In about two weeks, nearly everyone in this Atlanta conference room will be out of a job. But tonight, on November 5, the Scripps News team has an election to cover.

“Nothing goes on the air unless it gets vetted through the control room, okay?” says Brian Donlon, a New Yorker who tempers his gruff side with wisecracks. As the outlet’s senior director of live programming, he cautions two dozen anchors, writers, producers, and editors a couple of hours before showtime at the organization’s HQ, “It’s not the Wild West.”

Like other newsrooms across the country, Scripps News was bracing for the worst—potential violence, claims of rigged voting, a deluge of disinformation. But it was also wrestling with its own reckoning: the unraveling of its national broadcast news operation and the imminent unemployment of roughly 200 colleagues.

Scripps News is a division of the E.W. Scripps Company, one of the nation’s largest local TV broadcasters and the owner of brands Court TV and Ion Television. Acquired by E.W. Scripps in 2014 under the moniker Newsy, and then rebranded two years ago as Scripps News, it was pitched as a neutral voice in a hyperpolarized media ecosystem, a just-the-facts national alternative for viewers tired of punditry and hyperbole. Available free via digital antennas and on streaming services, the 24/7 news operation racked up awards and accolades for its evenhanded coverage from industry players like the Radio Television Digital News Association and gained a growing audience.

But financially, Scripps News could not outrun the trends decimating the media landscape—dwindling ad dollars and increasing competition from social media, podcasts, Substacks, and partisan outlets. It’s a downward spiral that began with print. Since 2005, a third of newspapers have disappeared while others have been gutted after being swallowed up by venture capital firms; over the past three decades, the number of newspaper reporters in the US has dropped by nearly two-thirds.

National TV news platforms now are facing a similar reckoning. Ad buyers want large audiences, but ratings are falling. Even primetime viewership on election night, broadcast media’s Super Bowl, was down 25 percent across all networks, compared with 2020. CBS and NBC have slashed jobs, while CNN has instituted a new paywall and is reportedly poised for more rounds of layoffs. Many mainstream outlets are also leaning into opinion and divisiveness, none more so than Fox News, which consistently scores the highest ratings. In 2020, Fox pulled out all the stops to help Donald Trump propagate his stolen election claims, and as a result, it was eventually forced to pay Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest-ever media settlements of $787.5 million for amplifying the actually fake news that its technology was used to commit widespread election fraud. Despite the debacle, Fox continues to thrive: In October, Nielsen said the network had marked 91 consecutive quarters as the most-watched cable news channel during primetime hours.

More traditional outlets are “increasingly struggling to reach people on the right, and there are other news outlets that have really sought to cater to them,” says Benjamin Toff, co-author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. “So you have this polarization of news audiences as well, and I think that puts a lot of conventional news organizations that perceive themselves as trying to be politically balanced in an awkward position.” This trend dovetails with social media platforms growing “less and less interested in actually delivering news content,” Toff adds.

In addition to unforgiving market forces, Trump and his allies have relentlessly attacked and attempted to discredit news outlets. Lately, Trump backer Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in undermining mainstream journalism, has joined the action. While frequently blasting out conspiracy theories and misinformation on X, the platform he owns, he has simultaneously worked to sow distrust in the press. Since November 5, he has relentlessly told his more than 205 million followers they are a practical replacement for trained journalists: “You are the media now.”

Scripps News is just one of the latest victims in an industry under siege. By the time you read this, it will have laid off the majority of its staff and dramatically scaled back its mission, no longer operating as a round-the-clock broadcast news source, and transitioning to a local news and streaming-only model. Usually, we learn about the fall of media organizations retrospectively, in postmortems. I wanted to see one in its liminal moment between bustling existence and relative extinction. So I spent Election Day in the Scripps News offices.

As Donlon reaches the end of his talk to a division he’s led since October 2023, in a conference room packed with pensive staff and trays of pasta, he tries to maintain his business-as-usual approach—but nearly falters. “Thirteen months and now we’re here,” Donlon says, his voice cracking. “When we educate one viewer and tell them something they didn’t know the day before, we did our jobs. That’s the job. Let’s go do it.”

Founded in 1878, the E.W. Scripps Company has navigated a century and a half of media evolutions. Starting from a single paper in Cleveland, it would become the nation’s first modern newspaper chain. It then established a wire service in 1907 that competed with the Associated Press. It branched into radio and, after World War II, opened its first local TV news stations. By 2011, the company owned about 20, reaching 13 percent of US households.

In 2015, with online news outlets growing and poaching advertisers, Scripps spun off more than a dozen local newspapers—those ended up with Gannett, which has gutted them—to focus on TV news. Today, Scripps has a presence in 40-plus markets with more than 60 local television stations. Its local programming is supplemented by correspondents stationed around the country.

When Adam Symson took over as CEO in 2017, he had an idea. What if the company drew upon the content its national reporters were already producing for local channels to create a national news division with its own anchors? What if the product was free? What if it delivered information unfiltered by hosts and opinion panels that have come to dominate the cable networks? The model would rival traditional broadcast news channels and attract viewers who didn’t want a cable package but could access this content via antennas or streaming platforms.

“That’s where TikTok competitors don’t matter and social media doesn’t matter, because they’re not always going to be there. We can get there.”

In 2023, Donlon, who had worked for many leading television news companies over a multidecade career and had most recently been an executive producer at Scripps News, took charge of fine-tuning all the live programming. Slowly, the division ramped up its offerings from intermittent live shows on weekdays to a 24/7 operation with an emphasis on breaking news.

“If it’s happening, we’re going no matter what. We are taking the viewer there. We’re going to book the best guests around it, and we’re going to try to get reporters there, because that’s where we can make a difference,” Donlon reminisces about the strategy a few days before election night. “That’s where the TikTok competitors don’t matter and the social media doesn’t matter, because they’re not always going to be there. We can get there.”

Donlon wanted Scripps News to educate viewers without persuading them—even if it came at the expense of attracting a more diehard audience. “I’ve worked at Fox. I’ve worked at MSNBC. And I can’t always say that I left those buildings thinking we served the viewer best,” he tells me. “I can honestly say that I’ve never left here thinking we didn’t do the right thing.”

The commitment to impartial reporting helped reporters connect with viewers across the political spectrum. Sometimes when political correspondent Haley Bull was in the field, people asked her, “Well, which way does your outlet lean?” She tells me she took pride in answering: “I am able to say that we approach our coverage in an objective, fair, unbiased, and balanced manner.”

Of course, sometimes the appearance of balance comes at the price of avoiding the obvious. When a comedian at a Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” Scripps News initially said “many have called [the comment] racist,” instead of just calling it racist. And last summer, a three-minute segment recapping the June debate that led to Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race made little mention of how poorly he performed or how decrepit he appeared.

Nevertheless, viewers were responding to Scripps’ understated approach. Streaming viewership increased more than 40 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to Scripps News Vice President Christina Hartman. Viewership of Morning Rush, a Today Show alternative, jumped 73 percent from December 2023 to September 2024. America Tonight had its best month ever this past September, with a 61 percent increase in viewers compared with the show’s debut in May. As its audience grew, Scripps News earned recognition. Two days before Symson announced the division would face major layoffs, Scripps News won an Emmy for its reporting on the residents of Flint, Michigan, who still don’t have lead-free water. Later, Scripps took home two prestigious Edward R. Murrow awards, which honor excellence in broadcasting.

“That’s the hardest part about this whole process,” says America Tonight host Maritsa Georgiou, who was part of the layoffs. “We got to a place where we were hitting these marks. Our viewership was growing every month. Show ratings are doing great.”

But the ratings didn’t translate to a balanced budget, which came as a surprise to Symson. A former reporter himself, he had seen major corporations, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, pledge to double down on supporting the pillars of our democracy, including the media. Seeing an opening, he embarked on a “personal quest to leverage their words to spawn conversations about how they could step up now,” he says. “I had conversations directly with the CEOs and CMOs of some of America’s largest companies, trying to draw the line between the important role that journalism plays and what we were doing at Scripps News and how they were spending their ad dollars­—and I failed.”

Companies can buy ads anywhere. Faced with the choice of marketing their products next to coverage of war, famine, and political strife or during sitcoms or football games, guess which one they’ll pick. The fewer viewers an outlet gets, the less likely a company is to risk being highlighted next to news that generally bums people out. “When push came to shove,” Symson notes, ad buyers were “uncomfortable putting their dollars to work around the news.”

While E.W. Scripps’ local news stations and entertainment assets were profitable, Scripps News was posting huge losses that contributed to a precipitous decline in the company’s share price; it slid from $20 three years ago to a low of $1.74 this past September.

“We were losing millions upon millions upon millions at a time when E.W. Scripps became increasingly unable to support that kind of loss,” says Hartman, who says she was responsible for decreasing the team’s expenses and increasing the product’s revenue. “When I look at our weekly broadcast revenue, we’re more than doubling what last year was. We could have tripled it, and it still wouldn’t have closed that gap.”

In retrospect, Georgiou says there were signs the budget was growing tighter. Then, on the morning of September 27, a blog post warning that Scripps News was headed for layoffs began circulating in employee group chats. Quickly thereafter, Symson convened a town hall and delivered the bad news.

With about 200 positions eliminated, approximately 60 people will remain at Scripps News. They will continue to report and package political, investigative, and national news segments that appear on and complement E.W. Scripps’ local stations. Sans anchors, the standalone news packages will be available on streaming platforms. Matt Simon, the vice president of news leading the leaner unit, says that by focusing on streaming, Scripps will be able to glean better metrics on the types of reporting that attracts viewers.

“Going straight to streaming as our primary and, in many cases, sole distribution is going to enable us to make sure we’re delivering to consumers and viewers the news that they need and want,” he says.

Donlon, who departed in mid-­November with most of his team, isn’t sold on the viability of the new strategy. “Frankly, I have not been involved with the development of that product at all,” he says. “I wish they would have involved me. I probably would have made some different suggestions, at least on personnel, but I wasn’t consulted.”

CEO Symson is also unsure whether streaming news segments will translate to profit. But his qualms have nothing to do with the quality of reporting. “I know for a fact that our journalism will continue to serve the industry and serve the country,” he says. “I think what I worry about is whether the American people are willing consumers.”

A few hours after the last production meeting, election results begin to trickle in to Scripps’ darkened control room. A writer drafts teleprompter scripts for the anchors, producers keep the live banners fresh, and a director seamlessly toggles among 14 journalists in the field.

Twenty different conversations are happening at once. The person making sense of them all is Donlon. Sometime around 8:15 p.m., he tells the team to pivot from focusing on the anchor desk to covering a press conference where law enforcement officials were discussing bomb threats made to more than two dozen Georgia voting sites. In a studio down the hall, host Georgiou asks a guest to “very quickly” answer an unrelated election question before cutting over. “No, no, no,” Donlon mutters in the control room, wanting his team to cut away. “There’s no such thing as very quickly.”

Within seconds, a control room producer starts to phase in instrumental music to cut off Georgiou and her guest. It is a master class in controlled chaos, and it takes only three words to make it happen. Nobody breaks a sweat.

When brief lulls allow, Donlon compliments his team’s hard work and ­repeatedly asks whether they would like more pasta. If he could, he tells me that night, he would have offered them stable jobs instead. Departing anchor Georgiou describes the depressing circumstances as “working through a funeral—our own.”

“The professionalism shining through has been heartwarming,” says Simon, “but also incredibly heart-wrenching—knowing that when the election starts to get resolved, people will stop having a place to work.”

Although the results of the presidential race were clear by early Wednesday morning, Scripps News had prepared for a repeat of the chaotic 2020 race, when the winner wasn’t determined for nearly a week. Because of the impending layoffs, the newsroom had already wound down some of its programming and wasn’t scheduled to broadcast live over the weekend. The previous week, Donlon had asked his team if anyone would be willing, on their own time, to staff an emergency show if necessary. He needed 12 people; more than 30 volunteered.

Kate O’Brian, president of news, who was to depart Scripps at the end of 2024, wasn’t surprised. “There will be emotions that are connected to what’s happening to them and their jobs,” she says, “but I bet they are way pushed down while we do the work.”

“You don’t have time to cry now,” she adds. “You cry later.”

In 2016, Jarrod Fidden, an Australian entrepreneur living in Ireland, announced that he’d launched a dating app for conspiracy theorists—or, as he put it at the time, for those who engage with “socially inconvenient truths.” The app was written up in dozens of news outlets in multiple languages as a funny curiosity. Fidden himself was described the same way: a jaunty, voluble character who liked to tell reporters how he and his wife had “woken up” together a few years before to the sinister, hidden hands shaping the world, generating the idea for the site.

Elon Musk’s version of X has proven especially helpful for the science-denying account.

While Awake Dating soon vanished from the headlines, the man behind the app seems to have moved on to more impactful pursuits. Less than a decade later, Wide Awake Media, a Twitter account that Fidden appears to operate, has become a major voice for climate denialism. Its more than 500,000 followers on X include former Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone; Craig Kelly, a former member of Australian Parliament and an overt climate change denialist; former General Mike Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a QAnon promoter; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an opponent of early Covid lockdown measures and a professor of health policy at Stanford, whom Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health in his second term.

Wide Awake Media is a huge player in a small but exceedingly noisy echo chamber of climate denial accounts on X, which parrot each other’s paranoid assertions that climate change is a “hoax” and that green energy proposals are a pretext to impose global control. With the help of Twitter’s monetized verification system, Wide Awake has grown an exceedingly large audience, mostly on the right; Elon Musk himself recently replied to the account, further raising its visibility.

The fact that a single conspiracy entrepreneur has been able to gain such a large foothold in Twitter’s information ecosystem is concerning to experts who research climate denialism and its dissemination.

Jennie King is the director of climate research and policy for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank that studies how extremism and disinformation spread online. “The Wide Awake story is indicative of various online trends,” she says, “including the diversity of actors who are piggybacking on the climate crisis as a way to generate both clout and revenue.”  

In its current form, Wide Awake Media began as a Telegram channel promoting primarily anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown content before joining Twitter in 2022 and becoming more active after Musk’s purchase of the site. (The Telegram channel remains, but is less frequently updated.) At the same time, the account also shifted to focus largely on climate denialism.

The Twitter account is verified, meaning its operator pays for a subscription, and in return has its visibility and replies boosted by the site’s algorithm. A verified account also means Wide Awake Media can make money from popular content.

In 2023, the account saw a huge boom in traffic; between April and November of that year, King says, “they had gone from having 322 followers to 250,000 followers. This morning they’re at 577,000. So in the course of 18 months, that is a 1.7 thousand fold increase.”  

The account focuses on several themes, King says, that reliably drive grievance-based engagement, including perceived government overreach during early days of Covid and its tension with “individual liberties,” and “fundamental changes to infrastructure and our lived environment,” like proposals for so-called 15-minute cities.

“There was a diverse community of people with grievances around these themes,” she explains. “Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new, in this case climate action.”

The transition was especially pronounced in 2023, King says. At that time, with the worst days of Covid infections over, you couldn’t “generate the same engagement with pandemic-related content,” she explains. “So you need to expand the business model and think about how you’re going to maintain your relevance, visibility, traction, and profit drivers.” 

Acting in a “mutually reinforcing” echo chamber with other online climate deniers is a huge part of Wide Awake’s strategy, King says. “It’s a tiny minority of accounts, probably less than 50 in the Anglosphere, who are really driving this ecosystem. They are constantly citing each other, appearing in each other’s channels, using each other to provide a veneer of credibility, and doing what disinfo needs to in order to survive: create the impression of critical mass.” 

Wide Awake Media also uses Twitter to promote an online store selling T-shirts with conspiratorial slogans—another way the operator has monetized their presence on the platform. (It also periodically promotes donations through fundraising platforms.) As Media Matters noted in a September 2023 analysis, the account’s “seemingly scrappy operation offering little original content besides t-shirts, proves that becoming a climate denial influencer is easier than ever.” 

A previous email for Fidden is no longer operational, and whoever is behind the Twitter account didn’t respond to several requests for comment—except to post a screenshot of one email I sent, warning that a “hit piece” was imminent. But there are strong indications Fidden is the person behind the Wide Awake Media Twitter account. For one, Wide Awake Media LLC was the name of the company he founded to promote Awake Dating. A previous website, wideawakemedia.ie, which advertised Awake Dating, began redirecting to an identical US-based site, wideawakemedia.us, in 2018. Both the Irish and US sites linked to the Wide Awake Media Twitter account as methods of contact. So does the vendor that sells Wide Awake Media’s T-shirts, suggesting one common operator behind the Irish site, the US site, and the T-shirt seller.

(The Twitter account has claimed to be a “one man operation” based in the UK, uses British spelling, and engages heavily with conspiracy theories about Australian politics, where Fidden is from, and local issues affecting the UK and Ireland.)

“Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new…climate action.”

In the transition from conspiracist dating to climate denial, Fidden seems to have lost at least one ally. Daniel John Sullivan, a Seattle-based software engineer, was previously identified as Awake Dating’s CTO. On one of several blogs he maintains, Sullivan has called Fidden a “shit head” and “a grifter.” In a brief email exchange, Sullivan emphatically stated that he’s no longer involved with Fidden or any of his projects. 

Wide Awake Media could be viewed as what the Pew Research Center, in a recent report, called a “news influencer”—a poster with no journalism background or news outlet affiliation, that nonetheless helps shape how their audience reads and interprets current events.

Musk’s version of X has proved especially helpful for Wide Awake Media as it expands its audience and promotes paranoia, given that under him, the company has dismantled its trust and safety teams and fundamentally ceded the fight against disinformation. That can, King says, “create a culture of permissibility within a platform.” 

“People know they’re likely to be able to act with impunity,” she adds. By removing the safeguards, “You create an enabling environment where certain accounts are suddenly able to accumulate enormous followings overnight.” 

Of course, individual climate disinformation peddlers are always joined by the much more powerful industry lobbyists. At this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP29, oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered “the delegations of almost every country,” the Guardian reported. But responses to the climate denialism industry, and the individuals who spread it, are also starting to take shape. Brazil, the United Nations, and UNESCO recently announced a project to respond to climate disinformation. Their Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change will, the groups have said, “expand the scope and breadth of research into climate disinformation and its impacts.” (Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has also announced support for the move.)

Meanwhile, King says, climate disinformation is likely to continue to be a major area of focus for conspiracy peddlers, because of the grim reality that climate change and its harmful impacts are increasingly impossible to ignore. 

“Judging from what we know about the climate crisis, and how its effects are becoming more directly experienced by the general public, this topic is going to have a long shelf life,” she says.

For years, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and seller of pills he claims reverse the effects of Covid vaccines, who Donald Trump has announced as his pick to replace FBI Director Chris Wray, has made his mission plain: He wants to crush the supposed Deep State that has conspired against Trump. Last year, while appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, he vowed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.” This was not an empty threat, for Patel has a list of specific targets for his score-settling. And that line-up includes not only Democrats but also prominent Republicans.

Patel laid out his plans in a 2023 book titled Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy. In this work, he breathlessly described the Deep State as a “coordinated, ideologically rigid force independent from the people that manipulates the levers of politics and justice for its own gain and self-preservation.” It is run “by a significant number of high-level cultural leaders and officials who, acting through networks of networks, disregard objectivity, weaponize the law, spread disinformation, spurn fairness, or even violate their oaths of office for political and personal gain, all at the expense of equal justice and American national security.” He added, “They are thugs in suits, nothing more than government gangsters.” And he inveighed that this is “a cabal of unelected tyrants.”

In his book, Patel, a supporter of QAnon and a promoter of assorted MAGA conspiracy theories (the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, the Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax, and the January 6 riot was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents), called for mounting “investigations” to “take on the Deep State.” Though he doesn’t specify what the cause for these inquiries would be, he has plenty of people in mind. In an appendix to the book, Patel presented a list of 60 supposed members of the Deep State who are current or former executive branch officials and who presumably would be the prey. He noted this roster did not include “other corrupt actors,” such as California Democrats Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, “the entire fake news mafia press corps,” and former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan. (When Patel worked for the GOP-controlled House intelligence committee, he had run-ins with Ryan over the issuance of subpoenas and Patel leaking information to a Fox News reporter—which must mean that Ryan was a Deep State operative.)

Patel’s list names what would for a MAGA activist be the obvious purported cabalists: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and former or current FBI directors Chris Wray, Robert Mueller, and James Comey. (Patel doesn’t explain why Comey, a supposed anti-Trump Deep State player, torpedoed Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016 when he reopened an FBI inquiry into her handling of State Department emails in the final days of the campaign.)

This line-up also includes a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees. These include Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump; John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first White House stint; Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel; Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump; Sarah Isgur Flores, who was head of communications for Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions; Alyssa Farah Griffin, the director of strategic commissions in the Trump White House; and Stephanie Grisham, former chief of staff for Melania Trump.

When Barr was Trump’s attorney general, he prevented Trump from appointing Patel deputy director of the FBI, noting Patel was vastly unqualified for the position. “Over my dead body,” Barr told the White House at the time. Barr’s presence on Patel’s run-down of Deep State wrongdoers—like Ryan’s inclusion— suggests it might also function as a list of his own personal vendettas.

After recently learning her name appeared in Patel’s appendix of enemies, Flores, who’s now a news commentator, tweeted, “Just learned I’m included on this list. I’ve never met Patel or attended any meetings where he was present as far as I know. Will include a disclaimer when I talk about this intent to nominate from now on.”

There are other Republicans on Patel’s Deep State inventory: Robert Hur, the US attorney who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents; Cassidy Hutchinson, the twenty-something aide who worked for Mark Meadows, the final White House chief of staff during the first Trump presidency; Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser for Trump; Ryan McCarthy, a secretary of the Army under Trump; Pat Philbin, a deputy White House counsel for Trump; Rod Rosenstein, a deputy attorney general for Trump; and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official under Trump.

Last year, Patel filed a lawsuit against Wray, Rosenstein, Hur, and others, claiming that in 2017, when he was an investigator for the House intelligence committee, the Justice Department spied on him.

These Republicans on Patel’s hit list are all in his dark worldview sinister Deep Staters. Yet some of these selections are especially absurd. Barr, as attorney general, undermined Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, an inquiry that according to Patel was a Deep State plot. Why would a Deep State denizen do that? And while Barr did not back up Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him, he endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign this year. Another curious move for an anti-Trump conspirator.

When she was at the Justice Department, Flores defended Trump’s controversial Muslim travel ban and his family separation policy. Hur issued a report that raised questions about Biden’s age and abilities. Rosenstein helped Trump fire Comey as FBI director. Hutchinson was an intern for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and then Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) before becoming an intern in the Trump White House for the office of legislative affairs. (She was a key witness at the hearings held by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 riot.). Griffin, the daughter of far-right journalist Joseph Farah, worked for her dad’s website, WorldNetDaily, then interned for a GOP congressman and was an associate producer for Fox host Laura Ingraham. She later served as a press secretary for Meadows and for the House Freedom Caucus before becoming a spokesperson for Vice President Mike Pence and, then, director of strategic communications for the Trump White House.

These are not the profiles or actions of Deep State plotters. Their inclusion on Patel’s list reveals the ludicrousness of his notion that a nefarious Deep State exists and has been scheming to sabotage Trump and destroy America. Patel is like the old commie-hunter who spots subversives under every bed and at every PTA bake sale. His book and his entire exercise of naming names raises questions about his analytical ability—an important asset for an FBI director. This appendix shows Patel is nothing but an extreme Trump loyalist, yearning to use (or abuse) government power to pursue Trump’s critics and opponents, as well as his own. Patel is even something of a Trump royalist, having written a series of children’s books about a “King Donald” who manages to triumph over his evil foes led by “Hillary Queenton.”

Still, Patel and Government Gangsters, which features a photo of Patel on the cover, ought not be dismissed. Patel has signaled he’s looking to conduct revenge-a-thon, and Trump endorsed this work as a “brilliant roadmap highlighting every corrupt actor.” He declared, “we will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government!” That indicates Patel’s list could end up as a to-do—or to-get—list for Trump. Not only Democrats should worry about that.

On Tuesday, the Department of Labor filed a proposed rule that could end the subminimum wage for disabled people—beginning the process of closing a loophole that can let companies pay disabled employees less than a dollar per hour.

When the federal minimum wage was established in 1938, it included a carveout that would permit companies to obtain certificates and pay disabled people less than non-disabled people. The argument for this subminimum wage is that disabled people bring less value to the workforce.

As of January 2023, half of the people—mostly those with intellectual and developmental disabilities—working under this certificate program make less than $3.50 an hour. These employees mostly work in sheltered workshops, which disabled advocates have also criticized for segregating disabled workers.

The new proposal recommends that the Department of Labor stop issuing new certificates, as well as let current certificates expire. Prior to this rule, 25 states have either started to phase out, completely ended, or introduced legislation to end subminimum wage for disabled people.

Mia Ives-Rublee, the senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, said that ending the certificate program “is one of the first steps to reducing poverty within the disability community and stopping the exploitation of disabled people.”

This proposed rule has been in the works for a long time. In 2014, an advisory committee was put together, which included advocates with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The committee concluded that “current widespread practice of paying workers subminimum wages, based on assumptions that individuals with disabilities cannot work in typical jobs…[is] antithetical to the intent of modern federal policy and law.”

Of course, the elephant in the rule is whether the incoming Trump administration will support an end to this type of subminimum wage. Donald Trump has not previously voiced his opposition or support of the certificate program; likewise, Project 2025 has not weighed in on this certificate program either.

Members of the public will be able to submit written comments on this proposed rule by January 17, 2025.

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

The world’s biggest climate case begins at The Hague in the Netherlands today. Oral arguments will be heard by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which will consider what obligations United Nations member states have under international law to protect the planet from greenhouse gas emissions for future generations.

The case begins less than two weeks after negotiations collapsed at the UN’s annual international climate conference, COP29, in Azerbaijan, resulting in a climate finance agreement that’s been widely criticized as inadequate. It also marks the end of the hottest year on record, punctuated by numerous extreme weather events including deadly floods and hurricanes driven by climate change.

“The stakes are not high, they’re devastatingly high,” said Julian Aguon, an attorney representing Vanuatu, the Pacific country leading the case. “It’s an opportunity to finally bring the promise of climate justice closer within reach.” 

The ICJ was established after World War II as a judicial mechanism for mitigating conflicts between United Nations member states and continues to arbitrate disputes issuing advisory opinions interpreting and clarifying international law. Such opinions are non-binding, but are still meaningful because they clarify binding law, such as the meaning of international treaties including the 2015 Paris Agreement that sought to cap the severity of global warming. In 1994, a judgment from the court on war between Libya and Chad over disputed territory prompted Libya to withdraw from Chad, and helped lead to a peace agreement. 

“We have the opportunity to leave behind a more capable international legal regime than we inherited.” 

But the court’s rulings are not always effective. Earlier this year, the ICJ ruled that Israel should end its occupation of the Palestinian territories immediately and make reparations to affected peoples. The occupation has continued, illustrating the limits of the ICJ’s power. In addition, big polluters like China and the US have rejected the court’s compulsory jurisdiction, and so a ruling may apply to them more narrowly.

The court will now decide what if any legal consequences such countries should face for contributing to climate change, both from what they’ve done and what they haven’t done. That could include affirming that big polluters have a legal obligation to pay reparations.

The campaign to bring the case to the ICJ was initiated in 2019 by 27 law students at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. It has now grown to be the largest case in the 77-year history of the ICJ and will consist of oral arguments from 98 countries and 12 international nongovernmental organizations.

In order to get on the ICJ’s docket, the students who began the case first had to convince Vanuatu’s government to back their campaign for an advisory opinion, then get other Pacific states on board by bringing the issue before the Pacific Forum, the premier diplomatic body in the Oceanic region. 

The pandemic in 2020 interrupted their campaign, preventing the youth from traveling to United Nations’ climate conferences to advocate for their agenda. But the group moved online and managed to drum up support from Pacific island states, Caribbean nations, countries in Africa and Latin America, and dozens more. Slowly the group built enough diplomatic support to get on the agenda at the UN General Assembly, and later, built such a widespread backing that the Assembly approved the resolution calling for an ICJ advisory opinion on climate change by consensus.

“How the law is shaped from here on depends on this moment, depends on the ICJ,” said Vidal Prashad, one of the student campaigners based in Fiji. “We have the opportunity to leave behind a more capable international legal regime than we inherited.” 

Ahead of this week’s oral arguments, young people have continued their campaigning, helping to collect witness testimonies from Indigenous Pacific peoples on how they’re currently being harmed by rising seas and climate change-fueled extreme weather events. They are also helping the governments who plan to present at the ICJ to craft their arguments and ensure they put forth the strongest, most progressive case. Prashad flew from Fiji to The Hague, where the youth’s five-year grassroots effort is finally reaching its conclusion. 

“It will have moral weight…We are doing this for the benefit of the global community.”

Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, which has provided legal support for the case, said a favorable ruling from ICJ would help climate activists hold polluting countries accountable. Youth activists could cite the ruling in future climate litigation against their governments. Politicians could use the ICJ’s opinion to push for sanctions against countries who fail to comply, and diplomats could point to the document as a minimum standard in next year’s global climate change negotiations. “Failure to comply with legal consequences in the face of such devastating climate harm, that’s not just being in contravention of the law, it’s unconscionable,” Chowdhury said. 

She noted that a lot of countries talk big about climate action, but this week’s oral arguments could illuminate what big polluters really think about the idea of being legally liable for their greenhouse gas emissions, something that could provide more clarity on what the barriers to climate action are. And even if it’s not in large countries’ interest to put up money for climate reparations, it is in their interest to appear to respect the treaties that they’ve already agreed to, which the ICJ ruling could help clarify. 

“Climate justice is about accountability,” Chowdhury said. “Climate harm has been done, there was knowledge about this, and there must be redress for frontline communities. And for this court to really clarify that there is a right to remedy and reparation for climate harm, that is really important.”

“It will have moral weight,” said Arnold Kiel Loughman, the attorney general of Vanuatu, who plans to address the court. “We are doing this for the benefit of the global community.”

Climate change witness testimonials from across the Pacific underscore the cost of doing nothing. One village in Papua New Guinea has been forced to move four times due to sea level rise, and is in the midst of its fifth and final relocation. “I say final, because there are simply no more inland (places) to go,” Aguon said. 

Such climate impacts have been existential for Indigenous Pacific peoples whose cultures are intimately connected to the food they grow, the waters they fish, and the lands they call home.

“We have so much to lose,” said Prashad from the University of the South Pacific. “Whole countries are standing to lose their whole identities.”

On Sunday, with less than two months remaining in his presidency, President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon to his son Hunter, convicted in June on three felony charges related to federal gun crimes and on three felony tax offenses in September. Reactions have been mixed: Many have criticized Biden, who argues that his son’s convictions were politically motivated, for setting a poor precedent and breaking a promise not to intervene. Others—even some who are not fans of the president—have said that they sympathize with his decision to pardon his son.

The controversial decision came after Biden repeatedly committed to not using his presidential powers to interfere in his son’s case—and after months in which Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as advocates, urged Biden to use his clemency power more broadly to free those incarcerated by federal drug policies that unfairly target Black and brown people. Hunter Biden will not spend a day inside a prison cell for his offenses; the same can’t be said for tens of thousands of people serving federal prison time because of disproportionate conviction and sentencing in the starkly racist War on Drugs. Biden can still pardon many of them, or commute their sentences—and set another, more valuable precedent.

Advocacy groups have praised Biden for some drug-related clemencies, like his move in April to pardon 11 people and commute five sentences the ACLU called unjustly long. Biden also issued pardons in October 2022 for everyone convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law—but, as advocates pointed out, that pardon didn’t actually free anyone who was in prison. 

In October, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Biden a letter urging him to commute sentences that exceeded those set by 2018’s First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice reform bill that reduced minimum sentences. The Senate letter suggested that thousands would be freed by the action, and called on the Biden administration to grant categorical relief to those who faced harsher sentencing for crack cocaine than they would have for its powder form. (The White House did not respond to questions about whether Biden would commute such sentences.)

In 1986, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act—drafted by then Sen. Joe Biden—set a hundred-to-one ratio between the amounts of powder and crack cocaine that triggered a mandatory five-year minimum sentence. A 2010 reform made it a still-disproportionate eighteen-to-one. The discrepancy has disproportionately affected the Black community: In fiscal 2021, almost four in five people convicted of trafficking crack cocaine were Black, compared to 25 percent for powder cocaine. Drug Policy Alliance, a nonpartisan advocacy group, recently called on Biden to commute sentences lengthened by the disparity.

In 2022, Biden’s Justice Department announced that it would no longer differentiate between powder and crack cocaine when seeking charges, a disparity it said had “no basis in science, furthers no law enforcement purposes, and drives unwarranted racial disparities in our criminal justice system.” Advocates praised the move but pointed out that it was temporary, and only applied to new cases. 

The Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit working for the release of all marijuana prisoners nationwide, joined members of Congress in November on the Capitol steps to call on Biden to “rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges,” as it wrote in an accompanying letter advocating pardons for federal marijuana convictions.

As pointed out by Sarah Gersten, the group’s executive director, to Marijuana Moment, Biden’s justification for pardoning his son was that the justice system had reached an unjust outcome—which, she says, “is certainly the case for the nearly 3,000 cannabis prisoners who remain incarcerated federally for activity that has been widely legalized.”

Update, December 3: This article has been updated to refer to the 501(c)(3) organization Drug Policy Alliance. It previously cited the organization’s 501(c)(4) partner.

Trump’s picks for taking over the federal government range from the conspiratorial to the absurdly underqualified.

But it’s former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, who may take the cake as the president-elect’s most controversial. (He had arguably been tied for that ignominious distinction with former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s brief pick for attorney general who dropped out over accusations of drug use and sexual misconduct.)

Since getting tapped for defense secretary, multiple disturbing accusations against Hegseth have emerged. The latest, revealed in a bombshell-packed New Yorker report late Sunday, centers on allegations of a drinking problem, sexual impropriety, and financial misconduct that reportedly forced Hegseth out of leadership positions from two different nonprofit advocacy groups catering to veterans. (Hegseth is a veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer notes.)

Here are all the allegations Hegseth is currently facing that you should know about:

Mismanagement, a Drinking Problem, and Sexually Inappropriate Behavior

A lengthy report in the New Yorker, from veteran reporter Jane Mayer, alleges that Hegseth was forced to step down from leadership posts at two nonprofit advocacy groups—Veterans for Freedom (VFF) and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA)—before moving to Fox News. Among the alleged reasons for his departure from VFF: Hagseth reportedly racked up more than $400,000 in debt for the organization.

One of Mayer’s main sources is a seven-page whistleblower report focused on Hegseth’s time at CVA, where he was president from 2013 until 2016. The report, compiled by former CVA employees, reportedly describes Hegseth as repeatedly drunk at work events, including one incident that required Hegseth to be restrained from getting on stage at a Louisiana strip club where he had brought his team. The whistleblower report also reportedly alleges that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other managers at the organization sexually pursued some of their female colleagues. Mayer cites another letter from a former employee that details an incident in which Hegseth reportedly drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims!” while at a hotel bar during a work trip.

“I’ve seen him drunk so many times,” one of the authors of the whistleblower report told the magazine. “I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary.”

Hegseth’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, sent the New Yorker a statement attributed to an adviser to Hegseth that stated: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”

Rape Allegation

A recently disclosed police report revealed that a woman accused Hegseth of raping her at a 2017 Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. While no charges were filed and Hegseth claimed the encounter was consensual, he wound up paying the woman as part of a nondisclosure agreement, the Washington Post first reported last month. Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, told the Post that the woman who made the accusation was “the aggressor in initiating sexual activity” and that Hegseth made the payment “knowing that it was the height of the MeToo movement” and afraid he could potentially lose his Fox News position.

His Mother Called Him “an Abuser of Women”

As my colleague Pema Levy wrote this weekend, Hegseth’s mother, Penelope Hegseth, wrote her son an email in 2018 in which she called him “an abuser of women,” adding, “your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out.” The letter, first obtained by the New York Times, reportedly focused on how Hegseth treated his ex-wife, Samantha, during their divorce proceedings. Penelope Hegseth told the Times she recanted the accusations she made in the email, alleging she wrote them in anger and immediately followed up to him with an apology. She also called the newspaper’s decision to publish the contents of the email “disgusting.”

Hegseth’s lawyer and a spokesperson for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Monday.

As Pema writes, though, don’t expect the allegations to tank Hegseth’s confirmation hearings:

Trump himself has been found liable for sexual assault, and faced numerous other allegations of assault and cheating. If the commander-in-chief can get away with it, maybe Hegseth can too.

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

President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to kill offshore wind energy development “on day one” of his second term is already triggering project slowdowns on the East Coast, but the biggest wind farm proposed in the Gulf of Mexico will likely stay on track. 

That’s because the project is on such a long development timeline that Trump’s four-year term will be over before permitting and construction begin, according to RWE, the German energy giant that plans to build a 2,000-megawatt wind farm about 40 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The project, which could power more than 350,000 homes, isn’t expected to be operational for about a decade. 

“The project has a long-lead development timeline that is longer than any one federal administration, and with a planned operational date in the mid-2030s,” RWE spokesman Ryan Ferguson said. 

RWE, the world’s second-largest offshore wind developer, and other key players in the renewable energy industry announced shifts in funding priorities and warned of project delays and possible derailments after Trump was elected president this month. 

“The change of administration in the US entails risks for the timely implementation of offshore wind projects,” RWE Chief Financial Officer Michael Muller said at a press conference earlier this month. “The new Republican administration could delay specific projects. The realization of our Community Offshore Wind project near New York, for example, depends on outstanding permits from US federal authorities.”

The “higher risks and delays” in the US offshore wind market prompted RWE to initiate a $1.6 billion share buyback, RWE CEO Markus Krebber said during a call with investors. The buyback signaled a significant shift in the company’s short-term spending priorities but not waning confidence in the durability of US demand for renewables, Muller said, noting that a growing number of states are setting goals for solar and wind energy. 

RWE’s recalibration makes sense, said Jenny Netherton, the Southeastern Wind Coalition’s Louisiana program manager. “That was not unexpected,” she said. “Companies are always trying to find the best way forward in an uncertain environment.”

“Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”

Trump’s opposition to offshore wind began in 2006, when he initiated a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over a proposed wind farm the future US president said would spoil the view from a golf course he hoped to build. Trump lost the battle and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees. In recent speeches, Trump has said wind farms harm property values and wildlife. More outlandishly, he has claimed wind energy causes cancer, increases food prices, and prevents people from watching TV when the wind isn’t blowing. 

During his first term, Trump was accused of “slow walking” the permits for some of the first offshore wind farms in federal waters. RWE and other companies say wind farms already under construction will likely move forward, but projects slated to break ground over the next couple years may face setbacks. 

Of the 30 states with offshore wind potential, nine have statewide wind energy mandates. Two states—Massachusetts and Rhode Island—have deadlines to reach wind energy targets in the 2020s and four states—New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia—have deadlines in the 2030s. 

These goals and the US’s ever-rising electricity needs are signs that Trump may slow but not kill wind energy development, Muller said. 

“We still believe US offshore wind [energy] is still needed,” he said, noting New York in particular. “If they are going to keep up with demand, they need offshore wind.”

Louisiana set a goal of developing the capacity for 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035, but the target wasn’t legally binding. Proposed in 2021 during the administration of Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, the goal appears to have been abandoned by Governor Jeff Landry, who took office in January. The Republican governor has said little publicly about offshore wind development and has not responded to requests seeking his position on the matter. 

Many other Louisiana Republicans strongly back offshore wind, seeing it as an economic boon for the state. Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry have seen business flag in recent years. Several of them, including shipbuilders, engineering firms, and metal fabricators, have easily transitioned to helping plan and build offshore projects on the East Coast, including the US’s first offshore wind farm.

Bipartisan legislation in Louisiana paved the way for a fast-tracked approval process for wind projects in state-managed waters, which extend 3 miles from the coast. Louisiana has approved agreements with two companies to build small-scale wind farms near Cameron Parish and Port Fourchon, the Gulf’s largest oil and gas port. The two projects will likely be built years before the RWE wind farm. 

The last federal lease auction in the Gulf was canceled in July due to weak interest from bidders, but two companies recently offered competing plans for a 142,000-acre area near Galveston, Texas. It’s unclear how Trump’s victory will affect those proposals. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is waiting to see if there’s more developer interest in the area and will likely initiate a competitive lease sale in the coming months. 

While Trump may cause uncertainty at the federal level, Louisiana isn’t likely to waver in its support for offshore wind energy, Netherton said. 

“It still enjoys broad support here,” she said. “Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”

This coverage was made possible through a partnership between Grist and Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of local newsrooms providing essential journalism in underserved communities and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.

In 2016, when Tennessee OBGYN Susan Lacy learned she would be providing gender-affirming care to transgender patients in her new job at a reproductive health clinic in Memphis, she felt out of her depth. But it didn’t take long to realize that hormone treatments for trans folks weren’t so different from those she’d been providing for years to cisgender patients. She already knew how to use pills, patches, gels, and injections, with their different formulations and side effects, to reduce menopausal night sweats, hot flashes, and brain fog. Patients who took hormones for gender dysphoria told her they felt a similar sense of relief. “It didn’t matter about socioeconomics, age, race, feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy,” Lacy says. Often the first reaction was, “I finally feel like I can think straight.”

Now a gynecologist in solo practice, Lacy has more than 300 adult trans patients. At one time, her patient list also included trans teenagers with the consent of their parents. But last year, Tennessee prohibited the prescription of certain medications to minors to treat the distress many trans people feel when their bodies do not align with their gender identity. Under the law, cisgender kids could keep receiving the meds: puberty blockers for those who start puberty too early, for instance, or testosterone or estrogen for teens who enter puberty late. But if the purpose was to treat gender dysphoria, those same medications were forbidden.

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a landmark lawsuit challenging the Tennessee ban, brought by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, Lacy, and three trans minors and their families. United States v. Skrmetti is one of the biggest cases of the term and the first major trans-rights case to be heard by the court since far-right lawmakers and policy groups launched a coordinated campaign inundating statehouses with hundreds of anti-trans bills a few years ago. Legal experts say the Skrmetti case could shape the landscape for trans rights for years to come, while testing how far the Court’s conservative supermajority is willing to extend its 2022 decision allowing states to ban abortion: Will the justices give states free rein to outlaw yet another form of healthcare?

“Before treatment, I hid,” one plaintiff, 15-year-old Ryan Roe, wrote in a declaration asking a federal judge to put the ban on hold. But with hormone therapy, “I am raising my hand in class again and participating in all aspects of school. I feel stronger—physically, mentally and emotionally. I feel so happy with myself and that makes me feel like I can do and be more.” 

That changed, he added, when Tennessee lawmakers began debating the gender-affirming care ban. “Hopelessness creeped in again.”

The Skrmetti arguments are happening at a time of intense fear and vulnerability for the trans community. President-elect Donald Trump and his allies bet on transphobia to take back the White House and Congress, pouring millions into anti-trans campaign ads and vowing a broad crackdown on what Trump refers to as “left-wing gender insanity” (though the extent to which trans issues swayed the electorate remains unclear). Supported by groups like the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, and Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal behemoth, states have made particular targets of trans young people, restricting their use of school bathrooms and locker rooms, their participation in sports, and discussion of LGBTQ-related topics in classrooms and libraries. 

They have also targeted medical care, with nearly half of states outlawing gender-affirming treatments for people under 18, cutting off access for an estimated 118,300 trans teens. The bans have been enacted over the objections of virtually all leading US medical associations, which consider such treatments clinically appropriate. One study of almost 12,000 trans teenagers found that those who received hormone therapy reported lower rates of depression and suicidality compared to those who wanted but didn’t receive the treatment. When Tennessee’s ban took effect, Lacy says, “the biggest sense from the patients was despair—anger and despair.” Parents, meanwhile, were frustrated: “Why can I not make this decision for my child?”

“It is painful to even think about having to go back to the place I was in before I was able to come out and access the care that my doctors have prescribed for me,” one of the plaintiffs, a 15-year-old trans girl known as L.W., wrote in a declaration. She struggled to focus and connect with friends, and got sick when she had to use the boy’s bathroom at school.

“It is painful to even think about having to go back to the place I was in before I was able to come out and access the care that my doctors have prescribed for me.”

L.W.’s mother, Samantha Williams, wrote in a declaration of her own that starting gender-affirming medical care had improved her daughter’s physical and mental health: “She has more confidence, she is fully present, and not only does she accept hugs, but she also gives hugs.” The Tennessee ban prompted Williams and her husband to consider moving their family away from relatives, work, and the community where their two children had grown up. “I do not want to see her go back to the dark place she was in prior to coming out and receiving the life-saving treatment she needs,” Williams wrote.

LGBTQ-rights organizations have filed lawsuits over almost every gender-affirming care ban, with Skrmetti the first case to reach the Supreme Court. Now, justices are being asked to set the standard under which lower-court judges must evaluate whether laws like Tennessee’s violate the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. The justices’ eventual decision could have implications not just for gender-affirming care bans, but for future anti-trans laws in statehouses and Congress. “It will tell the next administration whether it’s open season to continue with these attacks on trans young folks and transgender people more broadly,” says Jenny Pizer, chief legal officer of the LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal, “or whether there’s going to be some limits.”

There’s a potential wild card in the mix: When Trump takes office, his Department of Justice is likely to try to reverse the Biden administration’s position and withdraw the case. Pizer says that if that happens, there’s no telling how the Supreme Court would respond. They could agree to kill the case, deny the request, or push a decision off till next term. Or, they could let the federal government withdraw but allow the case to proceed, with only the Tennessee families and Lacy as plaintiffs.

Legally speaking, the main issue in the case boils down to the question of whether bans on gender-affirming care are a form of sex-based discrimination. If they are, then states going forward will have to prove, when challenged, that the bans are “substantially related” to an “important state interest.” That’s a fairly high bar—one that would require judges to weigh the medical and scientific evidence around the prohibited treatments. When trial courts have looked at that evidence in the past, they’ve overturned the bans, siding with the trans youth and their families.

In fact, that’s what happened in the Middle District of Tennessee federal court, where the Skrmetti case started. “The Court acknowledges that the state feels strongly that the medical procedures banned by [the law] are harmful to minors,” District Judge Eli Richardson wrote last year in an order temporarily blocking the law. “The medical evidence on the record, however, indicates otherwise.”

Richardson’s decision wasn’t controversial at the time—every federal judge, including Trump appointees, who had looked at gender-affirming care bans up until that point had blocked them. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees Tennessee, went the other way, ruling 2 to 1 that the law did not discriminate based on sex, and thus it didn’t have to meet the higher level of scrutiny. (The judges also shot down the plaintiffs’ two other arguments—that anti-trans discrimination is unique and merits a closer look by the courts, and that the ban violates parents’ right to direct their children’s medical care.) In the 14 months since that decision, more courts have upheld gender-affirming care bans for minors, including in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the Sixth Circuit’s approach, courts going forward will apply the lowest level of scrutiny to gender-affirming care bans. The result, says Jess Braverman, legal director at the advocacy group Gender Justice, would be “like a rubber stamp.”

Casual Supreme Court observers would be forgiven for thinking that the question of whether anti-trans discrimination counts as sex discrimination has already been settled. In his majority opinion in the court’s last major trans-rights case, Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, Justice Neil Gorsuch stated, “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” But since that ruling, which involved a funeral home employee who was fired after transitioning, conservative lawyers and public officials have been trying to limit Bostock from being applied to situations beyond employment. The result has been an escalation of the legal battles over federal protections for trans people: Do existing sex-discrimination laws shield them at school? What about at the doctor’s office?

In arguing that Tennessee’s ban discriminates based on sex, DOJ lawyers point to the text of the law, which explicitly says that the state wants to “encourage[e] minors to appreciate their sex” and forbid treatments that might “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” The “purpose is to force boys and girls to look and live like boys and girls,” appellate judge Helene White summarized in a dissent from the Sixth Circuit ruling. Under the law, kids can receive puberty blockers and hormone therapy if the medications are provided to help them conform their bodies to their sex assigned at birth, but not if the treatments are provided to help them not conform. “There is no way to determine whether these treatments must be withheld from any particular minor without considering [the minor’s] sex,’” DOJ lawyers argue in their Supreme Court briefing.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti contends that the ban does not discriminate based on sex. Instead, he says, the law is a health care regulation that applies to everyone. “The law draws a line between minors seeking drugs for gender transition and minors seeking drugs for other medical purposes,” he argues in his brief. “Boys and girls fall on both sides of that line.”

In making that argument, Skrmetti repeatedly cited Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 case that overturned the federal right to abortion. As Susan Rinkunas has noted over at The New Republic, the Tennessee AG is picking up on an aside by Justice Samuel Alito in the Dobbs ruling that Mississippi’s abortion ban didn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause because, according to the justice, the ban didn’t discriminate based on sex. To back up this assertion, Alito cited a Supreme Court ruling from 1974, Geduldig v. Aiello, which held that an insurance policy specifically excluding pregnancy-related coverage was not a form of sex discrimination, and applied to everyone. That ruling and a related decision were deemed so outrageous at the time that Congress swiftly enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to override them.

Now, there is a risk that when the Supreme Court decides Skrmetti, it will apply the same reasoning from Geduldig and Alito’s sidenote in Dobbs: Even when laws restrict medical treatments that only matter for certain groups—like pregnant women, or trans people—those laws aren’t inherently discriminatory, because not every member of that group requires that type of care. “It’s kind of like our Supreme Court is a bunch of freshman philosophy students,” Braverman says. “It’s like they’re all asking, ‘Do we see the same color when we see yellow?’ Except lives are at stake.”

“It’s kind of like our Supreme Court is a bunch of freshman philosophy students. It’s like they’re all asking, ‘Do we see the same color when we see yellow?’ Except lives are at stake.”

To Braverman, it’s no surprise that the arguments being used to defend bans on gender-affirming care are the same as those used to defend bans on abortion. “It’s the same people who are litigating it in court, and they’re making the same argument,” Braverman says. “If we treat what’s happening to transgender people as though it’s happening in a vacuum, everyone’s going to lose all their rights.” If the Supreme Court sides with Tennessee, for example, states might be emboldened to try banning other types of sex-specific healthcare, such as IVF or birth control, the ACLU warns.

“The real question in this case is, ‘Can powerful interest groups like the Heritage Foundation or Alliance Defending Freedom make up lies about your health care, and then use those lies to make your healthcare illegal?” Shawn Thomas Meerkamper, senior staff attorney at the Transgender Law Center, said in a briefing for journalists. “Because that’s what’s happening here.”

“One of the things that I think is so concerning about these laws is allowing legislators with no medical knowledge to restrict care for a specific diagnosis,” Lacy says from her office in Memphis. When the Tennessee ban came down, she tried to help her young patients find ways to keep up their existing prescriptions. Some families drove across the border to a clinic in Illinois or flew to other states where the medications were still legal. But for patients needing new prescriptions, her hands were tied.

She thinks about the families that never call her office in the first place—the “chilling effect” stopping parents from even considering medical care as an option after their children come out as trans. “I think when that law was passed, a lot of those parents just said, ‘Nope, can’t even deal with it,’” Lacy says. “Prior, they would say, ‘Well, let’s go in and let’s at least have the conversation.’”

Beyond the chilling effect, Lacy fears how laws like Tennessee’s worsen hostility toward transgender people. She worries about her own daughter, who came out as trans as a young adult, being judged based on how others perceive her gender identity. “There’s just a fear of the risk of existing in the world where the state is saying that you don’t have a right to exist,” Lacy says. “And that’s very, very frightening.”

What do anti-vaxxers and abortion opponents have in common? They both see an ally in David Weldon, who is now President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The physician and ex–Florida congressman’s track record includes introducing legislation that would have stripped the CDC of its authority to conduct research on vaccine safety and instead given it to an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Weldon has also promoted the unfounded theory that vaccines lead to childhood autism—a false claim boosted infamously in the past by Trump’s pick for HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And on abortion, Weldon is responsible for an eponymous federal law that prohibits HHS from funding any entities that “discriminate” against health care providers, hospitals, or insurance plans who opt out of providing abortion care—which the Trump administration “weaponized” to enact its anti-abortion agenda during his first term, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Weldon introduced the amendment in the House in 2004, and it has been passed as part of the HHS spending bill every year since 2005.

While in Congress, Weldon also co-sponsored legislation that sought to bar HHS from providing any Title X family planning funding to entities that provide abortions. (Then-Rep. Mike Pence sponsored that bill, and Trump enacted that policy in office, when Pence was vice president.) Weldon also supported a bill that proposed studying unsubstantiated links between abortion and depression.

Neither Weldon nor Trump have been shy about acknowledging these positions. On Weldon’s campaign site for his unsuccessful run for the Florida statehouse earlier this year, he promotes his record on so-called “vaccine safety,” as well as his “100% pro-life voting record” and the anti-abortion amendments he passed in Congress. When Trump announced Weldon as his choice to run the CDC on Nov. 22, he noted Weldon’s history “addressing issues within HHS and CDC,” including that he “worked with the CDC to enact a ban on patents for human embryos.”

“Dave will proudly restore the CDC to its true purpose, and will work to end the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and Make America Healthy Again!” Trump wrote.

Anti-vaxxers and abortion opponents are now celebrating the fact that Weldon could potentially control the CDC’s more than $9 billion budget.

“He is one of us!! Since before our movement had momentum,” the co-director of the anti-vaxx group Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights wrote on social media.

“This is YUGE!” a similar group in Oklahoma claimed, praising Weldon’s efforts to stop the CDC from conducting vaccine research.

And both the anti-abortion site Live Action and the right-wing Daily Signal ran pieces highlighting Weldon’s anti-abortion record, following Trump’s announcement. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Daily Signal that Weldon “is a proven leader for life, and we look forward to working with him.”

Now in the national spotlight, Weldon appeared to walk back his most ardent anti-vaccine beliefs of the past: He told the New York Times this week, “I give shots, I believe in vaccination.” On abortion, though, Weldon seems to be more status quo: His campaign website from this year says, “I will always vote to protect the unborn and support a culture that celebrates the value of life.”

For years, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and seller of pills he claims reverse the effects of Covid vaccines, who Donald Trump has announced as his pick to replace FBI Director Chris Wray, has made his mission plain: He wants to crush the supposed Deep State that has conspired against Trump. Last year, while appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, he vowed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.” This was not an empty threat, for Patel has a list of specific targets for his score-settling. And that line-up includes not only Democrats but also prominent Republicans.

Patel laid out his plans in a 2023 book titled Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy. In this work, he breathlessly described the Deep State as a “coordinated, ideologically rigid force independent from the people that manipulates the levers of politics and justice for its own gain and self-preservation.” It is run “by a significant number of high-level cultural leaders and officials who, acting through networks of networks, disregard objectivity, weaponize the law, spread disinformation, spurn fairness, or even violate their oaths of office for political and personal gain, all at the expense of equal justice and American national security.” He added, “They are thugs in suits, nothing more than government gangsters.” And he inveighed that this is “a cabal of unelected tyrants.”

In his book, Patel, a supporter of QAnon and a promoter of assorted MAGA conspiracy theories (the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, the Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax, and the January 6 riot was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents), called for mounting “investigations” to “take on the Deep State.” Though he doesn’t specify what the cause for these inquiries would be, he has plenty of people in mind. In an appendix to the book, Patel presented a list of 60 supposed members of the Deep State who are current or former executive branch officials and who presumably would be the prey. He noted this roster did not include “other corrupt actors,” such as California Democrats Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, “the entire fake news mafia press corps,” and former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan. (When Patel worked for the GOP-controlled House intelligence committee, he had run-ins with Ryan over the issuance of subpoenas and Patel leaking information to a Fox News reporter—which must mean that Ryan was a Deep State operative.)

Patel’s list names what would for a MAGA activist be the obvious purported cabalists: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and former or current FBI directors Chris Wray, Robert Mueller, and James Comey. (Patel doesn’t explain why Comey, a supposed anti-Trump Deep State player, torpedoed Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016 when he reopened an FBI inquiry into her handling of State Department emails in the final days of the campaign.)

This line-up also includes a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees. These include Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump; John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first White House stint; Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel; Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump; Sarah Isgur Flores, who was head of communications for Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions; Alyssa Farah Griffin, the director of strategic commissions in the Trump White House; and Stephanie Grisham, former chief of staff for Melania Trump.

When Barr was Trump’s attorney general, he prevented Trump from appointing Patel deputy director of the FBI, noting Patel was vastly unqualified for the position. “Over my dead body,” Barr told the White House at the time. Barr’s presence on Patel’s run-down of Deep State wrongdoers—like Ryan’s inclusion— suggests it might also function as a list of his own personal vendettas.

After recently learning her name appeared in Patel’s appendix of enemies, Flores, who’s now a news commentator, tweeted, “Just learned I’m included on this list. I’ve never met Patel or attended any meetings where he was present as far as I know. Will include a disclaimer when I talk about this intent to nominate from now on.”

There are other Republicans on Patel’s Deep State inventory: Robert Hur, the US attorney who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents; Cassidy Hutchinson, the twenty-something aide who worked for Mark Meadows, the final White House chief of staff during the first Trump presidency; Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser for Trump; Ryan McCarthy, a secretary of the Army under Trump; Pat Philbin, a deputy White House counsel for Trump; Rod Rosenstein, a deputy attorney general for Trump; and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official under Trump.

Last year, Patel filed a lawsuit against Wray, Rosenstein, Hur, and others, claiming that in 2017, when he was an investigator for the House intelligence committee, the Justice Department spied on him.

These Republicans on Patel’s hit list are all in his dark worldview sinister Deep Staters. Yet some of these selections are especially absurd. Barr, as attorney general, undermined Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, an inquiry that according to Patel was a Deep State plot. Why would a Deep State denizen do that? And while Barr did not back up Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him, he endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign this year. Another curious move for an anti-Trump conspirator.

When she was at the Justice Department, Flores defended Trump’s controversial Muslim travel ban and his family separation policy. Hur issued a report that raised questions about Biden’s age and abilities. Rosenstein helped Trump fire Comey as FBI director. Hutchinson was an intern for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and then Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) before becoming an intern in the Trump White House for the office of legislative affairs. (She was a key witness at the hearings held by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 riot.). Griffin, the daughter of far-right journalist Joseph Farah, worked for her dad’s website, WorldNetDaily, then interned for a GOP congressman and was an associate producer for Fox host Laura Ingraham. She later served as a press secretary for Meadows and for the House Freedom Caucus before becoming a spokesperson for Vice President Mike Pence and, then, director of strategic communications for the Trump White House.

These are not the profiles or actions of Deep State plotters. Their inclusion on Patel’s list reveals the ludicrousness of his notion that a nefarious Deep State exists and has been scheming to sabotage Trump and destroy America. Patel is like the old commie-hunter who spots subversives under every bed and at every PTA bake sale. His book and his entire exercise of naming names raises questions about his analytical ability—an important asset for an FBI director. This appendix shows Patel is nothing but an extreme Trump loyalist, yearning to use (or abuse) government power to pursue Trump’s critics and opponents, as well as his own. Patel is even something of a Trump royalist, having written a series of children’s books about a “King Donald” who manages to triumph over his evil foes led by “Hillary Queenton.”

Still, Patel and Government Gangsters, which features a photo of Patel on the cover, ought not be dismissed. Patel has signaled he’s looking to conduct revenge-a-thon, and Trump endorsed this work as a “brilliant roadmap highlighting every corrupt actor.” He declared, “we will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government!” That indicates Patel’s list could end up as a to-do—or to-get—list for Trump. Not only Democrats should worry about that.

On Tuesday, the Department of Labor filed a proposed rule that could end the subminimum wage for disabled people—beginning the process of closing a loophole that can let companies pay disabled employees less than a dollar per hour.

When the federal minimum wage was established in 1938, it included a carveout that would permit companies to obtain certificates and pay disabled people less than non-disabled people. The argument for this subminimum wage is that disabled people bring less value to the workforce.

As of January 2023, half of the people—mostly those with intellectual and developmental disabilities—working under this certificate program make less than $3.50 an hour. These employees mostly work in sheltered workshops, which disabled advocates have also criticized for segregating disabled workers.

The new proposal recommends that the Department of Labor stop issuing new certificates, as well as let current certificates expire. Prior to this rule, 25 states have either started to phase out, completely ended, or introduced legislation to end subminimum wage for disabled people.

Mia Ives-Rublee, the senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, said that ending the certificate program “is one of the first steps to reducing poverty within the disability community and stopping the exploitation of disabled people.”

This proposed rule has been in the works for a long time. In 2014, an advisory committee was put together, which included advocates with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The committee concluded that “current widespread practice of paying workers subminimum wages, based on assumptions that individuals with disabilities cannot work in typical jobs…[is] antithetical to the intent of modern federal policy and law.”

Of course, the elephant in the rule is whether the incoming Trump administration will support an end to this type of subminimum wage. Donald Trump has not previously voiced his opposition or support of the certificate program; likewise, Project 2025 has not weighed in on this certificate program either.

Members of the public will be able to submit written comments on this proposed rule by January 17, 2025.

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

The world’s biggest climate case begins at The Hague in the Netherlands today. Oral arguments will be heard by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which will consider what obligations United Nations member states have under international law to protect the planet from greenhouse gas emissions for future generations.

The case begins less than two weeks after negotiations collapsed at the UN’s annual international climate conference, COP29, in Azerbaijan, resulting in a climate finance agreement that’s been widely criticized as inadequate. It also marks the end of the hottest year on record, punctuated by numerous extreme weather events including deadly floods and hurricanes driven by climate change.

“The stakes are not high, they’re devastatingly high,” said Julian Aguon, an attorney representing Vanuatu, the Pacific country leading the case. “It’s an opportunity to finally bring the promise of climate justice closer within reach.” 

The ICJ was established after World War II as a judicial mechanism for mitigating conflicts between United Nations member states and continues to arbitrate disputes issuing advisory opinions interpreting and clarifying international law. Such opinions are non-binding, but are still meaningful because they clarify binding law, such as the meaning of international treaties including the 2015 Paris Agreement that sought to cap the severity of global warming. In 1994, a judgment from the court on war between Libya and Chad over disputed territory prompted Libya to withdraw from Chad, and helped lead to a peace agreement. 

“We have the opportunity to leave behind a more capable international legal regime than we inherited.” 

But the court’s rulings are not always effective. Earlier this year, the ICJ ruled that Israel should end its occupation of the Palestinian territories immediately and make reparations to affected peoples. The occupation has continued, illustrating the limits of the ICJ’s power. In addition, big polluters like China and the US have rejected the court’s compulsory jurisdiction, and so a ruling may apply to them more narrowly.

The court will now decide what if any legal consequences such countries should face for contributing to climate change, both from what they’ve done and what they haven’t done. That could include affirming that big polluters have a legal obligation to pay reparations.

The campaign to bring the case to the ICJ was initiated in 2019 by 27 law students at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. It has now grown to be the largest case in the 77-year history of the ICJ and will consist of oral arguments from 98 countries and 12 international nongovernmental organizations.

In order to get on the ICJ’s docket, the students who began the case first had to convince Vanuatu’s government to back their campaign for an advisory opinion, then get other Pacific states on board by bringing the issue before the Pacific Forum, the premier diplomatic body in the Oceanic region. 

The pandemic in 2020 interrupted their campaign, preventing the youth from traveling to United Nations’ climate conferences to advocate for their agenda. But the group moved online and managed to drum up support from Pacific island states, Caribbean nations, countries in Africa and Latin America, and dozens more. Slowly the group built enough diplomatic support to get on the agenda at the UN General Assembly, and later, built such a widespread backing that the Assembly approved the resolution calling for an ICJ advisory opinion on climate change by consensus.

“How the law is shaped from here on depends on this moment, depends on the ICJ,” said Vidal Prashad, one of the student campaigners based in Fiji. “We have the opportunity to leave behind a more capable international legal regime than we inherited.” 

Ahead of this week’s oral arguments, young people have continued their campaigning, helping to collect witness testimonies from Indigenous Pacific peoples on how they’re currently being harmed by rising seas and climate change-fueled extreme weather events. They are also helping the governments who plan to present at the ICJ to craft their arguments and ensure they put forth the strongest, most progressive case. Prashad flew from Fiji to The Hague, where the youth’s five-year grassroots effort is finally reaching its conclusion. 

“It will have moral weight…We are doing this for the benefit of the global community.”

Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, which has provided legal support for the case, said a favorable ruling from ICJ would help climate activists hold polluting countries accountable. Youth activists could cite the ruling in future climate litigation against their governments. Politicians could use the ICJ’s opinion to push for sanctions against countries who fail to comply, and diplomats could point to the document as a minimum standard in next year’s global climate change negotiations. “Failure to comply with legal consequences in the face of such devastating climate harm, that’s not just being in contravention of the law, it’s unconscionable,” Chowdhury said. 

She noted that a lot of countries talk big about climate action, but this week’s oral arguments could illuminate what big polluters really think about the idea of being legally liable for their greenhouse gas emissions, something that could provide more clarity on what the barriers to climate action are. And even if it’s not in large countries’ interest to put up money for climate reparations, it is in their interest to appear to respect the treaties that they’ve already agreed to, which the ICJ ruling could help clarify. 

“Climate justice is about accountability,” Chowdhury said. “Climate harm has been done, there was knowledge about this, and there must be redress for frontline communities. And for this court to really clarify that there is a right to remedy and reparation for climate harm, that is really important.”

“It will have moral weight,” said Arnold Kiel Loughman, the attorney general of Vanuatu, who plans to address the court. “We are doing this for the benefit of the global community.”

Climate change witness testimonials from across the Pacific underscore the cost of doing nothing. One village in Papua New Guinea has been forced to move four times due to sea level rise, and is in the midst of its fifth and final relocation. “I say final, because there are simply no more inland (places) to go,” Aguon said. 

Such climate impacts have been existential for Indigenous Pacific peoples whose cultures are intimately connected to the food they grow, the waters they fish, and the lands they call home.

“We have so much to lose,” said Prashad from the University of the South Pacific. “Whole countries are standing to lose their whole identities.”

On Sunday, with less than two months remaining in his presidency, President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon to his son Hunter, convicted in June on three felony charges related to federal gun crimes and on three felony tax offenses in September. Reactions have been mixed: Many have criticized Biden, who argues that his son’s convictions were politically motivated, for setting a poor precedent and breaking a promise not to intervene. Others—even some who are not fans of the president—have said that they sympathize with his decision to pardon his son.

The controversial decision came after Biden repeatedly committed to not using his presidential powers to interfere in his son’s case—and after months in which Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as advocates, urged Biden to use his clemency power more broadly to free those incarcerated by federal drug policies that unfairly target Black and brown people. Hunter Biden will not spend a day inside a prison cell for his offenses; the same can’t be said for tens of thousands of people serving federal prison time because of disproportionate conviction and sentencing in the starkly racist War on Drugs. Biden can still pardon many of them, or commute their sentences—and set another, more valuable precedent.

Advocacy groups have praised Biden for some drug-related clemencies, like his move in April to pardon 11 people and commute five sentences the ACLU called unjustly long. Biden also issued pardons in October 2022 for everyone convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law—but, as advocates pointed out, that pardon didn’t actually free anyone who was in prison. 

In October, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Biden a letter urging him to commute sentences that exceeded those set by 2018’s First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice reform bill that reduced minimum sentences. The Senate letter suggested that thousands would be freed by the action, and called on the Biden administration to grant categorical relief to those who faced harsher sentencing for crack cocaine than they would have for its powder form. (The White House did not respond to questions about whether Biden would commute such sentences.)

In 1986, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act—drafted by then Sen. Joe Biden—set a hundred-to-one ratio between the amounts of powder and crack cocaine that triggered a mandatory five-year minimum sentence. A 2010 reform made it a still-disproportionate eighteen-to-one. The discrepancy has disproportionately affected the Black community: In fiscal 2021, almost four in five people convicted of trafficking crack cocaine were Black, compared to 25 percent for powder cocaine. Drug Policy Alliance, a nonpartisan advocacy group, recently called on Biden to commute sentences lengthened by the disparity.

In 2022, Biden’s Justice Department announced that it would no longer differentiate between powder and crack cocaine when seeking charges, a disparity it said had “no basis in science, furthers no law enforcement purposes, and drives unwarranted racial disparities in our criminal justice system.” Advocates praised the move but pointed out that it was temporary, and only applied to new cases. 

The Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit working for the release of all marijuana prisoners nationwide, joined members of Congress in November on the Capitol steps to call on Biden to “rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges,” as it wrote in an accompanying letter advocating pardons for federal marijuana convictions.

As pointed out by Sarah Gersten, the group’s executive director, to Marijuana Moment, Biden’s justification for pardoning his son was that the justice system had reached an unjust outcome—which, she says, “is certainly the case for the nearly 3,000 cannabis prisoners who remain incarcerated federally for activity that has been widely legalized.”

Update, December 3: This article has been updated to refer to the 501(c)(3) organization Drug Policy Alliance. It previously cited the organization’s 501(c)(4) partner.

Trump’s picks for taking over the federal government range from the conspiratorial to the absurdly underqualified.

But it’s former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, who may take the cake as the president-elect’s most controversial. (He had arguably been tied for that ignominious distinction with former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s brief pick for attorney general who dropped out over accusations of drug use and sexual misconduct.)

Since getting tapped for defense secretary, multiple disturbing accusations against Hegseth have emerged. The latest, revealed in a bombshell-packed New Yorker report late Sunday, centers on allegations of a drinking problem, sexual impropriety, and financial misconduct that reportedly forced Hegseth out of leadership positions from two different nonprofit advocacy groups catering to veterans. (Hegseth is a veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer notes.)

Here are all the allegations Hegseth is currently facing that you should know about:

Mismanagement, a Drinking Problem, and Sexually Inappropriate Behavior

A lengthy report in the New Yorker, from veteran reporter Jane Mayer, alleges that Hegseth was forced to step down from leadership posts at two nonprofit advocacy groups—Veterans for Freedom (VFF) and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA)—before moving to Fox News. Among the alleged reasons for his departure from VFF: Hagseth reportedly racked up more than $400,000 in debt for the organization.

One of Mayer’s main sources is a seven-page whistleblower report focused on Hegseth’s time at CVA, where he was president from 2013 until 2016. The report, compiled by former CVA employees, reportedly describes Hegseth as repeatedly drunk at work events, including one incident that required Hegseth to be restrained from getting on stage at a Louisiana strip club where he had brought his team. The whistleblower report also reportedly alleges that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other managers at the organization sexually pursued some of their female colleagues. Mayer cites another letter from a former employee that details an incident in which Hegseth reportedly drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims!” while at a hotel bar during a work trip.

“I’ve seen him drunk so many times,” one of the authors of the whistleblower report told the magazine. “I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary.”

Hegseth’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, sent the New Yorker a statement attributed to an adviser to Hegseth that stated: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”

Rape Allegation

A recently disclosed police report revealed that a woman accused Hegseth of raping her at a 2017 Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. While no charges were filed and Hegseth claimed the encounter was consensual, he wound up paying the woman as part of a nondisclosure agreement, the Washington Post first reported last month. Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, told the Post that the woman who made the accusation was “the aggressor in initiating sexual activity” and that Hegseth made the payment “knowing that it was the height of the MeToo movement” and afraid he could potentially lose his Fox News position.

His Mother Called Him “an Abuser of Women”

As my colleague Pema Levy wrote this weekend, Hegseth’s mother, Penelope Hegseth, wrote her son an email in 2018 in which she called him “an abuser of women,” adding, “your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out.” The letter, first obtained by the New York Times, reportedly focused on how Hegseth treated his ex-wife, Samantha, during their divorce proceedings. Penelope Hegseth told the Times she recanted the accusations she made in the email, alleging she wrote them in anger and immediately followed up to him with an apology. She also called the newspaper’s decision to publish the contents of the email “disgusting.”

Hegseth’s lawyer and a spokesperson for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Monday.

As Pema writes, though, don’t expect the allegations to tank Hegseth’s confirmation hearings:

Trump himself has been found liable for sexual assault, and faced numerous other allegations of assault and cheating. If the commander-in-chief can get away with it, maybe Hegseth can too.

Late last month, Donald Trump named Karoline Leavitt as his incoming press secretary, positioning her to become the youngest person ever to hold the job. That’s a big step up. Just two years ago—following a failed congressional campaign—Leavitt was putting her name on a series of op-eds in right-wing publications lauding a fugitive Chinese mogul who has since been convicted of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from fans of his purportedly anti-communist movement.

Leavitt’s articles closely echoed topics, talking points, and even specific language that had been prepared for her by supporters of exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, as journalist Walker Bragman and I reported last year. I’ve since confirmed that Guo allies paid Leavitt for these op-eds.

Leavitt’s articles did not include any disclosure to readers that loyalists of Guo—the main subject of these articles—had helped her write them. That omission appears to have led one outlet, Townhall, to take down two Leavitt op-eds from its website last year, shortly after I asked about them. “This column was removed for violating Townhall’s commentary submission guidelines,” the outlet said in editor’s notes where Leavitt’s pieces previously appeared.

Leavitt told me last year that she’d written the articles herself. She did not deny that Guo associates had paid her to publish the stories. “I’m not going to comment to you about my clients or business relationships,” she said at the time.

When I contacted Leavitt recently, she did not answer additional questions or dispute my reporting. In a text message, though, she said she did not read my article last year “because you work for Mother Jones and I, like the 70+ million Americans who just voted for President Trump, don’t pay attention to your left wing propaganda.”

Leavitt, an aide in the first Trump administration who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022, is stepping into a job previously held by officials with more substantial resumes, some with backgrounds in serious journalism. But Trump’s selection of Leavitt, who said recently that she is prepared to take on a “hostile media,” suggests his preference for messengers who engage in performative combat with journalists.

In the United States, Guo is perhaps best known for bankrolling Steve Bannon. Years earlier, he’d made a fortune as a real-estate developer in China. He fled that country in 2014 to avoid pending criminal charges there and settled in a Manhattan penthouse. Beginning in 2017, he fashioned himself as a prominent critic of the Chinese Communist Party. He posted videos full of mostly uncorroborated allegations of Chinese government corruption that won him a large following in the Chinese diaspora. After partnering with Bannon that year, Guo launched Chinese language news outlets, nonprofits, and other organizations. He used those groups to promote himself, spread disinformation about Covid and other topics, and, in 2020, to push false claims aimed at helping reelect Trump.

Guo has long been dogged by allegations that his anti-CCP rhetoric was a cover for ongoing work on behalf of Chinese intelligence, claims Guo denies. In 2020, Guo ran into bigger problems as federal agents began probing complaints that he had defrauded investors who put up funds for financial ventures he promoted as part of a supposed effort to combat CCP influence.

By early 2023, Guo’s legal troubles were mounting. He had been held in contempt of court by a New York state judge, filed for bankruptcy, and seen many of his assets frozen by federal authorities.

Guo supporters responded with a public relations push in right-wing media. They paid broadcasters for the chance to appear to promote Guo on their shows. Guo supporters also worked to plant stories bolstering Guo’s image and attacking his perceived enemies on conservative websites. In addition to Leavitt, Guo’s backers recruited Gavin Wax, who heads the New York Young Republicans Club; Matt Palumbo, a far right pundit; and Natalie Winters, then an employee of Bannon’s streaming show, War Room, to churn out articles on his behalf.

As Bragman, who writes for OptOut Media’s Important Context publication, first reported last year, “representatives working on behalf of Guo would recruit the writers to place their names on opinion pieces that spoke glowingly of him and his efforts.” These pundits “would to take prompts as well as pre-prepared drafts, which they could then edit,” Bragman reported. The articles, which were placed in various conservative outlets, echoed Guo’s routine allegations that all of his critics—including judges, journalists, lawyers, and former supporters accusing him of fraud—were working for China’s Communist Party.

Last year, I obtained a document prepared by Guo supporters containing a list of prompts and talking points for proposed articles. Four of Leavitt’s articles repeated arguments or wording that appeared in these prompts. (See chart below.)

One of the prompts suggested an article alleging that three men frequently criticized by Guo—who often uses the first name “Miles”—were Chinese agents. The article, the prompt instructed, should argue that “these three CCP billionaires, or white gloves, are the primary source of illegitimate funding for the CCP’s unrestricted warfare abroad, including the CCP’s #1 priority goal of removing Miles.”

In a March 2023 Townhall article, Leavitt asserted that those three men—who she, too, described as “white gloves”—“are the primary source of illegitimate funding for the CCP’s unrestricted warfare abroad, including the CCP’s number one priority goal of removing a key Chinese freedom fighter, Miles Guo.”

Leavitt’s pieces fawned over Guo. She called him “an incredibly influential Chinese dissident” and “a renowned critic of the Chinese Communist Party.” The articles also echoed highly specific complaints Guo often made. In a March 14 Headline USA piece, Leavitt wrote about a 2017 hack of computers at a law firm that had represented Guo in an asylum bid. The piece tracked claims in a lawsuit Guo filed against the firm, and called the little-know incident “a disturbing reminder of the lengths to which authoritarian regimes will go to silence dissent and suppress free speech.”

Claiming credit for writing that was partially produced by others is not that unusual in online commentary. Senators do it. But Leavitt used material provided by people who were working on behalf of the subject of her articles, and she concealed the arrangement.

Professor Debora Weber-Wulff, who studies media ethics at Berlin University, said in an email that “lack of disclosure is the most problematic part of this.”

“It does smell,” Weber-Wulff added.

Leavitt’s articles praising Guo appeared shortly before his March 15, 2023, arrest on fraud charges. Prosecutors said that Guo stole investments made by people who believed he would use the funds as part of an effort to oust the Chinese Communist Party. Instead he used them for items including a $25 million mansion, $1 million worth of chandeliers, $978,000 of rugs, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and two $36,000 mattresses.

A Manhattan jury convicted Guo in July 2024 on nine counts, including racketeering conspiracy and securities fraud. Guo’s claim to be “a key Chinese freedom fighter,” the verdict suggested, was part of a massive con.

Asked if she stood by her cheerleading for Guo, Leavitt did not respond.

KAROLINE LEAVITT’S GUO OP-EDS Leavitt’s articles echoed talking points and language suggested by Guo’s supporters. Some of the claims below are baseless. Mother Jones is highlighting them not to suggest they are accurate but rather to show the similarities between the prompts and the published op-eds. What Guo’s Supporters Proposed: Professional Communist Moneyman: How Chinese Billionaires Are Bankrolling the CCP’s Foreign Expansion This article should focus on three people: Bruno Wu, Shan Weijian, and Jho Low. These three CCP billionaires, or white gloves, are the primary source of illegitimate funding for the CCP’s unrestricted warfare abroad, including the CCP’s #1 priority goal of removing Miles. What Leavitt Wrote: The American Denominator in CCP’s Global Dominance: Communist Moneyman and American Traitors …There are many white gloves, but three individuals Bruno Wu, Shan Weijian, and Jho Low are the primary source of illegitimate funding for the CCP’s unrestricted warfare abroad, including the CCP’s number one priority goal of removing a key Chinese freedom fighter, Miles Guo… Townhall, 3/2/23 What Guo’s Supporters Proposed: What The Hack: How CCP Cyber Warfare Brought an American Law Firm to its Knee This Article should focus on Clark Hill, a law firm hired by Guo to file his political asylum case. Clark Hill got all of its computers hacked and held as hostage by the CCP, and caved into the CCP’s influence, sold information to the CCP and helped to persecute Miles. What Leavitt Wrote: How a CCP Cyber-Attack Brought an American Law Firm to its Knees …However, strong questions remain that Clark Hill may have caved to pressure from the CCP and betrayed their client’s trust… Headline USA, 3/14/23 What Guo’s Supporters Proposed: First Amendment: Our First Line of Defense Against the CCP Use this article to talk about how the first admentend, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, is the most critical right in our fight against the CCP. And our enemies, the CCP and its enablers, absolutely hate it. Talk about how U.S. media is afraid of criticizing the CCP, how Shan weijian’s lawyers sent a letter to The Washington Times after they published Walker’s article, and how Judge Manning – the Bankruptcy Judge over Miles’ case – issued a court injunction against peaceful NFSC protesters… What Leavitt Wrote: American Media Must Stand Firm Against CCP-Sponsored Lawfare …On Jan. 30 this year, an American law firm, representing the “Pacific Alliance Asia Opportunity Fund”, a group with extensive links to CCP-controlled China, sent a demand letter to the Washington Times… Townhall, 2/10/23 What Guo’s Supporters Proposed: Exposed: DOJ-Employed Attorney Secretly Met with Chinese Ambassador to sell out America This article should focus on George Higginbathom’s trip to the Chinese Embassy in DC to meet with Cui Tiankai, then sitting Chinese Ambassador. The article should be very figurative, giving readers the freedom of imagination. The emphasis should be to show, from this example, how deep and how easily the DOJ could be and has been infiltrated by the CCP. We really want to hit home with this Higginbotham story. Make it thrilling! More sources coming What Leavitt Wrote: The Risk of CCP Influence on the DOJ for National Security and Legal System …The DOJ was swept up in a shocking infiltration that showcases how truly weak and vulnerable America’s intelligence agencies are to CCP infiltration… Epoch Times, 2/17/23

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

President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to kill offshore wind energy development “on day one” of his second term is already triggering project slowdowns on the East Coast, but the biggest wind farm proposed in the Gulf of Mexico will likely stay on track. 

That’s because the project is on such a long development timeline that Trump’s four-year term will be over before permitting and construction begin, according to RWE, the German energy giant that plans to build a 2,000-megawatt wind farm about 40 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The project, which could power more than 350,000 homes, isn’t expected to be operational for about a decade. 

“The project has a long-lead development timeline that is longer than any one federal administration, and with a planned operational date in the mid-2030s,” RWE spokesman Ryan Ferguson said. 

RWE, the world’s second-largest offshore wind developer, and other key players in the renewable energy industry announced shifts in funding priorities and warned of project delays and possible derailments after Trump was elected president this month. 

“The change of administration in the US entails risks for the timely implementation of offshore wind projects,” RWE Chief Financial Officer Michael Muller said at a press conference earlier this month. “The new Republican administration could delay specific projects. The realization of our Community Offshore Wind project near New York, for example, depends on outstanding permits from US federal authorities.”

The “higher risks and delays” in the US offshore wind market prompted RWE to initiate a $1.6 billion share buyback, RWE CEO Markus Krebber said during a call with investors. The buyback signaled a significant shift in the company’s short-term spending priorities but not waning confidence in the durability of US demand for renewables, Muller said, noting that a growing number of states are setting goals for solar and wind energy. 

RWE’s recalibration makes sense, said Jenny Netherton, the Southeastern Wind Coalition’s Louisiana program manager. “That was not unexpected,” she said. “Companies are always trying to find the best way forward in an uncertain environment.”

“Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”

Trump’s opposition to offshore wind began in 2006, when he initiated a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over a proposed wind farm the future US president said would spoil the view from a golf course he hoped to build. Trump lost the battle and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees. In recent speeches, Trump has said wind farms harm property values and wildlife. More outlandishly, he has claimed wind energy causes cancer, increases food prices, and prevents people from watching TV when the wind isn’t blowing. 

During his first term, Trump was accused of “slow walking” the permits for some of the first offshore wind farms in federal waters. RWE and other companies say wind farms already under construction will likely move forward, but projects slated to break ground over the next couple years may face setbacks. 

Of the 30 states with offshore wind potential, nine have statewide wind energy mandates. Two states—Massachusetts and Rhode Island—have deadlines to reach wind energy targets in the 2020s and four states—New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia—have deadlines in the 2030s. 

These goals and the US’s ever-rising electricity needs are signs that Trump may slow but not kill wind energy development, Muller said. 

“We still believe US offshore wind [energy] is still needed,” he said, noting New York in particular. “If they are going to keep up with demand, they need offshore wind.”

Louisiana set a goal of developing the capacity for 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035, but the target wasn’t legally binding. Proposed in 2021 during the administration of Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, the goal appears to have been abandoned by Governor Jeff Landry, who took office in January. The Republican governor has said little publicly about offshore wind development and has not responded to requests seeking his position on the matter. 

Many other Louisiana Republicans strongly back offshore wind, seeing it as an economic boon for the state. Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry have seen business flag in recent years. Several of them, including shipbuilders, engineering firms, and metal fabricators, have easily transitioned to helping plan and build offshore projects on the East Coast, including the US’s first offshore wind farm.

Bipartisan legislation in Louisiana paved the way for a fast-tracked approval process for wind projects in state-managed waters, which extend 3 miles from the coast. Louisiana has approved agreements with two companies to build small-scale wind farms near Cameron Parish and Port Fourchon, the Gulf’s largest oil and gas port. The two projects will likely be built years before the RWE wind farm. 

The last federal lease auction in the Gulf was canceled in July due to weak interest from bidders, but two companies recently offered competing plans for a 142,000-acre area near Galveston, Texas. It’s unclear how Trump’s victory will affect those proposals. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is waiting to see if there’s more developer interest in the area and will likely initiate a competitive lease sale in the coming months. 

While Trump may cause uncertainty at the federal level, Louisiana isn’t likely to waver in its support for offshore wind energy, Netherton said. 

“It still enjoys broad support here,” she said. “Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”

This coverage was made possible through a partnership between Grist and Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of local newsrooms providing essential journalism in underserved communities and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.

In 2016, when Tennessee OBGYN Susan Lacy learned she would be providing gender-affirming care to transgender patients in her new job at a reproductive health clinic in Memphis, she felt out of her depth. But it didn’t take long to realize that hormone treatments for trans folks weren’t so different from those she’d been providing for years to cisgender patients. She already knew how to use pills, patches, gels, and injections, with their different formulations and side effects, to reduce menopausal night sweats, hot flashes, and brain fog. Patients who took hormones for gender dysphoria told her they felt a similar sense of relief. “It didn’t matter about socioeconomics, age, race, feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy,” Lacy says. Often the first reaction was, “I finally feel like I can think straight.”

Now a gynecologist in solo practice, Lacy has more than 300 adult trans patients. At one time, her patient list also included trans teenagers with the consent of their parents. But last year, Tennessee prohibited the prescription of certain medications to minors to treat the distress many trans people feel when their bodies do not align with their gender identity. Under the law, cisgender kids could keep receiving the meds: puberty blockers for those who start puberty too early, for instance, or testosterone or estrogen for teens who enter puberty late. But if the purpose was to treat gender dysphoria, those same medications were forbidden.

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a landmark lawsuit challenging the Tennessee ban, brought by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, Lacy, and three trans minors and their families. United States v. Skrmetti is one of the biggest cases of the term and the first major trans-rights case to be heard by the court since far-right lawmakers and policy groups launched a coordinated campaign inundating statehouses with hundreds of anti-trans bills a few years ago. Legal experts say the Skrmetti case could shape the landscape for trans rights for years to come, while testing how far the Court’s conservative supermajority is willing to extend its 2022 decision allowing states to ban abortion: Will the justices give states free rein to outlaw yet another form of healthcare?

“Before treatment, I hid,” one plaintiff, 15-year-old Ryan Roe, wrote in a declaration asking a federal judge to put the ban on hold. But with hormone therapy, “I am raising my hand in class again and participating in all aspects of school. I feel stronger—physically, mentally and emotionally. I feel so happy with myself and that makes me feel like I can do and be more.” 

That changed, he added, when Tennessee lawmakers began debating the gender-affirming care ban. “Hopelessness creeped in again.”

The Skrmetti arguments are happening at a time of intense fear and vulnerability for the trans community. President-elect Donald Trump and his allies bet on transphobia to take back the White House and Congress, pouring millions into anti-trans campaign ads and vowing a broad crackdown on what Trump refers to as “left-wing gender insanity” (though the extent to which trans issues swayed the electorate remains unclear). Supported by groups like the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, and Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal behemoth, states have made particular targets of trans young people, restricting their use of school bathrooms and locker rooms, their participation in sports, and discussion of LGBTQ-related topics in classrooms and libraries. 

They have also targeted medical care, with nearly half of states outlawing gender-affirming treatments for people under 18, cutting off access for an estimated 118,300 trans teens. The bans have been enacted over the objections of virtually all leading US medical associations, which consider such treatments clinically appropriate. One study of almost 12,000 trans teenagers found that those who received hormone therapy reported lower rates of depression and suicidality compared to those who wanted but didn’t receive the treatment. When Tennessee’s ban took effect, Lacy says, “the biggest sense from the patients was despair—anger and despair.” Parents, meanwhile, were frustrated: “Why can I not make this decision for my child?”

“It is painful to even think about having to go back to the place I was in before I was able to come out and access the care that my doctors have prescribed for me,” one of the plaintiffs, a 15-year-old trans girl known as L.W., wrote in a declaration. She struggled to focus and connect with friends, and got sick when she had to use the boy’s bathroom at school.

“It is painful to even think about having to go back to the place I was in before I was able to come out and access the care that my doctors have prescribed for me.”

L.W.’s mother, Samantha Williams, wrote in a declaration of her own that starting gender-affirming medical care had improved her daughter’s physical and mental health: “She has more confidence, she is fully present, and not only does she accept hugs, but she also gives hugs.” The Tennessee ban prompted Williams and her husband to consider moving their family away from relatives, work, and the community where their two children had grown up. “I do not want to see her go back to the dark place she was in prior to coming out and receiving the life-saving treatment she needs,” Williams wrote.

LGBTQ-rights organizations have filed lawsuits over almost every gender-affirming care ban, with Skrmetti the first case to reach the Supreme Court. Now, justices are being asked to set the standard under which lower-court judges must evaluate whether laws like Tennessee’s violate the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. The justices’ eventual decision could have implications not just for gender-affirming care bans, but for future anti-trans laws in statehouses and Congress. “It will tell the next administration whether it’s open season to continue with these attacks on trans young folks and transgender people more broadly,” says Jenny Pizer, chief legal officer of the LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal, “or whether there’s going to be some limits.”

There’s a potential wild card in the mix: When Trump takes office, his Department of Justice is likely to try to reverse the Biden administration’s position and withdraw the case. Pizer says that if that happens, there’s no telling how the Supreme Court would respond. They could agree to kill the case, deny the request, or push a decision off till next term. Or, they could let the federal government withdraw but allow the case to proceed, with only the Tennessee families and Lacy as plaintiffs.

Legally speaking, the main issue in the case boils down to the question of whether bans on gender-affirming care are a form of sex-based discrimination. If they are, then states going forward will have to prove, when challenged, that the bans are “substantially related” to an “important state interest.” That’s a fairly high bar—one that would require judges to weigh the medical and scientific evidence around the prohibited treatments. When trial courts have looked at that evidence in the past, they’ve overturned the bans, siding with the trans youth and their families.

In fact, that’s what happened in the Middle District of Tennessee federal court, where the Skrmetti case started. “The Court acknowledges that the state feels strongly that the medical procedures banned by [the law] are harmful to minors,” District Judge Eli Richardson wrote last year in an order temporarily blocking the law. “The medical evidence on the record, however, indicates otherwise.”

Richardson’s decision wasn’t controversial at the time—every federal judge, including Trump appointees, who had looked at gender-affirming care bans up until that point had blocked them. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees Tennessee, went the other way, ruling 2 to 1 that the law did not discriminate based on sex, and thus it didn’t have to meet the higher level of scrutiny. (The judges also shot down the plaintiffs’ two other arguments—that anti-trans discrimination is unique and merits a closer look by the courts, and that the ban violates parents’ right to direct their children’s medical care.) In the 14 months since that decision, more courts have upheld gender-affirming care bans for minors, including in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the Sixth Circuit’s approach, courts going forward will apply the lowest level of scrutiny to gender-affirming care bans. The result, says Jess Braverman, legal director at the advocacy group Gender Justice, would be “like a rubber stamp.”

Casual Supreme Court observers would be forgiven for thinking that the question of whether anti-trans discrimination counts as sex discrimination has already been settled. In his majority opinion in the court’s last major trans-rights case, Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, Justice Neil Gorsuch stated, “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” But since that ruling, which involved a funeral home employee who was fired after transitioning, conservative lawyers and public officials have been trying to limit Bostock from being applied to situations beyond employment. The result has been an escalation of the legal battles over federal protections for trans people: Do existing sex-discrimination laws shield them at school? What about at the doctor’s office?

In arguing that Tennessee’s ban discriminates based on sex, DOJ lawyers point to the text of the law, which explicitly says that the state wants to “encourage[e] minors to appreciate their sex” and forbid treatments that might “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” The “purpose is to force boys and girls to look and live like boys and girls,” appellate judge Helene White summarized in a dissent from the Sixth Circuit ruling. Under the law, kids can receive puberty blockers and hormone therapy if the medications are provided to help them conform their bodies to their sex assigned at birth, but not if the treatments are provided to help them not conform. “There is no way to determine whether these treatments must be withheld from any particular minor without considering [the minor’s] sex,’” DOJ lawyers argue in their Supreme Court briefing.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti contends that the ban does not discriminate based on sex. Instead, he says, the law is a health care regulation that applies to everyone. “The law draws a line between minors seeking drugs for gender transition and minors seeking drugs for other medical purposes,” he argues in his brief. “Boys and girls fall on both sides of that line.”

In making that argument, Skrmetti repeatedly cited Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 case that overturned the federal right to abortion. As Susan Rinkunas has noted over at The New Republic, the Tennessee AG is picking up on an aside by Justice Samuel Alito in the Dobbs ruling that Mississippi’s abortion ban didn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause because, according to the justice, the ban didn’t discriminate based on sex. To back up this assertion, Alito cited a Supreme Court ruling from 1974, Geduldig v. Aiello, which held that an insurance policy specifically excluding pregnancy-related coverage was not a form of sex discrimination, and applied to everyone. That ruling and a related decision were deemed so outrageous at the time that Congress swiftly enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to override them.

Now, there is a risk that when the Supreme Court decides Skrmetti, it will apply the same reasoning from Geduldig and Alito’s sidenote in Dobbs: Even when laws restrict medical treatments that only matter for certain groups—like pregnant women, or trans people—those laws aren’t inherently discriminatory, because not every member of that group requires that type of care. “It’s kind of like our Supreme Court is a bunch of freshman philosophy students,” Braverman says. “It’s like they’re all asking, ‘Do we see the same color when we see yellow?’ Except lives are at stake.”

“It’s kind of like our Supreme Court is a bunch of freshman philosophy students. It’s like they’re all asking, ‘Do we see the same color when we see yellow?’ Except lives are at stake.”

To Braverman, it’s no surprise that the arguments being used to defend bans on gender-affirming care are the same as those used to defend bans on abortion. “It’s the same people who are litigating it in court, and they’re making the same argument,” Braverman says. “If we treat what’s happening to transgender people as though it’s happening in a vacuum, everyone’s going to lose all their rights.” If the Supreme Court sides with Tennessee, for example, states might be emboldened to try banning other types of sex-specific healthcare, such as IVF or birth control, the ACLU warns.

“The real question in this case is, ‘Can powerful interest groups like the Heritage Foundation or Alliance Defending Freedom make up lies about your health care, and then use those lies to make your healthcare illegal?” Shawn Thomas Meerkamper, senior staff attorney at the Transgender Law Center, said in a briefing for journalists. “Because that’s what’s happening here.”

“One of the things that I think is so concerning about these laws is allowing legislators with no medical knowledge to restrict care for a specific diagnosis,” Lacy says from her office in Memphis. When the Tennessee ban came down, she tried to help her young patients find ways to keep up their existing prescriptions. Some families drove across the border to a clinic in Illinois or flew to other states where the medications were still legal. But for patients needing new prescriptions, her hands were tied.

She thinks about the families that never call her office in the first place—the “chilling effect” stopping parents from even considering medical care as an option after their children come out as trans. “I think when that law was passed, a lot of those parents just said, ‘Nope, can’t even deal with it,’” Lacy says. “Prior, they would say, ‘Well, let’s go in and let’s at least have the conversation.’”

Beyond the chilling effect, Lacy fears how laws like Tennessee’s worsen hostility toward transgender people. She worries about her own daughter, who came out as trans as a young adult, being judged based on how others perceive her gender identity. “There’s just a fear of the risk of existing in the world where the state is saying that you don’t have a right to exist,” Lacy says. “And that’s very, very frightening.”

What do anti-vaxxers and abortion opponents have in common? They both see an ally in David Weldon, who is now President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The physician and ex–Florida congressman’s track record includes introducing legislation that would have stripped the CDC of its authority to conduct research on vaccine safety and instead given it to an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Weldon has also promoted the unfounded theory that vaccines lead to childhood autism—a false claim boosted infamously in the past by Trump’s pick for HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And on abortion, Weldon is responsible for an eponymous federal law that prohibits HHS from funding any entities that “discriminate” against health care providers, hospitals, or insurance plans who opt out of providing abortion care—which the Trump administration “weaponized” to enact its anti-abortion agenda during his first term, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Weldon introduced the amendment in the House in 2004, and it has been passed as part of the HHS spending bill every year since 2005.

While in Congress, Weldon also co-sponsored legislation that sought to bar HHS from providing any Title X family planning funding to entities that provide abortions. (Then-Rep. Mike Pence sponsored that bill, and Trump enacted that policy in office, when Pence was vice president.) Weldon also supported a bill that proposed studying unsubstantiated links between abortion and depression.

Neither Weldon nor Trump have been shy about acknowledging these positions. On Weldon’s campaign site for his unsuccessful run for the Florida statehouse earlier this year, he promotes his record on so-called “vaccine safety,” as well as his “100% pro-life voting record” and the anti-abortion amendments he passed in Congress. When Trump announced Weldon as his choice to run the CDC on Nov. 22, he noted Weldon’s history “addressing issues within HHS and CDC,” including that he “worked with the CDC to enact a ban on patents for human embryos.”

“Dave will proudly restore the CDC to its true purpose, and will work to end the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and Make America Healthy Again!” Trump wrote.

Anti-vaxxers and abortion opponents are now celebrating the fact that Weldon could potentially control the CDC’s more than $9 billion budget.

“He is one of us!! Since before our movement had momentum,” the co-director of the anti-vaxx group Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights wrote on social media.

“This is YUGE!” a similar group in Oklahoma claimed, praising Weldon’s efforts to stop the CDC from conducting vaccine research.

And both the anti-abortion site Live Action and the right-wing Daily Signal ran pieces highlighting Weldon’s anti-abortion record, following Trump’s announcement. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Daily Signal that Weldon “is a proven leader for life, and we look forward to working with him.”

Now in the national spotlight, Weldon appeared to walk back his most ardent anti-vaccine beliefs of the past: He told the New York Times this week, “I give shots, I believe in vaccination.” On abortion, though, Weldon seems to be more status quo: His campaign website from this year says, “I will always vote to protect the unborn and support a culture that celebrates the value of life.”