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

People weren’t the only ones fleeing fast-moving flames and hot embers as deadly wildfires burned down entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles beginning on Tuesday night and ongoing as of publication. Footage from NBC LA showed a fawn with singed fur running down the middle of a deserted street in Altadena with no doe in sight as the Eaton Fire burned. Later that night, camera crews from ABC 7 spotted a mountain lion and two cubs running across Topanga Canyon Boulevard away from the Palisades Fire.

The fires, which were still blazing as of Tuesday, have killed at least 24 people and damaged or destroyed more than 13,000 structures throughout greater Los Angeles. High Country News talked with Miguel Ordeñana, a wildlife biologist and environmental educator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, about the compounding threats wildlife fleeing wildfires face, and what people can do to help. Bobcats, cougars, coyotes, birds, bats and more all live in the region. Slow-moving creatures like snails and salamanders, wildlife that require specific habitats, nocturnal critters forced to move during the daytime, and animals with young are some of the most vulnerable. “I think a lot of people don’t think about our neighborhoods as ecosystems and habitats, but here, they really are,” Ordeñana said.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When it comes to wildlife, what are some of the most important short-term threats? Smoke inhalation? Burns? Habitat destruction? 

Miguel Ordeñana: It’s this domino effect that people don’t think about. Yes, they get physically burned or injured or killed by the fire itself. Just like us, they suffer from smoke-inhalation problems. But then, once you get a step beyond that, there are so many impacts that the fire can have on their population’s sustainability. You might not see the immediate effects right now, but you might see it within a few months or years. 

Territorial animals, especially, are wary of going anywhere outside the territory because of the social dynamics they have within their populations. It takes a lot for them to decide to risk their lives to leave. It’s a very vulnerable situation for them because they picked that territory for a reason. Now, they’re forced to evacuate those areas because of the fire and go somewhere with unknown dangers. For instance, if you’re a bobcat with kits, you might go to a coyote hotspot, and that’s where the coyotes are waiting to pounce. That’s why you didn’t choose that territory in the first place. It’s putting animals in really bad spots, especially with their young.

How are the Palisades and Eaton fires different from other wildfires? 

What’s so unique about this fire, and why it’s so devastating to not just wildlife and habitat, but also people, is that it’s spread into so many human structures. Even the most resilient species that are able to cohabitate in urban areas with people are losing their refuge. 

You study bats, among other animals. Are there any specific concerns for them? 

There are only so many places that they’re able to survive. Already, even when there’s no fires, they’re having to use the freeway underpasses. And if those places are getting burned and aren’t safe anymore—whether that’s trees or roofs—then it’s going to be really tough for them to survive. Yes, they can fly, but fly where? These unexpected events can be really devastating to the population. 

What are the long-term concerns when it comes to habitat in the area? 

[One] thing that comes to mind is the hard work of land managers that have been conserving habitat, creating habitat linkages and corridors and restoring habitat in affected areas. These are a lot of volunteer efforts as well. All of that is going up in flames.

I’ve seen suggestions that people leave out extra water in their yard for wildlife passing through right now. What else can people do to help? 

Stay vigilant and be aware that animals are being affected. If you see animals in distress in places that you don’t normally see them, you hopefully have a little bit more tolerance. That doesn’t mean you intervene specifically but call a professional, and hopefully they have the capacity. Know the number to your local animal rehabilitator. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add? 

Recovery is the next step. Recovery of our livelihoods and our homes and all that is very important and the first priority. But part of bringing back L.A. is making sure that we’re also considering wildlife, nature and habitat. Because if that doesn’t come back, and that’s not being supported, then L.A. is not going to be what it was. It’s already not going to be what it was.

The Los Angeles Natural History Museum’s community science team is encouraging Angelinos to document how wildlife are responding to the Los Angeles area wildfires. You can learn more about the project and submit observations here.

This story, which was updated to reflect current death and property tolls, is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation. 

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. A version of this story was first published online in July.

For decades, McLean Bible Church has served as the place of worship for many of DC’s Republican elite. The sprawling evangelical megachurch in Vienna, Virginia, boasts a roster of former parishioners that includes everyone from Ken Starr to Mike Pence. Donald Trump once dropped in after a round of golf.

McLean Bible is also where, in 2017, a senior pastor named Dale Sutherland formed a nonprofit called Act2Impact, described in state records as an “auxiliary” of the church that would “preach the gospel” and “conduct evangelistic and humanitarian outreach.”

That mission was short-lived.

Two years later, Sutherland—once an undercover narcotics officer in DC—left McLean Bible and filed papers to rename Act2Impact. It became the Constitutional Defense Fund (CDF), which would “promote and secure” constitutional rights. “We aim to defend and strengthen those rights through methods that will include litigation and other means,” the filing stated.

“We want to get a case before the Supreme Court.”

Around this time, Sutherland also leaned into a new persona: the Undercover Pastor. “Buying cocaine and preaching Jesus. A weird combo,” notes his website, which touted a newsletter—“get biblical wisdom delivered to your inbox”—and YouTube channel. “I used to lock people up,” he likes to say. “Now I’m trying to set people free.”

Sutherland is much less forthcoming about CDF, which since its re­christening has been at the center of a ­far-­reaching, multimillion-dollar legal campaign to dismantle America’s gun laws. From 2020 to 2023, CDF funneled more than $14 million to the DC law firm Cooper & Kirk and a constellation of gun rights groups, which together have helped file at least 21 lawsuits challenging gun restrictions.

These suits, aimed at getting an ­eventual Supreme Court hearing, concern bans on semiautomatic assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as restrictions on young adults buying and carrying handguns. In October, the court heard one of the cases, a challenge to the government’s ability to regulate home-assembled, unserialized “ghost guns.”

Most of the money that CDF spent on this vast effort came via Donors Trust, a pass-through fund founded in 1999 with the aim of “safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative” philanthropists who seek to channel their wealth into right-wing causes. The trust has more than $1 billion in assets and is not required to identify its donors.

In short, anonymous funders bankrolled a legal attack aimed at giving the Supreme Court’s conservative majority an opportunity to rewrite firearms laws. It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook—but for guns.

The Firm

In August 2019, before stepping on a podium in Colonial Williamsburg, Charles Cooper was introduced as a “legend” of the conservative legal world. He began by warming up the crowd at a gathering of the Convention of States Project, which seeks to amend the Constitution and eliminate what supporters consider ambiguous language that has enabled liberal advances. “Are there any freedom-loving, anti-communist patriots in this room?” The audience cheered. “Do any of you cling to your Bibles and your guns?”

The day before, Cooper had lost his decades-long­ gig as the National Rifle Association’s outside counsel. As details of financial abuses at the organization became public, many rallied around then-CEO Wayne ­LaPierre. Cooper did not and was purged.

Before representing the NRA, Cooper held a key role in the Justice Department. His Reagan-era DOJ opinions—for instance, one finding that employers could refuse to hire those with AIDS—burnished his reputation as a strident conservative. Cooper tapped Samuel Alito to be his deputy and, two decades later, would guide him through the Supreme Court confirmation process. By then, Cooper had founded Cooper & Kirk, which became known as the conservative movement’s prestige advocate. It hired zealots from elite law schools, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, as well as Noel Francisco, who would become Trump’s solicitor general in his first term. Cooper defended Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, and represented Jeff Sessions when the then-attorney general was under scrutiny for his contacts with Russian officials in 2016.

Cooper’s Williamsburg speech was titled “The Real Threat to the Second Amendment.” He described how his work had contributed to split circuit court rulings on whether people have a right to carry guns outside the home for self-defense. A case that would resolve that question, he noted, was before the Supreme Court.

Cooper was referring to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which challenged a state law requiring applicants for concealed carry permits to demonstrate a heightened need for protection. At the time, Cooper & Kirk was representing the plaintiffs. Although the firm did not argue the case before the court—that job was given to star Supreme Court advocate Paul Clement—invoices show that in April 2021, the month the justices agreed to hear Bruen, Cooper & Kirk managing partner David H. Thompson conferred with lead attorneys on the case about an “amicus panel,” a body of subject experts that advises on litigation strategy.

CDF money went to attorneys and advocacy groups that filed briefs backing the plaintiffs. Such filings, known as amicus briefs, are integral to legal strategy and are often cited in higher court rulings. Thompson filed an amicus brief in Bruen on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation, which has received CDF funding. Another partner at the firm did so on behalf of J. Joel Alicea, himself a Cooper & Kirk attorney identified in the brief only as a professor at Catholic University. The CDF-funded Firearms Policy Foundation (since renamed FPC Action Foundation) and a closely related group, the Firearms Policy Coalition, filed their own amicus brief. So did the archconservative Claremont Institute, which got a $105,000 CDF grant in 2021 to support gun rights. John Eastman—the lawyer who helped rally Trump’s faithful before they stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and is now under indictment in Georgia and Arizona for attempting to subvert the 2020 election—wrote the Claremont brief. (Eastman’s law license has been temporarily suspended in California and DC.)

The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Bruen was momentous. Conservative justices not only struck down New York’s law, but also established a new test for the constitutionality of all gun restrictions. No longer should courts weigh the government’s interest in reducing violence or promoting public safety against the right to bear arms, the majority said. Rather, the ­constitutionality­ of gun laws should depend on whether they’re similar enough to restrictions in place when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, or when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868—points at which, the justices said, the original meaning of the Second Amendment is best discerned.

Thanks to Bruen, lower courts have been deluged with gun law challenges. In the last two years, judges have issued, on average, more than one Bruen-related ruling daily, and firearms restrictions are being struck down at an unprecedented clip. “We are more excited than ever about the future,” declared Brandon Combs, who directs both the Firearms Policy Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, after the Bruen ruling. “Indeed, FPC is already working with the exceptional litigators at Cooper & Kirk—truly the best in the space—on the largest Second Amendment litigation program in the country.”

The Plaintiffs

Of course, before Cooper & Kirk can get involved, a plaintiff is needed. That’s where the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition come in. They not only act as plaintiffs themselves, but they also recruit individuals who can claim standing, a direct injury from the law that’s being challenged.

Since 2020—the year Trump replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett—a torrent of funding from CDF has helped turn the groups into juggernauts. In the three years prior to 2020, they were plaintiffs in 22 federal actions; in the three subsequent years, that number jumped to 61. “We want to get a case before the Supreme Court,” Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb said in 2023. “And the quicker these cases move, the better for gun ownership and for gun rights.”

Gottlieb is known for direct-mail and marketing savvy, and for cashing in on right-wing causes through private companies that have business arrangements with his advocacy groups. He created the Second Amendment Foundation in the early 1970s, and in 1984, he pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud. He was sentenced to a year in prison, which he served largely on work release. (More recently, the attorney general of Washington state investigated Gottlieb, who sued in response, claiming political harassment.)

In the late 1980s, Gottlieb gained public notice as an architect of the Wise Use movement, which capitalized on a backlash to federal control of land in Western states and environmental regulation. “I’ve never seen anything pay out as quickly as this whole Wise Use thing has done,” Gottlieb said in an interview from the time. “It touches the same kind of anger as the gun stuff, and not only generates a higher rate of return, but also a higher average dollar donation. My gun stuff runs about $18. The Wise Use stuff breaks $40.” When news stories linked the movement to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Gottlieb described them as “overplayed.” In 2023, he headlined the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an event hosted by the Rod of Iron Ministries, which is led by a son of Moon. The MAGA-allied church glorifies AR-15-style rifles—the type of gun used in an attempt to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally—seeing in them the biblical “rod of iron,” Christ’s prophesied instrument of dominion at Armageddon.

In November 2022, Gottlieb gave a deposition as part of a challenge to an Illinois gun law. He testified that an anonymous funder was paying his counsel, Cooper & Kirk, which had given him a statement outlining how much money the donor had spent to support roughly a dozen foundation lawsuits underway in 2021. When asked whether he knew who was paying Cooper & Kirk, Gottlieb testified, “I wish I did.”

That remark alarms some experts, who argue that rules of professional responsibility require that a client knows who is paying their counsel before consenting to representation. “He’s either just lying or the firm is delinquent in getting informed consent,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who specializes in legal ethics and firearms regulation. In response to written questions, Gottlieb said that his deposition answers were “accurate” and that “merely because a third party may have paid for some services rendered, the Second Amendment Foundation retains control over all legal direction, strategy, and settlement authority, which is wholly ethical.”  

Gottlieb is not the operation’s only player who is apparently unaware of his beneficiary’s identity. In 2021, CDF paid Gary Kleck, a professor emeritus at Florida State University whose work has been touted by gun interests for decades, $6,900, according to an IRS filing. Kleck told me the money was a consulting fee from Cooper & Kirk for work he’d done on Bruen. “I have no idea what the Constitutional Defense Fund is,” he said, “and had never heard of it before you contacted me.”

The Professor

Even when they go before a friendly court, the lawyers and plaintiffs need research to bolster their case. Enter Georgetown assistant professor William English, who in 2021 received a $58,750 CDF grant and the same year filed a key brief supporting the Bruen plaintiffs.

Last June, in an investigation revealing CDF’s dark money operation, the New York Times detailed how English’s Bruen brief was filed jointly with the Center for Human Liberty—which had been incorporated in Nevada two months earlier. (The center shares an address and leadership with the Firearms Policy Coalition and Firearms Policy Foundation.) The brief was prepared by a Manhattan attorney, Edward Paltzik, whose firm received $80,000 from CDF in 2021. It argued that, based on English’s own research, there was no link between right-to-carry laws, higher numbers of gun carry permits, and violent crime. The research had not been peer-reviewed.

English’s work suited the plaintiffs perfectly. Clement cited it during oral arguments, and Charles Cooper’s pal Alito did so in a concurring opinion. An update English later published concluded that assault rifles are in “common use,” a finding central to the movement’s legal advocacy post-Bruen. Gun interests have cited English’s work in dozens of motions and pleadings nationwide.

Academics on both sides of the gun debate have found defects in his scholarship. During a 2023 deposition in an Oregon case, Kleck, the Florida State professor, said English’s survey can’t be relied on. “He’s vague about exactly how he developed his sample,” Kleck said. “And there is nothing in his report to contradict the assumption that what he had was a self-selected sample.”

I’d been trying to get English and Georgetown to answer questions about his work since the Bruen ruling came down. Only after I paid a visit to the gated community where then-Georgetown President John DeGioia lived did the university’s communications office respond, stating: “Georgetown respects and supports academic freedom, including the right of its faculty members to conduct independent research. The University’s Institutional Review Board reviewed this study before the survey began, and the survey costs were supported by an external grant that did not flow through the University.”

However, the tax ID number that CDF reported to the IRS in conjunction with English’s grant is Georgetown’s. Asked to clarify the meaning of “did not flow through the university,” a Georgetown spokesperson said the university is “unable to identify any record of Constitutional Defense Fund funds flowing through Georgetown and is uncertain why the University’s tax identification number appears in CDF’s records.”

In late June, English published a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he defended his work, bashed the Times, and characterized attempts by me and other reporters to get answers from him as “harassment.” English wrote that media outlets “are signaling that they will cancel academics who state inconvenient facts…Those of us who want to foster an evidence-based public-­policy discourse should reject these tactics, and courts should take note of them.”

The Middleman

Lawyers and academics all need to be paid, which brings us back to the Undercover Pastor.

Sutherland likes to tout his time with the DC police, but not all of his undercover work ended smoothly. In one early 1990s case, Sutherland and his partner Joseph Abdalla—who would later sit on the board of CDF—handled an informant named Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was shot multiple times and killed. When federal prosecutors tried members of the drug crew suspected in the killing, it emerged that Williams had been allowed to continue making street buys for Sutherland, who was posing as a Georgetown University construction worker seeking crack, despite the fact that Sutherland’s presence caused dealers unease, according to court transcripts. At trial, evidence went missing, including a pager in Sutherland’s possession that defense attorneys argued could shed light on the crimes. “I am going to get the chief of police and the United States attorney in here and read them the riot act,” the judge said at one point. “To lose evidence of various kinds day after day is just not satisfactory.” Prosecutors dropped the murder charge but obtained drug conspiracy convictions against the defendants.

After Sutherland left the DC police force in 2013, his role at McLean Bible, where he’d long held staff positions, grew. In 2016, he began talks with the Southern Baptist Convention on a partnership to “plant” churches in the DC region. Sutherland founded an entity called New City Network, an arm of McLean Bible, to carry out the work. Concerned that the partnership violated McLean’s constitution, which requires the church to remain unaffiliated, a group of members filed suit against McLean in 2022.

The legal battle revealed a complex series of money transfers totaling more than $7 million between McLean, the convention, and New City Network. Satisfied that records and testimony demonstrated the partnership had indeed violated McLean’s constitution, the plaintiffs dropped the suit in 2023. In a letter summarizing the case, however, their attorney made clear that questions remain: “Current and former church leaders deposed could not explain the reasons for this unorthodox payment structure, or state with confidence where the money went specifically.” A church webpage allows that “financial transactions for the church planting were sometimes confusing,” but says an independent audit accounted for the money spent. 

In a deposition, Sutherland said he’d left McLean Bible and his role leading New City Network in May 2019. He was unable to name any churches the network had started, save for one in Falls Church, Virginia, where he and his son-in-law now preach. “For Heaven’s sake,” Sutherland said. “I can picture all the pastors in my head. I just can’t think of the names they gave their churches. Boy oh boy.”

One of the plaintiffs in the suit, Jeremiah Burke, said Sutherland’s limited recall was an act. “He repeatedly recounts, in his podcast and on his Instagram page, in vivid detail, events from 20 and 30 years ago with absolute precision, events in which he is the hero,” Burke said. “However, in his deposition, having sworn under oath to tell the truth, Dale somehow couldn’t call to mind details of significant events from the recent past.”

A former McLean Bible elder, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal church matters, described Sutherland as “kindhearted” and a “warrior for the Lord,” but also “deceptive.” During the church planting drive, he said, Sutherland “did things the way he wanted to, he just kind of ran rogue.” The elder said Sutherland “is a pretty good talker, he can sell pretty well,” and would “cuddle up next to” the church’s “big donors.”

As Sutherland left McLean Bible and established CDF, he began to collect more money from his array of nonprofits, including Code 3 Association, whose stated goal is better relations between police and the public. (Abdalla is a director there, too.) In 2020, these nonprofits paid Sutherland and his private company, Code 3 Consulting, more than $200,000. Over the next three years, Sutherland collected more than $1 million from his nonprofits. He also began flipping DC properties, buying at least a dozen homes valued at $7 million and selling them for more than $11 million.

In short, Sutherland has been awash in cash since he filed paperwork to create CDF. In one sense, he’s an odd middleman. People who know him can’t recall Sutherland expressing support for scuttling gun laws. “I never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or gun rights,” the former elder said. “I never did, nope, and I was with him a lot.”

But Sutherland’s history overlaps with another of the operation’s main figures. Speaking to an interviewer in 2023, Thompson, the Cooper & Kirk managing partner who has overseen much of the firm’s Second Amendment work, praised the church that was his spiritual home for two decades. “I grew up Episcopalian,” said Thompson, who did not respond to written questions for this story, “and about 20 years ago, I became a born-again Christian and went to McLean Bible Church.”

Twice while investigating this story, I knocked on the door of Sutherland’s home to no avail. Attempts to reach him by phone failed. Then, in mid-June, he answered. I asked him how he’d come to be running money through CDF to Cooper & Kirk. “Sir, I am in the car with my grandson,” Sutherland said, “and I am not talking.”

The Dark Money

In 2016, a young man in Washington state, angry and jealous after a breakup, bought an AR-15-style rifle, 60 rounds of ammunition, and multiple 30-round magazines. Then he killed three people, including his ex-girlfriend, at a house party. He later blamed his actions in part on easy access to guns. The killings prompted the state legislature to enact a ban on high-capacity magazines and assault rifles. The Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, as co-plaintiffs, filed suits in 2022 and 2023 to strike down the bans. Cooper & Kirk is their counsel in the magazine capacity case. English’s survey findings were cited by the plaintiffs in both ongoing suits. But after the state subpoenaed English in the assault rifle case, the plaintiffs agreed not to rely on his work.

Autumn Snider’s son, 19-year-old Jake Long, was the first to be shot and killed at the party. Snider said those with the means to fund litigation meant to affect public policy should be free to do so—as long as they do so openly. “You have the obligation to reveal who you are and should have the confidence to provide transparency to the public,” Snider told me. “If you can’t be forthcoming with who you are, that is a red flag.”

Defenders of using dark money to support litigation liken the practice to anonymous political speech, which enjoys First Amendment protection. But such arguments have limits, said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA who has written a book on the gun debate. “First Amendment rights are mitigated by the need to ensure the integrity of the judicial system,” Winkler argues. “We generally don’t allow parties in a case to be anonymous.” Anonymous funding arrangements—not uncommon in the realm of impact litigation—effectively allow an “end run” around judicial ethics safeguards, he said. “How do you know whether there is any impropriety, any influence peddling?” Winkler said. “It’s fundamentally problematic.”

Seth Endo, an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, said the debate involves fundamental questions about the role of courts. If courts are neutral arbiters of the rights and responsibilities of disputing parties, then it’s easy to argue that disclosure is irrelevant. However, if courts are not detached umpires but themselves political agents that drive social change—certainly a charge leveled at the Supreme Court—then the public has a strong interest in knowing who’s enabling litigation.

Given Cooper & Kirk’s ties to deep-­pocketed conservatives, there are any number of suspects who may be routing millions of dollars through Donors Trust to Sutherland’s CDF—and on to the advocacy groups and their lawyers.

Donors Trust is a pass-through that effectively conceals the identities of individuals and groups backing right-wing causes. (On the left, organizations like the Tides Foundation do the same.) Those who give to Donors Trust can say how they’d like their money to be spent, but they don’t have the final word. In exchange for giving up that control, they get upfront tax benefits. Prominent funders and architects of the modern conservative movement, including the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer, have all moved money through Donors Trust. 

Sutherland’s CDF ended 2023, the last year for which IRS filings are available, with $330,000 in Donors Trust cash on hand. In 2022, he formed a similarly named nonprofit in Virginia, and in 2023, he did so in Utah. In September 2024, six weeks after this story was initially published, Sutherland dissolved CDF, according to state records.

A French documentary series on Sutherland called Dale ­L’Infiltré, or Dale Undercover, was unveiled early last year. In it, Sutherland describes himself as an avid shapeshifter whose undercover guises included a drug kingpin, arms dealer, and Mafia boss. Several of the operations that the series highlights were aimed at getting guns off the street in DC. “I had to come up with these crazy schemes and then try and convince people that it was true,” Sutherland says. “This is where my faith made a big difference. I felt an extra confidence, a strength, to be able to face dangerous situations mentally.”

The Justices

On October 8, Pete Patterson, a partner at Cooper & Kirk, stood before the Supreme Court and argued that the Biden administration had overstepped by enacting a rule to crack down on ghost guns.

The firm, which was once again representing the Firearms Policy Coalition, had successfully steered the case through the right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. One of the individual plaintiffs—a former police officer and teacher named Jennifer VanDerStok—said in an interview with a gun rights group that she was “representative of the average American patriot” and warned of “deep state involvement” in an effort to “subvert our nation.”

Informed of Sutherland’s ties to the case, a former colleague, retired DC police Sergeant Gerald Neill, said: “I don’t understand why he would do that. From my point of view of the world, and probably Dale’s, we don’t want people to have ghost guns.”

Patterson told the justices that the 2022 rule—which requires serial numbers and background checks for “ready-to-build” gun kits—was improper because such products shouldn’t be covered by a federal law regulating items that can be “readily converted” into firearms. The argument quickly turned into one of competing food analogies: “I put out on a counter some eggs, some chopped-up ham, some chopped-up pepper, and onions. Is that a Western omelet?” Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who was defending the ghost gun rule. No, she replied, because those ingredients could be made into something other than an omelet.

Barrett then offered a more apt comparison: “Would your answer change if you ordered it from HelloFresh and you got a kit, and it was, like, turkey chili, but all of the ingredients are in the kit?” Yes, Prelogar said.

A majority of the justices seemed to agree with Prelogar, though a ruling isn’t expected until the middle of 2025. Other cases tied to the dark money operation continue to advance. The court is currently considering one of them, a challenge to Maryland’s assault rifle ban, that could topple similar laws across the country.

It has been a week since Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires began, driven by powerful winds that have made the blazes highly difficult to fight.

More than 40,000 acres have already burned, with at least 24 deaths; by comparison, the entirety of Washington, DC, is 43,000 acres. More than 12,300 structures have been destroyed, and at least 90,000 people are without power. Disinformation is skyrocketing as influencers peddle questionable products, right-wing commentators blame the devastation on ‘wokeness,’ and landlords look to profit. AccuWeather estimates the total damages and economic losses at more than $250 billion.

President Biden has promised six months of full federal funding for California’s efforts to combat the fires, while top-level Republicans continue to discuss placing “conditions” on federal aid to California. The Trump administration has a history of withholding aid in disasters, and Trump was quick to cast blame on California Gov. Gavin Newsom (and a fish). 

Observers across party lines have criticized Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass over the crisis, some critiquing Bass’ presence in Ghana on an official trip for the inauguration of its new president John Dramani Mahama on the first day of the fires. Others, like Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia and city fire chief Kristin Crowley, have criticized the city government’s recent $17.6 million budget cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department, which led to the loss of 61 positions as calls for service went up.

Meanwhile, more than 22,000 emergency personnel have been activated to fight the fires, including more than 900 incarcerated firefighters working for for barely $10 a day.

California’s recruitment of wildland firefighters from prisons has faced sharp criticism in the past week, despite Californians’ rejection of a November ballot measure that would have banned all prison labor, including firefighting. Many incarcerated and formerly incarcerated firefighters have spoken positively about the program. Others point out that it’s simply better than being in California prisons.

Officials expect the true death toll to exceed the two dozen fatalities, a figure that inclues multiple disabled residents, documented so far. United Nations research shows that disasters kill disabled people at a rate two to four times that of the general population.

What actually sparked each of the three fires is under investigation; while misinformation about arsonists spreads online, experts are investigating the role of power lines and embers from fireworks.

But the fuel—including strong Santa Ana winds, low rainfall, and climate change—is undeniable. There’s “no question…that climate change is exacerbating our fire regime and affecting fires,” Jon Keeley, a fire ecologist with the US Geological Survey and adjunct professor at University of California, Los Angeles, told Mother Jones‘ Jackie Flynn Mogensen last week.

Of the three active fires in Los Angeles, the Hurst Fire in San Fernando is 97 percent contained, at 799 acres; the Palisades Fire, which has gotten attention for devouring celebrity homes in particular, is just 17 percent contained, and has already burned more than 23,000 acres, making it the most destructive to ever hit Los Angeles County. 

Finally, the Eaton fire, which has burned over 14,000 acres in and around the city of Altadena, is 35 percent contained. As the Civil Rights Movement chipped at pervasive redlining in the Los Angeles area in the middle of the 20th century, Altadena became known as a place where Black residents faced fewer obstacles to homeownership. Today, the Black homeownership rate in the city is higher than 80 percent, almost double the national average among Black households. Multigenerational family homes have been lost, and a coalition of Black organizers has raised over $10 million to support displaced Black families from the area.

A prominent resident of Altadena was MacArthur “Genius” grant–winning science fiction author Octavia Butler, who wrote an eerily prescient novel in 1993, The Parable of the Sower, that predicted massive wildfires in Los Angeles—including Altadena—in 2025, alongside the rise of a far-right president with the catchphrase “Make America Great Again.”

In an essay titled “A Few Rules For Predicting The Future,” Butler wrote that a student had asked her whether she believed they were in for the futureshe’d predicted. “I didn’t make up the problems,” she replied. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

Butler was laid to rest in 2006 in Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery, which caught fire last week.

Legislative business in Minnesota’s 2025-2026 state House session began Tuesday at noon Central Time; or perhaps it hasn’t begun at all. It depends whom you ask.

The 66 members of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL)—Minnesota’s affiliate of the national Democratic Party—elected to the lower chamber did not show up Tuesday; these Democrats argue that work can’t begin until after a January 28 special election takes place to fill an open seat in a blue district.

With that seat unfilled, the Republicans lead the chamber 67-66. It’s a temporary advantage the party has vowed to use to try unseating Democratic state representative Rep. Brad Tabke, which could help them cement the GOP’s interim edge for the remainder of the term. Perhaps more importantly, Republicans used the Democrats’ absence on Tuesday to vote in a Republican House speaker.

Whether that stealth vote for House speaker was legal is an open question: Minnesota’s secretary of state, the state legislature’s presiding officer, had already concluded legislative business for the day on account of the DFL absences—which prevented Republicans from meeting the quorum threshold of 68 members. Republicans ignored the secretary and held the speaker vote anyway. On Tuesday evening, the secretary of state said he intended to challenge the speaker vote in court.

Minnesota Democrats’ dilemma is much broader than control over one seat or a brief period in the minority. If the Republicans’ speaker vote is deemed lawful, they’ll have control over committee leadership and the speakership—and thus legislative priorities—for the next two years, even if the chamber becomes tied after the blue district’s special election in two weeks. On a broader scale, Democrats say that Republicans’ proceeding without a quorum is a continuation of the national party’s efforts to disenfranchise voters, such as through Donald Trump’s 2020 election denialism, as well as recent efforts by North Carolina’s conservative state Supreme Court majority to unseat a Democrat elected to the bench.

“A little over a week ago our nation marked the four-year anniversary of January 6th, when Donald Trump inspired a violent mob to storm the US Capitol and overturn a free and fair election. As we’ve seen in the start of 2025, Republican attempts to disenfranchise voters don’t stop there,” Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Minnesota Republicans are now attempting to subvert the will of the people and ram through Republican leadership in the state House when they did not win a majority of seats.”

Republicans did not win a majority of Minnesota’s state House seats in November. Instead, each party won 67 of 134 seats, which was expected to result in the DFL and Republican parties governing through a power-sharing agreement. (The Minnesota state Senate, which is evenly split 33-33 due to a recent death, is using a similar governing structure until their own January 28 special election.)

But over the last three months, two Democrats’ state House seats have come under scrutiny. Democrats (temporarily) lost the first seat due to their own unforced error. In one liberal district, Democrats elected a representative who had not met a requirement to live in the district for at least six months prior to the general election. After a December court ruling, that representative resigned. Though the party is likely to regain the seat after the special election, bringing the House split back to 67 legislators per party, insiders say it would take a true majority of 68 or more members to change the leadership structure.

The other seat at issue is that of incumbent Rep. Tabke, a Democrat who won by 14 votes. After the election, officials discovered they’d accidentally discarded about 20 absentee ballots before counting them, putting Tabke’s win on hold. But on Tuesday morning, a court upheld his win, after hearing testimonies from multiple Tabke voters whose ballots were thrown out. “Brad Tabke remains the candidate with the most votes legally cast,” the judge wrote. “This election is not invalid.”

Still, state Republicans say they do not yet recognize Tabke’s win, and may try to force another special election, this one in a competitive district that could net them another seat. Rep. Lisa Demuth, the GOP lawmaker ostensibly voted House speaker, said in a statement that the state’s constitution empowers each legislative chamber to judge election returns, and that the party will “evaluate this lengthy ruling and consider options in the coming days.”

Republicans also argue that they did have quorum on Tuesday afternoon. While legislative work typically requires a quorum of at least 68 of 134 members present, Republicans say that until the open seat is filled in late January, 67 members fulfills the quorum requirement. With that purported majority, they can try to make an even bigger one.

“Everyone hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” says Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor spokesperson Darwin Forsyth, “but denying quorum is the only tool that we have to prevent Republicans from expelling a duly-elected Democrat from the legislature.”

When Donald Trump was president the first time, his Department of Education promulgated a set of rules under Title IX that made it harder for sexual assault survivors on school campuses to seek justice—limiting the definition of sexual harassment, for example, and forcing victims into complaint processes that magnified their trauma. Then the Biden Administration set about undoing the Trump-era regulations—part of a broader rewrite of Title IX rules that also added protections for transgender and pregnant students.

Incoming Trump officials—led by his nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon—were expected to revert to the old Title IX rules soon after the inauguration. Instead, a federal judge has done their work for them.

Just days before Biden is set to leave office, Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the US District Court of Eastern Kentucky rejected the administration’s Title IX protections for trans students, siding with a handful of Republican state attorneys general who argued that harassment on the basis of gender identity doesn’t constitute sex discrimination. But Reeves didn’t stop there. In refusing to uphold protections for queer and trans students, he vacated the Biden administration’s entire Title IX rewrite, including provisions aimed at making it easier for sexual assault survivors to hold their assailants accountable and for pregnant students to stay in school. 

Passed in 1972 , Title IX—which applies to schools and colleges that receive federal funds—asserted that no person shall be denied access to any educational program or activity “on the basis of sex.” Reeves said the Biden administration’s inclusion of gender identity in definitions of sex-based discrimination exceeded the Department of Education’s authority and Title IX’s original text.

According to Reeves, the expanded definition of sex discrimination permeated the Biden rule to such an extent that the entire rewrite ought to be scrapped—even the parts that have nothing to do with trans students or gender identity.

“This court ruling turns longstanding legal precedent on its head in a direct, disproportionate attack on trans students.”

“When Title IX is viewed in its entirety, it is abundantly clear that discrimination on the basis of sex means discrimination on the basis of being a male or female,” Reeves wrote, siding with attorneys general from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Virginia. “Expanding the meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ turns Title IX on its head.”

The Biden rule’s gender-identity language relied on reasoning laid out in Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 US Supreme Court decision that expanded protections against sex discrimination in employment to cover gay and transgender workers. But the new Biden rules were “life-changing” for non-LGBTQ students as well, Brandon Wolf, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, said last April, when the rules were finalized. For example, the updated regulations explicitly stated that pregnant and postpartum students were protected under Title IX, meaning they were entitled to lactation rooms on university campuses and academic accommodations throughout pregnancy. And the Biden rules undid many of the Trump provisions that had weakened protections for victims of sexual misconduct.

“For more than 50 years, Title IX has promised an equal opportunity to learn and thrive in our nation’s schools free from sex discrimination,” Biden’s secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, said last April. “These final regulations build on the legacy of Title IX by clarifying that all our nation’s students can access schools that are safe, welcoming, and respect their rights.” The rules were supposed to take effect nationwide last August.

At universities, the Trump rules required live hearings for sexual misconduct cases and allowed the admission of evidence about victims’ prior sexual history with the accused to “prove consent.”

But the Biden regulations were quickly challenged in court by multiple states and the Christian Educators Association International, represented by ultra-conservative legal firm the Alliance Defending Freedom, and never went into effect in more than half of the states. The plaintiffs argued that the rule was unconstitutionally vague, overly broad, and violated teachers’ freedom of speech by requiring them to use transgender students’ preferred names and pronouns. Reeves sided with the states. “The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” he wrote, referring to sections of the new rule that define misgendering of students as harassment. 

“We are thrilled that the judge saw these rules exactly for what they are: a contradiction of Title IX’s text and purpose,” David Schmus, executive director of Christian Educators, said in a news release. “Our members and other educators are free from any attempt by the federal government to use Title IX to force them to say things about sex and gender identity that aren’t true and that violate their deeply held convictions.”

In vacating the Biden regulations, Reeves reverted Title IX policy back to the rule promulgated in 2020 by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary during his first term. 

Those Trump-era rules were sweeping. Most significantly, they changed the way schools handled sexual misconduct claims at every stage of an investigation, putting in place some rules that protected the rights of alleged attackers but numerous other rules that discouraged victims from coming forward. For example, the Trump regulations raised the evidentiary standard needed to prove sexual misconduct; they precluded schools from investigating incidents that occurred off campus or on study-abroad trips, even if the perpetrator was a school employee; and they narrowed the definition of sexual harassment. At universities, the Trump rules required live hearings for sexual misconduct cases—forcing victims to undergo cross-examination by the accused’s adviser—and allowed the admission of evidence about victims’ prior sexual history with the accused to “prove consent.”

Biden’s rules returned the evidentiary standard to prove misconduct to the pre-Trump threshold, required schools to investigate harassment that occurred off campus or online, and no longer required live hearings or live cross-examination.

Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at the student- and survivor-led Know Your IX, called the Reeves ruling disappointing—and dangerous—for marginalized students, particularly survivors of sexual violence. “President Biden’s Title IX guidance defends survivors against retaliation,” Levine said in a news release. “With this ruling, the District Court imperils countless young people’s right to a safe, inclusive education.”

As wildfires continue to burn all around Los Angeles, influencers have emerged to promote sales of their own, highly specific solutions to the crisis. With smoke filling the air of many neighborhoods, the wellness machine has sprung into action, promoting tinctures, detox products, essential oils, parasite cleanses, and even raw milk as “treatments” for its effects.

The fires began in earnest on Tuesday, January 7. By that Thursday, Mallory DeMille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast, says she noted an “immediate influx” of people promoting products on Instagram and TikTok by trying to tie them to the fires. The situation, DeMille says, is “heartbreaking and really irresponsible.”

“How do you know you can trust them… if they’re financially driven to sell products and services?”

In a recent Instagram video, DeMille outlined the ways that wellness influencers are, as she put it, “trying to capitalize” on the wildfires and their potential negative health effects. Many focus on the impact of wildfire smoke on people’s lungs, and suggest potential “treatments,” including supplements, powders, and essential oils, alongside often-cited “detox” tools like drinking apple cider vinegar or taking activated charcoal.

While activated charcoal is used in emergency settings to mitigate swallowed poisons, there is no evidence it can “detox” lungs or any other body part. It can also decrease the effectiveness of medication. In general, bodily organs do not need to be “detoxed” or “supported” with supplements, some of which can cause additional harm.

One particularly impassioned detox influencer, Ginger DeClue—who offers online detoxing seminars and describes herself as a “master healer”—suggested on Instagram that Los Angeles deserved its fate. “Everything that’s burning needs to burn,” she said in a video post that pushed the notion the city is suffused with toxic mold.

“Los Angeles has been a den of evil, SA [sexual assault] and child abuse, moldy overpriced apartments and buildings, with no HVAC maintenance. crappy store fronts and hollyWEIRD since 1920,” she wrote. “God don’t like ugly in the span of a night he promises to destroy evil: but RESTORE the RIGHTEOUS.”

Some of the advice promoted by influencers and doctors who use social media have included commonsense, low-risk strategies that public health departments also recommend: using an air purifier at home, a saline nasal spray to help with irritation and congestion, and wearing high-quality masks outdoors.

But many are promoting products they have financial incentives to recommend, DeMille says, offering discount codes for products they already sold before the fires. “How do you know you can trust them with your health and wellness,” she asks, “if they’re financially driven to sell products and services?”

What’s happening with the wildfires is similar to the bogus cures and “detoxes” that have been offered throughout the Covid pandemic. Essential oils have been promoted as “immune support” for people trying to prevent Covid, along with a huge body of evidence-less products have sprung up for people who want to “detox” from the effects of Covid vaccines or being near people who have been vaccinated. (Vaccine detox was promoted by some in the alt-wellness world even before Covid.) 

“Wellness influencers are always leveraging tragedies,” DeMille points out, “but typically they’re personal tragedies”—say, telling sick people to try their products while undergoing cancer treatments or chronic illness.

“Leveraging a community tragedy isn’t that a long of a walk,” she adds.

As climate disasters continue to happen more frequently—and the world faces a new potential pandemic in the form of bird flu—business looks extremely good for wellness influencers adept at turning disease and disasters into marketing hooks.

It took nearly two hours into Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday for Democrats to effectively underscore the deeply alarming allegations surrounding the former Fox News host as he attempts to get confirmed as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense. But when they finally did, Democrats came out swinging.

As for Hegseth, it was his refusal to answer key questions related to those accusations—whether domestic abuse is a disqualifying factor for the job or if he’d resign if he reneged on a drinking pledge— that proved equally damning.

“Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked, alluding to allegations of sexual assault against Hegseth. “Have you ever faced discipline or entered into a settlement related to this kind of conduct?”

“The fact is that your own lawyer said that you paid a person who accused you of raping her a sum of money to make sure that she did not file a complaint.”

“Senator, I was falsely accused in October of 2016 and I was fully investigated and I was completely cleared.”

“I don’t think ‘completely cleared’ is accurate,” Sen. Hirono quickly replied, alluding to a payment Hegseth made, as part of a non-disclosure agreement, to a woman after she filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault. “The fact is that your own lawyer said that you paid a person who accused you of raping her a sum of money to make sure that she did not file a complaint. Moving on.” (Indeed, Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for Hegseth, confirmed this to the Washington Post amid mounting concerns about Hegseth’s conduct and qualifications as Trump’s pick for defense secretary.)

Hirono did not stop there, swiftly moving to the next allegation: excessive drinking.

“I have read multiple reports of you regularly being drunk at work, including by people who worked with you at Fox News. Do you know that being drunk at work is prohibited for service members under the UCMJ?”

Wow — Hegseth steamrolls Hirono as she tries to ask him about accusations of being drunk on the job. He then dodges a question about if he’ll commit to resign as sec def if he drinks on the job pic.twitter.com/bd6uo5QQPY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 14, 2025

Though Hirono appeared to be the first to underscore, at least effectively, the absurdity of confirming a nominee plagued by allegations, she wasn’t the last. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) built on this questioning by laying out a timeline of Hegseth’s personal conduct during his second marriage. He started by returning to the alleged sexual assault in Monterey, California.

“At that time, you were still married to your second wife, correct?”

“I believe so,” Hegseth responded.

“And you had just fathered a child by a woman who would later become your third wife, correct?”

Hegseth, once again, dodged the question and claimed to have been “completely cleared.” 

Kaine replied, “You had just fathered a child two months before by a woman that was not your wife. I am shocked that you would stand here and say you were completely cleared.”

“Can you so casually cheat on a second wife?” the senator continued. “And cheat on the mother of a child who had been born two months before. And you tell us you were completely cleared.”

“The child’s name is Gwendolyn Hope Hegseth,” Hegseth replied without apologizing for his multiple infidelities, “and she’s a child of God.”

Kaine went on to press Hegseth to say whether committing domestic abuse would be disqualifying behavior for a nominee for Secretary of Defense. Hegseth, who denied having ever physically abused any of his three wives, repeatedly declined to answer that question.

Kaine continued.

“You didn’t reveal any of this to President Trump or the transition team as they were considering you to be nominated for Secretary of Defense. You didn’t reveal the action, the criminal complaint. You didn’t reveal the criminal investigation, you didn’t reveal the settlement. You didn’t reveal the cash payment.”

The senator then posed a critical question: What else could Hegseth be trying to conceal?

“Are there any other important facts that you chose not to reveal to the president-elect and his team?”

Together, the moments appeared to neatly and harrowingly encapsulate the unique dangers of Hegseth’s nomination in a way that has evaporated, at least among Republicans, since the accusations against Hegseth first emerged. Would they be enough to convince Republicans to reject him? It seems like that decision has already been made.

Jack Smith‘s final report on Donald’s Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election doesn’t contain much new information, but what timing it has.

Released around 1 a.m. Tuesday—less than a week before Trump’s inauguration—the document takes aim at Trump’s and his lawyers’ contention that the end of Smith’s prosecution amounts to the “complete exoneration” of the president-elect.

“That is false,” Smith writes in a letter included with report, pointing out that the cases against Trump were dismissed not because he was acquitted, but simply because he won an election.

Smith makes it as clear as he can that the sole reason he dropped the January 6 case—along with the separate case regarding Trump’s attempts to hang on to classified documents he removed from the White House—was a Justice Department policy that bars prosecuting a sitting president.

“The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution,” the special counsel, who resigned last week, wrote in the concluding lines of the report. “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”

It’s normal for federal prosecutors to determine they can convict people they charge; they rarely bring cases they expect to lose. But this is the first time that prosecutors have asserted, just days before inauguration, that they would have been able to convict the incoming president of felonies.

Trump clearly hopes that his return to power marks the end of January 6 as a blight on his record. He even seems to view his reelection as validating his lies about his 2020 defeat. Smith’s report reads like an attempt to ensure that Trump, despite avoiding criminal conviction in the matter, will never be free of responsibility for causing a violent attack on Congress in an attempt to illegally retain power.

Even in a footnote explaining why he decided not to charge Trump with violating an anti-riot law or conspiring to impeded or injure an officer of the United States, Smith states: “The Office also had strong evidence that the violence that occurred on January 6 was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, and that he and his co-conspirators leveraged it to carry out their conspiracies.”

The report also suggests that Smith was eyeing criminal charges against some of the six co-conspirators mentioned, but not named, in Smith’s August 2023 indictment of Trump. “The Office’s investigation uncovered evidence that some individuals shared criminal culpability with Mr. Trump,” the document says. It also notes that the investigation found one of the conspirators “may have committed” unrelated crimes, which it referred to a US attorney’s office.

While not named by Smith, the alleged co-conspirators are identifiable. They include Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer; Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official; and former Trump lawyers John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, and Sidney Powell. Media reports have also identified Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn as another uncharged co-conspirator. All have denied wrongdoing in the case.

It’s not clear which of these individuals Smith considered charging or which he believes may have committed unrelated crimes. Smith wrote that his report “should not be read to allege that any particular person other than Mr. Trump committed a crime, nor should it be read to exonerate any particular person.”

Trump responded to the report in series of posts early Tuesday morning that called the findings “fake” and attacked Smith. “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump wrote in one of his early morning posts. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

It’s possible to argue that it’s unfair for Smith to insist he would have convicted Trump at trial, when he was unable to actually get either case before a jury. That complaint would be stronger if Trump had not worked so openly and aggressively to delay his trials until he could avoid them entirely by winning the election.

Still, Smith’s report, in asserting Trump’s guilt, highlights the epic failure by the federal justice system to resolve the issue of Trump’s criminal responsibility for subverting the 2020 election before the next one was held.

Critics can fault Attorney General Merrick Garland’s slow start on a high-level January 6 investigation, the partisan Supreme Court’s wish to create a presidential immunity doctrine that served Trump’s interests, or the ease with which rich defendants can slow cases. In any event, the system failed. The result is a tragedy for American politics.

Last Thursday, as wildfires continued to blaze through Los Angeles, firefighters appeared to be no match for the deadly combination of winds and flames. But one entrepreneur in the LA suburb of El Segundo had an idea. Augustus Doricko, a 24-year-old who runs a geoengineering startup called Rainmaker, announced on X his attention to help. “Rainmaker will do what it can,” he posted, “starting Saturday.”

Doricko may not be a tech celebrity like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but he isn’t a nobody, either—at least not anymore. Just four years ago, Doricko was a lowly undergrad conservative activist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he launched the school’s chapter of America First Students, the university arm of the political organization founded by white nationalist “Groyper” and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. But for Doricko as for many young aspiring tech entrepreneurs, a college degree was not a prerequisite for success.

Last year, PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s foundation granted Doricko a Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded annually to a select group of entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree in order to pursue a tech-focused business venture. In Doricko’s case, that venture was Rainmaker, which seeks to increase the US water supply through cloud-seeding technology. Like many tech entrepreneurs, Doricko believes his work is the solution to an urgent problem. “Cloud seeding is a necessary technology to avert worsening drought,” he posted recently.

But he also believes his work manifests God’s will. In August, he told his followers on X, “One of our Lord’s first commandments was to subdue the earth and tend to it! He desires that mankind control the weather for the sake of building the kingdom of God on earth and stewarding it well.” In another post, he wrote, “Dams modify rivers, Jesus was a carpenter who modified forests (cut trees) to build houses. We aim to serve God.” Cloud seeding is just the next step in the evolution of man’s relationship with nature for the greater glory of the Divine.

Doricko didn’t say exactly how he and his few dozen employees planned to help with the fires. But the practical details seemed to be beside the point, at least to his admiring followers on social media who responded to his post. “Augustus promises to do what he can to stop the bleeding,” enthused one fan on X. “He plans to command the heavens and make the angels cry for life to prevail.” Another added, “Godspeed brethren, may the good Lord bless you and keep you.”

Doricko is just one example within a rising tide of American Christianity that appears to be cresting in California’s tech enclaves. Recent news stories have described a new generation of tech bros flocking to church in the famously secular San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, discovering Christianity through PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and investing in a Christ-centered real estate enclave in rural Kentucky. There are the usual reasons for this surging interest in Christianity like yearning for community and searching for the greater meaning of life. And for those immersed in a tech culture that has long been obsessed with longevity, the promise of eternal life must offer a special appeal.

But there are other forces at play, which revolve around a very specific kind of Christianity: that of the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial and Gen Z, ultraconservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law. While the TheoBros’ beliefs are extreme—many of them think women shouldn’t be able to vote, and that the Constitution has outlived its usefulness and we should instead be governed by the Ten Commandments—their movement is moving out of the fringe. In part because they are very savvy about broadcasting it on a multitude of platforms—on podcasts and YouTube shows, on X, at a seemingly never-ending round-robin of conferences. Doricko attends a church that is part of the TheoBros denomination in an LA suburb, as do others in his El Segundo tech community and beyond.

The TheoBros also have made inroads to the upper reaches of political power. In November, President-elect Trump nominated one of their allies, former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth, to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth attends a church in Tennessee that is affiliated with the TheoBro movement, and his children attend a school affiliated with the network of classical Christian schools that Wilson helped found. JD Vance has brushed shoulders with the TheoBros, too—he spoke at last summer’s National Conservatism Conference, where Wilson also spoke, and he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a powerful group of Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, a board member of the unofficial TheoBro magazine, American Reformer.

The TheoBros’ burgeoning connections with the Trump administration mark a divergence from the style of Christianity that the MAGA world had once embraced. During Trump’s first term, he forged connections with leaders in what’s known as the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic movement whose adherents believe that Christians are called to take over the government. Those leaders went on to become instrumental figures in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that led to the Capital insurrection of 2021. Yet the TheoBros are, for the most part, much more militant in their political and social beliefs than the New Apostolic Reformation adherents. Recent pieces in American Reformer have bemoaned the “feminization” of Christianity, lambasted the “willfully childless feminists in the media,” and predicted that “traditional American holidays that reflect our Christian and Anglo heritage will become battlegrounds in the contest over the soul of America among the disparate groups now populating the country.”

TheoBros are also more tech- and media-savvy than many of their New Apostolic Reformation counterparts. As Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades, told me when I interviewed her for a piece on the TheoBros last year, “They are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.”

With the prominence of figures like Elon Musk and Peter Theil, the tech industry has gained a greater profile in Trump world, and so too are the links between the Trump administration and the TheoBro universe deepening. Shortly before Christmas, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club hosted a group of tech investors for a luncheon of butternut squash soup, roasted cod, and Trump Chocolate Cake (double chocolate cake, dark chocolate glaze, vanilla ice cream) for dessert. Among the firms represented was 1789 Capital, the firm that Donald Trump, Jr. joined in November. 1789 Capital’s founder is American Reformer’s Buskirk.

Another attendee was a 24-year-old entrepreneur named Isaiah Taylor, a friend of Rainmaker’s Doricko. Taylor runs a startup he founded in 2023 called Valar Atomics, which says it is “scaling nuclear energy for heavy industrial power and clean hydrocarbon fuel production.” He too currently lives in El Segundo, but he is originally from Moscow, Idaho, which, in 2023, he described on X as “a silly little town in northern Idaho (pop. 20k).” He lived there, he wrote, “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community,” specifically Christ Church, the reformed evangelical church founded by Wilson, the TheoBro patriarch.

Today, with Doricko as a fellow worshipper, Taylor attends Christ Church Santa Clarita, a southern California member church in the denomination that Wilson founded. In 2023, Taylor wrote on X that Wilson had been “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” Wilson has written that he sees technology as something like a divine gift. “If you have a smartphone, you have more wealth in your pocket than Nebuchadnezzar accumulated over the course of his lifetime,” he wrote in his 2020 book, Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work and Wealth. “We have a responsibility to turn a profit on these astounding resources.”

“I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a garden. So naturally I want to reindustrialize the United States and build 1,000 nuclear reactors.”

In keeping with that philosophy, Taylor told The Information’s Julia Black in December that he saw his company’s mission as spiritual in nature. “I think God created the world full of abundant energy and we have to unlock it,” he explained. On X, he put it differently. “I’m a Christian environmentalist,” he posted in 2023. “I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a garden. So naturally I want to reindustrialize the United States and build 1000 nuclear reactors.”

The hypermasculine aesthetics of TheoBros would seem to fit right into the El Segundo tech scene, the overwhelmingly male members of which refer to themselves as “’Gundo Bros.” In an article last February, Forbes’ David Jeans and Sarah Emerson described guys in defense tech startups who “pump iron while they code, host weekly bonfires on the beach, and shotgun energy drinks.” Vanity Fair’s Zoë Bernard observed the Gundo Bros’ “outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

The Gundo Bros have a way of casually mixing the realms of tech, masculinity, and Christianity. (“El Segundo is where you can: try to end scarcity, reverse engineer meteorological RF equipment, machinate about geopolitical GTM strategy, eat milk and steak for lunch, scheme w cracked engineers, squat a 5×5 of back squats w a disgusting amount of ammonia, praise god,” posted Doricko last year. In another post, he mused, “The physiques at Gold’s are markedly better after church hours on Sunday. Angelically sanctioned anabolism.”)

Many of the Gundo Bros have benefitted from the largesse of tech investor Marc Andreessen, a major Trump supporter, friends with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and close adviser to Trump’s newly convened Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. “Big Tech spent a decade doing everything possible to be the best conceivable progressive ally,” Andreessen posted on X in November. “They got treated with utter contempt, pounded daily, crucified in return. A full rethinking is required.” To that end, through his firm Andreessen Horowitz, he started a $500 million fund for tech companies, several of which have headquarters in El Segundo, which are “solving our country’s most vexing challenges.” Andreessen has TheoBro connections, too: Last month, Forbes reported that Andreessen backed New Founding, an investment firm that aims to build a conservative Christian community and real estate empire in rural Appalachia. Andreessen didn’t respond to emailed questions from Mother Jones.

Another powerful force in the El Segundo scene is Discipulus Ventures, an accelerator program, funded in part by Andreessen Horowitz, that says it seeks to build “a network of the smartest, most contrarian individuals whose aspirations to change the world have been overlooked by their respective universities and companies.” Discipulus’ guiding principles are “religion, patriotism, and family”; its participants must have “a strict devotion to truth and goodness.” The cohort of 10 entrepreneurs starts each day with a 6 a.m. workout, then the participants learn from more seasoned entrepreneurs. Mentors include Rainmaker’s Doricko and Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen’s firm.

It doesn’t look like Doricko’s company was able to make much progress against the fires over the past few days; the only evidence on X is a single post on Friday, by a Rainmaker engineer, showing a photo of some people holding a large white balloon attached to a spool of what looks like kite string. Doricko didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment for this piece. But he and his friends are aiming higher, anyway. In October, he reposted an X post from Valar Atomics’ Isaiah Taylor. “I don’t think most ‘hard tech investors’ even have the right categories,” Taylor wrote. “This is the real game. Who gets to own space logistics? Who gets to own the weather? Who gets to own energy? Think bigger.”

Meanwhile, the TheoBros’ mingling with MAGA elites is likely just getting started. This week, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, Valar Atomics’ Taylor, who also didn’t respond to a request for comment, is scheduled to return to Mar-a-Lago, this time to present at an event called Nuclear Energy Space & Defense Tech Investor Summit. “I’ll be speaking on Nuclear Energy and the Founding Fathers,” he posted on X in early January. “Come ready to restart America’s energy engine. We’re gonna fix this thing.”

Update, January 14: After this story was published, Nate Fischer, CEO of New Founding and co-founder of American Reformer, clarified to Mother Jones that Buskirk’s listing in tax filings as the editor and publisher of American Reformer had been a “clerical error (presumably copying his bio from American Greatness, where he was editor and publisher)” and that Buskirk was actually a board member of American Reformer. The sentence has been revised.

On July 10, 2020, Terry Tamminen wrote a letter to the board chair of Waterkeeper Alliance, the clean-water group founded and led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to say that he wanted out.

Tamminen, a veteran, highly-regarded environmentalist and co-founder and longtime board member of the organization, had become concerned about the outfit’s finances—so worried that he was tendering his resignation. At issue was at least $67 million that Kennedy’s group had received and passed along over the previous six years—an eye-popping amount for a non-profit that prior to this influx of money had annual revenues of about $4 million, according to its tax filings. Tamminen noted in his letter that he had repeatedly asked Kennedy and other top WKA officials for an explanation regarding these funds—the source of the money and its ultimate use—and had received no satisfying response. He wrote that either there was “no proper documentation” covering this large flow of funds or such documentation was being “withheld” by Kennedy and the staff.

Tamminen had come across a situation that had raised questions among staff at WKA and people within the group’s orbit about the organization and Kennedy’s handling of tens of millions of dollars. His letter was prompted by a legal complaint that claimed WKA had “funneled millions of dollars to the Bahamas” to assist Louis Bacon, a hedge-fund billionaire, in his purported effort to “destroy and damage” Peter Nygård, a Canadian fashion mogul, who owned an estate next to Bacon’s on the island nation. The complaint, filed in a lawsuit brought by Nygård against Bacon, alleged that WKA had engaged in “illegal and/or improper activities” to benefit Bacon, a major financial backer of WKA. It also claimed Kennedy had “carried out illegal and improper activities to further [Bacon’s] scheme to damage [Nygård’s] business and property at the direction of, under the supervision of, at the request of or on behalf of [Bacon].”

“Where did that money go? The whole thing stunk. It was obvious they were hiding something. They have never provided good answers.”

Tamminen’s letter suggested that he was concerned about possible misconduct at Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of hundreds of organizations across the globe that protect bodies of water, and that he worried that Kennedy was not being straightforward about the matter. The Nygård complaint was ultimately dismissed. But with Kennedy, an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to run the massive Department of Health and Human Services, this episode—involving millions of dollars—could shed light on his managerial experience and competence.

A Mother Jones investigation has found that charities associated with Bacon, the co-founder and CEO of Moore Capital Management, did contribute at least $63 million to WKA and that these funds were subsequently sent by WKA to Save the Bays, a small environmental group that Bacon, Kennedy, and others had started in the Bahamas and that filed multiple environmental suits against Nygård.

This money flow occurred at the same time Bacon was involved in a bitter feud with Nygård. The two owned adjacent estates in Lyford Cay, a posh community for the super-rich in the Bahamas, and a property dispute—they shared a driveway—had evolved into wild combat costing each millions of dollars. And Save the Bays and its lawyer had become involved in Bacon’s battle with Nygård.

Some WKA staff and associates considered these large transfers of funds to Save the Bays unusual and wondered how this modest outfit was absorbing and spending tens of millions of dollars. For them, it was a sign of Kennedy’s autocratic management of WKA. “You couldn’t really ask questions about this,” a former staffer says. “There was a cult of Bobby.”

Through 2023, the amount of money routed through Kennedy’s organization to finance what was described in its tax records as a program in the Caribbean totaled $79 million. A WKA trustee replying on behalf of the group to queries from Mother Jones maintains this money financed environmental-related litigation mounted by Save the Bays in the Bahamas. Former WKA staff say this is a tremendously high figure for such cases and assert there was no sufficient public documentation that this funding was appropriately handled. “Where did that money go?” asks Bob Shavelson, a former founding WKA board member. “The whole thing stunk. It was obvious they were hiding something. They have never provided good answers.”

Tamminen’s queries about WKA’s finances in 2020 were triggered by a news report about the years-long feud between Bacon and Nygård. Their titanic battle had come to involve multiple lawsuits in varying jurisdictions, private investigators, gang members, phony websites, an allegation of a murder plot targeting Bacon, charges of harassment, political intrigue, secret recordings, and accusations of sexual assault against Nygård.

Eventually, Nygård ended up being convicted in Canada last year of sexual assault and sentenced to 11 years in prison, while still facing trials for sex crimes and other charges in Montreal, Winnipeg, and New York. And Bacon won a defamation case against Nygård and a $203 million judgment, but in November that award was tossed out.

Tamminen had spotted a story about the complaint Nygård had filed on April 30, 2020, in a New York federal court alleging that Bacon and others had engaged in a pattern of illegal conduct for years to defame him and destroy his fashion brand. Nygård listed a host of people and organizations supposedly involved or knowledgable of this alleged scheme, including Waterkeeper Alliance, Kennedy, and Fred Smith, a Bahamian lawyer and co-founder and board member of Save the Bays, the group that Kennedy and Bacon had helped to start. (Smith was also a member of Waterkeeper Alliance.) Launched in 2013, Save the Bays had sued Nygård for dredging and other activity that, the group contended, had despoiled Clifton Bay, which Nygård’s gaudy and palatial estate overlooked.

There is “no way you can spend $79 million on this type of litigation. You can buy a whole ecosystem for that amount of money… Without details, there’s no way you can explain these numbers.”

Nygård’s complaint stated that Save the Bays had relied “heavily on funding and support from Waterkeeper Alliance.” The filing also cited a 2010 Denver Post story in which Kennedy had praised Bacon, noting he was the “single largest supporter” of the Waterkeeper Alliance. A lawyer who has worked with WKA describes Bacon as “one of Bobby’s rich-guy friends.”

After reading about this complaint, Tamminen wondered about WKA and Kennedy’s connection to the Nygård-Bacon face-off. According to his resignation letter, on July 2, 2020, Tamminen emailed Mary Beth Postman, the deputy director of WKA, and asked, “Did we run any litigation funding for this case through WKA? Some rumors flying around, but I don’t recall anything like that on our 990s.” He was referring to the annual tax return that nonprofits must file. WKA’s public 990s indicated that tens of millions of dollars had been sent to the Caribbean without detailing what they financed. A onetime WKA associate says, “This looked totally smelly.”

According to Tamminen’s resignation letter, he soon spoke with Kennedy and asked for records related to this funding, and Kennedy, was “unable to provide the documents (or a verbal explanation).”

Afterward Postman informed Tamminen that the WKA had a “fiscal sponsorship agreement” to support work in the Bahamas. This meant WKA was receiving, as a pass-through, money for the Bahamian group. Acting as a pass-through is a common practice for nonprofits, but they can only do this to support charitable activity, usually a project in sync with their own missions. They can charge a percentage of the funds for this service, often in the 7-to-14-percent range, and, according to the WKA trustee who replied to queries from Mother Jones, the organization did receive a cut. The trustee would not say how much.

Tamminen pressed Marc Yaggi, the CEO of WKA, for documentation and details on the source of the millions sent to the Bahamas, the recipients of those funds, and how this money was spent. “We can’t be funneling millions of dollars (3X our own budget as shown on 990s) to [nongovernmental organizations] without full transparency about how the money is being spent and an unambiguous contract with those recipients about what is allowable and, specifically, what is not,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

Finally, according to the letter, Tamminen was sent a spreadsheet from WKA trustee William Wachtel indicating that the majority of the more than $67 million in question went to the Coalition to Protect Clifton Bay, an earlier name for Save the Bays, and “an invoice for reimbursement by WKA from lawyers involved in the [Nygård-Bacon] litigation…in the amount of $1,752,193” for a three-month period in 2020.

Tamminen deemed this reply insufficient. At this point, he threw up his hands and decided to quit, noting in his letter, “I have a fiduciary responsibility to understand the organization’s finances” and stating that because Kennedy and his staff had not provided adequate documentation he could not perform this basic task.

Tamminen declined to comment.

In response to a long list of questions sent to Kennedy by Mother Jones about WKA forwarding money to the Bahamas, RFK Jr. texted, “The coverage on me from mother John’s [sic] has been consistently hostile and inaccurate. MJ was once a counter culture journal that spoke truth to power It now seems to be yet another propaganda bullhorn for the DS Regime.” (Might “DS Regime” refer to a Deep State Regime?) Asked if this text was his full response to the list of queries, Kennedy did not reply.

Tamminen’s letters, Shavelson says, was a “damning piece of evidence.” His resignation drew attention within WKA and its large network of local Waterkeeper groups to a curious question: Why had Kennedy’s organization passed along so much money to the Bahamas? “We didn’t really know who was giving us this money,” a former staffer says.

The WKA’s 990s show that through 2023, the total amount that passed through what the group called its Central America/Caribbean program was $79 million. On the 990s available to the public, the name of the recipient of those funds were redacted. (This is unusual; grantees tend to be identified.) A former WKA staffer says that the recipient listed on the 990s was the law firm of Fred Smith, the Bahamian lawyer who, with Kennedy and Bacon, helped organize Save the Bays and who was associated with Bacon’s wide-ranging fight against Nygård. That battle included a lawsuit charging Nygård with sex crimes.

WKA staff and associates of the Waterkeeper Alliance were suspicious of this funding arrangement. The amount of money going to Save the Bays was “off-kilter,” a former WKA staffer says. “It was disproportionate to the size of the program. They had an office that was maybe 400-square-feet with one full-time staffer and some part-timers. We did not know the source of the money going down there.”

Save the Bays has run a radio show and a youth education program. Its website is no longer operational, and the phone number listed on its Facebook page is out of service. “I’ve never heard of that amount of money being spent on that type of litigation,” Shavelson says.

“This money was orders of magnitude greater than anything in my experience in my 30 years of practice as an environmental lawyer,” says Daniel Cooper, the founding partner of Sycamore Law, a firm that specializes in filing environmental enforcement cases for grassroots nonprofits. (He was not involved in the Save the Bays litigation.)

The former WKA staffer adds that “there was a very closed loop on that money, with Bobby involved.” Some staffers at the time questioned whether some of the funds going to the Bahamas were being used for the ongoing conflict between Bacon and Nygård beyond the environmental lawsuits Save the Bays had filed regarding Nygård.

A key issue was the source of the funding. A review conducted by Mother Jones of charitable organizations associated with Bacon—Moore Charitable Foundation, Belvedere Charitable Foundation, and Bessemer Trust—shows that these entities donated a hefty amount, nearly $63 million, to the Waterkeeper Alliance from 2014 through 2023. (Unlike the Moore and Belvedere foundations, the Bessemer Trust, a multifamily office that oversees more than $200 billion for endowments, families, and foundations, is not controlled by Bacon. But Bacon’s contributions to its Bessemer Giving Fund closely matched the contributions it sent to WKA.)

The WKA trustee confirms that the Bacon donations to WKA were the source of the funds that Kennedy’s outfit passed to Save the Bays. If so, that means Bacon was sending money to WKA—a group for whom he was a major supporter—that Kennedy’s organization, after taking a cut, was forwarding to a group that Bacon, Kennedy, Smith and others had formed, which subsequently filed lawsuits against Bacon’s archnemesis.

For years prior to Tamminen enquiring about WKA’s activity in the Bahamas, Save the Bays had been a controversial organization on the island nation and had prompted questions about its funding and relationship to Bacon. During a 2016 television interview, Fred Smith refused to acknowledge that Bacon was a major financial supporter of Save the Bays. “It is often used as some measure of criticism against us,” he said. When the host suggested that Bacon had used Save the Bays “to get at Peter Nygård…to discredit Peter Nygård,” Smith replied, “Louis Bacon doesn’t need Save the Bays to do what you are suggesting.” In this interview, Smith said, “I have never been paid by Save the Bays… I’m a director of Save the Bays.” (About that time, Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald claimed Save the Bays, through its environmental lawsuits, was trying to destabilize and “overthrow” the Progressive Liberal Party government—a charge Smith denied in this interview. Nygård, a PLP supporter, once bragged he had donated $5 million to party.)

After Tamminen’s resignation caused a fuss for WKA, the law firm run by WKA trustee William Wachtel conducted a review of the money sent to the Bahamas and produced a private report. Wachtel was part of this review, according to the trustee who spoke to Mother Jones. In a one-page statement, the WKA board of directors called this inquiry an “independent assessment.” It said that the review found “no red flags” and concluded there was “no clear evidence of misuse of funds” and “no clear evidence of donors improperly gaining benefits from donations”—presumably a reference to Bacon. The statement did not mention Bacon, Save the Bays, or the Bahamas.

Former WKA associates point out that this was not an independent investigation, given that it was conducted by a trustee. “This was a bogus audit,” Shavelson says. A onetime WKA associate says, “To have a trustee conduct an investigation that then says ‘nothing to see here’ doesn’t pass the smell test.”

The inquiry’s final report was shared with an audit committee of the WKA board, not the full board.

The WKA trustee says this inquiry showed that the $79 million was mostly spent on litigation conducted by Smith and his law firm for Save the Bays and that the inquiry reviewed billing documents and invoices from Smith and determined they were accurate and covered legitimate expenses. “We saw nothing spent for anything other than the litigation that went on,” the trustee says. A former board member, who has not seen the review, says that they learned the litigation billing included expenses for lavish hotel suites, limousines, and security services.

Save the Bays and Smith did indeed engage in environmental-related litigation. In 2015, the group launched a legal action regarding pollution attributed to a power plant. It successfully sued Nygård for illegally dredging Clifton Bay to expand his property, and that case led to the Supreme Court of the Bahamas seizing his property in 2018. It also filed a legal action claiming Nygård had engaged in unauthorized construction. In 2021, Save the Bays and Waterkeeper Bahamas filed a case to compel judicial review of foreign oil development in the Bahamas.

But former WKA associates say the nearly $79 million price tag for Save the Bays litigation seems exceedingly high. “The cost of an illegal dredging case is in the tens of thousands of dollars,” a former WKA staffer says. Shavelson asks, “Where’s all this litigation? There would have to be a mountain of stuff for those billables. I’ve never heard of that amount of money being spent on that type of litigation.” Another former WKA associate says that the typical cases that Waterkeeper Alliance members bring range for $10,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars and that there is “no way you can spend $79 million on this type of litigation. You can buy a whole ecosystem for that amount of money.” This source adds, “Without details, there’s no way you can explain these numbers.”

While Smith was filing environmental cases for Save the Bays, he was a key ally of Bacon in the billionaire’s fierce fight with Nygård. According to a lengthy New York Times account of the Bacon-Nygård clash, Smith worked with private investigators and found 15 Bahamian women to participate in a sex crimes lawsuit against Nygård. He also encouraged women who claimed to be Nygård victims to go to the Bahamian police. The newspaper noted that Smith created a nonprofit called Sanctuary, which he and Bacon funded, and that it paid Bahamian lawyers and investigators involved in putting together the sex crimes lawsuit against Nygård. Smith and the private investigators, according to the newspaper, compensated at least two witnesses who located alleged victims.

Nygård reportedly spent $15 million on a smear campaign against Bacon, which included television and radio ads, doctored videos, and outlandish accusations, and Bacon said in court that he expended $53 million for investigators and lawyers in his legal fight with Nygård.

Mother Jones sent lengthy lists of questions to Marc Yaggi and Mary Beth Postman of WKA, Fred Smith, Save the Bays, Louis Bacon (through his Moore Charitable Foundation), and the Trump transition team. It asked WKA if it would release unredacted versions of its 990s. It asked if WKA could provide an accounting of the litigation the tens of millions of dollars supposedly financed. It asked whether Tamminen’s account—including his claim that Kennedy would not provide him information to confirm the money sent to the Bahamas was handled appropriately—was accurate. None of them, except Katie Miller, a Trump transition staffer, replied. Miller emailed, “As a matter of policy, I don’t respond to left wind [sic] activists masquerading as journalists.” The Bessemer Trust did not respond to a request to comment.

Several months after Tamminen prompted a stir about the Bahamas money, Kennedy resigned as WKA president. The WKA trustee says the Bahamas project was not a factor in Kennedy’s resignation. By that point, Kennedy had become a leading promoter of Covid disinformation, and this had caused concern within WKA and among the group’s funders and supporters.

When WKA in November 2020 announced Kennedy’s resignation as president, he said, “Waterkeeper is my life’s work and will always be my proudest achievement…. I’m immensely proud of what we created.” He added, “My dreams overflow with the thousands of miles of magnificent waterways that I’ve been privileged to paddle or travel with many of you over 40 years; the mangroves, the muskies, the Spanish moss, the schooling salmon, the shrimp, crayfish, blue crab, and yellow perch, the calving glaciers and all that flowing water from the Himalayas to the Tetons, from the Andes to the Arctic, from Bimini to Homer, from Bhutan to the Jordan, and from Lake Ontario to the Futaleufú.” He did not mention the Bahamas. Upon his departure, the board named him president emeritus.

On Tuesday morning, the Justice Democrats—the group that helped usher in a wave of progressive candidates during the first Trump presidency—announced they’re actively recruiting candidates to primary centrist Democrats. The PAC, which started in 2017, became known for backing “the Squad” and other left-wing Democratic candidates, some of whom ousted incumbents with decades of experience. 

In 2024, the left flank of the Democratic Party took some hits. Only one of the new candidates Justice Democrats supported this past year, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), won her election. Multiple Justice Democrat veterans lost. Prominent among them were Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). Both candidates were targeted for their outspoken calls to cut United States arms to Israel. 

Now, with Republicans set to assume control of the House, Senate, and White House, Justice Democrats are asking voters nationwide to search for, and nominate, working-class people as potential candidates for Congress two years from now. 

“This cycle, we want to kind of put all corporate Democrats on notice,” the group’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas, said last month.

Coming off a cycle in which corporate money mattered and Democrats swung right, such a move will be hard. But the hope is to run candidates close to the ground, who know the communities they come from. “The Democratic Party can only win back working-class voters with real working-class leaders,” Rojas said. 

The announcement isn’t being met with much glee by the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. “If the so-called Justice Democrats are serious about this effort, they should start in New York’s 8th congressional district,” Justin Chermol, a spokesperson for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), told Axios—implying they should try to oust Jeffries.

Immediately after the election, there was a mass debate about why Democrats lost. Many pundits said that Democrats lost because they pandered too much to the perceived interests of poor voters and voters of color pushed by elites who are “politically correct” or “woke.” (Former John Fetterman staffer Adam Jentleson, in a widely discussed New York Times piece, was quick to blame Justice Democrats in particular for supporting candidates who want to defund the police, thereby alienating the theoretical average voter.) 

Usamah Andrabi, the group’s communications director, argues that it’s the opposite: Democrats are losing because they don’t have anything to offer to the working-class voters who have traditionally supported them. “Last Congress ended with fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress coming from working-class backgrounds,” he said. This year, that percentage will be even smaller. “When we let working class communities represent themselves and their interests, then we have a better shot of actually having leaders who understand the priorities of everyday people,” he said.

The Democratic establishment, Andrabi said, “is a failure.” So Justice Democrats are gearing up to recruit a new round of progressive candidates to run against incumbent Democrats.

“They brought us another Trump administration and a trifecta of Republican leadership in Washington,” Andrabi added. “We need to be clear that from the start of this Congress, this is not what Congress should look like two years from now.”

Left Democrats were also up against a particularly large surge of money in Democratic primaries in 2024. As a Sludge report revealed last week, one group—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—spent more last year than any single organization has ever spent in any congressional campaign cycle in history. 

The Justice Democrats don’t think they can win by outraising their opponents. “I don’t think we should be turning 20 million dollar primaries into 40 million dollar primaries,” said Andrabi. (The group spent just under $7 million in the 2024 elections.) 

Three-hundred forty-nine House members and senators—or 65 percent of Congress—received funding from AIPAC. The largest portion of that cash went to candidates who defended the state of Israel as loudly as possible. The Democrats who took down Bush and Bowman—Wesley Bell and George Latimer, respectively—received several million dollars each from AIPAC.

In total, AIPAC spent more than $45 million across party lines. Crypto lobbying groups spent tens of millions. It is becoming increasingly normal to spend millions upon millions of dollars on winning a single congressional term—which makes running for office ever more inaccessible for those without cash on hand. 

“It’s not gotten any cheaper for everyday people to run,” Andrabi said. “But our goal has always been to be the infrastructure and resources that working class people can use to run for office.” 

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

Kristin Crowley was appointed Los Angeles fire chief in 2022 at a time of turmoil in a department consumed by complaints of rampant hazing, harassment, and discrimination among its 3,400-member ranks.

She was portrayed by then mayor Eric Garcetti as a stabilizing force, a trailblazer, and the most qualified person. “I look for who’s best, not just who makes history, because the protection of our city first and foremost has to go to the human being who is best prepared to lead. But let me be clear, that is Kristin Crowley,” he said.

Crowley, a 22-year veteran at the time, had proved herself in the field. During the Woolsey fire of late 2018, she and wife Hollyn Bullock, also a firefighter, had dropped their three kids off at school, pulled some old personal protective equipment from their car, and set about saving Bullock’s mother’s home and eight other houses in Malibu over the course of 16 hours.

“We only lost one home,” Crowley later told the Malibu Times, “because it had no water supply. Neither of us had fought a brush fire for at least five years, but we went back to our training on how to protect a structure from a brush fire, and were using only garden hoses and buckets.”

“The fire chief and I are focused on fighting these fires and saving lives, and any differences that we might have will be worked out in private,” said LA Mayor Karen Bass.

But now, six years since that incident and three since Crowley was appointed to lead the LA fire department, the mood between Crowley and Garcetti’s successor is different. Two Los Angeles neighborhoods have been leveled by wind-driven fires, and others are under threat.

The most destructive event in the city’s history has put civic and political leaders on the defensive. Recriminations are flying, and Crowley is in a public spat with Mayor Karen Bass over a lack of resources, including personnel and equipment, that the fire department desperately needed when the infernos ignited last Tuesday.

Crowley publicly criticized the city on Friday for budget cuts that she said had made it harder for firefighters to do their jobs at a time when they are seeing more calls. She also cast blame on the city for water running out on Tuesday when about 20 percent of the hydrants tapped to fight the Palisades fire went dry.

“I’m not a politician, I’m a public servant. It’s my job as the fire chief for Los Angeles city fire department to make sure our firefighters have exactly what they need to do their jobs,” she told CNN.

But in public city budget hearings last year, Crowley asked the city for an increase of 159 personnel. Instead, Bass and the city council cut 61 fire department positions despite calls for service increasing 55 percent since 2010.

Crowley warned that budget cuts could hamper the department’s ability to respond to emergencies, including wildfires. Cuts in overtime limited the department’s ability to prepare and train for “large scale emergencies,” she said, and the department had also lost mechanics, leading to delays in repairing the vehicle fleet. “This service delivery model is no longer sustainable,” she said, adding that more complex emergencies and the growth of the community “demand an expansion of our life-safety service capabilities.”

Crowley’s comments and perceived falling-out with Bass—who maintains the fire department has the resources needed to do its job and will address specifics once the crisis subsides—has prompted so much speculation about her job security that the union issued a statement on Friday assuring rank-and-file members that she had not been fired.

On Saturday, the mayor invited Crowley to stand beside her during a news conference in a public—and perhaps forced—show of unity. “Let me be clear about something: the fire chief and I are focused on fighting these fires and saving lives, and any differences that we might have will be worked out in private,” Bass said, adding: “Our first and most important obligation to Angelenos is to get through this crisis.”

But Crowley and Bass are now swept into the national political fray over diversity, equity and inclusion policies that conservatives believe have gone too far in US institutions. Crowley, the city’s first female fire chief, made diversifying the overwhelmingly male department a priority.

There’s no evidence that Crowley’s efforts to diversify the department have hampered the fight against the fires, but that’s not how right-leaning pundits see it. “What we are seeing [was] largely preventable,” the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly charged. “LA’s fire chief has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity.”

The Los Angeles department of water and power, and not the fire department, is in charge of providing water for the hydrants, and its leaders have said they were overwhelmed by the intense demand on a municipal system not designed to fight wildfires, particularly when firefighting aircraft were grounded by the Santa Ana winds.

Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered an investigation into what happened, and Crowley herself added to the criticism. “When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water,” she said during a local news interview.

Adam Thiel, who previously served as Philadelphia’s fire commissioner, suggested that people reserve judgment until the fires can be investigated. He noted that firefighters cannot control the weather, a key factor in battling wildfires.

“Firefighting, to a regular person, probably appears to be a relatively simple process of putting water on a fire,” Thiel said. “In reality every firefighting operation, in any environment, is inherently volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.”

Crowley was appointed to the job amid complaints about a frat-house culture in the department that was sometimes hostile to women and minorities. Several lawsuits alleged hazing and harassment, and federal investigators found evidence of discrimination.

At the time Crowley was sworn in, women accounted for just 3.5 percent of the uniformed membership, a figure that’s not unusual for a fire department. A survey found that half the uniformed women in the department—along with 40 percent of Black people, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders—felt harassment was a problem.

Crowley, who has served as a fire marshal, engineer and battalion chief, told the Los Angeles Times in 2022 that she planned to ensure all employees “come to work and feel safe and feel heard.”

Crowley, who grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, came to firefighting after what she called “a really unique journey.” A high school and college athlete, she studied biology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, with plans to become an orthopedic surgeon. Two weeks after graduation, she moved to California.

A stint as a paramedic changed her career path. She did an internship with the fire department and was hooked. “Within a few seconds of me entering into the fire station, it was just such a wonderful connection to what I had being a student-athlete for the majority of my life, and I tell you, it was a perfect fit,” she told WBAY-TV in Green Bay in 2022.

Associated Press contributed reporting.

Samuel Anthony turns his phone camera around to show me the view from his family home in Sierra Leone. He steps out to a veranda overlooking a carpet of lush green trees dotted with houses that merge with the ocean in the distance. 

“This is how the majority of people live in Sierra Leone,” Anthony tells me, pointing nearby to “pan body” single structures made of zinc. “In America, we call them camper homes.”

The landscape, we both agree, is breathtaking. “But that doesn’t help you financially,” he says. 

When his mother passed away in 2021, Samuel Anthony couldn’t be there for the funeral.

Anthony may have been born in West Africa, but the United States is what he knows. Now 52, he left Sierra Leone in 1978 at the age of 6 with his older sister to join their parents, who had crossed the Atlantic looking for better education. He grew up in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, around the city’s then–red light district of 14th Street—a world away from where he finds himself more than four decades later. 

In 2019, during the first Trump administration, Anthony was one of almost 360,000 immigrants deported that year. He had a decades-old drug conviction. Five years later, the president-elect is set to return to the White House vowing to supercharge mass deportation by the millions.

“When people have killed and murdered,” Trump told NBC News of his mass deportation plans, “when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.”

Trump touts his deportation agenda as necessary to root out violent criminals. But chances are those targeted by the Trump administration will be people like Anthony, long-time residents who have some type of criminal record and baggage from an imperfect American life. (In fact, recent US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data shows the most common offenses committed by immigrants on the agency’s radar are traffic-related.)

“I didn’t come to America in hopes of becoming a drug dealer and being a bad person,” he says. “Just life, elements of things, not understanding myself put me in a negative spiral. My life spiraled out of control and I was never able to get back on the right track.”

Days before Trump’s inauguration, Anthony fears he might not have a chance to come back. “I never wanted to be here,” Anthony says. “I never looked like this would be my final resting spot in my life.” 

Anthony’s childhood years as a new immigrant in Washington, DC, weren’t easy. In his mind, he was American. The world told him otherwise. “It wasn’t a period of what we call Kumbaya,” Anthony says, “everybody holding hands and singing a song. It was a very hostile era in America, just like we’re going through now with immigration.”

He remembers being bullied in school and struggling to fit in or make friends. “I wanted to be a part of American society,” he recalls. He felt at home and yet denied acceptance. “All I know is these American cities. All I know is Washington, DC.”

When Anthony was about 7 years old, he was sexually abused by a doctor. It wasn’t until later in life that he realized how what happened had affected him. “I have a difficult time trusting people,” he told me.

At the height of the drug era in the US capital, Anthony got involved with drugs. He started carrying weight-loss pills for other people and later began to sell crack cocaine and use PCP. His addiction led him to drop out of college.

“I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the right footing.”

Anthony had a couple of run-ins with the police. In 1991, after intervening in a fight, he was badly beaten and taken to the hospital, where the police searched him and found drugs. Five years later, Anthony was arrested and pleaded guilty to drug offenses. He was sentenced to almost 20 years. At the 15-year mark, after Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act to address racial disparities, he was released early.

Upon his release, ICE picked Anthony up and transferred him to a detention center. He didn’t know his drug conviction would impact his immigration status, but he lost the green card he had gotten in 1989, and was put in deportation proceedings.

Because the US government couldn’t obtain his travel documents from Sierra Leone, they couldn’t deport him. Instead, ICE determined Anthony wasn’t a threat or a flight risk and released him in 2012 under an order of supervision that required him to report to the agency regularly.

Anthony started rebuilding his life. He obtained a commercial driver’s license and began working for a trucking company while also driving for Uber and Lyft. He bought a house and reconnected with family, including his daughter Samantha, whose childhood he had missed while in prison. He also started a mentoring program to help formerly incarcerated people.

After Trump took office, in 2017, Anthony’s order of supervision became stricter. He was made to wear an ankle bracelet and had more regular check-ins with immigration. One day in July 2019, Anthony went in for what he thought was just another routine ICE appointment. But instead of letting him go, Anthony says the agents put him in a conference room, threw him on a table, and arrested him. He was blindsided.

Sarah Gilman, co-founder of the Rapid Defense Network, a legal nonprofit focused on detention and deportation defense that has joined forces with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, unsuccessfully tried to halt Anthony’s deportation in the courts, arguing it was illegal among other reasons because he had a pending case for a U visa—a special protection for undocumented victims of crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (The Trump administration dropped a guidance encouraging ICE to not deport U visa applicants.)

“Historically, people like Samuel who have criminal convictions,” Gilman says, “even though they serve their time and they’ve [been] quote-unquote rehabilitated…they are often unusually subject to double punishment.” She adds: “What happened during Trump 1.0 was that everybody became a bad immigrant.”

ICE kept Anthony detained until December 2019. Then, they put him on a plane to Morocco and from there to Sierra Leone. He landed in the middle of the night and all he could see was darkness. Anthony remembers wishing he could walk into the ocean and never come back out.

“That’s what’s been happening for the last 22 years of my life,” he says. “I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the right footing.”

In Sierra Leone, Anthony has struggled with depression and health problems, including bouts of malaria, stomach issues, and weight loss. His status as a deportee who doesn’t speak the local dialect makes finding a job hard and leaves him prey to extortion. When his mother passed away in 2021, he couldn’t be there for the funeral.

“It was heart-wrenching for my mother,” Anthony’s older sister Samilia says, “to the point that I think it contributed to her depression and ultimate passing.”

She hopes her brother’s story can make people reconsider how they view the immigration system. “It’s just not right,” Samilia says. “Even if you have committed a crime, you’ve paid your dues. If America didn’t want those people, then maybe they should just send them home directly instead of having them be incarcerated for 15 years and then after that send them to nothing.”

Anthony’s lawyers have requested that ICE joins in a motion to reopen his deportation case and dismiss it so that he can have his legal permanent resident status restored. In an October letter in support of Anthony’s petition addressed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the acting director of ICE, former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote he should not have to “be held hostage to the federal government’s unpredictable shifts in immigration policy.”

Anthony is also applying for humanitarian parole to try to return to the United States while the Biden administration is still in office, but time is against him.

“If Samuel does not come home before Trump comes into power,” Gilman says, “he will never come home over the next four years. And I don’t know if Samuel will survive in Sierra Leone.”

Anthony has no idea how to start over almost 4,500 miles away from the only place he has ever called home. “Here, I don’t feel [a] sense of peace,” he says. “I feel chaos. I see confusion. I see pain. I see myself broken. It’s not easy.”

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

A Navy submariner who said she was sexually assaulted multiple times. An Army major who chose to never report her assault. A Marine Corps sexual assault response coordinator who worries she is being discriminated against because she’s a woman. A former Defense Department sexual assault victim advocate of the year.

Over the past several weeks, The War Horse spoke with a dozen current service members across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines about their experiences with sexual assault in uniform—as survivors, advocates, and allies. 

“I want to have faith in the system because I think a lot of progress has been made,” one Army sexual assault survivor who works in Army medicine told The War Horse. “But for me, it’s unknown.”

As the military continues to grapple with its past treatment of female members and considers its future leadership under President-elect Donald Trump, their voices are critical.

But having a say isn’t part of the deal when you’re in the military. Service members are restricted in how they can weigh in on a debate now roiling Washington over the nomination of Pete Hegseth as the nation’s next secretary of defense. He is defending himself from allegations of sexual misconduct and excessive alcohol use.

“We need leaders who reflect our highest ideals, not ones who undermine them with a lack of accountability.”

The War Horse wanted to capture their sentiments at this critical juncture—about what they’ve experienced during their service, their thoughts about the future, and why they continue to serve their country. Our interviews included officers and enlisted ranks, as well as men and women, and represent a range of geographic locations and military specialties. 

We’ve agreed not to name them to protect those who are survivors of sexual assault and to allow others to freely share their views on the military’s treatment of women and their hopes and worries about the next four years. 

“If we start to turn away from being inclusive and if we start to treat people without dignity and respect…I can see the culture changing,” said the Army survivor, who worries about “a cancerous effect.”

“We’re a stronger service because of our differences.”

A Positive Trend? 

The military has struggled for decades to stem its problem with sexual assault, regardless of which party has held the White House. Some estimates suggest that as many as 1 in 4 military women are assaulted. But only a fraction choose to report their assaults. Nearly two-thirds of all women who report sexual misconduct say they experience retaliation, according to Pentagon data, and a 2020 GAO report found that women are nearly 30 percent more likely than men to leave military service.

Last year, the Pentagon released data it hailed as “cautiously optimistic,” showing that the number of sexual assaults in the military decreased for the first time since 2015. But 11 of the 12 service members we interviewed said they were worried about the future: If Hegseth is confirmed as secretary of defense, the top two positions in the military chain of command will be filled by men who have been accused of sexual assault.

“It’s disheartening to see the mechanisms of power appear indifferent to these serious accusations,” an Army infantry sergeant told The War Horse. “We need leaders who reflect our highest ideals, not ones who undermine them with a lack of accountability.”

Half of the service members we spoke with identified as sexual assault survivors. Two other service members said they have experienced sexual harassment or gender discrimination. Three work or have worked in sexual assault prevention and response in the military. Some say they reported their assaults formally, others did not. Some have watched fellow service members struggle with stigma and the aftereffects of assault.

Hegseth’s path to defense secretary is in question as allegations of heavy drinking and past misconduct emerge. But most of the service members who spoke with The War Horse said the very fact of his nomination, whether or not it survives, shows a disregard from the very top for their service and the barriers that women—and men—still face in expecting a workplace free from sexual violence. 

“It doesn’t matter if Pete Hegseth is never confirmed,” said one officer, who has been recognized by the Pentagon as a victim advocate of the year. “The fact that he was even nominated is setting back where we are in the DOD culturally by an amount that is personally terrifying and professionally, having worked so hard to get us to a different place, infuriating.” 

Military’s Drinking Culture

Sexual assault rates have remained high and convictions stubbornly low across the military branches, despite more than 150 congressional requirements and 50 different initiatives from secretaries of defense aimed at stemming the problem over the past 15 years. Last year, only 16 percent of reported sexual assaults went to court-martial, according to Pentagon data. About 40 percent of those cases were then dismissed or the alleged perpetrator was released from the military in lieu of completing the court-martial.

The number of sexual misconduct cases had long been on the rise when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took charge at the Pentagon. He has made addressing sexual harassment and assault and improving military culture a priority during his tenure. In 2021, he commissioned an independent review board to study the problem and in 2023 oversaw the implementation of one of its primary recommendations: transferring the decision on whether to prosecute sexual assault cases from the military command to an independent office, a move long sought by victim advocates. 

Austin has also signed off on the board’s 81 other recommendations, which range from increasing survivors’ access to civilian care to improving Pentagon oversight of alcohol policies. Advocates for sexual assault survivors have frequently pointed to the military’s heavy drinking culture as a factor in its difficulty stemming sexual abuse in uniform. 

The New Yorker and other news outlets have reported that Hegseth’s alleged history of alcohol use caused problems for him in previous jobs, a concern that has been at the center of Hegseth’s recent conversations with lawmakers whose support he will need to be confirmed as defense secretary. Hegseth—a Fox News host and former Army National Guardsman—has promised to stop drinking if he gets the job. 

The New Yorker also detailed a whistleblower report that described a history of personal misconduct and sexual impropriety, including allegations that Hegseth sexually pursued female employees at Concerned Veterans for America, the nonprofit he ran from 2013 to 2016, and that he brought his team to a strip club, where he had to be stopped from joining the dancers onstage.

“You are now being given permission by the uppermost leadership to degrade your fellow service members.”

“I’ve been kind of floored by how culturally accepted and culturally propagated toxic masculinity is within the services,” a female Air Force pilot who deployed to Afghanistan told The War Horse. “I think that it’ll only be made even more palatable.”

In 2017, a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her at a conference in a report to police in Monterey, California, though no charges were filed. He maintains the encounter was consensual. Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, has acknowledged in media reports that Hegseth paid the woman an undisclosed settlement in 2020 in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement. 

“The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared,” Hegseth told reporters in November. 

Don Christensen, the former chief prosecutor of the Air Force and former president of Protect Our Defenders, which works to end sexual assault in the military, said that type of accusation at the top of the military chain of command may make it harder for survivors to find justice. 

“Here you have a guy who has a police report that looks like hundreds of police reports I’ve read on sexual assault, where there’s alcohol involved, where the victim has a spotty memory,” he said. 

“Those are the kinds of allegations we see day in and day out in the military.”

“Oomph That We Need”

As Hegseth works to shore up support on Capitol Hill, he is facing a Congress with the highest-ever number of female veterans.

Sen. Joni Ernst—Republican of Iowa, a retired Iowa National Guard lieutenant colonel, and herself a survivor of sexual assault—has publicly expressed reservations about Hegseth’s nomination. After two meetings with Hegseth, Ernst said she is committed to seeing him through the confirmation process, though she has not indicated whether she will vote to confirm him. She told reporters in December that Hegseth has promised to select a senior official who will work toward preventing sexual assault in the military.

“We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”

The War Horse reached out to Hegseth and his lawyer for comment about the concerns raised by the service members with whom we spoke. We did not receive a response.

Trump has also been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. In 2023, he was found liable in a civil court for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and ordered to pay her $5 million. 

At the beginning of his first term in office, Trump enjoyed support within the military, according to polling from Military Times, though that support fell off as the 2020 election approached. A GOVX poll in June found that 66 percent of active duty service members intended to vote for Trump.

One Navy officer, who transferred to the reserves after her sexual assault, told The War Horse that she did not know much about Hegseth but that she does not believe the allegations against Trump.

“I am very excited for President Trump to be our commander-in-chief again,” she said. 

Like other service members who spoke with The War Horse, she was frustrated with the way the Navy handled her assault report. But she worried the military is too focused on things that take away from core skills, and she said she hoped that under Trump, the military would focus on higher-quality, but fewer and more efficient, training for things like preventing sexual assault.

“I feel like we have lost a lot of our tactical mindset,” the Navy officer said. “And I feel like he [Trump] will have that oomph that we need to be war fighters again.”

But other service members who spoke with The War Horse said they worried that dismissing the value of diverse contributions will undermine unit cohesion and mission readiness, arguing that the two men’s histories could signal a tacit acceptance of similar behavior in the ranks.

“You are now being given permission by the uppermost leadership to degrade your fellow service members,” an Air Force officer said. 

“I think that if people try to push back against that, they have a very easy argument to say, ‘Well, that’s what the president says or thinks,’ or ‘That’s what the SECDEF says or thinks.’”

“Life-Givers, Not Life-Takers”

Hegseth has repeatedly said the military’s commitment to diversity undermines its lethality, lamenting in his book, The War on Warriors, what he called “a more empathetic and effeminate military.” He has said women should not serve in combat.

“[Women are] life-givers, not life-takers,” Hegseth told conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro last summer.

“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” he wrote in his book. “We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.” 

Last month, Hegseth appeared to roll back his comments, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that women are “some of our greatest warriors, our best warriors.”

“Why should I serve in a military that doesn’t value me and that I don’t think has my back?”

“I look forward to being a secretary for all our warriors, men and women, for the amazing contributions they make in our military,” he said.

Women made up about 18 percent of active duty service members in 2022, the most recent data available, ranging from 9 percent of the Marine Corps, which has the lowest percentage of women, to nearly 22 percent of the Air Force.

Almost a decade after the defense secretary at the time Ash Carter removed the ban on women in combat, about 4,500 women have served in combat roles in the Army and Marines. More than 150 women have completed the grueling Army Ranger course.

Women who spoke with The War Horse said they were worried that Hegseth’s view on women in the military could directly affect their careers.

“I am very happy I was selected to serve in a combat role,” a Marine who has also worked as a sexual assault response coordinator told The War Horse. “I want to deploy. I want to do my job. I want to do the things I’ve been trained to do.”

But Hegseth’s views could affect women’s decisions to join the military, says Rachel Van Landingham, a retired Air Force judge advocate general and a professor at Southwestern Law School.

“Why should I serve in a military that doesn’t value me and that I don’t think has my back?” she said.

Most of the service members who spoke with The War Horse said they would hesitate to recommend the military to young women today, or would only recommend it with extreme caution.

“The military,” Van Landingham said, “needs to be doubling down and being able to maximize the potential of everyone that’s actually willing to raise their hand and serve, which is still a tiny, tiny percentage of our overall country.”

This War Horse story was reported by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. 

In emergency updates, American Sign Language interpreters are crucial to the safety of Deaf people—close to a million of whom live in the Los Angeles area alone. They’ve also become the latest target of right-wing online influencers like Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, who offered a very obnoxious take on his eponymous Charlie Kirk Show last Wednesday, calling live ASL interpretation a “distraction” in the context of the fires; other right-wing media figures have piled on, adding ASL to the increasingly preposterous list of “woke” practices somehow related to the fires.

But the Americans with Disabilities Act protects the right to equal information, as National Association of the Deaf board president Lisa M. Rose wrote in a response to Kirk.

“Sign language interpreters provide crucial visual context, emotional nuance, and cultural mediation that captions alone cannot convey,” Rose wrote. “This real-time interpretation can be life-saving during emergencies, when clear and immediate understanding is vital.”

Kirk was far from the only right-winger to attack ASL interpreters: “critical race theory” profiteer Christopher Rufo said on X that no “wild human gesticulators [are] necessary,” referring to a video of a Los Angeles County emergency management news conference; Richard Hanania said ADA requirements to have ASL interpretation “have led to a nightmare.”

Bad takes on ASL interpreters and their purpose are not new, but given the current hold of anti-DEI activists on the Republican Party, and the speed with which other social and news media organizations have capitulated to Trump on advertising, fact-checking, and diversity initiatives, those attacks may soon lead to fewer ASL interpreters on emergency news broadcasts. There are already gaps in meeting that requirement, and not just from the right—in 2020, for instance, a judge had to force Andrew Cuomo to include an ASL interpreter in his lauded Covid briefings.

Kirk and Rufo obviously know little about ASL if they’re criticizing it for being expressive—which it’s supposed to be. As Arika Okrent wrote in a 2012 Atlantic article “signers are animated not because they are bubbly and energetic, but because sign language uses face and body movements as part of its grammar.” What’s for certain is that interpretation is vital, not annoying—the exact opposite of Kirk, Rufo, and Hanania’s takes.

Ketan Joshi did not mean to become the manager of all things climate on Bluesky, the fast-growing social media platform that’s trying to compete directly with Twitter.

GreenSky was designed to be this overarching, overall thing that encompassed all the communities. I see that emerging through the GreenSky feed, because you see people from very disparate communities talking to each other.

The 39-year-old Australian expat who now lives in Oslo, Norway has spent his career writing about green energy as a communications specialist for renewable energy companies and author of Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future, but found it especially hard to share climate information on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Those sites seemed built toward sowing discord and had secret rules about what posts would do well. Immediately, he noticed that Bluesky was different.

Built as an open-source decentralized network, Bluesky’s architects, which included Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, wanted to create something that was user-led rather than company-led. (Dorsey is no longer involved and the project is led by Jay Graeber, who promises to “billionaire proof” the site.) What it means is that Bluesky has no all-powerful algorithm directing content. Instead of trusting a privately-owned, sometimes-biased, often-inflammatory and increasingly misinformed system, users can choose multiple feeds from thousands of mini-algorithms built by users. Or make their own.

Early on in the project Dorsey, who is no longer involved, stated: “Existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health.” Bluesky’s goal was to change that.

The appeal seems to be working. The platform now has 25 million users, and counting. In the days following Donald Trump’s re-election in a campaign that was supercharged by Elon Musk, who owns Twitter , over 1 million new users joined the site.

Joshi has been on Bluesky for a while–since the site had less than 100,000 users. He built up his climate community on Bluesky by searching manually for folks involved in climate change work. He followed and added their names to spreadsheet to keep track

At first the spreadsheet was just for Joshi, but quickly there was interest from those in his network, so he shared it widely. 

(Nowadays, Bluesky has improved on the spreadsheet sharing with a function where users can curate lists of other users called Starterpacks with the option to “follow” or “block” all of them.)

Joshi also created a feed that congregated all the posts from users on his climate list. It, like many other early Bluesky feeds, like Blacksky and BookSky, combined a keyword with sky—”GreenSky”—each varying in capitalization. The result was a unique space where everyone was talking about the environment. 

GreenSky is a “Top-50” feed with near-constant engagement and frequent debates as those in different climate camps come face off on policy disagreements in real time. In early January, in the midst of devastating fires in Los Angeles, posters used the feed to stay up to date, grapple with how climate led to their ferocity, and sift through misinformation. Top climate voices, like energy transition engineer Jesse Jenkins and Farhana Sultana, author of Confronting Climate Coloniality, are members and frequent posters.

Mother Jones spoke to Joshi about the unique climate dialogues emerging on BlueSky, facilitated by GreekSky, how he is trying to manage it, and the role that social media plays in climate engagement broadly.

How has GreenSky changed since the early days, beyond sheer growth?

I added a keyword filter which limits posts to [77] climate keywords only. But Bluesky is such a flexible, open platform, so I created a second version that is just the unfiltered thoughts of everybody on that list, if you desire to have it that way. And then, a friend on Bluesky decided that he liked green sky, but wanted a different filtering on it, so he created a version that not only filters for the keywords, but also filters for sort of popularity and engagement. 

It’s a basic thing that people can riff off. They can make their own version. I think that’s really quite wonderful. 

You have a presence on several social media platforms, and seem to be in the habit of making a climate community on each one. How did that experience translate into managing climate posting on Bluesky?

The key thing that I find on the other sites, very consistently, is that in the process of trying to find your people and then communicate with your people, you’re kind of swimming against the tide.

Instagram is a nice example where there’s a sort of this behavioral culture of people trying to act and speak and present their content in a way that pleases a secret formula. And I’ve done that. I’m there googling the type of thumbnail to use and the type of description to use and the perfect length to please the sort of secret algorithms.

So Bluesky is quite different?

One thing I have noticed is people are very quickly unlearning the habits of trying to please the algorithm. Other websites down rank hyperlinks because they don’t want people leaving the website. They don’t want the eyeballs of the people going away from the website and away from advertisers. That doesn’t happen on Bluesky unless somebody makes a feed that has the formula inside it. But no one’s going to subscribe to that feed because we all love seeing each other’s work. That really stands out to me, where there’s a lot of sharing of work, there’s a lot of sharing of reports, people link to other places on the internet. Bluesky is a conduit.

Bluesky gets the critique of being an echo chamber a lot, but I’ve noticed a huge diversity of opinions in the climate side of Bluesky. What are your observations?

The climate community has its own bubbles: climate science and ecological sciences, energy technology and investment innovation, indigenous rights. I don’t wring my hands about [this]. You see this anxiety about cross chatter between communities and or even Bluesky being a silo but it’s just, it’s simply not the case? That’s not how communities form on a well designed social media site. What you get is people cluster with topics they want to hear from and people they want to hear from, and then they sort of cross through each other, sometimes often in bad ways, often in good ways.

GreenSky was designed to be this overarching, overall thing that encompassed all the communities. I see that emerging through the GreenSky feed, because you see people from very disparate communities talking to each other.

What do those debates look like on Greensky?

I very intentionally designed it so that replies show up in the feed so people are replying to each other. I want it to be a little bit noisy. I want it to be a little bit overwhelming. 

I’ve seen debates occur in very refreshing and unique ways that are passionate, but they never default to hate and personal invective. You can tell that the blood pressure is high and that people feel strongly when they’re replying. It’s not dispassionate or boring. But, I have not seen it sort of like falling to insults or to snide, snippyness, like we have seen on other sites.

It’s a nice style of interaction, because it’s a fight. It’s a proper fight, people mean it, but at the same time, they’re not full of hate or developing beef. 

People who have been on X for a while now, they’ve been subject to the design of the website, which is obviously encouraging conflict as much as possible as a way to keep people on there. 

I’m sure there are many examples of actual, proper, personal, interpersonal hate on arguments in Bluesky and even in the climate space. But I would say, as a general thing, it feels like an improvement.

What are some of the biggest debates on GreenSky right now?

Permitting reform, the abundance agenda, gas terminals, Biden’s overall agenda. 

A big one is how to deploy clean energy in the US. On one side, you’ve kind of got the people who say wind power and solar power should be somewhat deregulated and rolled out in a faster way to achieve quicker, deeper emissions reductions. It’s justified on the grounds of: this is an urgent problem, and when you have too much process, then you end up with people like blockers and NIMBYs, and they sort of block like wind funds and solar farms. 

And then the other side, which I’m a little bit more aligned with is like: “Yes, permitting needs to be reformed, but it should be reformed in a way that encourages more community engagement and community benefit sharing, because that will actually result in the quicker roll out.” 

These two sides of the debate are like red hot right now, because the political change was so clearly stressful on a lot of people who are allies but have a different idea about how to reach the same goal, and so the intensity of these debates has increased. 

What about management? How have you handled the influx of billions people onto Bluesky and thousands of people to your feed?

This is something that I’m a little daunted by because my criteria when I first started making this list, was literally “climate people,” and that can mean quite a lot of things. It can mean somebody who doesn’t work in any professional sense in climate, but is extremely interested in it. I always told myself that the keyword filtering will do the job. 

I actually haven’t updated it with the new opt-in requests from the great surge of earlier, so it’s going to get a lot noisier in the next couple of weeks. It’s probably going to double in size or so. 

I monitor the feed pretty closely to see who’s posting in it and what type of topics get filtered through the keyword filter. It seems okay so far. 

One thing I really want to try and preserve is how diverse the climate community is across those different groups, while at the same time sort of acknowledging who’s missing. There’s quite a few groups missing, and it’s because they haven’t really joined Bluesky yet. Climate activists who rely very much on strong preexisting networks. They can’t just quit their network and then just hope that everybody else will run behind them. That’s going to take longer, but the clusters of people will expand pretty significantly over the next year or so. 

What about moderating bad stuff?

One day somebody’s going to request to join, who is, for instance, sailing close to the wind of being a climate denier or a delayer.

The initial policy that I had on GreenSky was “no dickheads,” which is an Australian term. I will only kick somebody off the list if they’re either abusive, if they’re breaching any of Bluesky’s basic moderation rules, or if it’s a pretty cut and dried case of mis- or disinformation spreading.

The feed is probably going to grow. It’s going to need to have a lot more transparency around how I deal with a lot of those questions. I am thinking about a log of content that has been flagged.

I guess that makes me a forum moderator type due, and that is not something I’ve ever done before. That’s the only thing I wish I had prepared for, but I’m lucky. I’ve got access to a huge community of people who will offer good advice.

What is the future of climate online, Bluesky or otherwise?

I’ve spoken to climate activists about the social media they’re using and what they prefer and what they and what they’re interested in. I think someone once jokingly referred to it as a millennial retirement home when it was first set up. That just cut deep out of its sheer truthfulness. 

Something that occurred to me when they told me about that is that they don’t need to join Bluesky. This is an open protocol. It should hypothetically, eventually be such that it would be incredibly easy to set up your own [social] server. 

Some people really need video. Some people really need a network that is secure and can’t be taken down by an authoritarian regime. 

I’m imagining a future for different climate communities where it’s not about Bluesky or GreenSky, but the protocol that enables interconnectedness between different purposes and needs for the community.

It wasn’t long ago when a daily glass of wine was considered safe, even healthy. The practice could confer onto someone a sense of sophistication, a realized version of whatever “bon vivant” means.

But in recent years, as multiple studies started to dismantle that notion of safety, I tended to mostly ignore what I had considered obvious: Alcohol is not great for you. (Duh? Meh?) Instead, I have slowly dialed down my consumption to align with what has been happening in real-time: the arrival of my first kid and all the attendant things that start at the outset of early middle age. Which is to say, I started drinking less, but I never once considered giving it up for good. In fact, if given the chance to go Tucker Carlson Dark, I’d need to consider an offer that could withstand a not-nothing martini budget.

So when the US surgeon general kicked off 2025 with a recommendation to include cancer warnings on alcoholic beverages, I was stunned by how clear-cut the message was. It landed, for me, with an unequivocal, self-assured ferocity that has since left me envisioning the brutal totality of all the alcohol I have consumed over nearly two decades. In these moments, a parade of evil-grinning beverages barrels down at me, taunting a future of illness. And all because I thought it was…fun? (But it is!)

Have I done life completely incorrectly? Has every outing that involved alcohol actually been a pathetic march to a hollowed-out future? I called up Dr. Jennifer Panning, a clinical psychologist in Evanston, Illinois, to hear how I—and probably many of you—should be processing all of this.

What have you been hearing in response to growing evidence of just how terrible alcohol is for us?

A lot of my clients are actually more in the sober or sober-curious realm. Some of that’s been for health reasons, menopause, and things like sleep disruption. There’s also been a more general realization that they don’t have to engage in the drinking culture to socialize or have fun.

So the recent surgeon general’s warning has been more of an affirming event than anything?

For some people, I think it probably has been validating. The notion of having wine as a healthy way to help your lifestyle is no longer as in vogue as it used to be.

What does the phrase “I have an alcohol problem” mean to you?

It tends to mean that an individual is identifying that there’s something wrong. That something is going on that they need or they’ve decided to seek professional help and acknowledge something to themselves as well.

Alcohol use disorder sees a lot of secrecy and denial to minimize true amounts of consumption. So when somebody has the ability to acknowledge a problem, we can try to shift this as an opportunity [for change]. Let’s understand what your concerns are and assess the negative impacts of your behavior.

There’s also a difference between people who identify as true alcoholics. Then some people are more problem drinkers. And I think in that category, we can talk more about harm reduction. That typically involves acknowledging that going out and having six drinks or nine drinks is not helping you. But for whatever reason, they don’t want to go into an abstinence model. So we’ll discuss what the threshold could be there, identify that as maybe two or three drinks max, and work on cutting themselves off with that. It’s all about people realizing the impacts of their behaviors. That could be an inability to get out of bed the next morning or they’re not feeling clear-headed at work. Their sleep is disrupted or they’re arguing with their partner. Maybe they’re not present with their kids. More serious use in terms of hard liquor every night is something that likely requires more specialized treatment and support.

“Your memories are your memories and honor them for what they are…They shouldn’t be tarnished because of what the surgeon general now says.”

The link between alcohol and anxiety has been clear for years now. And yet, as someone who enjoys her cocktails, I can’t help but feel anxious, amid all these studies, about what I’ll do without the occasional martini. And in the next minute, I’m downright panicked thinking about all the drinks I’ve had in my lifetime. How can people reconcile these competing anxieties?

That’s a really good insight. So, we know that chronic stress is really bad for our health too, right? We know that sitting every day is bad for our health. We know there are so many different things that are not ideal for our health. We live in an extremely high-pressure society. So we have to think about trade-offs. When people realize that the best part of their days is when they have a cocktail and that they’re not looking forward to anything else, it’s critical to interrogate what’s going on there. What do you need to readjust or have some more balance? For many people, they need more sleep. Instead of a cocktail then, maybe they should look into hiring a housekeeper or delegate more. Have their spouse take over kid duty.

If you focus on all the ways that we make mistakes and spend time beating ourselves up for those mistakes, that is ultimately very unproductive. We have to take the perspective of wanting to be as healthy as we can be. And how do we achieve that? What kinds of things do I need to work on my stress level?

I was recently talking to a friend about all of this, and they reminded me that we also grew up in an era when it was considered good and normal, even exciting, for kids to eat Lunchables tacos with meat sauce that dripped out of a plastic tube. Yet, we’re still here, and in relatively good health. I mean, even Jesus drank. Therefore, alcohol can’t be that bad. 

As a therapist, what type of behavior or justification strategies would you say my friend and I are engaging in? Do you encourage this or am I doing something that should once again instill further anxiety?

“Guilt is rarely helpful. It’s only helpful when it helps us see something that we need to change. But if that’s not the case, then you need to release that guilt. “

I come back again to the idea that chronic stress is extremely bad for us. There is indisputable, countless research that has concluded exactly this. So we have to figure out the balance. Sure, you might be justifying or relying on different defense mechanisms; that’s simply part of being a normal human. But you can also see various past behaviors in the context of that period of life. An example: I have teenagers now and they barely want to be around me, so I’m in a moment when I’m adjusting to more free time and sleep. But when they were really little, it felt exhausting and challenging just to survive. We’re human. We have vices and stressors. We have patterns and habits, and we have to figure out how to how to make sense of all that. But it’s not easy. In this moment of time and our history and what’s happening sociopolitically, people are just very stressed out.

I was just about to say: With the election, non-stop climate catastrophes, and studies that black spatulas and booze are going to kill us, it just feels so bleak all the time. Have you noticed a general uptick in hopelessness? That I should just walk myself into the ocean? Nihilism?  

It’s been difficult to support people. I live in a very progressive area and the shock of the election has left people feeling deeply unsettled and dreading. People are very much on edge. So I’m talking [to my clients] about what keeps them grounded. How do you grab onto your grounding and make sure that you are back in the present moment? Look at the fires right now. These people were living their lives three days ago and were completely unaware of what was coming for them. We simply don’t know the future. So living in the present moment and being present in the here and now are hugely important.

With anxiety, we talk a lot about what’s possible versus what’s probable. I often use this example. My day usually starts by parking in the garage down the street, and I go to my car after work. I’ll drive back to my house, but I won’t remember the drive because it won’t be significant. But if I left my office and I had a zombie apocalypse happening, I would have a very vivid memory of that. But how likely is that to happen?

We have to learn how to recalibrate ourselves into the present moment and enjoy our loved ones in our community. Stay connected to people we care about and who care about us. Notice the beauty.

I had a really bad day a couple of days ago while traveling to Florida. But coming back to Chicago to this very cold weather, I suddenly looked up and noticed a beautiful sunset sky. It was almost as if I needed to notice it, to recognize and notice when there are moments of beauty. And sunsets are so fleeting. You notice them and five minutes later, the sky is gray. You simply have to take advantage and savor that moment. We have to remind ourselves that throughout history, during war and awful times, people were also getting married, having kids, and celebrating.

Yeah, I’ve been trying to teach myself that all that’s bad and good in life are not competing narratives. They coexist and you have to be aware of them.

Buddhism has some great principles around being present and having the dialectic of holding both. Yes, concerning things may be happening; we should not deny or ignore them. But what do we have control over? What can we do and what are the choices that we can make to keep ourselves healthy and grounded?

As a non-public health professional, do you think it’s helpful to speak about alcohol consumption, or consumption in general, in such absolutist language?

I’ve been talking a lot this week about goals and resolutions. And I’m encouraging people to look more at the process than the outcome. People who say they would like to start exercising three times a week. That’s a reasonable goal and we can talk about the benefits they believe they will get out of that. But also, what’s going to happen when life gets in the way? When you can only work out once a week? Instead of looking at this as a failure, I encourage people to see this as going from zero to once a week. That’s still progress, right?

With alcohol, if someone has identified they want to reduce their alcohol use, I’d ask what they can do in a processed way to reduce it. Because the nuance is important. As therapists, we help people understand the wins. Even one small change is a win. Doing something different than your usual pattern, that’s a good thing, and that’s a win. We want to reinforce that and look at how you can take that and also learn from that for the future.

Can you talk about the role of guilt in these discussions and how we should approach it in light of the surgeon general’s warning?

Guilt is rarely helpful. It’s only helpful when it helps us see something that we need to change, right? Like when people take a hard look at themselves and realize that they depend too much on alcohol. But if that’s not the case, and you’ve done the self-analysis to understand that that’s not the case, then you need to release that guilt. Again, guilt can be good if it’s a signal that a change really is necessary. An example: As a parent, it’s normal to lose your temper with the kids sometimes. But if you have constant guilt about that, you should also understand that you don’t have to be a perfect parent. But on the other hand, if you’re recognizing that you are constantly yelling at your kid, that’s a problem, right? So that guilt can help us understand that better. But if it’s something that we’re using to beat ourselves up further, that’s not helpful.

At the risk of sounding like I have a genuine problem, some of my fondest memories of all time tend to involve some level of drinking. Wandering around, being silly and loud with best mates. Now they feel slightly tarnished. That might be a natural response, but it also feels toxic, like I’m engaging in self-flagellation. How can we move forward with a more healthy lifestyle but maintain self-respect and fondness for those memories?

As we get older, we all look back on these memories. I was talking to a friend the other day and we were recalling those earlier days when we could stay out all night and listen to music until 2 am on a Tuesday. That’s not my life anymore. But there’s fondness about those carefree days, a nostalgia of when life seemed simpler. We all engage in reminiscing and having a little bit of rose-colored glasses.

But I would say that your memories are your memories and honor them for what they are. They both were and are meaningful. It sounds like [memories that involved alcohol] also brought you joy and a lot of fulfillment. It’s important to acknowledge that that fondness matters. They shouldn’t be tarnished because of what the surgeon general now says. As we grow and develop, we have to have compassion for ourselves. I also have memories of college, doing dumb things, and having fun with friends. Sure, I wouldn’t make those same decisions now. But those memories were a part of my growth path and they were significant.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

I tend not to get all dewy-eyed about bipartisanship. It was bipartisanship that gave us the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, deregulation of the financial sector that caused economic disaster, the bloated military budget, trade deals that undercut American workers, and protection for rapacious corporate interests, including energy conglomerates that long denied and covered up evidence of climate change. But I found it hard not to tear up on Thursday morning during Gerald Ford’s eulogy of Jimmy Carter, a posthumous tribute that demonstrated that political division can be overridden by shared values. Or, at least, once could be. 

Ford died 18 years ago. But before he passed, the 38th president of the United States penned a eulogy for the 39th president. Prior to his death, Ford had asked Carter to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. Carter agreed and asked if Ford would do the same at his funeral. It was a bit of a joke: who of the pair would be the one to show up and deliver the second eulogy. At Carter’s funeral at Washington National Cathedral, Ford’s son, Steve Ford, read the testament to Carter that Ford had left behind.

In the 1976 election, Carter, running as a let’s-clean-up-government Democrat who vowed “I will never lie to you,” defeated Ford, who was weighed down by the stench of Richard Nixon and Watergate (and perhaps his pardon of Nixon), by 2 points in the popular vote. Five years later, a year after Carter was trounced by Ronald Reagan, Carter and Ford found themselves together on Air Force One flying to Egypt for the funeral of Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian president with whom Carter had negotiated the historic Camp David Accords (with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin). The two one-term ex-presidents hit it off and for the next 25 years enjoyed a friendship.

“It was the first time, but by no means the last time, that our unlikely partnership ruffled feathers in the Washington establishment,” Ford recalled in his eulogy.

In the eulogy, Ford noted that during the 1976 contest, “Jimmy knew my political vulnerabilities, and he successfully pointed them out. Now I didn’t like it. But little could I know that the outcome of that 1976 election would bring about one of my deepest and most enduring friendships.” On the return trip from Egypt, they discussed their families, faith, and values—and the bother of having to raise money for a presidential library. They decided they would jointly declare that that Palestinian issue needed to be resolved to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East—not a popular position within the Reagan administration. “It was the first time, but by no means the last time, that our unlikely partnership ruffled feathers in the Washington establishment,” Ford recalled in his eulogy. The pair also agreed to hold a series of conferences on arms control—at a time when the Reagan cold warriors were looking to rip up previous nuclear weapons agreements, expand the US nuclear arsenal, and beat the Soviets in an arms race.

Ford, in this tribute, praised Carter for his integrity: “He displayed that honesty throughout his life.” He hailed Carter for pursuing “brotherhood across boundaries of nationhood, across boundaries of tradition, across boundaries of caste. In America’s urban neighborhood, in rural villages around the world, he reminded us that Christ had been a carpenter. And in Third World villages, he successfully campaigned not for votes but for the eradication of diseases that shame the developed world as they ravaged the undeveloped one.” He cited Carter’s work promoting democracy overseas: “The American people and the people of the world will be forever blessed by his decades of good works. Jimmy Carter’s legacy of peace and compassion will remain unique as it is timeless.”

It was a lovely moment—and a gesture showing that politics need not be an arena of hatred. As Steve Ford spoke his father’s words, it was nigh impossible to consider Donald Trump’s presence in the cathedral—he was in the second row, sitting next to Barack Obama—and to not contemplate how Trump has intensified the animosity that does flow through American politics. Could Trump pen such words about a onetime rival and display graciousness and compassion? No, his go-to schtick is one of cruelty, mockery, and mean-spiritedness. During the campaign, he repeatedly claimed Carter was a happy man because he was now “considered a brilliant president” when compared to President Joe Biden, whom Trump repeatedly derided as an imbecile and moron.

As Carter’s fundamental decency, intelligence, devotion to faith, commitment to public service at home and abroad, and generosity of spirit were celebrated by the eulogists, Trump was the elephant in the room.

Politics for Republicans has long been a blood sport. Nixon exploited racism with his Southern strategy; Reagan teamed up with the religious right that accused Democrats of hating God and country; Newt Gingrich encouraged Republicans to brand Democrats as traitors and the enemies of American families and children; Sarah Palin assailed Obama as a commie who despised the United States. But Trump has embraced malice and brutality unlike any president.

As Carter’s fundamental decency, intelligence, devotion to faith, commitment to public service at home and abroad, and generosity of spirit were celebrated by the eulogists—who included two Carter grandsons; former Vice President Walter Mondale’s son (who read the eulogy his deceased father left behind); Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who served in Carter’s administration as UN ambassador; and Biden—Trump was the elephant in the room. The question hovered: How have we come to this? About to reenter the White House is a grifting and deceitful narcissist who relishes insults, who incites violence, who encourages savagery. And how many houses for the poor did Trump build after his first White House tenure? What efforts did he make to improve the lives of the less fortunate overseas? Trump’s own foundation was shut down, and he was forced to pay a $2 million fine because he had inappropriately used it for business and political—not charitable—purposes.

During his presidential campaign, Carter released a book titled Why Not the Best? After Watergate exposed the sordidness of American politics, he suggested that we as a nation could do much better. When Trump was considering a presidential run in the spring of 2015, I asked one of his aides if his crew was worried about Trump’s well-known liabilities: his history of misogynistic remarks, his many business failures, his mob ties, his relentless hucksterism, his ego, his obnoxiousness. None of that, the aide said, was of concern to Trump’s team. “That’s all baked in,” he said. The strategic premise guiding Trump and his minions was that voters wanted an asshole who would be their asshole. It’s as if the Trump campaign motto would be “Why not the worst?”

As a person, Carter was the antithesis of Trump. Sure, as a politician he was no saint, and his presidency had both accomplishments and serious flaws. But for four decades after leaving the White House, he showed the world how a politician could serve without putting himself first. With Trump returning to power, Carter and all the tributes he has received are counterprogramming showing us that the leader of America need not be a cruel, callous, and vicious megalomaniac.

Trump has adopted crassness as the currency of the realm of politics. He has demonized Americans who are not within his MAGA cult and attempted to delegitimize political foes and critics (as well as the press). He has waged war on decency. In the coming stretch, he can be expected to continue this crusade and further infuse and debase American politics with hatred. Those not entranced or enthralled by his reliance and promotion of animus will need to find in our national discourse and in our own lives acts and moments of decency that can counter the rancor and enmity that Trump seeks to enshrine within the American spirit. This will make the darkness less dark, and from the grave, Carter and Ford have reminded us that is possible.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

I tend not to get all dewy-eyed about bipartisanship. It was bipartisanship that gave us the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, deregulation of the financial sector that caused economic disaster, the bloated military budget, trade deals that undercut American workers, and protection for rapacious corporate interests, including energy conglomerates that long denied and covered up evidence of climate change. But I found it hard not to tear up on Thursday morning during Gerald Ford’s eulogy of Jimmy Carter, a posthumous tribute that demonstrated that political division can be overridden by shared values. Or, at least, once could be. 

Ford died 18 years ago. But before he passed, the 38th president of the United States penned a eulogy for the 39th president. Prior to his death, Ford had asked Carter to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. Carter agreed and asked if Ford would do the same at his funeral. It was a bit of a joke: who of the pair would be the one to show up and deliver the second eulogy. At Carter’s funeral at Washington National Cathedral, Ford’s son, Steve Ford, read the testament to Carter that Ford had left behind.

In the 1976 election, Carter, running as a let’s-clean-up-government Democrat who vowed “I will never lie to you,” defeated Ford, who was weighed down by the stench of Richard Nixon and Watergate (and perhaps his pardon of Nixon), by 2 points in the popular vote. Five years later, a year after Carter was trounced by Ronald Reagan, Carter and Ford found themselves together on Air Force One flying to Egypt for the funeral of Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian president with whom Carter had negotiated the historic Camp David Accords (with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin). The two one-term ex-presidents hit it off and for the next 25 years enjoyed a friendship.

“It was the first time, but by no means the last time, that our unlikely partnership ruffled feathers in the Washington establishment,” Ford recalled in his eulogy.

In the eulogy, Ford noted that during the 1976 contest, “Jimmy knew my political vulnerabilities, and he successfully pointed them out. Now I didn’t like it. But little could I know that the outcome of that 1976 election would bring about one of my deepest and most enduring friendships.” On the return trip from Egypt, they discussed their families, faith, and values—and the bother of having to raise money for a presidential library. They decided they would jointly declare that that Palestinian issue needed to be resolved to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East—not a popular position within the Reagan administration. “It was the first time, but by no means the last time, that our unlikely partnership ruffled feathers in the Washington establishment,” Ford recalled in his eulogy. The pair also agreed to hold a series of conferences on arms control—at a time when the Reagan cold warriors were looking to rip up previous nuclear weapons agreements, expand the US nuclear arsenal, and beat the Soviets in an arms race.

Ford, in this tribute, praised Carter for his integrity: “He displayed that honesty throughout his life.” He hailed Carter for pursuing “brotherhood across boundaries of nationhood, across boundaries of tradition, across boundaries of caste. In America’s urban neighborhood, in rural villages around the world, he reminded us that Christ had been a carpenter. And in Third World villages, he successfully campaigned not for votes but for the eradication of diseases that shame the developed world as they ravaged the undeveloped one.” He cited Carter’s work promoting democracy overseas: “The American people and the people of the world will be forever blessed by his decades of good works. Jimmy Carter’s legacy of peace and compassion will remain unique as it is timeless.”

It was a lovely moment—and a gesture showing that politics need not be an arena of hatred. As Steve Ford spoke his father’s words, it was nigh impossible to consider Donald Trump’s presence in the cathedral—he was in the second row, sitting next to Barack Obama—and to not contemplate how Trump has intensified the animosity that does flow through American politics. Could Trump pen such words about a onetime rival and display graciousness and compassion? No, his go-to schtick is one of cruelty, mockery, and mean-spiritedness. During the campaign, he repeatedly claimed Carter was a happy man because he was now “considered a brilliant president” when compared to President Joe Biden, whom Trump repeatedly derided as an imbecile and moron.

As Carter’s fundamental decency, intelligence, devotion to faith, commitment to public service at home and abroad, and generosity of spirit were celebrated by the eulogists, Trump was the elephant in the room.

Politics for Republicans has long been a blood sport. Nixon exploited racism with his Southern strategy; Reagan teamed up with the religious right that accused Democrats of hating God and country; Newt Gingrich encouraged Republicans to brand Democrats as traitors and the enemies of American families and children; Sarah Palin assailed Obama as a commie who despised the United States. But Trump has embraced malice and brutality unlike any president.

As Carter’s fundamental decency, intelligence, devotion to faith, commitment to public service at home and abroad, and generosity of spirit were celebrated by the eulogists—who included two Carter grandsons; former Vice President Walter Mondale’s son (who read the eulogy his deceased father left behind); Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who served in Carter’s administration as UN ambassador; and Biden—Trump was the elephant in the room. The question hovered: How have we come to this? About to reenter the White House is a grifting and deceitful narcissist who relishes insults, who incites violence, who encourages savagery. And how many houses for the poor did Trump build after his first White House tenure? What efforts did he make to improve the lives of the less fortunate overseas? Trump’s own foundation was shut down, and he was forced to pay a $2 million fine because he had inappropriately used it for business and political—not charitable—purposes.

During his presidential campaign, Carter released a book titled Why Not the Best? After Watergate exposed the sordidness of American politics, he suggested that we as a nation could do much better. When Trump was considering a presidential run in the spring of 2015, I asked one of his aides if his crew was worried about Trump’s well-known liabilities: his history of misogynistic remarks, his many business failures, his mob ties, his relentless hucksterism, his ego, his obnoxiousness. None of that, the aide said, was of concern to Trump’s team. “That’s all baked in,” he said. The strategic premise guiding Trump and his minions was that voters wanted an asshole who would be their asshole. It’s as if the Trump campaign motto would be “Why not the worst?”

As a person, Carter was the antithesis of Trump. Sure, as a politician he was no saint, and his presidency had both accomplishments and serious flaws. But for four decades after leaving the White House, he showed the world how a politician could serve without putting himself first. With Trump returning to power, Carter and all the tributes he has received are counterprogramming showing us that the leader of America need not be a cruel, callous, and vicious megalomaniac.

Trump has adopted crassness as the currency of the realm of politics. He has demonized Americans who are not within his MAGA cult and attempted to delegitimize political foes and critics (as well as the press). He has waged war on decency. In the coming stretch, he can be expected to continue this crusade and further infuse and debase American politics with hatred. Those not entranced or enthralled by his reliance and promotion of animus will need to find in our national discourse and in our own lives acts and moments of decency that can counter the rancor and enmity that Trump seeks to enshrine within the American spirit. This will make the darkness less dark, and from the grave, Carter and Ford have reminded us that is possible.