A few months ago, a man crawling along a rooftop in Pennsylvania tried to murder Donald Trump at a campaign rally. Hours later, press releases started to circulate, from analysts, think tanks, politicians, and pundits, all offering to cut through the swell of confusion and misinformation. 

One of the people who washed up in my inbox was Ben Swann, whom a New York–based PR team presented as a journalist, and a source “to separate the conspiracy theories from the facts behind Trump’s assassination attempt.” 

This was curious for several reasons, the main being that Swann is himself an energetic conspiracy theorist, who first attracted notice in 2017 by touting Pizza­gate, a lurid conspiracy about child trafficking, while working for Atlanta’s CBS affiliate. Swann was ultimately fired, but quickly launched a new career as a star of the most conspiracy-addled corner of the online universe, posting to his website Truth in Media. He also began accepting millions of dollars in funding from a Kremlin-backed broadcaster to produce pro-Russian propaganda, according to disclosure forms he filed with the federal government when registering as a foreign agent. 

While Swann has prospered by confidently and cynically presenting himself as a force for truth, legitimate researchers of disinformation—the kind he’s spread for much of his professional life—are struggling. Over the last several years, the field has undergone a broadscale attack from politicians, right-wing media, and tech industry giants. As a result, research has been curtailed, people have been laid off, and academics working in the space even fear talking to one another, lest it leave them open to charges of “conspiring” by their adversaries.

Who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well?

The timing of the crisis could hardly be worse. In January, the World Economic Forum highlighted dis- and misinformation as a top global threat over the next few years, citing concerns about increasingly sophisticated AI and the ways that disinformation could be used to destabilize consequential elections—including here in the United States, but also in the UK, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, and India. With our campaign season in full swing, the political implications of the battle over disinformation are obvious: Identifying fake news and misleading narratives is both a core part of the researchers’ work and routinely attacked as a political project.

The question that has begun to bedevil these disinformation researchers—used to recognizing patterns and ferreting out the source of influence operations—is, who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well? Some see strong similarities to corporate-backed assaults on climate scientists in the 1990s, where oil and gas groups teamed up with conservative politicians to push back against the scientific consensus that human beings were causing climate change. Others see echoes of Cold War paranoia.

“The Red Scare came for academia also,” one researcher said recently, with exasperation. “How do we not see the historical parallels?”

There are, to be clear, still some cops on the beat. At the University of Washington, for instance, the Center for an Informed Public does rapid response on electoral rumors. Other academic institutions like Clemson University and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard continue to publish peer-reviewed research, like Shorenstein’s Misinformation Review, which looks at global misinformation. But no one disputes that the environment for doing this work has gotten much, much worse.

Led by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the Trump loyalist who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans in Congress have mounted an onslaught of harassing investigations and legislative attacks, accusing the field of colluding with the Biden administration to silence conservatives. Jordan and his committee investigators have grilled disinformation researchers from both Clemson and the University of Washington, where Dr. Kate Starbird, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, has been under sustained attack. The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which spent the last five years studying misinformation and misuse of social media platforms, has been gravely weakened after lawsuits brought by conservative pundits and anti-vaccine activists alleging it was promoting censorship. One was filed by America First Legal, the organization run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who bragged it was “striking at the heart of the censorship-­industrial complex.” 

Stanford has denied that SIO is ending its work, saying it is simply facing “funding challenges.” But its founder, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, has left, as has its star researcher Renée DiResta, who warned in a June New York Times op-ed that her field was “being dismantled.” Disinformation scholar Joan Donovan recently filed a whistleblower complaint against Harvard, alleging the university dismissed her to “protect the interests of high-value donors with obvious and direct ties to Meta.” (Harvard said her departure was due to her research lacking a faculty sponsor, and insisted “donors have no influence” over its work.)

The conservative legislative onslaught against disinformation shows very little sign of slowing. In May, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced a bill that would ban federal funding for “disinformation research grants, and for other purposes.” The right-wing Cato Institute applauded and praised Massie for fighting back against “censorship.”

Arguments over truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new.

Some blows have been self-inflicted. The industry had become, as researchers Chico Q. Camargo and Felix M. Simon put it in a 2022 paper, “too big to fail” without reckoning with its rapid growth or establishing enough “methodological rigor.” In a passage that inadvertently echoes conservative attacks, the paper, sponsored by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, cautions against the field’s “unique position,” given that whatever it determines “counts as mis-/disinformation will likely be regulated as such.”

Arguments over the nature of truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new. Before misinformation, disinformation, and fake news became phrases in America’s political lexicon, a similar storm wracked climate science. Beginning in the 1990s, climate researchers faced attacks from politicians and private groups alike, who contested their widely accepted finding that human activity was causing climate change. Fossil fuel–funded organizations like the Heartland Institute began loudly promoting scientists willing to attack the consensus while hosting a series of lavish conferences devoted to promoting alternative climate facts. In 2009, a hacker stole emails between climate researchers, helping launch a scandal, known as Climategate, sustained by false claims that the messages documented scientific misconduct.

One target of the hack, and of climate change deniers throughout this period, was Dr. Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climatologist best known for his 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which showed sharply rising temperatures over the past century. Mann told me he sees “parallels between the politically and ideologically motivated attacks on climate scientists, public health scientists, and now disinformation researchers…including common actors (e.g. plutocrats and Republican politicians).” Mann ultimately sued some of his most strident critics for defamation, two conservative authors who published pieces for National Review and the libertarian think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute; one called Mann’s research “fraudulent,” while the other wrote that he “could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” After more than a decade of delay, this winter a jury awarded Mann a $1 million judgment. 

“The only solution to the larger problem of ideologically motivated antiscience is to go after the bad actors behind it,” Mann says, not just through such lawsuits, but by voting out Republican politicians involved in the attacks. In 2022, GOP state officials filed a suit against the Biden administration that alleged the government’s requests that social platforms take down Covid misinformation were unconstitutional. The case, thanks to the arch-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, made it to the Supreme Court, where it was dismissed for a lack of standing, but not before contributing to the chill cast over the broader anti-disinformation field.

At the same time fighting disinformation has become a political battleground, it has also shown to be a problem on which Big Tech has been all too eager to throw in the towel. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, it stopped policing Covid misinformation in November 2022. Since then the site and Musk in particular have energetically amplified disinformation; one calculation found that his posts sharing election and immigration disinformation have been seen more than 1 billion times. Mass layoffs at companies like Meta have made it harder to set and establish standards around misinformation, including election fraud or dangerous pseudomedical advice. On the whole, the platforms have prioritized gathering eyeballs and profit over safeguarding an informed public.

So, for industrious conspiracy peddlers, conditions are a dream: confused, acrid, and with the powers that be seemingly convinced that combating disinformation is more expensive or more trouble than it’s worth. From now on, if you need help, you might be on your own.

In the aftermath of the bloodshed on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, state authorities arrested Colin Gray, whose 14-year-old son, Colt Gray, allegedly shot four people to death and injured nine others before surrendering to police. The father is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, eight counts of cruelty to children—and, most significantly, two counts of second-degree murder.

The murder charges are unprecedented, the most severe ever filed against the parent of a school shooter. Late Thursday, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said at a news conference that the charges against Colin Gray are “directly connected with the actions of his son” and that the father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon.”

Authorities have not provided further details about evidence they may have, but according to news reports, Colin Gray owned the type of AR-15 that his son allegedly used in the attack. And Colt Gray had been “begging for months” for mental health help but had received none, according to an aunt of his who spoke to the Washington Post. (Colt Gray has been charged with four counts of murder and will be tried as an adult, authorities said.)

For more than a decade, I’ve studied and reported on the American epidemic of mass shootings. Over the past several years, and particularly since early 2024, a dramatic shift has taken shape: a reckoning for the parents of school shooters. Today, with more than 400 million guns and a lack of political will to regulate them more effectively nationwide, it may be that America has begun to find another route—a legal end-run of sorts—to bring accountability for these events of catastrophic gun violence.

The arrest of the school shooter’s father in Georgia comes just seven months after James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of a 15-year-old school shooter in Michigan, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter—also a first. What is publicly alleged so far about the role of Colin Gray appears to echo the case of the Crumbleys, who were found to have ignored their son’s mental health crisis and supplied him with the gun he used to commit his attack at Oxford High School, where four died and seven were injured.

The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included. But that theme no longer holds.

It is a near certainty that in the days and weeks ahead, more details will emerge about warning signs given off by the school shooter in Georgia, one of 20 states now requiring plans for violence prevention in public schools. School shootings are almost always preceded by such warning signs. Significant questions also loom about what may have been done regarding concerns about Colt Gray by law enforcement or the school district, after anonymous tips about threats posted online put him on the radar of the FBI and local authorities in 2023.

Another parental role—starkly different—came into public view this spring, when we published my two-year investigation, “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” in Mother Jones and aired a companion audio investigation on our radio show Reveal. These chronicle the experience of Chin Rodger, whose son Elliot Rodger committed mass murder in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin Rodger hadn’t been able to recognize her deeply troubled son’s suicidal and homicidal warning behaviors, but she had gone to great lengths to get him help and care before his attack. Years later she began working with violence prevention experts at the FBI and beyond, sharing myriad details about her son’s life with them—and eventually with the public—in hopes of raising awareness about warning signs and helping avert future violence.

As I wrote in the story: “The public rarely hears from parents of mass shooters apart from brief statements of sorrow in the aftermath. The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included. But that theme no longer holds, especially in light of a recent tragedy that could remake the legal landscape.”

There I was referring to the new criminal precedent established with the Crumbleys—one with the potential to expand, it now appears, with the case in Georgia. The recurring mass murder of school kids and their teachers drives intense public calls for finding culpability among parents (and others), which may well be warranted in some cases. But this nascent trend of criminalizing parents is not without possible pitfalls, including, legal experts have said, for mothers and fathers of minority children exposed disproportionately to gun violence.

Another notable development in the past several years has been a trend of civil liability for gun manufacturers who market their AR-15s and other firearms aggressively to America’s youth. In early 2022, Remington, the company that made the AR-15 used in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, agreed to a landmark $73 million civil settlement with victims’ families. In late 2022, the family of a 10-year-old victim in Uvalde, Texas, filed suit against Daniel Defense, the maker of the AR-15 used in the massacre at Robb Elementary School, accusing the company of using militaristic marketing appeals to target “young male consumers.”

The devastation in Georgia this week is far from the first to involve a shockingly young perpetrator. The shooter at Oxford High School in 2021 was only one year older, just 15 at the time. Other cases going back in time, documented in our mass shootings database and in my book on prevention, Trigger Points, have involved shooters as young as 13 and 11 years old.

In January 2023, a 6-year-old child brought a pistol to school in Virginia and shot his first grade teacher—a case in which the mother was later imprisoned for gun-related federal crimes. (The child used the mother’s unsecured firearm; her prosecution involved drug use and lying related to the gun purchase.)

What happened in Georgia this week serves as a particularly stark reminder: In America, a teenager can easily get his hands on a military-grade rifle and use it to gun down his classmates and teachers. Why we have this problem—and tens of millions of AR-15s in civilian hands—is complicated and arises from a recent history that many Americans know relatively little about.

Another reminder about this problem worth repeating is that, despite popular opinion, it is not an unsolvable one. Now, deterrence for gun-owning parents may be a growing part of a broader solution.

Just hours after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, high-profile allies of the ex-president began promoting unfounded conspiracy theories and blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats, without evidence, for causing the horrific attack. Trump and his surrogates have continued nonstop ever since with this coordinated messaging, which security experts have told me could provoke retaliatory violence from pro-Trump extremists. In late August, backers of Project 2025 joined the effort pushing this dangerous propaganda.

On Aug. 29, podcast host Monica Crowley interviewed Trump and proposed without evidence that he may have been targeted for murder from within the Biden administration.

“The more we see what happened that day, the more suspicious it all looks,” said Crowley, a former Trump administration spokesperson and a credited contributor on the Project 2025 policy tome detailing a hard-right agenda for a second Trump presidency. “Does it look increasingly to you like this was a suspicious—maybe even inside job?”

“Well, it’s strange,” Trump replied. Then he speculated about the deceased gunman’s father hiring “the most expensive lawyer” and suggested a partisan conspiracy involving former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. Weissmann quickly denounced Trump’s comments as false on social media. A spokesperson for Elias Law Group told me that no one from the firm has had any involvement in any aspect of the case.

Trump further claimed in the podcast interview, first reported by Media Matters for America, that the FBI had failed to gather evidence from the gunman’s cellphone. That’s untrue: FBI Director Christopher Wray and other FBI officials have spoken publicly about the bureau’s extensive investigation into the gunman’s background and activity, including his various digital communications.

Trump and Crowley then riffed about the JFK assassination, with Crowley reiterating the baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Trump: “You were shot five or six weeks ago, and the imperial media, the regime, they’ve all buried it. They don’t want anybody talking about it, which also lends credence to this idea that this is very suspicious and could have been an inside job.”

“Yeah, true,” Trump interjected. “They don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Tells you bad things,” Trump said, starting to draw a connection with the broader conspiracy theory at the core of his campaign.

“It raises big suspicions,” Crowley agreed.

“Well they didn’t want to talk about the election of 2020 either,” Trump said. “They just don’t want to talk about it because they know they’re guilty as hell. And the only way you can stop it—it’s amazing. People that want to have a fair election are indicted. The people that cheated on the election are allowed to keep cheating.”

Three days prior, on Aug. 26, the Heritage Foundation—home of Project 2025—hosted the “J 13 Forum,” a faux congressional hearing on the assassination attempt. Billed as an “independent” investigation, it was led by Reps. Cory Mills of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona and framed as a necessary circumvention of ongoing federal investigations, including a bipartisan congressional task force on the shooting convened by Republican Speaker Mike Johnson. In his opening remarks, Mills stated that he and his MAGA colleagues from the House were certain to uncover not just “criminal gross negligence” but “purposeful intent” attributable to the Biden administration.

“I think everyone’s heard me say before, ‘DEI equals DIE.’”

Participants in the testimony-style interviews included former Secret Service agent and right-wing media personality Dan Bongino, and former Blackwater CEO and Trump political operative Erik Prince. Attacks on DEI policy and its alleged role in the catastrophic security failure on July 13 were a focal point, also teed up by Mills from the outset. The hearing at Heritage, he said, “is a message to all of Congress, that if we are not selecting people based on meritocracy, that independent investigations such as this will continue to move forward.”

Project 2025 includes detailed plans to purge the US government of DEI policies. Midway through the hearing, Bongino went off on DEI as having supposedly led to unqualified agents working for the Secret Service. Citing unnamed whistleblower sources, he claimed that deficient personnel included trainees who had failed shooting tests and had filed “nuisance” employment complaints—and who were then given high-stakes jobs. “Many are out on protective assignments now,” Bongino said, without providing any evidence to support his claims.

“So what you’re saying is that DEI plays a major role, not meritocracy with regards to the current culture,” Mills said.

“No, the major role,” Bongino emphasized. “The Secret Service right now is dominated by DEI.”

Mills replied: “I think everyone’s heard me say before, ‘DEI equals DIE.’”

Project 2025 also calls for the mission of the Secret Service to be narrowed to protective operations only, and to have all of its criminal financial investigations moved under other law enforcement agencies—an argument Bongino also made in his remarks. Agents should be able to focus on protective work, Bongino said, “without running out cheap $20 counterfeit notes at Seven Eleven on a Friday night while the president is getting shot in the head.”

At the closing, Mills reiterated his takeaways, including on federal hiring policy. “Again, I think that we’re understanding that we’ve investigated the culture of the Secret Service and what needs to change, and why DEI is not healthy for our military, for our security services or otherwise.”

In his own closing remarks, Rep. Crane thanked the “witnesses” for participating, including a SWAT operator who had offered what he described as “secondhand” information about some of the tactical failures on July 13. “Any time you’re in law enforcement and you take the risk to come and testify before Congress,” Crane said to the small audience in the Heritage Foundation conference room, “it takes a lot of courage.”

Just hours after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, high-profile allies of the ex-president began promoting unfounded conspiracy theories and blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats, without evidence, for causing the horrific attack. Trump and his surrogates have continued nonstop ever since with this coordinated messaging, which security experts have told me could provoke retaliatory violence from pro-Trump extremists. In late August, backers of Project 2025 joined the effort pushing this dangerous propaganda.

On Aug. 29, podcast host Monica Crowley interviewed Trump and proposed without evidence that he may have been targeted for murder from within the Biden administration.

“The more we see what happened that day, the more suspicious it all looks,” said Crowley, a former Trump administration spokesperson and a credited contributor on the Project 2025 policy tome detailing a hard-right agenda for a second Trump presidency. “Does it look increasingly to you like this was a suspicious—maybe even inside job?”

“Well, it’s strange,” Trump replied. Then he speculated about the deceased gunman’s father hiring “the most expensive lawyer” and suggested a partisan conspiracy involving former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. Weissmann quickly denounced Trump’s comments as false on social media. A spokesperson for Elias Law Group told me that no one from the firm has had any involvement in any aspect of the case.

Trump further claimed in the podcast interview, first reported by Media Matters for America, that the FBI had failed to gather evidence from the gunman’s cellphone. That’s untrue: FBI Director Christopher Wray and other FBI officials have spoken publicly about the bureau’s extensive investigation into the gunman’s background and activity, including his various digital communications.

Trump and Crowley then riffed about the JFK assassination, with Crowley reiterating the baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Trump: “You were shot five or six weeks ago, and the imperial media, the regime, they’ve all buried it. They don’t want anybody talking about it, which also lends credence to this idea that this is very suspicious and could have been an inside job.”

“Yeah, true,” Trump interjected. “They don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Tells you bad things,” Trump said, starting to draw a connection with the broader conspiracy theory at the core of his campaign.

“It raises big suspicions,” Crowley agreed.

“Well they didn’t want to talk about the election of 2020 either,” Trump said. “They just don’t want to talk about it because they know they’re guilty as hell. And the only way you can stop it—it’s amazing. People that want to have a fair election are indicted. The people that cheated on the election are allowed to keep cheating.”

Three days prior, on Aug. 26, the Heritage Foundation—home of Project 2025—hosted the “J 13 Forum,” a faux congressional hearing on the assassination attempt. Billed as an “independent” investigation, it was led by Reps. Cory Mills of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona and framed as a necessary circumvention of ongoing federal investigations, including a bipartisan congressional task force on the shooting convened by Republican Speaker Mike Johnson. In his opening remarks, Mills stated that he and his MAGA colleagues from the House were certain to uncover not just “criminal gross negligence” but “purposeful intent” attributable to the Biden administration.

“I think everyone’s heard me say before, ‘DEI equals DIE.’”

Participants in the testimony-style interviews included former Secret Service agent and right-wing media personality Dan Bongino, and former Blackwater CEO and Trump political operative Erik Prince. Attacks on DEI policy and its alleged role in the catastrophic security failure on July 13 were a focal point, also teed up by Mills from the outset. The hearing at Heritage, he said, “is a message to all of Congress, that if we are not selecting people based on meritocracy, that independent investigations such as this will continue to move forward.”

Project 2025 includes detailed plans to purge the US government of DEI policies. Midway through the hearing, Bongino went off on DEI as having supposedly led to unqualified agents working for the Secret Service. Citing unnamed whistleblower sources, he claimed that deficient personnel included trainees who had failed shooting tests and had filed “nuisance” employment complaints—and who were then given high-stakes jobs. “Many are out on protective assignments now,” Bongino said, without providing any evidence to support his claims.

“So what you’re saying is that DEI plays a major role, not meritocracy with regards to the current culture,” Mills said.

“No, the major role,” Bongino emphasized. “The Secret Service right now is dominated by DEI.”

Mills replied: “I think everyone’s heard me say before, ‘DEI equals DIE.’”

Project 2025 also calls for the mission of the Secret Service to be narrowed to protective operations only, and to have all of its criminal financial investigations moved under other law enforcement agencies—an argument Bongino also made in his remarks. Agents should be able to focus on protective work, Bongino said, “without running out cheap $20 counterfeit notes at Seven Eleven on a Friday night while the president is getting shot in the head.”

At the closing, Mills reiterated his takeaways, including on federal hiring policy. “Again, I think that we’re understanding that we’ve investigated the culture of the Secret Service and what needs to change, and why DEI is not healthy for our military, for our security services or otherwise.”

In his own closing remarks, Rep. Crane thanked the “witnesses” for participating, including a SWAT operator who had offered what he described as “secondhand” information about some of the tactical failures on July 13. “Any time you’re in law enforcement and you take the risk to come and testify before Congress,” Crane said to the small audience in the Heritage Foundation conference room, “it takes a lot of courage.”

Ever since the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump, the former president and his allies have promoted unfounded conspiracy theories and blamed Democrats directly for the violence. The effort appears highly coordinated: From JD Vance to Trump’s sons and MAGA Republicans in Congress, many have used the same rhetoric to declare that Trump’s political opponents sought to have him murdered at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. No one has furnished any evidence to support that claim. And while Trump himself was relatively quiet in this regard during the initial aftermath, he has since been pouring fuel on the fire, starting with a campaign speech on Aug. 5 in Atlanta, where Vance introduced him by emphasizing that Trump’s opponents had “even tried to kill him.”

Trump took the narrative to the next level in a softball interview with TV host Dr. Phil that aired this week. The first quarter of the hour-long conversation focused on Trump’s brush with death as a divine miracle, which was a major theme of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee just days after the attack. “It has to be God,” Trump said to Dr. Phil about surviving the shooting. He went on to claim that the assassination attempt could’ve ended up like the 2017 massacre on the Las Vegas Strip, where hundreds of people were gunned down.

Later in the interview, Trump returned to the shooting unprompted, focusing blame on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety,” he claimed without evidence. He further suggested that they played a role in undermining his security: “They were making it very difficult to have proper staffing in terms of Secret Service.”

“I’m not saying they wanted you to get shot,” Dr. Phil said, “but do you think it was OK with them if you did?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of hatred.” (Biden, Harris, and other Democratic leaders condemned the shooting in the aftermath and Biden phoned Trump to offer prayers and support—a call Trump said was “very nice” in a leaked conversation with RFK Jr.)

Trump then reiterated the same claim he made in his Aug. 5 speech: “They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” he told Dr. Phil. “They would say that, that was [a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

The deceased 20-year-old gunman was a registered Republican voter, as noted throughout national media coverage—and as I reported in the days and weeks after the attack, there appears to be no solid evidence that he was driven by partisanship or ideology. A sweeping FBI investigation, including analysis of his digital devices and interviews with more than 450 people, has found no clear motive, according to congressional testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI officials reiterated those findings on Wednesday in a call with reporters. They suggested that the gunman, who also considered attacking a Biden event, was seeking infamy and selected the Trump rally as a “target of opportunity.” (I reported five days after the attack about the emerging indicators of this behavioral profile—a common one among political assassins, as I documented in my book, Trigger Points.)

The provocative rhetoric from Trump and his allies isn’t just unfounded but also carries a disturbing risk: Threat assessment and law enforcement leaders have told me that the messaging is fueling the danger of political violence headed into the election. Sources also told me that Trump’s political incitement more broadly—increasingly focused on a supposed grand conspiracy to steal the election from him—has made potential violence from MAGA extremists a top concern. As one source put it, “they’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified.” Another described how conspiracy theories about the Trump shooting give extremist groups “a really big plot point” for retaliatory violence.

The “J 13 Forum,” a faux congressional hearing held by Trump allies at the Heritage Foundation, leaned into speculation and innuendo.

The blame narrative from Trump and his allies also expanded this week when Republican Reps. Cory Mills of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona convened an “independent” hearing they called the “J 13 Forum” at the Heritage Foundation (home of Project 2025). They and several colleagues conducted congressional testimony-style interviews with participants including former Secret Service agent and right-wing media personality Dan Bongino, and former Blackwater CEO and Trump political operative Erik Prince. Many key questions indeed still loom about the catastrophic security failure that occurred in Pennsylvania; ongoing investigations by the FBI, Homeland Security, and a bipartisan congressional task force will last many months, if not years. Nonetheless, the “J 13 Forum” leaned into speculation and innuendo about what could explain the disaster, with Mills suggesting from the outset that a nefarious plot would inevitably be uncovered.

“You will see at this stage, where I think that criminal gross negligence and purposeful intent will be indistinguishable,” he said.

The faux congressional hearing included various unsubstantiated claims about the tactical response to the gunman in Butler and heated rhetoric from Bongino about the alleged role of DEI policy at the Secret Service. At one point, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida prompted Prince to highlight the risk of a foreign terrorist team carrying out such an assassination attempt on US soil. “I’m very concerned,” Prince responded. “I don’t think they have any idea what’s coming at them.”

Notably, Mills has been involved in the blame narrative from the start—he was among the Trump allies using the same attack lines in the initial aftermath. “What about the rhetoric said by President Biden, when he said it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye?” Mills asked on Fox’s Varney & Co. five days after the shooting. (Biden went on to apologize for that previous word choice, despite the fact that it clearly was taken out of context by Mills and others in the aftermath.) With that setup, Mills landed his allegation: “They tried to silence him. They tried to imprison him. And now they’ve tried to kill him.”

Rep. Maxwell Frost is the youngest US congressman—and every headline and article about him (including ours!) never fails to mention it. Hailed as the first and only (for now) Gen Z Representative, Frost rose from the ranks of activism as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives to Congress, when he was elected to represent central Florida nearly two years ago. He instantly aligned with several big progressive causes, especially ending gun violence, and joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He also became an outspoken defender of and campaigner for President Joe Biden. That’s come at a cost. More recently, critics singled him out for having betrayed his activist roots, accusing him of not being outspoken enough about the war in Gaza.

Having just won his primary this week, Frost is facing reelection in November and I had the chance to catch up with him in one of the DNC’s fancy “creator” spaces on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. During our sit-down interview, we talked about what he’s learned in his short time in Congress (it’s dysfunctional!), how to navigate big, contentious issues (it’s hard!), and what he wants to see from the Harris campaign in terms of policy (he’s very excited about housing! Not surprising when you recall his apartment-hunting headaches when he arrived in DC.)

Watch the video, and below there’s a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Okay, so what have you learned? What has been most surprising for you as a Congressman? And, I wanna know how you’ve changed.

Honestly, what’s been really surprising for me, is we know there’s so much dysfunction in Congress. And oftentimes, we just blame the people there for that dysfunction, so I’m gonna give them 60 percent of the blame. Forty percent, or a good chunk, actually has to do with the institution itself. I’ll give you a very small example. Orientation, when the new members first get to know each other, before we start arguing, we’re just all humans, new people to Congress. You don’t really get a lot of time to spend time with the other side of the aisle. The only time I’m with the Republicans is during the classes, and what are you supposed to do in class? Listen. The last half of the day, the social aspect, is all separated by party. So it makes sense why there’s so much dysfunction here.

Here at the DNC, we are looking forward. We have about 75, or so, days until the election. What is it that you wanna see? What kind of policies? What do you want the Harris campaign to bring forward?

“I’m really excited about the housing platform that Vice President Harris has put forth.”

I’m really excited about the housing platform that Vice President Harris has put forth. Honestly, it’s one of the first times, I think, the Democratic party has put together a housing platform that’s really exciting. What else? I’m excited to see the Vice President continue to talk about her plans around preventing the climate crisis. Obviously, the Biden-Harris administration made history and dedicated the most resources and money towards defeating the climate crisis. Not in the history of our country, but the history of the world.

The Vice President has been very vocal on gun control—an issue that’s very near and dear to you and your work. What are you hoping to see around that? And what role would you play?

I’m proud that the first bill I introduced in Congress was to create a federal office of gun violence prevention. The President took that legislation with Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and used it as the foundation for an executive order. And he created the White House Office of Violence Prevention. Who’s its leader? Vice President Kamala Harris. So, I’m excited to see her expand that office, and what I wanna see is for us to put more money toward CVI, Community Violence Intervention. These are programs, community-based, that work at identifying people most likely to be shot, and the people most likely to shoot someone. And then, they intervene at the community level. We had this program in Orlando, and gun violence has gone down in the blocks it’s operating in. And how did we get the program started? Federal money. First from the American Rescue Plan, and then from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

So, let’s get a personal question in here. How do you grow as a politician and a leader with all of the complex issues here that we face in this country.

“There’s so much to learn.”

Yeah, there’s so much to learn. I have 10 meetings in a day about completely different subjects. I’m gonna be honest, number one, it’s a team effort. I have a great staff that really helps educate me. There’s a lot of resources that are available to us. There’s actually something called the Congressional Research Service. I can go to my staff and say, “I want an in-depth briefing on the situation in the Congo.” And they will get our government experts to come in and give me an in-depth briefing. That information, is always the basis for me to do more research, and speak to other outside groups, as well. So we have a lot of resources we can take advantage of to educate ourselves. We’re not gonna be experts on every issue. But we should definitely try our best to educate ourselves on every issue. That way we can legislate in a better way.

We have so many issues like, why is this important? What makes it more important than something else? And it all leads us to, why is this election important?

“There are communities that won’t survive.”

This election is important because if we elect Donald Trump again, it’s not a pause in progress, it’s a rollback. And there are communities that won’t survive. That word “survival” means something different for everyone. More people will die of gun violence. He wants mass deportations of certain communities. Nothing will be done about the climate crisis. People will literally die. We’re experiencing extreme heat right now that’s killing more people than ever before. So, lives are at stake. And from the gun violence movement, my work, and my organizing has always been about saving lives. So, we gotta make sure we don’t let that guy anywhere near the White House. Kamala Harris is gonna save lives.

Congressman Frost, thank you so much for your time.

Appreciate it man.

This story is a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative reporting news organization.

It wasn’t a difficult choice for Linda Evers, after graduating high school in 1976, to take a job crushing dirt for the Kerr McGee uranium mill, just north of her hometown Grants, New Mexico. Most gigs in town paid $1.75 an hour. This one offered $9 an hour.

She spent seven years working in New Mexico’s uranium mines and mills, driving a truck and loading the ore crusher for much of the late 1970s and early 80s, including through her pregnancies with each of her children. “When I told them I was pregnant…” Evers, now 66, recalled. “…they told me it was okay, I could work until my belly wouldn’t let me reach the conveyor belts anymore.”

Both children were born with health defects—her son with a muscle wrapped around the bottom of his stomach and her daughter without hips. Today, Evers herself suffers from scarring lungs, a degenerative bone and joint disease, and multiple skin rashes. All of which doctors have attributed to radiation exposure.

“We never learned about uranium exposure or any of that. They were killing us. And they knew they were killing us.”

“We never learned about uranium exposure or any of that,” said Evers, who recalled safety training that consisted primarily of standard first aid such as treating burns and broken bones. Only decades later Evers learned of the health risks she’d incurred. “They were killing us. And they knew they were killing us.”

American workers have labored in uranium mines since the early 1900s, with the majority of mining occurring from the 1950s through the end of the Cold War when tens of thousands of workers produced hundreds of millions of pounds of uranium. The government has since acknowledged that, despite being at least partially aware of the health risks, decades of miners like Evers were allowed to labor in dangerous conditions.

“Anything that got in the way of producing more nuclear weapons, testing more nuclear weapons, anything that made that more expensive was to be avoided if at all possible,” said Stephen Schwartz, senior fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In 1990 Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, creating a process by which some of those harmed as a result of the expansion of the US nuclear program could receive financial and medical benefits. “The bill in a small way will make up for the mistakes made in the early days of the uranium mines,” Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said during a public hearing in March 1990. More than 500 members of the Navajo Nation who either themselves or had loved ones who worked in uranium mines, attended, according to an account in the Arizona Daily Sun. “We could never replace the ones that died or those who are ill,” he continued. “But this is a giant step.”

In the three and a half decades since, 41,977 Americans have received about $2.7 billion—roughly $62,000 per—for health impacts caused prior to 1971 when the US government stopped being the sole domestic purchaser of uranium.

Advocates across the country have long argued that such benefits are available to far too few people given that the US continued to operate uranium mines and employ miners for years after 1971 and that medical advances have provided new insight into the adverse health effects for many others—such as those who lived downwind of test sites or in homes constructed near or on top of nuclear waste.

“That was a problem—this person got compensated, this one didn’t,” said Doug Brugge, an expert in health epidemiology related to uranium mining. “For people who are not government bureaucrats or academic intellectuals and parsing numbers, it just felt really unfair.”

Arlene Juanico and her husband Lawrence both worked as post-71 uranium miners, making them among those ineligible for RECA benefits under the original legislation. She remembers being hired within a week of having applied, given a hard hat, leather gloves, and ear plugs but never warned about the danger of radiation. Today their home in Paguate, New Mexico, sits in the shadow of Jackpile uranium mine, an EPA Superfund site. The Juanicos say that they wake each morning to a strong, rotting scent wafting off of the vacated mine. “Lawrence and I never considered being exposed until 2019,” she said. “We breathed that air 24 hours a day.”

Within the last year, Lawrence has been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, the same disease his father and uncle—who worked the same mines—died from. Arlene fears she’ll be next.

With RECA benefits scheduled to expire earlier this year, a bipartisan set of lawmakers proposed a significant expansion of the program which, among other things, would have extended the program until 2030 and increased the compensation amount and eligible circumstances to now include people in about a dozen states, including people like Evers and the Juanicos.

The proposal passed the Senate, but died at the doors of the House when Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—despite pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle—refused to bring it up for a vote. The Senate bill had a two-thirds majority in the Senate, and 20 of 47 Republican senators voted in favor. However, from Johnson’s perspective, the issue was the cost of the expansion’s more than $50 billion price tag without budget offsets, and he did not believe the Senate bill had majority GOP support in the House, according to a Republican leadership aide.

The result: for the first time in 34 years, Americans who suffer due to radiation exposure have no pathway to federal compensation.

“It’s really tough to have people say ,‘Nope, sorry that’s too expensive,’” Tona Henderson, director of Idaho Downwinders, said through tears. “’It wasn’t too expensive to poison you, but it’s too expensive to fix what we did and you aren’t worth it.’”

“It’s really tough to have people say, ‘Nope, sorry that’s too expensive. It wasn’t too expensive to poison you, but it’s too expensive to fix what we did and you aren’t worth it.’”

Henderson and other advocates still hope they will be able to convince Johnson to allow a vote between now and the end of the year in order to send the program to President Biden, who has said he supports the legislation.

“We have a very short window to try to convince people that this needs to be taken up,” Henderson said. “We’ve been told that we have the votes in the House, that we just need Speaker Johnson to bring it to the floor.”

The roadblock in the House has frustrated the bill’s Senate sponsors, some of whom note that 57 of the places whose residents would benefit from the RECA expansion are in GOP districts. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said that Johnson’s “inaction puts the lives and well-being of our constituents at risk.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has vowed to attach the RECA expansion to any legislation that moves through the Senate.

“As I stand here on this floor, Coldwater Creek: still poisoned. The Westlake landfill: still burning. Weldon Spring: not cleaned up. Government hasn’t done anything,” Hawley (R-Mo.) declared from the Senate floor earlier this year. “The victims have waited too long.”

Those living near St. Louis are within a few mile radius of two Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites—Coldwater Creek and Westlake landfill – which is a program designed to clean up some of the nation’s most contaminated land.

Last year, the Missouri Independent, MuckRock, and the Associated Press published a trove of 15,000 documents showing that officials in St. Louis were aware as early as 1949 of the danger presented by the radiation waste produced in the city.

Among those who would benefit are Dawn Chapman, who as a 12-week pregnant newlywed moved to an idyllic suburb on the outskirts of St. Louis in 2000 without ever considering that it would harm her family’s health. “We really thought we hit the jackpot,” she said.

Now, Chapman’s husband is chronically ill and her 18-year-old son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and is in limbo with an additional unknown chronic illness. Doctors have told Chapman’s family that their health woes are likely the result of radiation exposure from the landfill, which sits a couple of miles from their home.

“It’s devastating,” Chapman said. “We feel guilty, we feel like we did this to my son, our kids, it’s our fault.”

The nuclear waste is primarily residue from downtown St. Louis’ Mallinckrodt Chemical plant, which was one of the largest producers of uranium oxide and uranium metal for US atomic bomb testing from 1942 to 1957. The nuclear waste was illegally dumped in the landfill in the early 70s. By 1988, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission had documented a “significant increase in the radiological hazards,” noting, among other things, groundwater contamination and that some of the radioactive waste had no soil cover. 

In 1990, the EPA declared it a Superfund site and has worked to prevent further contamination, with a full plan for remedial design expected to be complete sometime this fall, according to an EPA Region 7 spokesperson. After the final plan is approved, the EPA will enter into an agreement with those responsible to start the cleanup process. For the West Lake Landfill Superfund site, the US Department of Energy, Cotter Corporation, and Bridgeton Landfill are the “potentially responsible parties” as determined by the EPA, so work will begin at the Superfund site once the three parties enter a consent agreement with the agency.

Without access to RECA benefits, Chapman said her family has had to spread out medical treatment over the course of the year. She worries what will happen if she, too, becomes sick.

“I almost feel like that’s the game being played against us by the Speaker,” said Chapman, who helped launch Just Moms STL, a non-profit that advocates for those suffering from radiation exposure in their local community. “We have to go back and educate all these other elected officials on what happened in St. Louis, because they don’t know. We’re left out.”

Reuters recently published an investigation diving into how a federal health agency failed a neighborhood near Chapman, also ailing from radiation exposure.

It’s a similar story in Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, where communities that sit downwind of former nuclear testing sites have been ravaged by cancers and other diseases yet excluded from RECA benefits for decades.

Tina Cordova has lost count of all the relatives who have died from various cancers and chronic illnesses in the past several decades. She herself has been in remission from thyroid cancer for 26 years and is the fourth generation of five in her family to have had cancer over the past century. At least a seventh-generation New Mexican, Cordova’s hometown of Tularosa sits about 45 miles downwind from where the Trinity atomic bomb was detonated in 1945.

“It’s affected everybody in my family one way or the other,” said Cordova, 64, who has spent years collecting roughly 1,200 testimonials and health surveys from New Mexico families who believe they have suffered radiation exposure. “We just trudge through this and we wonder who’s going to be next.”

In her years traveling around the state to advocate for those suffering from radiation exposure, Cordova has heard the same story on repeat. First, people get sick from radiation exposure and have to quit their jobs. When they lose their health insurance, they have trouble keeping up with their medical bills and the travel required for treatment. At some point, they face a choice: either leave their families with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt, or go home to die.

Under the proposed RECA expansion, residents downwind of the Trinity test site would be able to receive up to $100,000 for medical bills or to travel for treatments, as well as access to additional medical benefits. In the meantime, they aren’t eligible.

“We’ve been irreparably harmed and they recklessly did it. And now when we’re trying to have them atone for this, for them to say it’s going to cost too much is absolutely unacceptable,” Cordova said. “It speaks to how much they had to dehumanize us to do this. They didn’t treat us like human beings, they treated us like collateral damage.”

Ilhan Omar won renomination to Congress on Tuesday night, beating back a repeat challenger.

Leading up to the primary, it seemed Rep. Omar, after an aggressive campaign backed by a major financial advantage, would cruise to an easy win against her familiar opponent, Don Samuels, who lost the 2022 primary by a little over 2,000 votes. And that’s more or less how it turned out: Within two hours of the close of voting, Omar was declared the winner with a victory margin of around 16,00o votes, or 14 percent.

In the race’s final days, conservatives looking to oust Omar mounted a late effort to take advantage of Minnesota’s open primary format and convince Republicans to skip their party’s primary and instead vote for Samuels, a former member of the Minneapolis city council.

Royce White, the state GOP-endorsed Senate candidate, posted to X that he would gladly give up 5,000 votes in the fifth congressional district to help unseat Omar. Far-right influencer Laura Loomer tweeted that “Republicans, Independents and Democrats have a once in a lifetime opportunity to remove a HAMAS supporter from Congress. Everyone can vote in the open primary.” 

A recent investigation by The Intercept revealed a WhatsApp group named “Zionists for Don Samuels,” that played host to pro-Israel activists and a campaign consultant for Don Samuels; the group chat had also explored corralling Republican voters against Omar in the primary.

Omar won her primary by 14 percent.

Samuels campaign stated they had no part in the plan. On Twitter, Omar wrote that it “is shameful that my opponent is actively courting Republican votes.” 

One participant in “Zionists for Don Samuels” boasted he had raised more than $120,000 for a pro-Samuels super-PAC in the last two weeks, part of a fundraising effort discussed in the channel that arose in response to a lack of support for Samuels from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. That lobbying group and its spending vehicle, the United Democracy Project have put over $25 million this primary season to supporting challengers that rose up to take on “squad” members who have been critical of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

While AIPAC reportedly planned to spend $100 million to elect more pro-Israel members of Congress in 2024, they seem to have sidestepped Samuels. Before he announced his repeat campaign, AIPAC sought to recruit sitting city councilmember LaTrisha Vetaw, as they reportedly believed Samuels had “reached his capacity” in 2022. But Vetaw’s campaign did not take shape, and Samuels again became Omar’s challenger.

In the 2022 primary, the Samuels-backing super-PAC Make a Difference MN 05 received $350,000 from UDP—a late donation that went unreported before the polls closed. This year, if late AIPAC support for Samuels exists, it has yet to be seen. But an almost identically named super-PAC sprung up in late July to amass over $100,000. Whatever its final receipts, this late funding was not enough to overcome Omar’s nearly $5 million lead.

Omar will now face Dalia Al-Aqidi, an Iraqi-immigrant who has the GOP endorsement, in the general election. The district has not sent a Republican to Congress since 1963. Omar won the 2022 general election with roughly 75 percent of the vote.

On the morning of August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old man walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. He murdered 23 people and injured 22 others. Most who died were Latino, including eight people from Mexico.

The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.

At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.”

Today, Trump is running again using the same potent demagoguery he wielded during his presidency and prior campaigns. Five years to the day after the massacre in El Paso, he held a rally in Atlanta with running mate JD Vance, and, over the course of an hour, warned a half dozen times about hordes of murderous foreigners overrunning America.

“Forty or fifty million illegal aliens will invade our country during the next four years if they’re in,” Trump said of his Democratic opponents at the outset. He soon continued: “Many of them that are coming in are from prisons and jails and mental institutions, insane asylums.” He taunted media covering the rally as he referenced the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a provocation he now uses to depict migrant “insanity” and brutality.

He went on to vow he would “stop the invasion” and expanded on the peril: “These people are so violent and vicious…These are the worst people anywhere in the world coming into our country. They’re coming in at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”

“We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again,” one threat assessment source told me.

Audience reaction was relatively subdued as Trump recited these lines from a teleprompter, perhaps because they are such a familiar fixture of his speeches. But deep into this speech, the next escalation played differently. The danger, Trump now further alleged, came from a grand conspiracy against him, one involving migrants. He warned that his political opponents who “hate our country” are “actually trying to get them to sign up and vote.” Then came the climax: “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

A close listener could hear echoes of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump invoked loss of country and the danger of inaction against an election that he falsely claimed was stolen from him. Now, in his telling, that conspiracy promised to use legions of evil foreigners against him and his supporters.

The crowd cheered, beginning to stir more as Trump recounted a recent murder of a university student at the hands of a Venezuelan man illegally in the country. “Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley,” Trump declared. He railed against “migrant crime” and falsely claimed that “thousands” of Americans were being killed in this way.

He continued: “If Harris wins, a never-ending stream of illegal alien rapists, MS-13 animals, and child predators will flood into your communities. If I win, on day one we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”

The crowd roared at this signature line from his speech.

“We have no choice,” Trump said.

Who was listening? Perhaps some disturbed young man there in the crowd, or elsewhere watching Trump live on YouTube—perhaps someone who might feel enraged, like the El Paso mass shooter surely did when he wrote down the lie that Democrats “intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters.”

Shortly after Trump’s speech in Atlanta, I talked to a longtime threat assessment source with expertise in counterterrorism and far-right extremist groups. His response was blunt when I noted that no major media focused their coverage on Trump’s inflammatory language, almost as if all that rhetoric was just business as usual.

“There’s nothing normal about any of this,” the source said. “We have the First Amendment and he can say whatever he wants, that’s our democracy. But it really disturbs me how politicians in his party won’t stand up and say one word against it now. The country really needs that. We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again.”

The use of Trump’s rhetoric to justify racist and organized political violence began early in his presidency. Strained denials of that reality crumbled for good with the horrific events at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This June, I reported again on Trump’s years of incitement against his many perceived enemies, a method known to national security experts as stochastic terrorism. The results, as I’ve reported, grow even worse when a high-profile figure emphasizes themes of contempt and disgust.

Security and law enforcement sources told me that topping the list of concerns now for election-year violence are threats stemming from white supremacist groups and Trump’s MAGA movement. After the assassination attempt against the ex-president in mid-July, sources told me that the promotion of conspiracy theories and false blame on Democrats by Trump allies could provoke retaliatory attacks.

At the Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, JD Vance doubled down on that very blame, declaring in his speech that Trump’s political opponents “tried to kill him.” Meanwhile, a new intelligence report from the FBI and Homeland Security focused on the upcoming Democratic National Convention highlights similar concerns about retaliatory violence.

I contacted three people with the Trump campaign asking specifically for comment on these warnings about political violence: spokespersons Brian Hughes and Steven Cheung, and Trump senior advisor Alina Habba. None of them responded.

America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit.

Trump shows no signs of stopping the incitement. Last Thursday, in a rambling speech to reporters assembled for a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, he again emphasized that America was under invasion by millions of migrants “from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums.” They are flooding in “from all over the world,” he claimed. “Prisons are being emptied into our country.”

He delivered more of the same at a rally on Friday in Montana: “Fifty million of them… they’re destroying our country, they’re ruining our country… migrants praying on our women and our girls.”

Fear and loathing, dressed up as just another stump speech.

Trump’s incitement focused on migrants is not mutually exclusive with the fact that America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit. In early 2024, Congress was poised to pass a bipartisan border security bill, with President Biden ready to sign it. Trump killed the deal. No one bothered trying to hide why he pressured Republicans to do his bidding: He wanted immigration to remain his political weapon.

“The fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem, because he wants to blame Biden for it, is really appalling,” Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters in January, the deal dead.

Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who helped author the legislation, later revealed how “a popular” media commentator had threatened him: “If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year,” that Trump ally told him, according to Lankford, “I will do whatever I can to destroy you. Because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”

What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?

Trump’s relentless fear-mongering against migrants underscores how he has always seen immigration and the border as essential to his political power. There is zero doubt that his current trajectory—begun nearly a decade ago when he announced his first campaign and inveighed against Mexican criminals and “rapists”—will continue to the November election.

Most news media are no longer paying any of this much attention. But that carries risk of the public forgetting about the violence that has already occurred. More broadly, shouldn’t we be asking: What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?

According to one of Trump’s own senior national security advisers in the White House, Trump was informed explicitly and repeatedly about how his rhetoric had been used to justify acts of violence. Credible evidence of his awareness—and his demonstrated unwillingness to respond meaningfully against the violence—suggests that, for him, more bloodshed will be welcome.

Next week, Rep. Ilhan Omar will take on a familiar opponent. On Tuesday, August 13, the progressive stalwart will face a second-consecutive primary challenge from Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis City Council member who came within 2 percent of beating her in 2022.  

For Samuels, that narrow margin was enough evidence to try again. But he didn’t announce his plans for a rematch against the congresswoman until about a month after Hamas’ October 7 attack, as a wave of contenders emerged to take on left-leaning lawmakers who spoke critically of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza. Soon after getting in the race, Samuels staked his turf by going on TV to claim Omar had voiced opinions that were “the last straw in a long series of insensitive statements about Israel and Jewish people.” 

Omar has “been raising money on the idea that AIPAC would attack her. That has not happened.”

Samuels and these other challengers stepped up as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the long standing lobbying group, announced plans to spend $100 million in 2024 to contest candidates that they’ve determined are not pro-Israel enough, many of whom, like Omar, count themselves among the group of incumbent progressive representatives known as the “squad.” The strategy paid off when Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost to George Latimer in a June race where 61 percent of the money spent was from the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated vehicle. It did so again on Tuesday night in St. Louis, as Rep. Cori Bush lost her primary to prosecutor Wesley Bell—whose campaign has been supported by $9 million from United Democracy Project.

While Samuels has made Omar’s positions on Israel and Gaza a key talking point—even calling her a “pawn for Hamas”—unlike Latimer and Bell, he has failed to garner substantial pro-Israel PAC funding. Samuels didn’t have the same issue in 2022, when United Democracy Project contributed $350,000 to his efforts just days before voting. The donation was only disclosed a month after the 2022 primary; Samuels later complained that he did not receive as much support from pro-Israel funders as the failed challenger who took on Omar in 2020. 

While a similar late infusion of money, potentially spurred on by Bell’s fresh win, remains a possibility, so far FEC filings show just one minor contribution backing Samuels from a pro-Israel PAC—$5,000 from an entity called To Protect Our Heritage. 

Given Samuels’ strong showing two years ago, it’s not exactly clear why he’s failed to garner such support. In August, Jewish Insider reported that while Samuels was already considering a rematch, AIPAC was instead seeking to recruit LaTrisha Vetaw, a sitting Minneapolis council member, to run against Omar. An operative involved in the discussions told the outlet that AIPAC had judged Samuels to have already “reached his capacity.” (AIPAC and UDP declined to comment on why they have not backed Samuels, or if they might still do so.)

While an AIPAC-supported Vetaw candidacy never materialized, Joelle Stangler, a Minneapolis teacher who is managing Omar’s primary campaign, says the hundreds of thousands of dollars AIPAC spent against the congresswoman in 2022 “could be seen as a bellwether” of the money spent this year taking down incumbents like Bowman and Bush. “We were a test case.” 

Given Omar’s narrow victory over Samuels in 2022, Stangler admits the campaign “took our foot off the gas” in that election. This year Omar, who is one of a handful of Muslim members of Congress, has been aggressively campaigning. Another change: their 2022 primary took place about a year after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis cops, kicking off widespread and sometimes destructive protests against police violence. By suing to force the city to hire more cops at the same time Omar and energized activists were calling for the dismantling of the city’s police department, Samuels emerged, as the Star Tribune put it, as “the face of the backlash against calls to reduce the police force.” That pro-police image boosted him among moderate Democrats and was a cornerstone of his 2022 challenge to Omar—but it’s a less salient issue in 2024. 

There’s no indication Samuels has the traction he did two years ago.

Omar has also already doubled the amount she fundraised in all of 2022; her nearly $7 million as of July 24 almost quintuples Samuels’ haul. Samuels has attempted to make an issue of the fact that a majority of Omar’s funding comes from out of state. “Representative Omar, with a large national fundraising base, has since November, been raising money on the idea that AIPAC would attack her. That has not happened,” says Joe Radinovich, Samuels’ campaign manager. 

In June, Omar’s campaign put AIPAC aside when it released research identifying roughly  $50,000 in 2024 contributions to Samuels that came from right-wing or Republican-backing donors, while noting his 2022 backers included Clarence Thomas-patron Harlan Crow and Republican-supporting super PACs. 

Radinovich defends the donations, arguing “that there are a number of people out there, of all political stripes…willing to give their resources to Don Samuels, who supports universal health care, bold climate policy, a woman’s right to choose—then you know we’re going to use the money to get that message out.”

Molly Priesmeyer, a South Minneapolis resident and an Omar supporter, says Samuels’ conservative funders have become a voting issue. After people learn about “that kind of influence,” she says, “regardless of their feelings about Omar, they’re reluctant to go with Don Samuels.” 

Samuels’ attacks have centered on Omar’s high number of missed votes, her foreign policy, a World Cup trip funded by the Qatari government, and an ongoing fraud case involving her husband. In spots that ran on local television during the Republican National Convention, Samuels’ debut ad slammed Omar for being “missing on the issues that matter most,” and assailed her position on police reform and her vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill.

But the ad also depicted her face on a missing persons poster—an image that immediately drew blowback from advocates from organizations focused on the disproportionate number of women of color who go missing or are murdered; one of them called it “​​insensitive, racist, [and] anti-women.” It wasn’t the first time Samuels was criticized for sexism. In November, Samuels spoke about Omar on a podcast, saying “You’re not cute enough, you don’t dress well enough, nothing about you is attractive enough to overcome that deficit.” Omar tweeted that the remarks were misogynist.

In the 2020 general election, Omar got about 73,000 fewer votes in her district than Joe Biden. “There is no Democratic congressional candidate in the country who trailed Joe Biden by more than Ilhan Omar in 2020,” Radinovich says, arguing that pool of Biden voters could be receptive to Samuels, who only lost by 2,500 votes last time.

But so far, there’s little indication Samuels is making new inroads, or has anything approaching the traction he did two years ago. While most polling data in the race has been released by Omar’s campaign, those figures have consistently shown her with a massive lead—numbers she released in late July put it at 27 points.

Correction, August 7: This story has been updated to reflect the number of Muslim women in Congress.

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

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators—deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, which wrote the report.

The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming, or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.

It also highlights examples of denial from representatives. “Of course the climate is changing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”

Just because politicians “say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Other instances are more recent. “We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”

Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52 million in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.

The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23 percent of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.

Even as a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public has been moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to various studies, with long-running polling by Yale University showing that those they class as “dismissive” stand at just 11 percent.

While this slice of the American public opinion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger, growing cohort is worried about the climate crisis following a string of record hot years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other climate-fueled events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale surveys find.

“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum—alarmed and dismissive—were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.

Though the portion of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is stunning, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who don’t deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to thwart greenhouse gas curbing policies.

“There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

The Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for instance, previously used the language of climate denial, but more recently described climate change as being “more of a religion”—a different form of “climate obstruction,” the report says. He has also continued to oppose climate aid.

“There are lots of harmful ways to talk about climate and act on it,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.

“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”

She noted, however, that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used a variety of messaging to rebuff concerns about the climate. She said she was unsure those other forms of rhetoric were any less harmful.

“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying renewable energy isn’t reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power…kills whales,” she said. “Is it really so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but you deny the possibility of solutions?”

Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or tie climate science to conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated both politically and throughout US society.

“This small minority of Americans are really vocal, they are more likely to vote and clearly they are more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said. “They are punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public square, to the extent that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half of the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to hew to more extreme views in order to secure key party primary contests, have helped entrench this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.

In June, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) lost to George Latimer in the most expensive primary in the history of the House of Representatives. Latimer was backed extensively by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). While many factors—like a recent redistricting—affected the race, the contest was viewed widely as an indication of the power of AIPAC to help oust progressives. (Bowman had, notably, called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide.)

But to say Bowman lost because of his views on Israel misses the way money works. AIPAC and other ads targeted Bowman on a myriad of issues. A key talking point, repeated consistently, was that Bowman did not vote for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. “Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda,” explained one $2.8 million spot, “and refuses to compromise with President Biden.”

In this election cycle, the attack has become a common theme. AIPAC and its subsidiary the United Democracy Project (UDP) have targeted progressive members of Congress who have vocally opposed Israel’s 10-month war in Gaza. But their line of attack has often not been about foreign policy but, instead, that the leftists did not toe the Democratic line.

Tomorrow, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) will go up against St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell, who entered the race almost immediately after Bush called for a ceasefire in Gaza—and, in doing so, has accessed massive ad funding from those same PACs that funded Latimer.

The same dynamic is at play in the race: Bell’s ads have repeatedly said Bush did not vote for the infrastructure bill.

That’s true—but also misses key context.

President Joe Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized $1.2 trillion in federal spending to modernize America’s roads and bridges, among other things. It was a landmark achievement. But it came as a compromise—excluding provisions around human infrastructure needs, like child care. Bush had fought for the wider agenda as part of Biden’s original goal to Build Back Better.

When Build Back Better was first introduced, it was budgeted at about $3.5 trillion. The House passed a version of the bill, only to be thwarted by Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), who at the time had de facto veto power. Eventually, through a lot of negotiations (and exhausting back and forth), Biden and Congress passed two bills: the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

During that process, to push for as many components of Build Back Better as possible, members of the progressive caucus withheld their votes from the infrastructure bill.

Bush and Bowman, alongside three other progressives, kept pushing to pass a fuller version that would give families a $3,600 annual Child Tax Credit, establish a guaranteed free pre-K program, increase housing investments, supply tax-funded elder care, incentivize green energy development, and expand Medicare and Medicaid. At the time, Bush said this more robust plan would have benefited low-income residents of her district, and people like herself—a Black single mother who spent time living in her car. 

“St. Louis deserves the president’s entire agenda,” Bush said at the time. “So that means both the bipartisan infrastructure package and the Build Back Better Act.” The Build Back Better Act included $1.75 trillion in child care and climate readiness investment; the infrastructure package did not. (Some elements of Build Back Better did make it into the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Bush’s position that both bills needed to pass was not particularly radical. Joe Biden himself initially said that: “If this is the only one that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.” 

Everyone seemed to understand the dynamics at play in the aftermath. Bush handily won reelection in 2022 with about 70 percent of the vote in her district. Her “no” vote on the infrastructure bill was not brought up as loudly at any point during that election. Now, though, it’s near-impossible to turn on the television in Bush’s district without seeing a portrayal of Bush as anti-union, anti-infrastructure, anti–St. Louis. 

“What I find really disheartening about that is, before she took that vote, she did a district Zoom meeting,” Megan Green, president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and a staunch Bush supporter, remembers. “There were labor leaders on the call, there were a lot of elected officials on the call, and she said, I just want to talk through what we’re doing and why I’m taking this vote this way.”

“To kind of turn around and use that against her is really disappointing,” Green continued.

Latimer’s campaign—well-subsidized by PACs like AIPAC and Fairshake, a cryptocurrency lobby group—deployed that same playbook earlier this summer. 

Like Bell in his race against Bush, Latimer’s campaign dug up Bowman’s “no” vote on the infrastructure bill and presented him as an incorrigible obstructionist. But that’s not an accurate account of what happened back in 2021, as Bowman explained at the time. 

“While one is the hard infrastructure bill—roads, bridges, tunnels and construction jobs; great, we need that. We also need child care. We also need universal pre-K. We need to lower drug prices. We need paid family leave,” Bowman said. “The plan was to pass both together, and when we decided not to do that, I decided to vote no on that bill.” 

Latimer defeated Bowman by 17 percentage points. 

Don Samuels, who will be up against Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in an August 13 primary, is using a note-for-note identical strategy in his first advertisement of the campaign. 

It has been three years since the infrastructure bill vote, and the Build Back Better Act still hasn’t been passed.

Bowman lost, and Bush, tomorrow, runs the risk of being ousted too.

On her 48th birthday, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) celebrated by campaigning. Yes, there was cake, and there was singing, and there was a DJ, but there was also—a little under three weeks out from a heated Democratic primary—canvassing in the sweltering heat.

The primary has been cast as another test of how the Democrat Party responds to Israel’s war on Gaza. Bush, a member of the Squad, has been among the loudest voices calling for America to push harder for a ceasefire. United Democracy Project—a super-PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—has spent more than $7 million against Bush. The MO-01 race is already the fifth-most-expensive House primary in US history.

Late last year, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell dropped out of his bid to dethrone Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri to challenge Bush. Some speculated he was recruited by AIPAC. A recently leaked phone call between Bush and Bell published by Drop Site News shows Bell promising he would not run against her: “I’m telling you on my word I am not running against you. That is not happening,” Bell is reported to have said. Four months later, he changed his mind.

Despite both coming of age as politicians during Ferguson—and despite the fact that in their campaign literature, both candidates label themselves the “real progressive” here—Bell’s challenge is firmly from the center. “He’s going to run as a Biden Democrat…as a Democratic team player,” Missouri Independent columnist Jeff Smith, a former state senator who used to represent parts of Bush’s district, told us in early 2024. “There’s a constituency for that, in particular among older voters, white and Black.”

After the defeat of Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) by an AIPAC-funded challenger in New York, many are worried. Will Bush be the latest member of the Squad to lose? The race is shaping up to define how Democrats deal with both post-Ferguson politics and members vocal against the party’s mostly uncritical support of Israel.

Bush’s political career was born in the streets of Ferguson, fighting against police brutality. Her staunch advocacy for a ceasefire, years later, brings those same values beyond US borders. “St. Louis is my priority, but the world is also on my back, and in my head and in my heart,” Bush said at a rally. Those values carried her to an easy reelection in 2020. But now, as the party drifts back to the right, she might be punished for them.

On the muggy late-July afternoon when Bush gathered supporters, friends, and family members in a park pavilion decorated in her signature purple for her birthday, guests buzzed over the news that, only hours earlier, President Joe Biden had dropped his bid for reelection.

“Today was a gift to us,” Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, a friend of Bush’s from her Ferguson days, told the crowd.

Earlier that week, Bush had told reporters that most calls to her office lately were requests for Biden to step down. While Bush herself didn’t join the chorus of voices calling for Biden to go, she didn’t push for the president to stay in the race as loudly as other Congress members either. “Of course, her opponent jumped on that, and said this was an example of her being anti-Democratic,” Sonnier said.

“Cori Bush is desperate to talk about anything other than how she has failed the people of Missouri’s 1st congressional district,” Jordan Sanders, Bell’s campaign manager, told me in late June. “Wesley will continue talking with voters about why St. Louis needs a progressive champion who will work with, not against, President Biden on delivering his agenda.”

This line has been typical of the attacks on Bush. Bell has campaigned not only against her stance on Gaza but also asserted that her constituent services are lacking, that she hasn’t passed enough bills, and that she hasn’t been willing to work with Biden. AIPAC-funded ads have made similar points. (This is the usual state of play; the group does not often fund ads that are attacks on a candidate’s policies on Israel. Instead, it helps the challenger win on other issues.)

The money could be working. In February, a poll released by the blog Missouri Scout, in collaboration with Republican polling firm Remington Research, showed Bush trailing Bell by 22 points. But people on the ground are not confident that the race for Missouri’s 1st District is a foregone conclusion. President of the Board of Aldermen Megan Green told me the Remington Research poll is not indicative of Bush’s support on the ground—because the group has been under-polling progressives for years. “That same poll has had me far behind, when I ended up winning by 12 points against my opponent,” she said.

Other polls have shown a tighter race. Democratic Majority for Israel, an AIPAC-affiliated group, has run multiple surveys since Remington’s. Both polls show Bell and Bush close, with Bell in the lead. The latest DMFI poll, which sampled 400 residents—but did not provide details about its methodology—finds Bell with a six-point edge over Bush.

“It’s not a shoe-in, and it’s really hard to predict,” longtime Jennings city Council member Terry Wilson puts it. “But [if] anybody was to beat [Bush], I’d say he had a pretty good shot at it.”

Bell and Bush both found political careers in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, a protest movement that began 10 years ago this August when white police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed Black teenager Mike Brown. Bush’s district contains just under half of Missouri’s entire Black population. The legacy of Ferguson has played a large part in influencing the outcome of mayoral, prosecutorial, and congressional races for the past decade here.

In 2018, Bell, previously a Ferguson City Council member, ran for St. Louis county prosecutor on the promise of overturning unjust convictions and perhaps reopening the case against Wilson. He won. But just like his conservative predecessor, he did not charge Wilson.

Bush took a different path to elected office. She was a protest stalwart back in Ferguson in 2014—showing up in the streets again and again as subsequent waves of anti-police-brutality protests bubbled over the next six years. She positioned herself as a community organizer, calling herself a “politivist”—a slightly hard-to-grasp portmanteau of politician and activist. In 2020, she defeated William Lacy Clay, a part of the 52-year Clay family congressional dynasty.

This has earned her trust. Mike Brown’s family recently appeared in a Bush campaign advertisement to differentiate her activism from her opponent’s: “Wesley Bell…used my family for power, and now he’s trying to sell out St. Louis,” Michael Brown Sr. tells the camera.

Two weeks from today is the 10th anniversary of Michael Brown's death.

His family deserves accountability for his killing. We fought for it. They were promised it. And that promise was broken.

His still grieving family deserves this platform to share their story. pic.twitter.com/6pOxXT58L7

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) July 26, 2024

And rapper Tef Poe released a diss track laying out what he sees as a betrayal by Bell, over the beat of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”

“Can’t even walk through the Loop / you a sellout to the Lou,” the former Ferguson activist says, referencing the downtown area in St. Louis. “Shoulda reopened that case, but you a disgrace and ain’t even tried.”

Since her election to Congress in 2021, Bush has become one of the most outspoken members on the left, pushing for an eviction moratorium and the restoration of abortion rights.

In 2022, she won 70 percent of the vote. Since then, she has upped her finances and has received some celebrity donors. Kyrie Irving—a sometimes controversial basketball star who does not ordinarily involve himself in congressional races—donated the maximum legal amount to her campaign, according to FEC records. (Irving’s management did not respond to requests for comment.) Fellow Squad members Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) have come to Missouri to campaign for her. In total, Bush has raised about $2.6 million for her campaign.

That’s surpassed by Bell, who has taken out more than $12 million in ads. “I can’t turn on the TV without every commercial break being like three or four Wesley Bell ads or the same ad over and over again,” Green, the alderman, said.

But the money has courted controversy. As HuffPost reported in May, Bell has taken more than $65,000 from donors who also give to Missouri Republicans.

Some Missouri progressive groups can’t shake their concern that these donors will influence his policy positions. Abortion Action Missouri recently endorsed Bush, though they’ve endorsed Bell in previous races, and have no qualms with his record as a prosecutor around abortion.

Mallory Schwarz, the advocacy group’s executive director, said the group is “unsettled by what we have heard about some of the anti-abortion megadonors who have jumped into this race, and we question—what is their personal interest in weighing in, in our state and in our city?” Planned Parenthood of Missouri has also thrown its weight behind Bush in this contest, though they’ve endorsed Bell before. (On the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Bell tweeted that he had been endorsed by Planned Parenthood; he then quickly revised that tweet to reflect that he didn’t mean this race, but rather previous races he had run.)

On an organizing call in early June, Bush laid out how she sees the terms of this race to a small Zoom room. “My opponent was running against Josh Hawley, and now he takes money from Josh Hawley’s donors,” she said. “This is who we get if I am unseated—we get someone who goes whichever way the wind blows. We become unsafe when the people that only care about the money are the ones that take power.”

Donald Trump may seek to obfuscate his stance on abortion and distance himself from Project 2025’s ultraconservative policy goals, but the anti-abortion record of his vice presidential pick is impossible to hide.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance has previously argued against abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest, supported the use of the Comstock Act to criminalize sending abortion medications in the mail, and called for a national abortion ban. “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said on a podcast in 2022 when running for the Senate.

Add to that his recent support for the use of patients’ medical records by the police to investigate people who travel out of state for abortions. In a letter sent in June 2023 to the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Vance and 29 other Republican lawmakers urged HHS to reverse course on its recently finalized rule that protected patients’ reproductive healthcare information from law enforcement, particularly when patients travel to access lawful abortion care.

“Abortion is not health care—it is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women,” the letter reads. “​The Proposed Rule unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers, and directs health care providers to defy lawful court orders and search warrants.”

The rule, which became effective June 24, modifies privacy regulations under the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA protects patients’ protected health information (PHI) from disclosure but generally makes allowances for court orders or law enforcement investigations. Under the new rule, medical providers, health plans, and clearinghouses cannot share health information to assist in criminal, civil, or administrative investigations related to the “mere act of seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating reproductive health care.” It specifically protects patients who travel to states where abortion is legal and instances in which federal laws like EMTALA require abortion care.

The HHS notes that Dobbs and the flood of abortion restrictions that states have enacted since then “increase the potential that use and disclosure of PHI about an individual’s reproductive health will undermine access to and the quality of health care generally.” In response, the conservative lawmakers call the rule “ideologically motivated fearmongering about abortion after Dobbs.” In fact, the concern is not hypothetical; Idaho and several other states have passed laws criminalizing assistance to minors seeking to travel out of state for abortion care. Meanwhile, some conservative state attorneys general have threatened to prosecute abortion funds.

The call to rescind the rule is just one of many anti-abortion proposals found in the pages of Project 2025’s policy book, which until recently was viewed as the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Trump administration. Trump’s campaign has disavowed Project 2025, but its rhetoric and goals live on in Vance’s own anti-abortion proclivities. While the GOP and Trump have attempted to soften the image of their anti-abortion goals, as my colleague Julianne McShane has reported, opposing abortion is very much still part of the plan. That includes using the Fourteenth Amendment to establish “fetal personhood” and federally outlaw abortion.

The Democratic National Committee responded sharply to Vance’s prior calls to rescind the rule. As DNC National Press Secretary Emilia Rowland said in a statement, the Trump and Vance ticket would call “for every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and incidental pregnancy loss from medical treatments like chemo to be reported to the federal government…tearing away health data privacy protections under HIPAA, and allowing states to surveil patients and doctors, monitor pregnancies, restrict women’s freedom to travel for abortion care, and ultimately use health data against patients and providers in court. This isn’t about policy, it’s about control.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—erstwhile Philadelphian and “the worst leader in Jewish history since the Maccabean king who invited the Romans into Jerusalem over 2100 years ago,” according to Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.)—is slated to address Congress today, less than a week after the International Court of Justice found Israel’s actions in the West Bank to be illegal and equivalent to apartheid, and ten months into Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, in which at least 39,000 Palestinians have been killed. 

In May, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson first floated the idea of bringing Netanyahu to speak. Johnson, who has led the passage of billions of dollars of military aid for Israel, has received over $100,000 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). 

As Netanyahu comes to the US, he is facing tremendous pushback from various groups. Protesters have descended on the Capitol, with hundreds already arrested. Major unions have publicly pushed Democrats to halt aid to Israel, using the visit as leverage. And members of Congress—even the powerful Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—are skipping the address, publicly declaring a protest against Netanyahu’s refusal to end a war to which America has contributed billions of dollars.

Soon after Johnson’s announcement, the Palestinian Youth Movement and US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), among others, began to call people from around the country to come to Washington DC for a massive street protest. Buses from at least a dozen cities left before dawn today.  

Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of USCPR, says that now is the time to push toward stopping the bombs. “As Israel kills a Palestinian every four minutes and escalates regional war, justice cannot wait another day,” he said. Since October, the US has sent thousands of bombs to Israel. “Americans protesting in the streets will certainly not wait for the next president while US-made bombs paid for with our tax dollars are dropping in Gaza,” he said.

Last night, rallies outside the Watergate Hotel where Netanyahu is staying called for the Israeli Prime Minister’s arrest. Protesters toted banners reading  “WAR CRIMINAL STAYS HERE” and banged pots and pans outside the hotel until late into the night. Earlier in the day, several hundred Jewish people staged a sit-in inside the Cannon Rotunda to demand an arms embargo. 

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) has backed up the protesters’ demands, saying that “it is utterly disgraceful that leaders from both parties have invited him to address Congress. He should be arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court.” (Almost 40 governments and NGOs have filed requests with the ICC supporting the position that Netanyahu, along with other senior Israeli and Hamas officials, should be issued an arrest warrant.)

On Tuesday, seven labor unions, representing six million workers, signed a letter demanding that President Joe Biden stop sending weapons to Israel. 

Representatives of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), International Union of Painters (IUPAT), National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Electrical Workers (UE), signed the letter. Between the seven unions, they speak for nearly half of all unionized workers in the US. The American Federation of Teachers was notably absent from the letter—but as of the 22nd, that union has divested from all Israel bonds, according to a release from a pro-Palestine group within AFT.

“We have spoken directly to leaders of Palestinian trade unions who told us heartwrenching stories of the conditions faced by working people in Gaza,” the seven unions’ letter said. “Large numbers of Palestinian civilians, many of them children, continue to be killed, reportedly often with US-manufactured bombs.” Stopping US military aid, the unions said, is therefore the quickest way to achieve a ceasefire. 

Some of those unions also represent graduate students. Young people who were beaten, arrested, and in some cases hit with felony charges due to their participation in Gaza Solidarity Encampments this past spring are represented by the UAW and SEIU. Members of the UAW—which called for a ceasefire in December but endorsed President Joe Biden the following month—plan to join the mass protest in the streets during Netanyahu’s address. (Editor’s note: Mother Jones workers are represented by UAW Local 2103.)

Multiple senators and congresspeople have also announced that they aren’t going to be attending Netanyahu’s speech: Sen Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will be among those finding something else to do. 58 Democrats skipped Netanyahu’s address to Congress nine years ago. Nearly 50 House and Senate Democrats have publicly stated their intention to do so this time.

Rep. Mark Pocan, who floated the idea of protesting inside the chamber during the Netanyahu speech, being coy about his plans for tomorrow. “I’m probably having a snickers bar,” he said me, when asked.

— Marc Rod (@marcrod97) July 24, 2024

Joe Biden, as he recovers from COVID, will be missing the speech, too. As will Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, whose staff have said she has another event scheduled in Indianapolis that she must attend. That’s not much of a break from mainstream Democratic policy. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that Netanyahu should step down in March. And despite Harris’ absence from Netanyahu’s speech, she has made plans to meet privately with him that same week, as will Biden. (And, reportedly, former President Donald Trump will too.) 

A stronger signal of change than Harris’ absence from today’s speech may be her choice of advisors. The Wall Street Journal reported some Biden appointees who have guided his Gaza policy, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, aren’t likely to keep their jobs under Harris. 

Abuznaid of USCPR isn’t willing to wait for a Harris presidency to demand change. “If Vice President Kamala Harris is serious about winning the votes of the American people, who widely support a permanent ceasefire and stopping weapons to Israel, then she must prove it by taking action to push for an immediate arms embargo in her current role as vice president,” he said.

Harris, however, has not yet indicated what her own policy on Gaza will be—or whether she’ll depart from Biden’s fervent willingness to back Netanyahu in action if not always in press releases.

Even before the Supreme Court ruled late last month in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a lawsuit over a herring fishing regulation, Meredith Moore knew the case was never really about fish. Moore, the director of the fish conservation program at the nonprofit environmental group Ocean Conservancy, instead saw the case as a “Trojan horse” that would weaken public agencies’ regulatory power across the board and unleash a wave of lawsuits aimed at unraveling environmental protections. “This is an opportunity for a free-for-all,” she says.

“This is an opportunity for a free-for-all.”

As Moore had feared, when it came time for the Court to deliver its June 28 decision on Loper Bright (which it had merged with a near-identical case, Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce), the conservative majority overturned a decades-old legal precedent known as “Chevron deference.” Named after a 1984 Supreme Court case involving the oil giant, the doctrine was one of the most cited legal precedents ever. For 40 years, it instructed judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of a law—say, the Clean Water Act, Social Security Act, Affordable Care Act—when that law was unclear. Now, thanks to the pair of lawsuits (and the anti-regulatory interests like Charles Koch, who backed them), the power to determine the “best” reading of ambiguous statutes now falls to judges, not agency officials.

The decision, many legal experts warn, will curtail federal agencies’ ability to regulate everything from tax policy to reproductive rights and the environment, and is likely to be one of the court’s most significant actions in recent history—on par with decisions that overturned the right to abortion and ended affirmative action.

While it’s clear that the decision will be extraordinarily broad (which I’ve written about here and here), the specific, concrete details about its impact are less obvious. What will the ruling mean, for instance, for herring? Or other fish we eat? Or any of the more than 1,000 threatened and endangered species in the US?

Let’s start with herring. The regulation that sparked Relentless and Loper Bright required herring fishermen to pay for boat observers to monitor their catches—around $700 per trip—a practice intended to document what species are caught and prevent overfishing under the Magnuson–Stevens Act. While the Supreme Court took up the case, it only agreed to address Chevron deference, putting the fate of the fishing regulation in the hands of lower courts.

But beyond that single rule, Moore worries about federal efforts to manage fisheries in all sorts of other ways. Under the Magnuson–Stevens Act, the primary law governing US fisheries, she explains, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sets catch limits for various types of fish. If a population becomes overfished, the agency creates plans to rebuild them. In the last nearly 25 years, the agency says it’s helped recover 50 fish stocks, including populations of bocaccio (a type of rockfish), Snohomish coho salmon, and Pacific Ocean perch. But now, if the agency’s regulations are challenged in court, it will be up to a judge, rather than NOAA officials, to identify the most suitable application of laws like the Magnuson–Stevens Act—a change Moore worries will make it harder for NOAA to keep US fisheries operating sustainably.

Many other regulations may also be at risk. According to Democracy Forward, a nonprofit public policy research organization tracking lower-court citations of Loper Bright and Relentless, there have been at least 40 references to the court’s Chevron ruling as of mid-July, including in filings in 19 different cases and opinions from 11 courts. These citations involve many areas of the law, from gas appliance energy standards, Title IX, abortion, airline fees, anti-discrimination provisions in health care, and more. “By and large, these cases are being used aggressively to seek to stop regulations and programs that benefit the American people,” said Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward. In one lawsuit, Massachusetts Lobstermen Association v. National Marine Fisheries Service, lawyers representing lobster fishermen referenced the Supreme Court’s Chevron ruling as part of their fight against a federal regulation intended to protect North Atlantic right whales. (Read more about this battle here.)

But not every environmental advocate sees the overturning of Chevron deference as a disaster for plants and animals. Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that has sued the federal government many times for not doing enough to protect imperiled wildlife, told me that he expects the decision to yield a “mixed bag” of lawsuits that will take years to play out. But he also sees it as an opportunity to strengthen certain environmental protections.

For instance, Hartl argues, the Fish and Wildlife Service hasn’t always gone far enough to protect at-risk species as required by the Endangered Species Act. The agency has failed to follow its own species recovery plans, he argues, often proposing to delist species too soon. And it has never fully grappled with a key definition in the ESA: what it means for a species to be at risk of extinction within “a significant portion” of its “range”—whether that means an animal’s current range, historic range, or something else. The agency’s “unambitious” and “piecemeal” approach to recovery, as the Center for Biological Diversity has described it, hurts creatures like wolves and grizzly bears that once roamed large swaths of the country. (When reached by email, a spokesperson with the Fish and Wildlife Service pointed me to the Department of Interior, which declined to comment on its alleged shortcomings or the impacts of overturning Chevron broadly.)

Similarly, the wording of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, Hartl points out, suggests a need to steward the environment for “succeeding generations.” With this language, he argues, “NEPA creates almost an intergenerational responsibility to the environment,” and no administration has ever really capitalized on that mandate. Now, without Chevron, he argues, a federal judge might agree that federal agencies ought to do more to protect the environment under the law.

“If you have agencies constantly not meeting their mandates, and sort of falling short,” Hartl says, “Chevron is mostly a shield for them that has allowed them to perpetuate bad behavior.”

Now that Chevron is gone, Hartl says, “there actually are opportunities to make things better.” (The Center for Biological Diversity, he told me, is already planning to “retool” some of its ongoing lawsuits and introduce new ones to take advantage of the ruling.) Hartl argues that if Donald Trump wins reelection, his agencies will have “a hell of a lot less power” when it comes to regulations. “Do you want them having all this deference? I don’t.”

But overall, most of the experts I’ve spoken to about Chevron deference did not see a silver lining for wild plants and animals (or for environmental protections as a whole). Holly Doremus, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, told me via email that an optimistic view like the Center for Biological Diversity’s may be trying to “see the best in a bad situation.” In the short run, she expects federal courts to follow the Supreme Court’s lead and “be much more skeptical” of agency actions they see as overstepping the law rather than those seen as not going far enough for, say, endangered species protection. As Vermont Law School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau explains, lower courts often take their cues from the Supreme Court, which has signaled a clear desire to narrow environmental laws and reign in agency authority.

Lower courts often take their cues from the Supreme Court, which has signaled a clear desire to narrow environmental laws and reign in agency authority.

Other experts noted that the loss of Chevron will likely prompt groups on all sides of the political spectrum to judge-shop in specific courts to challenge rules they dislike. This could lead to a “lack of coherence” in which agency regulations are overturned or upheld, NRDC lawyer David Doniger, who argued the original 1984 Chevron case before the Supreme Court, told me ahead of the recent ruling. (It’s no secret, for instance, that a disproportionate number of lawsuits against Biden administration regulations are filed in the Amarillo Division of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where conservative, Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk sits.)

“I think you could have maybe a few wins here and there,” the Ocean Conservancy’s Moore says. “But I’m more concerned about the instability, uncertainty, and patchwork nature of what regulations will look like if they’re all able to be sued in different ways in different places.”

Echoing both Moore and Doremus, Parenteau said that while environmental advocates may see some victories in court, he believes they’re up against a “stacked deck” under this new system, in part because of the signals coming from the Supreme Court and industry’s near-unlimited resources to sue the government.

“The opponents of environmental regulation have the upper hand, there is no question about it,” he says.” And they’re going to win and win and win. And environmental advocates are just going to have to scrape and claw and try to win a few. That’s the world we’re in.”

Even after the attempted assassination of their presidential candidate, the GOP remains focused on being shitty: During a House Oversight Committee hearing Monday, several GOP representatives blamed Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on the Secret Service hiring women.

In that hearing, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raked Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over the coals for the agency’s failure to prevent 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks from shooting the GOP presidential candidate with an AR-15 rifle. While most remained focused on the agency’s alleged procedural failings, or our nation’s epidemic of gun violence, a few representatives took a more misogynistic approach.

“You are a DEI horror story,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “My wife and I have told my daughter multiple times about how she is going to succeed. She will succeed in life by achieving. Ma’am, you have not achieved today. You’ve let the American public down, and if it were up to me, you’d be gone.”

He wasn’t the only one expressing these thoughts. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) asked Cheatle if she thought there were “too many men” in the Secret Service—and whether she wasn’t hiring men to “meet certain targets.”

The remarks did not go unchecked by their Democratic colleagues: Both Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) called those legislators out during the meeting.

“Some Republicans have used this moment to attack progress towards racial justice and gender equity in America. Disappointing, but not surprising,” said Pressley, adding, “In the wake of gun violence and tragic loss of life, Republicans are ignoring solutions like gun safety reform and are instead trotting out sexist tropes.”

Sexist sentiments were not contained to today’s hearing. Conservative media outlets and far-right influencers were quick to blame female Secret Service agents for the attempt on the president’s life.

A few days following Trump’s attack, the Daily Wire‘s Matt Walsh posted a video of female agents surrounding Trump with the caption:

“There should not be any women in the Secret Service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.”

YouTuber Pearl Davis, often described as the “female Andrew Tate,” tweeted, “Why do we keep trying to put women in positions where we don’t belong? Go work in human resources, assistant, sales, or low-level management.”

It’s easy to write off conservatives’ obsession with “DEI” as pathetic (which it is). But as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, it absolutely should be taken seriously. Removing DEI programs from institutions like universities and workplaces is a large part of Project 2025, the 920-page plan to introduce a Trump-led autocracy to the US; stigmatizing DEI and its advocates is an element of that process. Dias reports:

The group suggests the next conservative presidential administration “must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for culture warriors” and proposes removing terms such as gender equality, DEI, abortion, and reproductive rights from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

It also calls for: amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to prevent the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from collecting data on race and ethnicity; doing away with disparate impact legal theory; limiting the applications of the Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that established Title VII protections for employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and rescinding regulations that bar discrimination based on “sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”

With President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, and Kamala Harris, a Black woman, the frontrunner to become his replacement, we’re already seeing an uptick in “DEI” being leveled as an insult, especially towards Harris herself.

On Sunday, Grothman, the Wisconsin Republican, told CBS that Democrats are only endorsing the vice president as the Democratic nominee because of “her ethnic background.” Judging by today’s congressional hearing, if Harris clinches the candidacy, those racist and sexist attacks are surely going to escalate.

Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, tells our Milwaukee affiliate, @CBS58, that many Democrats feel they must stick with VP Kamala Harris for the presidential nomination "because of her ethnic background."

Grothman also said it "is going to be more… pic.twitter.com/BKiuBNGGAY

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 22, 2024

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

As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this week to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government. 

Dozens of conservative groups contributed to Project 2025, which recommends changes that would touch every aspect of American life and transform federal agencies—from the Department of Defense to the Department of Interior to the Federal Reserve. Although it has largely garnered attention for its proposed crackdowns on human rights and individual liberties, the blueprint would also undermine the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice. 

“This is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically…dismantle the government in service of private industry.”  

Under President Joe Biden’s direction, the majority of the federal government’s vast system of departments, agencies, and commissions have belatedly undertaken the arduous task of incorporating climate change into their operations and procedures. Two summers ago, Biden also signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate spending law in U.S. history with the potential to help drive greenhouse gas emissions down 42 percent below 2005 levels. 

Project 2025 seeks to undo much of that progress by slashing funding for government programs across the board, weakening federal oversight and policymaking capabilities, rolling back legislation passed during Biden’s first term, and eliminating career personnel. The policy changes it suggests—which include executive orders that Trump could implement single-handedly, regulatory changes by federal agencies, and legislation that would require congressional approval—would make it extremely difficult for the United States to fulfill the climate goals it has committed to under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

“It’s real bad,” said David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the environmental advocacy group the League of Environmental Voters. “This is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically take over, take away rights and freedoms, and dismantle the government in service of private industry.”  

Trump has sought to distance himself from the blueprint. “Some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote in a social media post last week. 

However, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to Project 2025, and policy experts and environmental advocates fear Project 2025 will play an influential role in shaping GOP policy if Trump is reelected in November. Some of the blueprint’s recommendations are echoed in the Republican National Convention’s official party platform, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts says he is “good friends” with Trump’s new running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Previous Heritage Foundation roadmaps have successfully dictated presidential agendas; 64 percent of the policy recommendations the foundation put out in 2016 had been implemented or considered under Trump one year into his term. The Heritage Foundation declined to provide a comment for this story.  

Broadly speaking, Project 2025 proposals aim to scale down the federal government and empower states. The document calls for “unleashing all of America’s energy resources” by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants. “What’s been designed here is a project that ensures a fossil fuel agenda, both in the literal and figurative sense,” said Craig Segall, the vice president of the climate-oriented political advocacy group Evergreen Action. 

Within the Department of Energy, offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped. The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research. 

“There’s no problem that’s getting addressed with this solution, this is a solution in search of some problem.”

In addition to these major overhauls, Project 2025 advocates for getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that safeguard public health and environmental justice. It recommends eliminating the Endangerment Finding—the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends axing government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damage each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the “co-benefits,” or the knock-on positive health impacts, of their policies, such as better air quality. 

“When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. “The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.” 

Other proposals would wreak havoc on the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Project 2025 suggests eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service housed therein and replacing those organizations with private companies. The blueprint appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

But the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data from the National Weather Service, as do most other private weather service companies, and eliminating public weather data could devastate Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts. “It’s preposterous,” said Rob Moore, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund. “There’s no problem that’s getting addressed with this solution, this is a solution in search of some problem.” 

“You are disincentivizing states and local governments from making wise decisions about where and house to build.”

The document also advocates moving the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which marshals federal disaster response, out from under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, where it has been housed for more than 20 years, and into the Department of the Interior or the Department of Transportation. “All of the agencies within the Department of Interior are federal land management agencies that own lots of land and manage those resources on behalf of the federal government,” Moore said. “Why would you put FEMA there? I can’t even fathom why that is a starting point.” 

The blueprint recommends eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program and moving flood insurance to private insurers. That notion skates right over the fact that the federal program was initially established because private insurers found that it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-prone homes—long before climate change began wreaking havoc on the insurance market. 

Despite the alarming implications of most of Project 2025’s climate-related proposals, it also recommends a small number of policies that climate experts said are worth considering. Its authors call for shifting the costs of natural disasters from the federal government to states. That’s not a bad conversation to have, Moore pointed out. “I think there’s people within FEMA who feel the same way,” he said.

The federal government currently shoulders at least 75 percent of the costs of national disaster recovery, paving the way for development and rebuilding in risky areas. “You are disincentivizing states and local governments from making wise decisions about where and house to build because they know the federal government is going to pick up the tab for whatever mistake they make,” Moore said.  

Quillan Robinson, a senior advisor with ConservAmerica who has worked with Republicans in Washington, DC, on crafting emissions policies, was heartened by the authors’ call for an end to what they termed “unfair bias against the nuclear industry.” Nuclear energy is a reliable source of carbon-free energy, but it has been plagued by security and public health concerns, as well as staunch opposition from some environmental activists. “We know it’s a crucial technology for decarbonization,” Robinson said, noting that there’s growing bipartisan interest in the energy source among lawmakers in Congress. 

An analysis conducted by the United Kingdom-based Carbon Brief found that a Trump presidency would lead to 400 billion metric tons of additional emissions in the U.S. by 2030—the emissions output of the European Union and Japan combined.

Above all else, Segall, from Evergreen Action, is worried about the effect Project 2025 would have on the personnel who make up the federal government. Much of the way the administrative state works is safeguarded in the minds of career staff who pass their knowledge on to the next cadre of federal workers. When this institutional knowledge is curbed, as it was by budget cuts and hostile management during Trump’s first term, the government loses crucial information that helps it run. The personnel “scatter,” he said, disrupts bottom-line operations and grinds the government to a halt. 

Although Project 2025’s proposals are radical, Segall said that its effect on public servants would echo a pattern that has been playing out for decades. “This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.”

Straight from jail, Peter Navarro told the Republican National Convention Wednesday: “I went to prison so you won’t have to.”

The former Trump White House trade advisor, who peddled phony election fraud claims in late 2020, in fact went to prison for contempt of Congress. Subpoenaed by the January 6 House committee, Navarro completely blew them off. He took the position that his own assertion of executive privilege relieved him from having to wrangle with the committee, a stance no American court has yet endorsed.

You actually don’t have to go prison as long as you pay a bit more attention to the law than the famously self-regarding Dr. Navarro, who is not a lawyer, but tried to play one in court. Executive privilege is real, but again, it is not magic.

Navarro declared Wednesday that the January 6 committee “demanded that I violate executive privilege,” but he “refused.” In fact, Navarro never produced any evidence that Trump asserted privilege to block him from appearing. Notably, Trump’s lawyers declined to confirm Navarro’s version of events. Navarro went to prison, in part, because Trump refused.

Navarro in his remarks also cited Steve Bannon, who was similarly imprisoned for contempt of Congress after refusing to negotiate at all with the January 6 committee after being hit with a subpoena. (Navarro did not name the exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui, who with Bannon launched a supposed government-in-waiting to replace the Chinese Communist Party. Navarro nominally worked for Guo and Bannon’s organization as an international ambassador. Guo was convicted Tuesday of using the group as a means to run a racketeering conspiracy that stole hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters. Navarro wasn’t charged in the case.)

But Navarro’s depiction of himself as martyr to Democratic “lawfare” reinforced a key convention myth: A man who has vowed to use the Justice Department and other powers of the presidency to jail political foes is a victim of politicized prosecution.

“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, they can come for you,” Navarro declared.

This supposed threat, Navarro said, requires Republicans to seize control of “all three branches of our government.”

Navarro told the Associated Press earlier on Wednesday that he planned to call for “unity.” On stage, however, he went in a different direction, urging the GOP to use the power they hope to win for retribution against their enemies.

With a note of menace, Navarro blamed Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has worked to restore the Justice Department’s nonpartisan reputation, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the widely respected judge (and former defense attorney) who sentenced to four months in prison for contempt him as responsible for his imprisonment.

“Amit Mehta,” Navarro said. “Keep your eye on him.”

On election day, Navarro added, “America will hold these lawfare jackals accountable.”