founder and executive director of The People’s Justice Council and Alabama Interfaith Power and Light. Chavis was one of the organizers of a prolonged protest in 1982 of a hazardous waste landfill in a predominantly Black community of North Carolina, where he popularized the term “environmental racism.”

Malcom added, “Even when we look at the actual death of Dr. King, we find out he was actually in Memphis marching for workers rights. These were garbage workers, and we see a direct correlation of environmental injustice and social injustice.”

Many other connections can be made between civil rights and environmental justice, and right now, one that’s boiling over in Congress is voting rights, Malcom said. With Republicans working to roll back voting rights in states, Democrats are pressing for nationwide standards on voting access, among other measures.

“We don’t see the connections, but the conversations we are having about voting rights determine who will be elected, and they will determine what policies are put in place,” he said.

King wrote in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait, that the United States was “born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.”

For one Native American elder and fighter of environmental injustices, Casey Camp-Horinek, King deserves all the recognition and reverence he has achieved. Camp-Horinek is an official environmental ambassador for the Ponca Tribe in Oklahoma, where she has been fighting an oil and gas industry that she says has “wrapped” her people in poison.

But she described a more complicated and nuanced relationship with King’s life and what he has come to represent. To be sure, Camp-Horinek said, the fight for Native American rights benefited from the civil rights movement that King led starting in the 1950s.

“A good deal of what we would perhaps call the Red Power movement began on the heels of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King was part of,” she said. “And many of the allyships happened around civil rights issues. And that boils down to what would now be considered, oftentimes environmental issues.”

“He didn’t go out there and try to kill anyone or hurt anyone. We are doing it in a peaceful way, too.”

She also recalled a Martin Luther King Jr. Day protest at her son’s Oklahoma school years ago, inspired by the civil rights leader. “We walked out on Martin Luther King Day because the manner in which they were treating our children was very much, and continues to be very much, like what was happening in Selma, Alabama, and we wanted that parallel drawn.”

But the struggles of Black and Indigenous Americans are not the same and the voices of Native Americans are too often silenced, Camp-Horinek said.

“More often than not, the Indigenous voice has been relegated to either that of the noble savage, or the relic of history, and less of an intricate part of the people of color struggle that goes on now,” she said. “My perception is that oftentimes, the Black fight was for equal rights. Ours is for liberation. Red people still have not become liberated from the yoke of the slavery that they call the colonial government of the United States of America.”

At Creighton University, professor and theologian Daniel R. DiLeo studies Catholic social teaching, and notes that Pope Francis’ landmark Laudato Si’, his 2015 teaching document on the “care for our common home” and climate change, makes a similar point to King’s “network of mutuality,” in its exploration of what the Pope calls integral ecology—or the deep and broad connection between all living things and from generation to generation, as well as the obligations humans have to reign in greenhouse gases and pollution and their oversized impacts on the poorest people.

“It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected,” the Pope wrote.

“It’s a unifying principle,” said DiLeo, of the pope’s message that was also part of King’s. 

DiLeo, who teaches King’s Birmingham letter in an ethics class, said he’s also studying the letter for a book chapter he’s writing on his research that documents US Catholic Bishops’ reluctance to embrace the climate change aspects of Laudato Si’.

King wrote the letter to eight Alabama religious leaders who had criticized the civil rights demonstrations as “unwise and untimely” and had urged King to lead a less confrontational approach to achieve his goals.

“The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound” and “the arch supporter of the status quo,” King wrote. While he wrote that he agreed the demonstrations were unfortunate, he told the pastors “it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.”

Within the Catholic Church now, DiLeo said, there might be a parallel situation, with what he sees as the US Bishop’s slow walk on climate change in effect lending support to a status quo that supports systems and policies that are greenhouse-gas intensive.

In Port Arthur, Texas, former oil company worker and former city councilman John Beard Jr., has been fighting against an expansion of Gulf Coast LNG export facilities and for health and safety protections in a region known for its refineries, export terminals and petrochemical plants.

The region’s economic benefits from a growing oil and gas industry have not been shared equally by Black residents, who get shut out of jobs, he said, adding the root cause is generations of inequality.

 “We have been sacrificed,” said Baird, who in fall 2021 took his message to Scotland and the Conference of the Parties (COP26), the United Nations-led climate negotiations. There, he confronted Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on fossil fuel experts in a video that went viral after Granholm said stopping oil and gas experts was not “in my lane.”

MLK Day “is not a holiday for people of color. It is a holiday about service for everyone.”

Two hundred miles east, in a Louisiana’s industrial corridor often dubbed “cancer alley” with its concentration of refineries and petrochemical plants, Sharon Lavigne has helped to win a delay in the construction of a planned $9.4 billion petrochemical complex in St. James Parish. The environmental justice advocate views King’s life as a guiding light, she said.

“He did everything peacefully,” said Lavigne, a winner last year of the prestigious Goldman Prize for her grassroots environmental justice leadership. “He didn’t go out there and try to kill anyone or hurt anyone. We are doing it in a peaceful way, too.”

“He did marches,” she said. “We do marches. He fought to end racism. We are doing the same thing today, with an industry that is racist,” because of the toxic pollution it sends into predominantly Black and Brown communities, and avoids locating new plants in White communities, she said.

Scientists are urging aggressive global action to bring the world to net zero carbon emissions in less than 30 years to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change such as extreme storms, prolonged drought, fire, famine, sea level rise, and social disruption. In August 2021, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment confirmed that if the global rise in temperature is not stopped somewhere near a goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels that climate change could spiral out of control.

Increasingly, the global climate fight is being seen as a fight for climate justice because Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people are bearing a disproportionate impact from climate disruptions, said climate researcher and professor J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric sciences program.

Shepherd, too, draws meaning from King’s Birmingham jail letter to expand his own thinking about climate impacts and solutions. 

“At one point in the letter, he pushed back on those that called him an outside agitator by noting that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Playing on that, climate change doesn’t operate on a level playing field, so as it amplifies and accelerates, it is a threat to vulnerable communities everywhere.”

The MLK holiday, he added, is really not about race or civil rights, Shepherd said. “It is not a holiday for people of color. It is a holiday about service for everyone. It is time to reflect on what each of us can do individually and collectively to serve our home planet, too. It’s the only one we have. King would certainly be on the frontlines of the climate crisis if he were alive today.”

Biden Gives Parting Commutation to Prominent Native Activist

20 January 2025 at 17:55

On Monday, moments before Donald Trump’s inauguration, President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, who has been in prison for nearly 50 years, from two life sentences to home confinement. In a press release, Biden said: “This commutation will enable Mr. Peltier to spend his remaining days in home confinement but will not pardon him for his underlying crimes.”

An internal FBI memo from 1972 showed that the agency planned to target AIM activists, referring to them as “violence-prone individuals.” In 1977, Peltier, a member of the Lakota tribe who was a prominent activist for Native American rights, was convicted of killing two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, and given two life sentences. The agents died as the result of point-blank gunshots to their heads, which Peltier and his supporters have insisted that he was not responsible for.

Peltier’s imprisonment over the years has become, as Mother Jones reported in 2016, “an international symbol of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the US criminal justice system.” As we wrote then, Peltier detailed the following in a petition for clemency that was sent to then-President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in 2016:

After the FBI agents came on to the private property, “I heard shooting, grabbed my rifle, and ran towards a residence where there were women and children, but quickly ran in another direction because my presence had attracted additional gunfire to the area.” He says the area was surrounded by more than 100 FBI agents, SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, and members of the GOON squad.

“Along with many other American Indians who were present that day, I fired shots in the direction of men whom I later learned were federal agents,” Peltier notes in the petition. “At the end of extended gunfire, three men lay dead.”

Over the years, human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have urged that Peltier be released. In July, the organization sent a letter to Biden urging that the now-80-year-old be granted clemency, writing that “there are serious and ongoing concerns about the fairness of trial and conviction.” Amnesty International also noted that “the former US Attorney whose office handled the prosecution, James Reynolds, has since called for clemency.”

“Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason for continuing what looks from the outside to have become an emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta,” a former FBI agent told the Guardian in 2023 of the FBI blocking Peltier’s release in the past.

Peltier has also continued to speak about Indigenous rights while behind bars, saying in 2023: “Although we have made many gains and won some victories in the courts, we are still fighting against the large corporations for the theft of our lands and minerals.”

“It took nearly 50 years to acknowledge the injustice of Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration,” Kevin Sharp, who represented Peltier for five years, said in a press release, “but with the President’s act of mercy Leonard can finally return to his reservation and live out his remaining days.”

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