After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.
The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbittand that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.
It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voicedconcerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”
As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”
“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.
The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”
“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and Doctors for Harris did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.
Two weeks from Tuesday, millions of voters across the country will fan out to polling places.
And when they do, there will reportedly be a GOP-backed, 200,000-strong army of volunteers watching them. Their task? “Establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should former president Donald Trump lose.
That’s according to a new report in the New Yorker that sheds light on the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s plan—led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and Michael Whatley, its co-chairs—to use a giant grassroots group of Trump worshippers to question the integrity of the election.
In June, the RNC announced that the so-called “Protect the Vote” tour would make a series of stops in swing states to “train volunteers to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat this November.” (Never mind that research shows voter fraud is quite rare; that Republican-led gerrymandering has helped enshrine minority rule, as my colleague Ari Berman has covered; and that Trump still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election—despite more than 60 failed legal challenges affirming that he did.)
According to the New Yorker, much of the RNC’s strategy relies on indulging supporters’ paranoia over conspiracy theories about a Democrat-coordinated campaign to steal the election—via the usual suspects, undocumented immigrants and dead people—and training volunteers to be “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign,” as far-right Internet personality Jack Posobiec put it. If they suspect fraud, the volunteers are told, they should call the RNC’s “election integrity hotline,” which a team of volunteer attorneys will apparently answer.
The irony is that poll watching has, historically, been an important safeguard of democracy. Poll watchers helped implement the Voting Rights Act, for example, ensuring election workers were actually allowing Black people to vote. But experts also say that without clear guidelines—and under Trump’s GOP—the practice can help foment Election Day discord.
Recent history offers proof: In 2020, mostly white Republican poll watchers—including five activists linked to the Trump campaign—heckled mostly Black election workers in Detroit and spread disproven rumors of fraud, chanting “stop the count,” as NBC News recently investigated. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than a quarter of Republicans—compared with 14 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats—believe poll watchers should be armed. And nearly a fifth of Republicans surveyed said that if Trump loses, he should contest the results and do “whatever it takes” to assume the presidency—compared with 12 percent of Democrats saying the same of Harris.
The GOP is not waiting until Election Day to stoke doubt, though: The RNC has already filed dozens of “election integrity” lawsuits across the country, which challenge absentee and mail-in ballots and try to make it easier to purge voter rolls and allow local officials to refuse to certify elections, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote. As one expert told her, their forethought should be a warning to the rest of us:
“In 2020, the attempt to undermine election results by the Trump campaign [was] more of an afterthought,” says Sylvia Albert, who runs voting and election projects at Common Cause, a pro-democracy nonprofit. “Now it looks like a cohesive party strategy nationwide, and it’s not an afterthought. The lesson we’ve taken is to prepare for it.”
After Elon Muskunveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.
As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.
While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”
Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)
WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL
Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”
Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.
This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.
Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.
With just over two weeks until Election Day, both candidates are plunging into nonstop rallies and interviews in a bid to get in front of as many voters as possible. (Though notably, Trump has backed out of several recent high profile media appearances, including a sit-down with 60 Minutes.)
Vice President Kamala Harris sat for a contentious exchange with Fox News host Bret Baier this week, and headlinedrallies in the swing states of Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan. Former President Donald Trump, for his part, sank to new lows during a suite of appearances—lobbing crude insults at his opponents and rambling incoherently. Let’s review Trump’s very weird week, which, even by Trumpian standards of shock, veered into increasingly alarming territory. Let’s go day-by-day:
Monday
At a Pennsylvania town hall Monday night, Trump ranted about Hannibal Lecter, renewed his longstanding attacks on the “fake news,” and then abandoned answering questions entirely to listen to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA” for a half hour as he swayed on stage.
"Turn it up louder!" — Trump calls for Ave Maria to be played again while his favorite chart is displayed, which he says "I sleep with every night. I kiss it." pic.twitter.com/bLCOBNuCjI
At an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait on immigration and economic policy, Trump took a question about inflation as an opportunity to bash Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), an architect of the Green New Deal: “She never even studied the environment in college. She went to a nice college. She came out. She just said—the Green New Scam. She just named all these things.” (Ocasio-Cortez studied international relations and economics at Boston University.)
That exchange was indicative of the interview at large: While Micklethwait repeatedly pressed Trump on the specifics of his economic policies and their potential impacts—higher prices due to tariffs, the loss of immigrant labor due to his proposed mass deportation plan—the former president went on tangent after tangent. When Micklethwait asked him if Google should be broken up, for example, Trump responded with a grievance about voting in Virginia. When the host called him out for his meandering, Trump offered his now-common but unsatisfying explanation: “It’s called the weave.” Other highlights: Trump called Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) “Newscum” and claimed the insurrection represented “a peaceful transfer of power.”
Trump: New scum I call him
Micklethwait: There are CEOs out here if they said that sort of thing about a rival CEO they would be sacked.
And at an all-women’s town hall hosted by Fox News host Harris Faulkner taped Tuesday, Trump called himself “the father of IVF”… despite the fact that the Dobbs decision—which he made possible by appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade—has undermined IVF access and Senate Republicans twice blocked a vote on a Democrat-led bill to protect the fertility treatment.
Trump: “I’m the father of IVF”
FACT CHECK: IVF is under threat across the country because Trump ended Roe v. Wade and his Project 2025 plan could effectively ban IVF altogether. pic.twitter.com/tEOUiufDjO
His campaign dismissed the bizarre remark as a joke. But as former President Barack Obama said at a rally for Harris in Arizona Friday night: “I do not know what that means. You do not either.”
Wednesday
At a town hall for Latino voters hosted by Univision, Trump called Jan. 6, 2021—the day he unleashed a mob on the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election—”a day of love.” He also falsely claimed “nobody died” other than Ashli Babbitt,and “there were no guns.” January 6, as my colleague Mark Follman has covered extensively, was in fact a heavily armed insurrection.
He also doubled down on the racist lies his campaign helpedspread about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating house pets, claiming without evidence they are “eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”
Question: Do you really believe that these people are eating people’s pets?
Trump: I was just saying what was reported. And eating other things too that they’re not supposed to. pic.twitter.com/GAXezwPkqe
During a sit-down with Fox and Friends, Trump took viewers’ questions… including softballs from children who asked about his favorite animal and favorite former president. We’ll just leave one of his responses here:
A six-year-old asks Donald Trump what his favorite farm animal is:
"I love cows. But if we go with Kamala you won't have any cows anymore. I don't want to ruin this kid's day. I love cows, I think they're so cute and so beautiful."pic.twitter.com/qNxVPQ2suQ
To cap it all off, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump called Harris a “shit vice president” and spoke about the penis size of golfer Arnold Palmer. Yes… really.
Trump 10 minutes into his Arnold Palmer story: But when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there. They said, oh my God. That's unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/kRLKWixpT8
All this makes it no wonder, then, that Harris is drawing voters’ attention to Trump’s rambling incoherency and insults. “He has called it the weave,” she said at a rally in Detroit Saturday. “I think we here will call it nonsense.”
Correction, Oct. 20: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as the former VP.
This story was originally published byVox.comand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.
The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.
James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.
“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”
After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.
Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.
All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.
To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.
The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.
“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”
Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.
According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.
“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”
There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.
The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.
Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.
James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.
“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”
On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.
For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.
Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.
This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”
While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”
The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.
The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.
Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”
These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.
By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”
Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.
Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.
Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”
So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”
Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Thursday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20o million followers that he’s offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his pro-Trump petition.
If you’re a registered Pennsylvania voter, you & whoever referred you will now get $100 for signing our petition in support of free speech & right to bear arms.
Earn money for supporting something you already believe in!
This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous bargain he levied with swing state voters earlier this year, where he offered $47 to any voters located in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina who’d be willing to refer a friend to the petition.
However, this $100 special offer is exclusively for Pennsylvanians.
According to the site, the goal is to get “1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”
The tech CEO tweeted this offer shortly after hosting his first solo political event at a Pennsylvania town hall on Friday night, in which he reportedly peddled debunked election conspiracy theories.
While this petition isn’t his only bid to flip the swing state in Trump’s favor, (last week, Musk offered to go door-to-door in Pennsylvania to petition for the former president), it’s certainly one of his stupidest ones.
This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for realpeople who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.
It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important.
On Saturday, Musk will speak at a Pennsylvania megachurch with strong ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, a religious movement that believes Christians are called to take over the government.
Correction, October 19: An earlier version misstated the date of the tweet. It was tweeted on Thursday, October 17.
Every four years, the presidential election brings with it a perennial question about an essential voting bloc: Who will Black voters turn out for?
Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes has spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans, including a new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
This week on Reveal, we hear from voters at the Republican National Convention, a graduate from a historically Black university whose star is rising on the right after appearing in a viral video hugging Trump at a Chick-fil-A, and a Republican organizing other Black voters to turn out for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Here’s me, explaining more about what to expect from the episode:
Black voters are at the center of the fight for the election, as Dems scramble to shore up support from Black men.
In a NEW episode of @reveal, @garrison_hayes brings us into his months talking to Black conservatives about Trump's allure.
Approval of the construction of two gas power plants without public comment. Another’s expansion approved without an environmental review.
New fees for homeowners with rooftop solar that the Arizona attorney general has called “discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.” Approval of an 8 percent rate increase for customers of Arizona’s largest utility, largely to cover the costs of expanding its grid despite the availability of cheaper options. The gutting of the utility’s plan to provide financial support for communities impacted by the closures of coal-fired power plants.
And all of that in just the past year.
Those decisions by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) have drawn an outcry from environmentalists and the state’s attorney general, spawned lawsuits, and prompted public campaigns by climate advocacy groups to hold the commission and Arizona Public Service Co., the state’s largest utility, accountable for continuing to use fossil fuels for electricity generation in Arizona.
In previous years, APS has invested tens of millions of dollars in influencing ACC elections. But this November, the commission’s actions and the responses to them will play a pivotal role in determining who will be elected to the commission, which advocates say has the potential to dictate Arizona’s climate and renewable energy future more than any other vote for office holders in the state.
“When it comes to mitigating climate change…the corporation commission plays a huge role in that,” said Emily Doerfler, a clean energy attorney with Western Resource Advocates who represents the climate-focused nonprofit in Arizona.
Created in 1912 under the state’s constitution, the Arizona Corporation Commission regulates the state’s water and power utilities and determines how much customers can be charged, how much profit utilities can make, and how Arizona’s power grid is built and operated, along with other responsibilities. The state is one of 10 where the commissioners are elected and are separate from the state’s other branches of government, meaning only elections and lawsuits can hold them accountable.
“We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.”
In 2022, Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats, giving them a supermajority. But three seats are up for election this year, setting the stage for a possible shift of the commission’s balance of power in one of Arizona’s most important, but often forgotten government entities.
The election comes on the heels of the ACC approving two more gas-powered plants and yet another summer of record-breaking heat in Phoenix, with over 100 days straight of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in 339 confirmed heat-related deaths and another 336 cases under investigation.
Eight candidates—three Democrats, three Republicans and two Greens—are on the ballot for the three spots. Only one candidate, Republican Lea Marquez Peterson, is running for reelection.
In interviews and debates, Marquez Peterson and her Republican running mates, Rene Lopez and Rachel Walden, have defended the current commission’s approval of rate increases, citing the need to maintain grid stability, which they argue requires a “balanced” energy portfolio, including fossil fuels.
“The reality is, as Arizona continues to grow, whether it’s residential growth or we have this long line of data centers and semiconductor industries that want to come to this state, we need to prepare for that energy demand, and that is why energy reliability needs to be our No. 1 factor,” Marquez Peterson said during a debate on Sept. 3.
The Republican candidates have also downplayed the energy sector’s role in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and argued that creating a mandate for renewables would raise rates further. About a quarter of the country’s emissions come from electric power, according to data from the EPA.
Democratic candidates Ylenia Aguilar, Jonathan Hill, and Joshua Polacheck have campaigned on allowing the free market to dictate Arizona’s energy sources, which they say would favor solar and other renewable energy sources leading to lower emissions and costs, and they have attacked the current commission for failing to protect Arizonans from rising energy costs and climate change. They say they will stick up for customers when utilities ask to increase rates and work to address climate change by expanding renewables in the state.
“Arizona is not known as an oil and gas capital of the country,” Hill, who is currently a mission planner at Arizona State University’s Mars Space Flight Facility, said during the debate. “We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.”
Polacheck, a former foreign service officer with the US Department of State, said in an interview with Inside Climate News that the commission’s actions aren’t just affecting Arizonans today, but also future generations.
“The commissioners will be constructing the future of our state, and whether that state is going to be livable, whether it’s going to be a state where people can afford to raise their families and whether it’s a place where we can coexist with the environment,” he said.
Just a few years ago, it seemed Arizona was close to setting a path to relying on an electricity mix made up entirely of renewable energy by 2050 thanks to a bipartisan plan from the ACC to reach that goal.
But the plan ultimately unraveled. Since Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats in 2022, they have consistently approved new natural gas plants and are attempting to roll back what standards for renewable electricity still exist, though the state’s largest utilities have implemented their own clean energy goals.
The commission’s decisions have prioritized “making it easier for utilities to continue expanding and investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, which is historically much more profitable for them but much more expensive for ratepayers,” said Keriann Conroy, a research associate for the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-clean energy watchdog organization. “And of course, has a lot of climate and health and environmental impacts.”
The ACC has “abandoned” its duty to protect Arizonans” in favor of profit, says environmental lawyer Emily Doerfler. “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission.”
This year, two major actions have dominated the headlines about the commission. The first was a decision approving a rate hike from APS that increased customers’ bills by roughly 8 percent, while also adding a surcharge for rooftop solar customers. That action also allowed utilities to build new power plants without first going through a rate hike case that allows public comment on the plan. The second decision expanded UNS Electric’s natural gas-powered Black Mountain Generating Station without an environmental review, which reversed 50 years of precedent and a vote from the commission’s Line Siting Committee that required the project to undergo such a review.
The first action, climate groups argue, raised costs for customers to subsidize the utility’s continued consumption of fossil fuels despite its own studies finding that maintaining its coal-fired plants is uneconomical and that transitioning to renewables sooner would save it and ratepayers money. The ACC even went so far as to amend APS’s own plan, removing a $100 million fund the utility proposed for communities impacted by the coal-fired power plants eventually shutting down.
The Black Mountain Generating Station decision led to legal action. Western Resource Advocates, the Sierra Club and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a former corporation commissioner herself, separately filed lawsuits appealing the commission’s decision.
UNS Electric plans to add four new gas-powered plants to its Black Mountain facility at 50 megawatts each, for a total of 200 MW. The utility argued that it was not under the jurisdiction of the commission or subject to an environmental review because each of the plants was under 100 MW.
Arizona law requires a Certificate of Environmental Compatibility for power plants over 100 MW, and opponents of the ACC’s action say the new plants should be considered for their combined power output. The commission’s Line Siting Committee rejected the company’s argument in a 9-2 vote, arguing the commission had jurisdiction as the combined power of the plants at the single facility exceeded 100 MW. But the commissioners sided with the utility.
Doerfler, with Western Resource Advocates, said the ACC decision is just the latest example showing the commission has “abandoned” its constitutional duty to protect Arizonans, especially rural ones, “over and over and over again” to instead prioritize utility profits. “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission,” Doerfler said.
As essentially the state’s fourth branch of government, the ACC almost exclusively has the power to either end or continue Arizona’s reliance on fossil fuels, she said. That would include decisions like whether to mandate a quicker end to coal-fueled plants like APS’s Four Corners Power Plant.
“That means that the emissions that are coming from this coal plant in the next year are almost directly in the hands of the Arizona Corporation Commission,” Doerfler said.
Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.
The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.
There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”
And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”
Trump’s refusal to compensate workers and contractors has been widely documented. In 2016, USA Todayreported that Trump’s companies had been “cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.” In 2019, the Washington Postbroke the story that employees at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York, were forced to work without pay after they clocked out. It was called “side work.” The Trump Organization denied this happened.
In addition to the misleading substance of the ad, the spot features slow-mo, heroic-ish imagery of supposedly American workers. But in several instances, these are not Americans but overseas workers. A photo of a welder comes from a stock image taken by a photographer in the Netherlands and available (at a low price) on a Portuguese site. Footage of a delivery man on a bicycle traces back to a stock image company in Thailand and was also available on the Portuguese site. Video of a woman dressed in surgical garb—she’s a doctor or a nurse—was produced by a Ukrainian company. And a clip of a chef in a kitchen is from a video made by a Spanish production company.
The creators of the Right for America spot could not be bothered to find real Americans for the ad.
Right for America is funded by a small group of billionaires who are pals with Trump. Its biggest backers are Ike Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who together have kicked in at least $20 million. He’s a former CEO of Marvel Entertainment and has a reputation as an eccentric tycoon who eschews being photographed. Other major donors include venture capitalist Douglas Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital; Robert Book, a co-vice chair of the board of Axxes Capital; and trash hauling magnate Anthony Lomangino. The Perlmutters and Lomangino are members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club. The PAC is run by Sergio Gor, a friend of the Trump family once nicknamed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago.”
Right for America is just one of several billionaire-funded PACs that in the final weeks of the election are flooding TV, radio, and social media in swing states with ads to help Trump. According to Axios, it has booked about $40 million in ads through Election Day. And the New York Timesreported that it has spent $500,000 to run this spot in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona and $360,000 to air a Spanish-language version, mostly in Arizona.
This ad, which shows video of Trump returning to his feet after a gunman fired at him at a campaign rally in July, claims that “for too long no one in Washington has been looking out for” overtime workers and declares Trump is the one man who will. It’s rich that billionaires are spending so much money to convince voters that Trump is an advocate for hard-working toilers when he has shafted them as a businessman and as a president. Their pitch is as phony as the stock footage used to sell it.
It’s not often that an obituary truly surprises you, but the other day it happened to me in the best possible way. The person who passed wasn’t a relative, friend, or close colleague. But he did play a key role at one point in my life, by showing me what journalism can do—and often fails to.
Barlett was half of Barlett and Steele, a reporting duo as significant as Woodward and Bernstein, but in a very different way. When they worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer, they embodied the shoeleather investigative reporting that newspapers once nurtured. My colleague Robert Rosenthal, who was their mentee and friend at the Inquirer, has some moving (and funny!) recollections of the duo here.
But I wanted to zoom out a little, because the kind of reporting Barlett and Steele did is special, valuable, and endangered, and also because of the thing that surprised me in that obit: its last line. “Donations in his name may be made to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Box 584, San Francisco, Calif. 94104.” That’s us! The Center for Investigative Reporting is Mother Jones’ parent organization, and we are a bit of a Noah’s Ark for this kind of endangered journalism.
I was floored when I saw that line, and here’s why. In 1991, I was just out of journalism school, in the middle of a recession and the run-up to a presidential campaign, when Barlett and Steele published a series called America: What Went Wrong? It was a deep dive into the rising income inequality that had come to dominate the US economy.
The pair worked on the series (and subsequent book) for many months, and the book opens with a series of thank-yous that feel like a time capsule: “Lela Young, in the public reading room of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington.” But what comes next could have been written yesterday: There are all these pundits on TV talking about how the economy isn’t so bad and everything will be fine, Barlett and Steele note. But then why does it not feel fine to so many people? Here we see a giant graphic that looks exactly like what you would make on your Apple Macintosh in 1991 (you can find it on page ix in the Google Books version). It shows that the top 4 percent of Americans make as much (just in wages, not counting investment income) as the bottom 51 percent.
Perhaps, Barlett and Steele wrote, it’s no wonder that “the stories you read in newspapers and magazines seem disconnected from your personal situation.” Those stories don’t talk about the factories and workplaces being shuttered, about millions of workers going from earning $15 an hour to $7 an hour. “For the first time in this century, members of a generation entering adulthood”—GenX—“will find it impossible to achieve a better lifestyle than their parents. Most will be unable even to match their parents’ middle-class status.”
These Americans, they write, look at the economy from the bottom up. “Those in charge, on the other hand, are on the top looking down. They see things differently. Call it the view from Washington and Wall Street.” Those folks include corporate execs, Republicans—led by Reagan and George H.W. Bush—who pushed through tax giveaways, trade deals, and deregulation, but also Democrats who went along with it.
Imagine the economy like a hockey game, Barlett and Steele continue, “a sport renowned for its physical violence.” Now imagine what the game would look like if you took away the rules and referees. “That, in essence, is what is happening to the American economy. Someone changed the rules. And there is no referee. Which means there is no one looking after the interests of the middle class. They are the forgotten Americans.”
It’s incredibly striking rereading, 33 years later, how accurately Barlett and Steele captured the dynamic that still defines our economy—and our politics. It’s also striking to remember how few mainstream journalists were doing that kind of reporting, and how many fewer do it now.
When I started in journalism, smack in the middle of that early-’90s recession, there were still a lot of investigative reporters in newsrooms, and they did great work, but there was something that defined most of those stories: They were about exposing people breaking the rules. Politicians stealing from the public purse. Construction workers catching naps on the taxpayer’s dime. Reporters exposed illegal acts, not ones that were merely unfair or inequitable. And there was a reason for that: Mainstream newsrooms had positioned themselves as carefully neutral; value judgments had no place in their work. But the mission of investigative reporting, inherently, is about showing the contrast between how things are and how they should be—it’s about exposing wrongs. Every investigative reporter since Ida B. Wells shone a spotlight on lynching has been animated by this.
Defining “wrong” as “rulebreaking” was a way to avoid making a value judgment—but it meant that a lot of important stories were not told. Stories about systems, especially, such as the growing inequality in the US economy.
That’s what made Barlett and Steele’s reporting so unique, and so powerful. What happened to incomes in America was wrong, it was right there in the book title. Not because it broke any laws (the point was that it was all perfectly legal!) but because it was unfair.
Seeing that journalism could do that—could expose not just lawbreaking, but systemic injustice—was an aha moment for cub reporter me. That’s the kind of work I wanted to be doing, and apparently there were jobs for people to do it.
Little did I know that most of those jobs were about to disappear. Investigative reporting is expensive, and the corporations and hedge fund investors who were buying up America’s newspapers had no intention of paying for it—or, ultimately, for any newsroom jobs. Since Barlett and Steele wrote their series, nearly half of America’s journalism jobs have disappeared (a loss rate faster than coal mining), and most of the rest are on borrowed time. There are very few journalists who can take the time to dig deep on a big issue, especially one as hard to get your arms around as income inequality.
And the idea of journalism as a distant, removed, value-neutral observer, especially in politics, also persists. I don’t need to tell you how much damage the he-said-she-said model has done to campaign coverage. Even now, in the third election of the Trump era, we see media (not all media, all the time—but it happens far too often) launderingextremist disinformation into normal-sounding campaign stories. No wonder that a man who embodies the self-enrichment and rapacious profit-taking that Barlett and Steele skewered in America: What Went Wrong? is getting away with styling himself as a champion of the forgotten Americans.
But Don Barlett wouldn’t want us to stop there, at the doom and gloom. That’s why his obituary ends on that incredible honor of asking readers to support our work here at Mother Jones, Reveal, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Our newsroom has not been taken over by hedge funders and it never will be. Our budget comes from you, the people who rely on our journalism to tell it like it is. And because we are accountable to you and you alone, we can do the kind of reporting that Don Barlett and Jim Steele did, and do it with the same commitment: exposing what is truly wrong, even if it’s completely legal.
I met Don Barlett, who died last week at 88, in early January 1980. I had recently joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general assignment reporter, and my first big assignment was to write about the infamous, bombastic, and larger-than-life mayor of Philadelphia Frank Rizzo’s final days in office. When I asked the editor why me, since I had just come to Philadelphia a few weeks before and knew very little about Rizzo, I was told: “We want a fresh eye. And besides he hasn’t talked to an Inquirer reporter in months and he hates our guts. Good luck getting to him.”
Well, I did get to Rizzo and the story was stripped across the Sunday paper on January 6. The next day a short, bald, gnome-like man introduced himself to me in the newsroom. I noticed his staring eyes, unblinking and expressionless framed by glasses. “Hello, I’m Don Barlett and I liked your Rizzo story.”
I was in awe. This was Barlett of Barlett and Steele, the famous and Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporting team. Astaire and Rogers, Ruth and Gehrig, Abbott and Costello, Woodward and Bernstein, Barlett and Steele were all up there in my realm of immortals.
He had a few questions. How many people had I interviewed? How did I get Rizzo to talk to me? How long did I work on the story?
I told him I had interviewed more than 30 people, that I’d reported the story for three weeks, that I’d asked everyone who knew Rizzo for advice on how to get to him and, finally, when he did a public event, I came and watched and listened to him.
He said thanks and walked away.
Over the next 17 years at the Inquirer, Don and Jim’s stature and work only grew. Many considered them the best investigative reporting partners in American journalism history.
I spent a great deal of time in their lair. They had their own office, stuffed with documents, papers, and books. Don had served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps and it showed. He had that perfect spy quality about him. He was opaque. Last week, Jim said to me, “Don could be standing on a corner and nobody could see him.”
A friend once asked me what Don was like and I said, “If somebody wanted to find out the worst things about you and they hired Barlett, you would be in trouble.”
When I became a high-ranking editor, Don would sidle up to me in the newsroom, always out of nowhere, and in a low, raspy voice tell me things that I should know or maybe should not know. He worked the newsroom well and his interests were always the best interests of the paper, and he had plenty of ideas about things we should be reporting on or investigating.
I relied on him and Jim for advice. When I joined The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2008, they would help me with story ideas and Don was always there if I had a question or was doing a reference check. This continued until illness and age made it harder for him.
In passing, Don and his family sent a final message to me. At the end of his obituary in the Inquirer his family asked that donations in his memory be made to The Center for Investigative Reporting. I was surprised and felt honored.
I asked Don’s wife, Eileen, how this happened.
“As for the note to support the Center for Investigative Reporting to remember Don, there wasn’t much thought in that decision,” Eileen wrote me in an email. “I accompanied Don to many of your seminars and programs. While there, a parade of young people would approach Don and Jim thanking them for the inspiration to take up the investigative reporter mantle. Don loved what he did. You and the Center support such work. No other place even came to mind.”
Jim reminded me this week that one of Don’s greatest attributes was patience. “There are so many dry holes in investigative reporting,” he said. “The string does not always move forward but you stay with it and keep pulling.”
Don was deeply motivated, Jim said, by something you couldn’t see but felt if you knew him.
“Running through him was a powerful streak, a belief,” Jim said, “that everyone deserves to be treated fairly.’”
A fitting legacy for a journalist who truly made a difference.
This week, soon after his 100th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter was able to vote in his home state of Georgia—in part thanks to protections under the Voting Rights Act. As his grandson Jason Carter explained in a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, voting assistance protections in Georgia allow family members to help cast absentee ballots (the vote can still be discarded if a signature or mark on the ballot does not match what is on file, per Georgia law).
“He sat down and told everybody what he wanted to do, and was excited about it,” Jason Carter told Tapper. “My aunt dropped his ballot [at] an absentee drop box, just like thousands and thousands of other Georgians.”
Even if Carter doesn’t consider himself disabled, many aging people benefit from disability rights laws and protections. Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees that “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write may be given assistance by a person of the voter’s choice.”
In recent years, Republicans have attacked voters’ right to assistance, sometimes with carve-outs for close family members. But courts have repeatedly found such actions unconstitutional. In Texas, in 2022, a federal court ruled that people assisting voters can further explain ballot measures if asked; just last month in Alabama, a federal judge also ruled that the state was obligated to let voters get help from any person of their choice. While some people, like Carter, choose to, it’s not an option—or preference—for everyone.
Some aging people in Georgia still face barriers to voting, even if their right to assistance hasn’t been as harshly attacked. A recent lawsuit argues that a state law enacted this year, under which votes can be challenged if a voter is registered at a nonresidential address, could impact people living in nursing homes, assisted living communities, and similar facilities.
What is unclear, as my colleague Michael Mechanic recently wrote, is whether Georgia will count Carter’s ballot should he pass away before Election Day. What is clear, during the CNN interview, is how crucial Carter finds his right to vote, and the Voting Rights Act disability protections that enable him to do so.
“He has done that forever,” his grandson said, “and is excited to keep doing it.”
Days after helping launch a clearly false claim about vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a disinformation peddler with a huge platform has disappeared from X.
The “Black Insurrectionist” profile began claiming last week that he’d been in touch with a former student of Walz who baselessly alleged the Minnesota governor sexually abused him years ago when he was a teacher and football coach. The now-missing account, which posted under the name @Docnetyoutube, has a documented history of promoting fake stories. But even with his profile gone, the seeds of the lie had already been sown and spread across the conspiracy ecosystem, driven by right-wing activists and self-styled conservative journalists.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool.”
The @Docnetyoutube account seems to have been deleted sometime on the evening of Thursday, October 17. It’s unclear if the user deleted the account or the company did: under Elon Musk’s ownership, X no longer responds to journalists and could not be reached for comment.
Twitter has proved to be a key nexus for the false claim. Earlier this week, a video began circulating on the platform claiming to depict Walz’s alleged victim. One of the most widely-seen tweets promoting the video was also recently deleted. It came from an X user calling himself @TheWakeninq, who uses variations of the name “QAnon76” on other websites. But the video, as BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh noted, had obvious hallmarks of being a deepfake, with distorted facial features and a foreign-accented voice that was out of sync with the speaker’s movements. While the alleged victim is a real person who, according to his social media presence, did graduate from the school where Walz once taught and coached, other videos on his Facebook account capture someone who looks different and speaks with an American accent. According to his Facebook account, the now-adult former student—who did not immediately respond to a request for comment—has previously experienced homelessness; a Gofundme from 2021 said that he was living in Hawaii and trying to “get off the streets.” The video is still up on @TheWakeninq’s Rumble page, where it has been viewed by at least 6,000 people.
A local Texas Republican official named Sarah Fields, who also describes herself as a journalist, shared the video on Wednesday, claiming the student had come forward and “officially” accused Walz of abuse. She claimed to have filed public record requests with Walz’s old school, before adding that “Reportedly, a lawsuit is soon to be filed. I will keep you all updated. I’m watching this very closely.”
“I was able to confirm with multiple sources within the Trump campaign that THEY believe there is truth to these allegations, and have begun their own investigation,” she wrote.
Other conspiracy peddlers have gotten involved, including Ian Carroll, a self-styled independent journalist with a history of antisemitic statements. Carroll first promoted the story on October 14, crediting Black Insurrectionist with “breaking” it. In his own video on the subject, which has been viewed 2.5 million times on X, he claimed that Walz had been accused of “rampant” sexual assault. In a stab at fairness, he acknowledged that the claims “had not been corroborated yet,” but concluded that, “personally, I don’t think it’s looking good for Tim.”
A day later, Carroll provided an update of sorts—which has been viewed roughly a million times— saying that he’d been in contact with Black Insurrectionist and that he had a “40 minute phone call” with someone who “sounded an awful lot like a genuine whistleblower.” Still, noting “a lot of problems and inconsistencies” with the story, he conceded that it was “probably safe to assume” the claim was not real.
“I’m not some professional journalist or anything,” he said, while passing on word from the “whistleblower” that more proof would be forthcoming. He declared that a “somewhat decentralized network of powerful journalists and other protected actors” were working behind the scenes to promote the story if it turned out to be true.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool,” Carroll added, sounding chipper. “We all learned something.”
Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Thursday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20o million followers that he’s offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his pro-Trump petition.
If you’re a registered Pennsylvania voter, you & whoever referred you will now get $100 for signing our petition in support of free speech & right to bear arms.
Earn money for supporting something you already believe in!
This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous bargain he levied with swing state voters earlier this year, where he offered $47 to any voters located in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina who’d be willing to refer a friend to the petition.
However, this $100 special offer is exclusively for Pennsylvanians.
According to the site, the goal is to get “1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”
The tech CEO tweeted this offer shortly after hosting his first solo political event at a Pennsylvania town hall on Friday night, in which he reportedly peddled debunked election conspiracy theories.
While this petition isn’t his only bid to flip the swing state in Trump’s favor, (last week, Musk offered to go door-to-door in Pennsylvania to petition for the former president), it’s certainly one of his stupidest ones.
This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for realpeople who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.
It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important.
On Saturday, Musk will speak at a Pennsylvania megachurch with strong ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, a religious movement that believes Christians are called to take over the government.
Correction, October 19: An earlier version misstated the date of the tweet. It was tweeted on Thursday, October 17.
Every four years, the presidential election brings with it a perennial question about an essential voting bloc: Who will Black voters turn out for?
Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes has spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans, including a new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
This week on Reveal, we hear from voters at the Republican National Convention, a graduate from a historically Black university whose star is rising on the right after appearing in a viral video hugging Trump at a Chick-fil-A, and a Republican organizing other Black voters to turn out for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Approval of the construction of two gas power plants without public comment. Another’s expansion approved without an environmental review.
New fees for homeowners with rooftop solar that the Arizona attorney general has called “discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.” Approval of an 8 percent rate increase for customers of Arizona’s largest utility, largely to cover the costs of expanding its grid despite the availability of cheaper options. The gutting of the utility’s plan to provide financial support for communities impacted by the closures of coal-fired power plants.
And all of that in just the past year.
Those decisions by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) have drawn an outcry from environmentalists and the state’s attorney general, spawned lawsuits, and prompted public campaigns by climate advocacy groups to hold the commission and Arizona Public Service Co., the state’s largest utility, accountable for continuing to use fossil fuels for electricity generation in Arizona.
In previous years, APS has invested tens of millions of dollars in influencing ACC elections. But this November, the commission’s actions and the responses to them will play a pivotal role in determining who will be elected to the commission, which advocates say has the potential to dictate Arizona’s climate and renewable energy future more than any other vote for office holders in the state.
“When it comes to mitigating climate change…the corporation commission plays a huge role in that,” said Emily Doerfler, a clean energy attorney with Western Resource Advocates who represents the climate-focused nonprofit in Arizona.
Created in 1912 under the state’s constitution, the Arizona Corporation Commission regulates the state’s water and power utilities and determines how much customers can be charged, how much profit utilities can make, and how Arizona’s power grid is built and operated, along with other responsibilities. The state is one of 10 where the commissioners are elected and are separate from the state’s other branches of government, meaning only elections and lawsuits can hold them accountable.
“We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.”
In 2022, Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats, giving them a supermajority. But three seats are up for election this year, setting the stage for a possible shift of the commission’s balance of power in one of Arizona’s most important, but often forgotten government entities.
The election comes on the heels of the ACC approving two more gas-powered plants and yet another summer of record-breaking heat in Phoenix, with over 100 days straight of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in 339 confirmed heat-related deaths and another 336 cases under investigation.
Eight candidates—three Democrats, three Republicans and two Greens—are on the ballot for the three spots. Only one candidate, Republican Lea Marquez Peterson, is running for reelection.
In interviews and debates, Marquez Peterson and her Republican running mates, Rene Lopez and Rachel Walden, have defended the current commission’s approval of rate increases, citing the need to maintain grid stability, which they argue requires a “balanced” energy portfolio, including fossil fuels.
“The reality is, as Arizona continues to grow, whether it’s residential growth or we have this long line of data centers and semiconductor industries that want to come to this state, we need to prepare for that energy demand, and that is why energy reliability needs to be our No. 1 factor,” Marquez Peterson said during a debate on Sept. 3.
The Republican candidates have also downplayed the energy sector’s role in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and argued that creating a mandate for renewables would raise rates further. About a quarter of the country’s emissions come from electric power, according to data from the EPA.
Democratic candidates Ylenia Aguilar, Jonathan Hill, and Joshua Polacheck have campaigned on allowing the free market to dictate Arizona’s energy sources, which they say would favor solar and other renewable energy sources leading to lower emissions and costs, and they have attacked the current commission for failing to protect Arizonans from rising energy costs and climate change. They say they will stick up for customers when utilities ask to increase rates and work to address climate change by expanding renewables in the state.
“Arizona is not known as an oil and gas capital of the country,” Hill, who is currently a mission planner at Arizona State University’s Mars Space Flight Facility, said during the debate. “We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.”
Polacheck, a former foreign service officer with the US Department of State, said in an interview with Inside Climate News that the commission’s actions aren’t just affecting Arizonans today, but also future generations.
“The commissioners will be constructing the future of our state, and whether that state is going to be livable, whether it’s going to be a state where people can afford to raise their families and whether it’s a place where we can coexist with the environment,” he said.
Just a few years ago, it seemed Arizona was close to setting a path to relying on an electricity mix made up entirely of renewable energy by 2050 thanks to a bipartisan plan from the ACC to reach that goal.
But the plan ultimately unraveled. Since Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats in 2022, they have consistently approved new natural gas plants and are attempting to roll back what standards for renewable electricity still exist, though the state’s largest utilities have implemented their own clean energy goals.
The commission’s decisions have prioritized “making it easier for utilities to continue expanding and investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, which is historically much more profitable for them but much more expensive for ratepayers,” said Keriann Conroy, a research associate for the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-clean energy watchdog organization. “And of course, has a lot of climate and health and environmental impacts.”
The ACC has “abandoned” its duty to protect Arizonans” in favor of profit, says environmental lawyer Emily Doerfler. “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission.”
This year, two major actions have dominated the headlines about the commission. The first was a decision approving a rate hike from APS that increased customers’ bills by roughly 8 percent, while also adding a surcharge for rooftop solar customers. That action also allowed utilities to build new power plants without first going through a rate hike case that allows public comment on the plan. The second decision expanded UNS Electric’s natural gas-powered Black Mountain Generating Station without an environmental review, which reversed 50 years of precedent and a vote from the commission’s Line Siting Committee that required the project to undergo such a review.
The first action, climate groups argue, raised costs for customers to subsidize the utility’s continued consumption of fossil fuels despite its own studies finding that maintaining its coal-fired plants is uneconomical and that transitioning to renewables sooner would save it and ratepayers money. The ACC even went so far as to amend APS’s own plan, removing a $100 million fund the utility proposed for communities impacted by the coal-fired power plants eventually shutting down.
The Black Mountain Generating Station decision led to legal action. Western Resource Advocates, the Sierra Club and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a former corporation commissioner herself, separately filed lawsuits appealing the commission’s decision.
UNS Electric plans to add four new gas-powered plants to its Black Mountain facility at 50 megawatts each, for a total of 200 MW. The utility argued that it was not under the jurisdiction of the commission or subject to an environmental review because each of the plants was under 100 MW.
Arizona law requires a Certificate of Environmental Compatibility for power plants over 100 MW, and opponents of the ACC’s action say the new plants should be considered for their combined power output. The commission’s Line Siting Committee rejected the company’s argument in a 9-2 vote, arguing the commission had jurisdiction as the combined power of the plants at the single facility exceeded 100 MW. But the commissioners sided with the utility.
Doerfler, with Western Resource Advocates, said the ACC decision is just the latest example showing the commission has “abandoned” its constitutional duty to protect Arizonans, especially rural ones, “over and over and over again” to instead prioritize utility profits. “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission,” Doerfler said.
As essentially the state’s fourth branch of government, the ACC almost exclusively has the power to either end or continue Arizona’s reliance on fossil fuels, she said. That would include decisions like whether to mandate a quicker end to coal-fueled plants like APS’s Four Corners Power Plant.
“That means that the emissions that are coming from this coal plant in the next year are almost directly in the hands of the Arizona Corporation Commission,” Doerfler said.
Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.
The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.
There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”
And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”
Trump’s refusal to compensate workers and contractors has been widely documented. In 2016, USA Todayreported that Trump’s companies had been “cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.” In 2019, the Washington Postbroke the story that employees at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York, were forced to work without pay after they clocked out. It was called “side work.” The Trump Organization denied this happened.
In addition to the misleading substance of the ad, the spot features slow-mo, heroic-ish imagery of supposedly American workers. But in several instances, these are not Americans but overseas workers. A photo of a welder comes from a stock image taken by a photographer in the Netherlands and available (at a low price) on a Portuguese site. Footage of a delivery man on a bicycle traces back to a stock image company in Thailand and was also available on the Portuguese site. Video of a woman dressed in surgical garb—she’s a doctor or a nurse—was produced by a Ukrainian company. And a clip of a chef in a kitchen is from a video made by a Spanish production company.
The creators of the Right for America spot could not be bothered to find real Americans for the ad.
Right for America is funded by a small group of billionaires who are pals with Trump. Its biggest backers are Ike Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who together have kicked in at least $20 million. He’s a former CEO of Marvel Entertainment and has a reputation as an eccentric tycoon who eschews being photographed. Other major donors include venture capitalist Douglas Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital; Robert Book, a co-vice chair of the board of Axxes Capital; and trash hauling magnate Anthony Lomangino. The Perlmutters and Lomangino are members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club. The PAC is run by Sergio Gor, a friend of the Trump family once nicknamed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago.”
Right for America is just one of several billionaire-funded PACs that in the final weeks of the election are flooding TV, radio, and social media in swing states with ads to help Trump. According to Axios, it has booked about $40 million in ads through Election Day. And the New York Timesreported that it has spent $500,000 to run this spot in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona and $360,000 to air a Spanish-language version, mostly in Arizona.
This ad, which shows video of Trump returning to his feet after a gunman fired at him at a campaign rally in July, claims that “for too long no one in Washington has been looking out for” overtime workers and declares Trump is the one man who will. It’s rich that billionaires are spending so much money to convince voters that Trump is an advocate for hard-working toilers when he has shafted them as a businessman and as a president. Their pitch is as phony as the stock footage used to sell it.
It’s not often that an obituary truly surprises you, but the other day it happened to me in the best possible way. The person who passed wasn’t a relative, friend, or close colleague. But he did play a key role at one point in my life, by showing me what journalism can do—and often fails to.
Barlett was half of Barlett and Steele, a reporting duo as significant as Woodward and Bernstein, but in a very different way. When they worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer, they embodied the shoeleather investigative reporting that newspapers once nurtured. My colleague Robert Rosenthal, who was their mentee and friend at the Inquirer, has some moving (and funny!) recollections of the duo here.
But I wanted to zoom out a little, because the kind of reporting Barlett and Steele did is special, valuable, and endangered, and also because of the thing that surprised me in that obit: its last line. “Donations in his name may be made to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Box 584, San Francisco, Calif. 94104.” That’s us! The Center for Investigative Reporting is Mother Jones’ parent organization, and we are a bit of a Noah’s Ark for this kind of endangered journalism.
I was floored when I saw that line, and here’s why. In 1991, I was just out of journalism school, in the middle of a recession and the run-up to a presidential campaign, when Barlett and Steele published a series called America: What Went Wrong? It was a deep dive into the rising income inequality that had come to dominate the US economy.
The pair worked on the series (and subsequent book) for many months, and the book opens with a series of thank-yous that feel like a time capsule: “Lela Young, in the public reading room of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington.” But what comes next could have been written yesterday: There are all these pundits on TV talking about how the economy isn’t so bad and everything will be fine, Barlett and Steele note. But then why does it not feel fine to so many people? Here we see a giant graphic that looks exactly like what you would make on your Apple Macintosh in 1991 (you can find it on page ix in the Google Books version). It shows that the top 4 percent of Americans make as much (just in wages, not counting investment income) as the bottom 51 percent.
Perhaps, Barlett and Steele wrote, it’s no wonder that “the stories you read in newspapers and magazines seem disconnected from your personal situation.” Those stories don’t talk about the factories and workplaces being shuttered, about millions of workers going from earning $15 an hour to $7 an hour. “For the first time in this century, members of a generation entering adulthood”—GenX—“will find it impossible to achieve a better lifestyle than their parents. Most will be unable even to match their parents’ middle-class status.”
These Americans, they write, look at the economy from the bottom up. “Those in charge, on the other hand, are on the top looking down. They see things differently. Call it the view from Washington and Wall Street.” Those folks include corporate execs, Republicans—led by Reagan and George H.W. Bush—who pushed through tax giveaways, trade deals, and deregulation, but also Democrats who went along with it.
Imagine the economy like a hockey game, Barlett and Steele continue, “a sport renowned for its physical violence.” Now imagine what the game would look like if you took away the rules and referees. “That, in essence, is what is happening to the American economy. Someone changed the rules. And there is no referee. Which means there is no one looking after the interests of the middle class. They are the forgotten Americans.”
It’s incredibly striking rereading, 33 years later, how accurately Barlett and Steele captured the dynamic that still defines our economy—and our politics. It’s also striking to remember how few mainstream journalists were doing that kind of reporting, and how many fewer do it now.
When I started in journalism, smack in the middle of that early-’90s recession, there were still a lot of investigative reporters in newsrooms, and they did great work, but there was something that defined most of those stories: They were about exposing people breaking the rules. Politicians stealing from the public purse. Construction workers catching naps on the taxpayer’s dime. Reporters exposed illegal acts, not ones that were merely unfair or inequitable. And there was a reason for that: Mainstream newsrooms had positioned themselves as carefully neutral; value judgments had no place in their work. But the mission of investigative reporting, inherently, is about showing the contrast between how things are and how they should be—it’s about exposing wrongs. Every investigative reporter since Ida B. Wells shone a spotlight on lynching has been animated by this.
Defining “wrong” as “rulebreaking” was a way to avoid making a value judgment—but it meant that a lot of important stories were not told. Stories about systems, especially, such as the growing inequality in the US economy.
That’s what made Barlett and Steele’s reporting so unique, and so powerful. What happened to incomes in America was wrong, it was right there in the book title. Not because it broke any laws (the point was that it was all perfectly legal!) but because it was unfair.
Seeing that journalism could do that—could expose not just lawbreaking, but systemic injustice—was an aha moment for cub reporter me. That’s the kind of work I wanted to be doing, and apparently there were jobs for people to do it.
Little did I know that most of those jobs were about to disappear. Investigative reporting is expensive, and the corporations and hedge fund investors who were buying up America’s newspapers had no intention of paying for it—or, ultimately, for any newsroom jobs. Since Barlett and Steele wrote their series, nearly half of America’s journalism jobs have disappeared (a loss rate faster than coal mining), and most of the rest are on borrowed time. There are very few journalists who can take the time to dig deep on a big issue, especially one as hard to get your arms around as income inequality.
And the idea of journalism as a distant, removed, value-neutral observer, especially in politics, also persists. I don’t need to tell you how much damage the he-said-she-said model has done to campaign coverage. Even now, in the third election of the Trump era, we see media (not all media, all the time—but it happens far too often) launderingextremist disinformation into normal-sounding campaign stories. No wonder that a man who embodies the self-enrichment and rapacious profit-taking that Barlett and Steele skewered in America: What Went Wrong? is getting away with styling himself as a champion of the forgotten Americans.
But Don Barlett wouldn’t want us to stop there, at the doom and gloom. That’s why his obituary ends on that incredible honor of asking readers to support our work here at Mother Jones, Reveal, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Our newsroom has not been taken over by hedge funders and it never will be. Our budget comes from you, the people who rely on our journalism to tell it like it is. And because we are accountable to you and you alone, we can do the kind of reporting that Don Barlett and Jim Steele did, and do it with the same commitment: exposing what is truly wrong, even if it’s completely legal.
I met Don Barlett, who died last week at 88, in early January 1980. I had recently joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general assignment reporter, and my first big assignment was to write about the infamous, bombastic, and larger-than-life mayor of Philadelphia Frank Rizzo’s final days in office. When I asked the editor why me, since I had just come to Philadelphia a few weeks before and knew very little about Rizzo, I was told: “We want a fresh eye. And besides he hasn’t talked to an Inquirer reporter in months and he hates our guts. Good luck getting to him.”
Well, I did get to Rizzo and the story was stripped across the Sunday paper on January 6. The next day a short, bald, gnome-like man introduced himself to me in the newsroom. I noticed his staring eyes, unblinking and expressionless framed by glasses. “Hello, I’m Don Barlett and I liked your Rizzo story.”
I was in awe. This was Barlett of Barlett and Steele, the famous and Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporting team. Astaire and Rogers, Ruth and Gehrig, Abbott and Costello, Woodward and Bernstein, Barlett and Steele were all up there in my realm of immortals.
He had a few questions. How many people had I interviewed? How did I get Rizzo to talk to me? How long did I work on the story?
I told him I had interviewed more than 30 people, that I’d reported the story for three weeks, that I’d asked everyone who knew Rizzo for advice on how to get to him and, finally, when he did a public event, I came and watched and listened to him.
He said thanks and walked away.
Over the next 17 years at the Inquirer, Don and Jim’s stature and work only grew. Many considered them the best investigative reporting partners in American journalism history.
I spent a great deal of time in their lair. They had their own office, stuffed with documents, papers, and books. Don had served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps and it showed. He had that perfect spy quality about him. He was opaque. Last week, Jim said to me, “Don could be standing on a corner and nobody could see him.”
A friend once asked me what Don was like and I said, “If somebody wanted to find out the worst things about you and they hired Barlett, you would be in trouble.”
When I became a high-ranking editor, Don would sidle up to me in the newsroom, always out of nowhere, and in a low, raspy voice tell me things that I should know or maybe should not know. He worked the newsroom well and his interests were always the best interests of the paper, and he had plenty of ideas about things we should be reporting on or investigating.
I relied on him and Jim for advice. When I joined The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2008, they would help me with story ideas and Don was always there if I had a question or was doing a reference check. This continued until illness and age made it harder for him.
In passing, Don and his family sent a final message to me. At the end of his obituary in the Inquirer his family asked that donations in his memory be made to The Center for Investigative Reporting. I was surprised and felt honored.
I asked Don’s wife, Eileen, how this happened.
“As for the note to support the Center for Investigative Reporting to remember Don, there wasn’t much thought in that decision,” Eileen wrote me in an email. “I accompanied Don to many of your seminars and programs. While there, a parade of young people would approach Don and Jim thanking them for the inspiration to take up the investigative reporter mantle. Don loved what he did. You and the Center support such work. No other place even came to mind.”
Jim reminded me this week that one of Don’s greatest attributes was patience. “There are so many dry holes in investigative reporting,” he said. “The string does not always move forward but you stay with it and keep pulling.”
Don was deeply motivated, Jim said, by something you couldn’t see but felt if you knew him.
“Running through him was a powerful streak, a belief,” Jim said, “that everyone deserves to be treated fairly.’”
A fitting legacy for a journalist who truly made a difference.
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