Political News

For more than a decade, right-wing Christian groups have taken issue with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nonprofit organization founded more than 50 years ago that researches and challenges those it characterizes as hate and extremist groups. The right-wing groups’ grievances have varied, but they tend to boil down to the claim that it’s the SPLC that’s hateful and extreme for labeling other groups that way. Recently it appears that, after an FBI investigation and a subsequent criminal indictment, the Department of Justice has taken the complaints of these Christian right groups seriously. In an April press release, FBI Director Kash Patel accused SPLC of having “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups—even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.” The government has yet to prove any of these accusations, but it is eager to keep the narrative going. When announcing the charges, acting attorney general Todd Blanche summed up the case: “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” It appears that the government has sided with the organizations that long populated SPLC’s hate-group lists.

Federal prosecutors have specifically alleged that SPLC defrauded its donors by using their funds to pay members of hate and extremist groups for tips on their activities. These practices are not a secret, least of all to the FBI, with which the SPLC had shared tips. Months before the indictment was made public, Kash Patel suspended any relationship between the FBI and SPLC; after the indictment, Todd Blanche claimed on Fox that SPLC had never shared information obtained from its confidential informants with federal law enforcement. “The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” said the SPLC in one court filing. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”

Blanche’s claims to the media are indicative of how the government’s narrative about the case has taken prominence over the legal process. In June, for instance, the Department of Justice sent a superseding indictment to the media before it was filed in federal court. SPLC’s lawyer Abbe Lowell told CBS News that sharing the indictment first with the press was “another example of the government’s troubling and unusual handling of this case.” In a later filing, the government said that “media members erroneously received the draft document.” It all only underscored the fact that what the government said in public showed their intentions more clearly than anything written in the court filings.

Groups that the SPLC placed on its Hate Map greeted the indictment eagerly, as an opportunity to turn public scrutiny back on a group that has long monitored them. Some are going further. At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, a senior staffer at the Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate group Alliance Defending Freedom testified that his group, contrary to the SPLC’s characterization, is actually “mainstream.” Ryan Bangert, senior vice president for strategic initiatives as well as an advisor to the president of Alliance Defending Freedom, did not dispute that his organization had done what had warranted the SPLC’s designation: rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people by way of social stigma and the law. It is an agenda evident in its interventions at the Supreme Court, such as its 2003 brief arguing in favor of laws criminalizing sodomy, and in the words of its founder, who in 2012 described the group’s mission as a “battle” against “the homosexual legal agenda.”

This legal agenda is hardly mainstream. It wasn’t mainstream in 2003, either, when 74 percent of adults surveyed at the time supported overturning sodomy laws, including 70 percent of those adults who described their political views as “conservative.” But ADF has worked overtime in the years since to remake the courts and the country to serve its Christian nationalist enterprise. (Sometimes, as it did in arguing to overturn the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, it succeeded.) But in this moment, when the Trump administration has marshaled the Justice Department to serve as the president’s enforcers, ADF may get to have it both ways: casting itself as an innocent victim of hatred for Christian conservatives, and recasting the whole idea of “hate groups” as a variety of fraud. It also appears, based on a new filing last week in the federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, that Alliance Defending Freedom may have played a more direct role in the FBI’s recent investigation into the SPLC than was previously known.

The Christian right’s grievances against SPLC go beyond the Hate Map. When ADF’s Bangert testified before the house committee in June, he not only positioned his group as a purported victim of SPLC, but he also called on Congress to “reach beyond the indictment,” to take “critical steps toward dismantling” SPLC’s work, which he called a “shadow censorship regime,” that had “tarred mainstream conservative organization as ‘hate groups.’” The examples of SPLC’s “censorship regime” were thin, and beside the point. Bangert was jumping onto the government’s attempt to unmake SPLC.

Bangert himself has worked for state attorneys general who supported ADF’s mission, such as former Missouri attorney general Josh Hawley (whose wife, Erin Hawley, works for ADF, arguing its failed attempt to ban medication abortion via telehealth in 2024). He also worked for Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (whom Bangert later testified against in his 2023 impeachment trial). He knew what he was doing when he repeated the indictment’s allegation that SPLC had been “funding the racist groups they claimed to fight,” mischaracterizing payments made to informants inside those groups for tips that informed SPLC’s research and publications, and which they also shared with law enforcement. But Bangert quickly pivoted to what he called the “broader story” behind those “shocking allegations.” That’s the story, he said, of “how the SPLC tarred mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups.”

For ADF, it’s not just about refuting the “hate group” label, but casting doubt on the idea that opposition to LGBTQ+ rights could constitute hate. “We’ve been on the SPLC’s hate map since 2016, which is odd given that we reject racism,” Bangert also testified. Given that ADF has been listed for more than a decade, one might think he was familiar with the actual reasons why. “The SPLC lists ADF as a hate group because it has supported the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad and believes that is OK to put LGBTQ+ people in prison for engaging in consensual sex,” a 2020 story on the SPLC website begins. “ADF has played a role in the passage of religious exemption laws that lead to discrimination against LGBTQ+ people,” it goes on. “ADF is not only attempting to erase transgender people through its litigation and policy work but by deliberately misgendering them in media and on its website.”

For ADF to acknowledge the reason SPLC has designated the group as it did, however, would require ADF to acknowledge that queer and trans people have civil rights, which ADF is dedicated to eroding. It is extremely disingenuous for ADF to pretend that SPLC only labels racist groups as hate groups, but the pretending is strategic: ADF appears to allow the claim that there are “real” hate groups, if only to state that it is not one.

Now, Alliance Defending Freedom has appeared in the SPLC case by name—in documents the government had to hand over. A new filing from the Southern Poverty Law Center made these part of the court record. They point out that a prior investigation into SPLC, opened under Trump’s first administration, continued into the Biden administration, and then was dropped. “The investigation sat closed for approximately four years,” the filing states. “It was suddenly reopened during the Trump Administration at least as early as September 2025. The question before the Court is why.” A letter to Stephen Miller, produced by the government in discovery, could provide an answer.

That letter, which appears to have been sent in August 2025, complains that SPLC, a “biased” and “politicized” organization “unmoored from its original mission,” has “begun placing traditional value and faith-based organizations” on its Hate Map, such as “Alliance Defending Freedom” and “Moms for Liberty.” It goes on to claim that “the SPLC places many groups on its ‘Hate Map’ as a smear tactic solely because they disagree with its radical leftwing ideology.” (They may as well have called it a “homosexual agenda.”)

The Miller letter was signed by the head of Alliance Defending Freedom, Kristen Waggoner, as well as Tina Descovich of Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Christian pseudohistorian David Barton, reactionary conspiracy theorist James Lindsay, and the founder of Gays Against Groomers, an anti-trans group that has operated in the vein of Libs of TikTok. Parts of the groups’ letter to Miller appear lightly paraphrased in another document the government turned over: a redacted FBI incident report dated October 24, 2025, not long after the killing of Charlie Kirk and Trump’s directives to investigate the left over alleged “political violence.” As SPLC put it, the FBI incident report reads like a “rehashing” of the letter sent to Stephen Miller by these groups, some of which appear on the Hate List, and were the main ones to complain about it. If groups like ADF protesting their appearance on the Hate Map is what prompted the FBI to reopen an investigation, SPLC contends, then the case wasn’t really about the financial crimes the government alleges. Rather, what provoked the investigation, it appears, was speech that these groups find objectionable.

If that is true, then the case against the Southern Poverty Law Center was at bottom motivated by Christian nationalist groups that want to punish SPLC for accurately describing their agendas. Also, notably, it was SPLC that exposed, based on scores of leaked emails, Stephen Miller’s links with white nationalists, pushing a shared anti-immigrant agenda that dates back to Trump’s first administration. A Department of Justice spokesperson told HuffPo that Miller “had nothing to do with FBI-Mobile’s investigation of the SPLC.” However, the spokesperson also said that the Miller letter “was provided by one of the signatory groups in the initial stages of an investigation of potential criminal law violations committed by the SPLC.” They did not say which group.

We may be hearing more about how this case came about soon, thanks to a whistleblower. The whistleblower’s allegations have not yet been made public, but they were described in an April 30 letter that Representatives Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon sent to Aakash Singh, associate deputy attorney general. The congressmembers received reports that Singh “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case,” their letter states. Singh had also previously instructed the leaders of each U.S. Attorney’s Office that the president is their “chief client.”

It was perhaps with a bit of authority, then, that at the June House Judiciary hearing where ADF’s Ryan Bangert testified, Representative Raskin called the prosecution of SPLC “a tissue of lies, that will join the pantheon of debunked, fraudulent prosecutions that DOJ has been excoriated for by dozens of judges across the land.” He added, “I predict it will not be long before another federal judge casts this obscene prosecution to the winds.”

If an investigation into the case itself results, we may hear more from Stephen Miller and from the groups on the Hate Map. But we may never learn whether an anti-LGBTQ group—whose founder said of its mission that it aimed to stop “the homosexual agenda,” and which argues major cases before the Supreme Court, sometimes with a sitting senator’s wife making the arguments—also has the influence to wield the Department of Justice against its political opponents. Perhaps ADF is simply fortunate enough to share some enemies with the “chief client” of the Justice Department: the president.

The Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii law on Thursday that forbid concealed-carry permit holders from bringing their guns onto private property without the owner’s express permission. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”

The 6-3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez, which fell along the usual ideological lines, is the court’s latest effort to apply its relatively new history-and-tradition test to state gun-control laws. Along the way, the court raised new questions about what kinds of “historical analogues” can be used to defend gun restrictions—and whether the bigotries of past generations should be a factor.

In 2022, the Supreme Court adopted a new Second Amendment test for lower courts in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. At issue in Bruen was New York’s restrictive law for granting concealed-carry licenses. In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority held that the law violated the Second Amendment because it fell outside the historical bounds of gun rights in America.

Bruen’s history-and-tradition test, as articulated by the court, has two steps. “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his majority opinion. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.”

At first, lower courts found themselves applying Bruen to a wide range of long-standing gun restrictions. Different courts also reached wildly different conclusions on when and how to use historical evidence to decide whether a law fit within “the nation’s historical tradition.” Two years years later, in United States v. Rahimi, the conservatives clarified the Bruen test: the government need only identify a “historical analogue” to survive judicial scrutiny, not a perfect match or a “dead ringer.”

After Bruen, states that historically favored greater restrictions on guns rewrote their laws to accommodate the Supreme Court’s ruling. Among those states was Hawaii. One of their changes was to the state’s “default rule” for trespassing. Before Bruen, it was lawful to bring a concealed weapon onto private property that is generally open to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—unless the owner specifically prohibited it. (For brevity’s sake, I’ll just refer to this as “private property” from now on, even though I am not literally referring to all private property in the state.)

Hawaii reversed that presumption: Now it would be illegal to bring a gun onto private property unless the owner had explicitly allowed it. With only a handful of exceptions, the law requires private-property owners to provide “clear and conspicuous signage” that grants permission or “unambiguous written or verbal authorization.” As Alito noted in his opinion, Hawaii also bans concealed carry altogether in a variety of other locations, like public buildings, parks, banks, schools, hospitals, beaches, playgrounds, and so on.

A group of Hawaii gun owners sued to challenge the law in federal court, arguing that it violated their Second Amendment rights by depriving them of the ability to feasibly carry their concealed weapons anywhere in public. The state defended the law by arguing that the individual right to bear arms does not supersede an owner’s right to exclude people from their property. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state last year.

Since the Bruen decision was announced, lower courts and litigants have sharply disagreed on what counts as evidence of a “historical tradition” in Second Amendment cases. Hawaii, which had a unique path to entry into the Union, cited legal texts from the Kingdom of Hawaii in the early 19th century that strictly limited when and how weapons could be carried in public. This tradition, the state argued, supported Hawaii’s passage of a new default-rule law. Not so, said Alito.

“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” the justice wrote in his majority opinion. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald [v. Chicago]). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8 percent of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59 percent).”

In other words, the Second Amendment’s interpretation must flow from British common-law sources and those found in the colonial and early founding era, the court held. (There is an ongoing dispute over how Reconstruction-era sources apply, but I’ll come back to that later.) Hawaii cited those laws as well, pointing to 18th-century statutes in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that restricted gun owners from carrying their weapons in private fields at certain times of the year.

Unsurprisingly, Alito dismissed their value as historical evidence as well. The laws that Hawaii cited, he wrote, “consist almost entirely of laws that prohibited unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property,” and did not implicate stores, restaurants, and the like. “They had little if any impact on the Second Amendment’s central objective: protecting the fundamental right to self-defense,” Alito claimed. “And their obvious aim was to prevent the distinctive harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.”

The three liberals justices disagreed in their dissents. Justice Elena Kagan, writing only for herself, noted that Bruen envisioned that historical analogues might be enacted for different purposes. Both the Hawaii law and the colonial-era laws cited by the state meant to address, in her view, the problems that would come with unauthorized gun possession on private property.

“The ‘how’ is identical: The new law, just like the old ones, sets a default rule against gun carry that a private landowner may reverse,” Kagan explained. “The ‘why’ is sufficiently close. Both sets of laws respond to the dangers and harms that someone with a gun can cause on another person’s property. That the old laws had a special (though by no means exclusive) concern with poaching does not matter.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a separate dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, took the same view of Hawaii’s historical analogues. She additionally argued that the case should be primarily viewed as a property-law case where the state is owed more deference than a Second Amendment case. Alito countered that Bruen clearly applied, since it commanded judges to apply it in any case involving gun restrictions.

Perhaps the most controversial citation made by Hawaii was to an 1865 law in Louisiana that made it illegal to bear arms “on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor, other than in lawful discharge of a civil or military order.” Alito dismissed the statute because it was an isolated example and not “widespread, well-known, or widely accepted.”

The conservative justices have left open a debate over whether Reconstruction-era gun laws have any weight in the Bruen test. Under the court’s precedents, the Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Therefore, the “original public meaning” that the court claims to seek might naturally take them to the 1860s when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and not just the 1790s when the Second Amendment was adopted or earlier.

But there’s a complicating factor here: Louisiana did not adopt the 1865 law in a vacuum. Instead, it enacted the restriction as part of what became known as the Black Codes—laws specifically designed to deprive formerly enslaved Black Americans of the fundamental rights that they would otherwise enjoy. In other cases, states have cited founding-era gun restrictions drafted to disarm Native Americans and enslaved people. To what extent does that reflect the “original public meaning” of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments?

In Alito’s eyes, such laws hold no weight. He concluded that the Radical Republicans who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment intended to protect Black civil rights, including an individual right to bear arms, and that this intent supersedes that of Southern state legislatures. “Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously,” he wrote.

Alito was not the only conservative member of the court to criticize Hawaii for its choice of historical analogue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a separate concurring opinion where she specifically castigated Hawaii for invoking the Black Codes, which she described as “vile laws,” in a 21st-century case.

“The State seems to think Bruen is a matching game: Southern states enacted broad default rules, Hawaii reasons, so it can do the same today,” Barrett wrote. “But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why.” She noted that the Black Codes were enacted to “subordinate newly freed slaves,” and that since Hawaii did not have the same intent, the laws did not count as a historical analogue.

It is always a welcome sight to see the Supreme Court condemn the bigotry and discrimination of the past. The majority’s words would also carry slightly more weight, however, if they were more consistent about it in the present. Their condemnation, for example, would have more moral weight if she and her conservative colleagues had not gone out of their way to sanitize Trump’s racist bile towards Haitians as merely a strong, constitutionally permissible critique of immigration in Mullen v. Doe—a case decided on the same day as Wolford.

Alito’s appeal to the intent of the Reconstruction Amendment’s drafters is also laudable. At one point, he cites the Republican Party’s platforms in 1856 and 1860 to illustrate how the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters meant its protections to operate for certain rights. One can only hope that he and his colleagues show the same deference to the Reconstruction Amendments’ purpose when they decide the imminent case on birthright citizenship next month. It is lamentable that Reconstruction’s lessons have already been forgotten or disregarded by Alito and his allies in cases on voting rights, racial gerrymandering, and insurrectionist disqualifications.

Jackson agreed with her colleagues in the majority that the Black Codes were “ugly” and “racist.” She also argued that the court “cannot have it both ways” by selectively drawing from relevant statutes. Though Jackson was not on the court when it decided Bruen, she criticized its approach to constitutional law in follow-up cases and described it on Thursday as “a grave mistake.”

“Either history does matter, and if so, all potentially relevant historical experiences must be thoroughly examined to determine whether they reflect our Nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation,” Jackson argued. “Or, it does not, and the Court should just admit that the test it has created is boundless, allowing it to accept or excise any historical analogue it chooses for any reason it prefers.”

That is problematic, Jackson explained, because the court’s original rationale for the Bruen test was to rein in lower courts that were upholding too many gun restrictions. “Of course, the real irony is that the Court’s effort to rein in judicial discretion has resulted in an arbitrary rule that unleashes judges to thwart gun regulation at every turn,” she explained. It is hard to disagree with that assessment, just as it is hard to believe that future Second Amendment cases will not be similarly arbitrary.

A gloomy financial prognosis for Social Security by the program’s trustees could spell a reduction in benefits for millions of Americans in just six years. The cuts to Social Security benefits would come amid changes that already make it more difficult for low-income adults to access key federal nutrition and health programs.

A June report estimated that, barring congressional action, the Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund, or OASI—which includes both retiree and survivor benefits—is expected to be depleted by the end of 2032. Incoming revenue for the program will only be able to pay out 78 percent of full benefits, a cut of 22 percent applicable to current and future beneficiaries.

Around 70 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, the majority of which is paid through the OASI trust fund. If combined with a separate, far smaller trust fund that pays out benefits for disabled workers and their families, the OASI fund could remain solvent for an additional two years—but this would also require action from Congress. The earlier timeline is due in part to the Republican tax and spending law that was approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last year, which reduced revenue going into the Social Security trust fund. Lower expected rates of immigration and births will also contribute to the fund’s depletion.

Social Security is not an anti-poverty program, and the pending bankruptcy of its primary trust fund would affect millions across wealth brackets. But low-income beneficiaries will likely be the hardest hit.

“There are a significant number of Americans who only have Social Security, and so any type of reduction in benefits would have a much more dramatic effect on those who have no other source of income,” said Joel Eskovitz, senior director of Social Security and savings at the AARP Public Policy Institute.

The Republican law foisted onto states a share of benefit costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Medicaid. It also tightened work requirements and narrowed eligibility for both programs. For SNAP, this includes the expansion of work requirements for able-bodied adults without children, applying to adults up to age 65, where previously people over age 54 were exempt. The new work requirement also removes exemptions for homeless people and veterans.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, approximately 1.4 million adults between the ages of 55 and 64 receive SNAP benefits. Another report by the Urban Institute found that the Republican law would result in 480,000 families with a member between the ages of 55 and 64 losing their SNAP benefits entirely, while 312,000 would see lower benefits.

The new work requirements for Medicaid are applicable to adults living in states that  expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. There is not total overlap between the exemptions for SNAP and Medicaid work requirements, further complicating the process of applying for and maintaining both benefits.

For the first time, millions of enrollees between the ages of 55 and 64 will need to prove either that they are working or that they qualify for an exemption, a significant burden that could result in people losing their benefits. According to the AARP, nearly 80 percent of the 4.6 million adults between the ages of 55 and 64 who receive both SNAP and Medicaid benefits reported being either retired or unemployed. For those roughly 20 percent that do work, more than half did not meet the minimum 80-hour-per-month requirement.

Tracey Gronniger, the managing director for economic policy for the advocacy group Justice in Aging, said that the work requirements do not accurately “reflect the disabilities and the challenges that older adults may be facing in terms of age discrimination, or being able to maintain work, or other kinds of health issues.” Meanwhile, given the higher burden of expenses on states, legislatures may choose to cut SNAP benefits or narrow eligibility for the program, as well as slash Medicaid payments to health care providers, both of which would result in people being booted from the program.

Even when they are no longer subject to work requirements, these older adults who have struggled to maintain their benefits may be faced with further economic hardship. Imagine a childless 59-year-old SNAP and Medicaid recipient who must now work 80 hours per month to obtain their benefits. Assuming that this person is able to find a job and maintain employment for the next six years, they decide to retire at age 65 in 2032. That person may no longer be subject to work requirements, but if Congress has not taken action to raise revenue for the Social Security fund, the individual is now receiving payments that have been cut by 22 percent.

For those older Americans who rely entirely on Social Security payments as their only source of income, these cuts would feel like salt in a wound already gouged by stringent program requirements for their other benefits.

“We’re going to see older adults who should be economically secure, who should have these benefits that are helping them to maintain their economic security, instead finding that it’s harder and harder to keep up with costs of health care and shelter and all the other expenses that people continue to have,” said Gronniger.

Once a person reaches age 65, their difficulties in obtaining benefits will not necessarily come to an end. Jessica Johnston, senior strategist for economic wellbeing at the National Council on Aging, noted that SNAP already has low participation rates among eligible adults. In 2023, only 38 percent of eligible adults over age 65 received SNAP benefits. This low number is due in part to significant administrative hurdles and personal reluctance to accept assistance from the government. SNAP participants already need to regularly recertify their benefits, and requiring states to screen for the new requirements and exceptions could further complicate that process.

“We already have an enrollment problem, and so when you add on the number of older adults who might fall off the rolls due to not meeting a work requirement or not understanding new recertification requirements, the likelihood that they will unexpectedly lose the benefit becomes much higher as well,” said Johnston.

There is also a complicated intersection of eligibility for nutrition and health care assistance. In 2022, nearly nine million adults ages 65 and over who were eligible for SNAP were not eligible for the Medicare Savings Program, which covers premiums for qualifying low-income elderly individuals. (Separately, the hospital trust fund for Medicare is expected to be depleted by 2033, with money enough to pay 89 percent of full benefits.)

Johnston said that the assistance offered by SNAP to cover food purchases would not offset rising health care costs—and that these struggles could in turn be compounded by cuts to Social Security.

“A cut to their Social Security benefit is likely going to mean that they have to make even more difficult decisions about whether to pay for housing or for food or for medications,” said Johnston. “We hear from our community-based partners regularly that older adults will come in and talk about cutting pills in half or not being able to afford food that helps them manage chronic conditions, and so a cut to Social Security is only going to exacerbate those types of situations.”

States are already responding to the new limits on SNAP and Medicaid, but there is some time to address the pending bankruptcy of the Social Security fund. There are a few strategies that Congress could employ to keep Social Security solvent, such as eliminating the limit on taxable income. The trust fund largely receives revenue through payroll taxes, but there is a taxable maximum of $184,500. This means that most people earning less than that amount will pay taxes on 100 percent of their income, whereas a person with a far higher salary will only pay taxes up to that $184,500 limit. Rising income inequality has exacerbated the issue, with the fund unable to benefit from higher earners’ pay.

Lifting the cap on the payroll tax has bipartisan support and polls well among Americans, although making any change to Social Security is easier said than done. Other strategies, such as raising the tax rate, increasing the retirement age, or slimming down benefits, would likely be less popular with Americans. But Eskovitz said that lawmakers could not afford to kick the can down the road.

“The quicker Congress acts, the less dramatic the changes will need to be,” Eskovitz said.

So Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi of Long Island has come out swinging against the socialists. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” reads a letter that The New York Times reports he and 14 other legislators signed and began circulating last week. This went out Thursday, two days after three self-described democratic socialists backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in the city.

The letter, which is on the short and vague side, states two broad principles to which the signatories adhere. The first is “growth, competition, and broad prosperity.” “Growth” and “prosperity” are time-honored centrist buzzwords, as they’re hoisted into use to send the message that these Democrats value economic dynamism more than “fairness,” which is a word that moderates fear signals endorsement of excessive statism, although interestingly, the concept is tucked into the first sentence (“We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy…”). The second is “safety, security, and human dignity,” under which the letter lists four components: fiscal discipline, a government that works, free speech, and patriotism.

There’s nothing wrong with these things as far as they go. But they don’t go far enough. In particular, there’s one big missing word. I’ll circle back to that, but first, let’s talk about why these democratic socialists are winning in some places.

The first reason is that people are really pissed off at a system they see as totally rigged. Suozzi is roughly my age. He and I grew up in a United States in the 1960s and ’70s that Lord knows had many problems, but that was at least trying to build a robust middle class and was taxing excessive wealth appropriately.

The Gini coefficient is a number that measures economic inequality. Like golf, lower scores are better, and the lowest Gini scores, invariably logged by the Scandinavian countries, are in the mid-20s. The highest is always South Africa, in the low-60s.

When Suozzi and I were toddlers, the U.S. number was fairly high—around 37. Then came the Great Society—the civil rights, fair housing, and other anti-discrimination laws that first brought large numbers of Black families into the middle class, and other anti-poverty programs. The right has sold middle America on the idea that the Great Society—which I’d hope most Democrats today are proud of, but much of which was, as the word is used today, “socialism”—was a failure. But by the 1980s, right before Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. Gini number reached its lowest point in modern history, 34.7.

Then came Reagan and supply-side economics and the war on the War on Poverty. By the time Bill Clinton took office, the number was north of 40. Today it’s 42 and climbing. We’re worse than Russia and Iraq and about on par with Argentina and Mexico.

People aren’t stupid. They may not know what the Gini coefficient is or who Gini was (an Italian economist), but they know what’s been happening to the country and their money in their bones. And they know how they’re being ripped off by corporate actors, as these hidden junk fees become more and more just a fact of life, especially for working-class people paying rent to private-equity landlords or trying to take their kids to a ball game. So, it’s small wonder that more people are voting for the candidates who are saying most emphatically that they’re going to try to do something about all that—specifically, fighting back against the people who’ve been cheating the middle- and lower-classes for years.

The second reason socialists are winning elections is that the Democratic base has moved well to the left of where it was even just 10 years ago. Early this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats. We asked respondents to identify themselves ideologically, giving them five choices: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. There were little descriptions of each, so it should have been clear to all that “progressive” was the left-most choice.

I thought “progressive” was going to finish third. It finished first (within the margin of error): Progressive got 32 percent, liberal 31, and moderate-to-liberal 21. Moderate was way back at 12 percent. Back in the Obama days, moderates were around 35 percent of the party. Indeed, liberal overtook moderate as the top Democratic category only around 2012, according to Pew.

So that’s a huge change. Now it’s true that other polls, which unlike TNR’s didn’t offer five categories, show a higher moderate share, but the overall move leftward by Democratic base voters is undeniable. They haven’t done so because they want the government to take over the means of production. They’re enraged at the way they’re getting nickel-and-dimed by these billionaires who have more and more power, and they want their party to take on that fight, and the democratic socialist candidates are, in most cases, the ones who are being clearest that they would take up that challenge.

Moderates can choose to recoil at that word “socialist” if they want. The branding carries some amount of risk: We have a diverse population and many people who reside here now remember when totalitarian regimes that called themselves socialist ravaged their lives—a far cry from the way socialism is practiced in Canada and the Nordic states (all of which are, or course, capitalist countries at their core). Still, it’s not even clear it’s such a dirty word, at least to Democrats. In our poll, we asked people if they thought the word was a plus or a minus or didn’t matter. Results: plus 31, minus 24, didn’t matter 43.

I’d rather see moderate Democrats try to make common cause with this resurgent left to the extent possible. As recounted in the 2024 book, The Truce, this is a feat that President Joe Biden managed for much of his presidency, so it can be done. I should note that I think the left bears some responsibility for this as well. As I wrote in a long piece back in our March issue, both sides are just too emotionally invested in regarding the other side with suspicion. As political psychologist Drew Westen explained to me in that piece, Democrats tend to discuss politics and policy in a way that emphasizes their differences and not their points of commonality.

Members of Congress form a lot of caucuses and coalitions. It’s telling that to my knowledge, there isn’t one, not one, that tries to bridge the differences between the two sides and highlight some things they agree on. It would be nice if a prominent left leader and a prominent moderate leader formed some kind of coalition that said to America hey, we agree on these X number of things. For starters:

1. That the rich should pay higher taxes, with a top marginal rate somewhere above 40 percent.
2. That Social Security must be made solvent forever, probably by reimposing the Social Security tax above a certain income level (the so-called “donut hole” approach, which by the way polls through the roof).
3. That the minimum wage should be raised to $18 an hour (there’s been a lot of inflation since the Fight for 15) and that Congress should index it to inflation so that it never has to worry about passing increases again.
4. That the expanded child-tax credit enacted in the wake of the pandemic—which as The New Republic’s Grace Segers reported was a historically successful anti-poverty program—should be made permanent.
5. That they will pass laws cracking down on monopoly power.

Doing this would send the almost unprecedented signal to voters and the media that Democrats are less interested in fighting each other than in uniting to pass an agenda that actually improves people’s daily lives. These five positions would signal such a commitment. They should all be completely uncontroversial.

Ah, but that last one … And here we return to the Suozzi letter. It sings the praises of competition. Great. I’m all for it. But what force today in the United States is crushing competition? It’s not the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s not the government. It’s not Zohran Mamdani.

It’s the billionaire class, or “the Epstein class,” if you prefer Jon Ossoff’s acerbic locution. You call yourself a capitalist, Tom Suozzi? Well, monopoly is the most grotesque perversion of capitalism that exists. There’s a reason Adam Smith hated monopolies. Centrist Democrats should familiarize themselves with that history, if they don’t know it.

And this is a telling point on which Suozzi’s letter comes up short. That missing word I alluded to above is “monopoly.” You can’t praise competition without criticizing monopoly. Monopoly kills competition—period, end of story.

But to criticize monopoly is to be willing to make powerful enemies. The democratic socialists—and by the way, in proper historical terms, they’re really social democrats; go Google “difference between social democrat and democratic socialist”—are willing to do this. The centrists are not. And until they are, their happy talk about competition won’t mean much. Rank-and-file Democrats want their party to fight. That doesn’t mean just fighting Donald Trump. It means fighting the powerful interests that are screwing them deeper into the ground every day.

Fareed Zakaria, who I’m pretty sure is not a card-carrying DSA member, made the point forcefully in his Washington Post column over the weekend. Discussing a new book on liberalism by Adrian Wooldridge, Zakaria wrote that liberalism “was once the most radical force in politics. It attacked inherited privilege, monopoly power, censorship, aristocracy, clerical authority, and closed guilds. It was not the ideology of the establishment. It was the battering ram against the establishment.”

That’s what this country needs. I don’t care that much whether it’s called liberalism or socialism. I prefer that it be called liberalism, but if others want to call it socialism, I won’t go into hysterics. The point is that the Democratic Party better do it, or it will lose again in 2028, and it, and our democracy, will die.

Donald Trump has insisted six people have been arrested and many more have been given citations for vandalizing the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This allegedly includes carving a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant, and in a dark and angry tirade, Trump just described these people as akin to enemies of the state. But The New York Times just obtained a new statement from federal prosecutors. While they confirmed some citations, the Times also reports that administration officials and prosecutors are refusing to provide a single detail about what happened, refusing to divulge anything about who’s been targeted or what their offenses were, and refusing to confirm any arrests of any kind. As former prosecutor Ankush Khardori tells us in today’s episode, this is deeply strange. We discuss why it’s unusual for officials to clam up about such a high-profile claim, how this raises unnerving possibilities about the unhinged despot in the Oval Office, and why it all points to a deeper rot of Trumpian corruption. Listen to this episode here.

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture. In his second term, Donald Trump scored one of the biggest gimmes in presidential history: His term included America’s 250th birthday. How easy it should have been to unite the nation—at least a little…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Musk would rather sue than hear about how many kids he’s killed…

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By Kerry Sheridan, WUSF, for KFF Every state, along with Washington, D.C., requires children to obtain certain vaccinations before they can attend school or childcare. These mandates date back decades, and many public health experts consider them a foundational defense against infectious disease. Since the summer of 2025, Florida leaders have aimed to make the state the first to…

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Donald Trump’s network of family businesses—and network of US government deals with those businesses—is mind-bogglingly wide. A New York Times investigation reveals his sons’ latest venture: tungsten mining in Kazakhstan. 

The US government recently cut a massive mining deal for the critical mineral with the government of Kazakhstan, whose leader recently said Donald Trump was “sent by Heaven.” Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr., and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, are all tied directly or indirectly to the American company, Kaz Resources, that plans to break ground on the tungsten mine. Kaz Resources is also slated to recieve at least $1.6 billion in government funding. 

Tungsten, a mineral widely used in missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips, has become increasingly difficult for the US to access since China put export restrictions on it in 2025. Since then, the Pentagon has selected contractors to build small tungsten refineries on US military bases, while also looking to expand overseas mining—because no onshore mines are currently operational, and likely won’t be for a long time. And those offshore mining deals may mean big money for Trump and Lutnick-affiliated companies: at least 14 different companies affiliated with one or both families are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals. 

The Kazakh deal was signed on November 6th, without disclosing the Trump or Lutnick families’ involvement. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Brandon Lutnick and Kyle Lutnick were “doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history,” Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton of the Times wrote. 

“I can see how the optics might be disturbing to some people,” Pini Althaus, the CEO of Kaz Resources, said. “But that’s unfortunate because this company and this project goes way beyond any one president, let alone any family.”

Last week, Elon Musk threatened Rep. Ro Khanna for saying that an estimated 4.5 million children will die as a result of Musk feeding USAID “into the woodchipper.”

But the statement hurts because it’s true. By January, over 700,000 people had already died preventable deaths due to the USAID cuts, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota:

One year after the Trump administration began its dismantling of USAID, a model that tracks the impact of USAID funding cuts on global disease prevention programs estimates that more than 762,000 people have died as a result of those cuts, including more than 500,000 children. 

These deaths are the inevitable outcome of slashing life-saving aid programs. With the wave of a chainsaw, the richest man in the world condemned the poorest people in the world to death. Then he became a “trillionaire.”

This is like a 21st-century version of a Greek myth. Either Elon Musk is doomed—or humanity is. Musk’s legacy won’t be electric cars, spaceships or satellites. Musk’s legacy is dead children.

Last week, I joined Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski to discuss the USAID cuts, which I call a “Silicon Valley Genocide” in my book. We talk about Silicon Valley’s fantasy of replacing human beings with AI, a nightmare scenario that would render the majority of us economically useless and in need of aid. And judging by what the tech billionaires did to USAID, we won’t be getting any of their “abundance.”

This interview crossed 124,000 views in under two days. And yes—the thumbnail gives Musk devil horns. Watch it and tell me they aren’t earned.

Click to Watch: Why I Call the USAID Cuts a Silicon Valley Genocide.

Audio Version: Click here to listen to the episode on Substack.

Coming Soon: The Nerd Reich book

This is only a peek at what you’ll get in my forthcoming book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy. It details how a cult of billionaires is chasing a self-fulfilling prophecy of societal collapse.

Early sales make a huge difference. If you can, please pre-order it today!

Click this link to support independent bookstores and this newsletter.

Publishers Weekly: “This transfixing debut from journalist Durán investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration ... It’s an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy.”

Here’s what some amazing writers are saying about The Nerd Reich:

“Gil Durán is an essential voice on this technofascist moment—where it comes from and where we are going.” —Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist, The Nerve

“A clear and compelling account of the threats posed by technofascism to democracies everywhere.” —Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Reader take note: Gil Durán is a deep, thoughtful, and expansive observer of events that shape the current and future of our American democracy.” —George Lakoff, author of The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

“The Nerd Reich is a clarion warning about the rise of techno-fascist sociopaths who seek to profit off of our collective misery. In clear, compelling and meticulously-researched detail, Gil Durán sounds the alarm about this incestuous cabal of broligarchs. He brings the receipts and the righteous rage.” —Wajahat Ali, The Left Hook

President Donald Trump has spent more than $16 million to restore the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, only for the dark blue coating to peel off and the refilled water to become overtaken by algae just days after the project was completed. Trump then ordered the arrests of people who allegedly dared to touch the peeling paint floating on the pool’s…

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On Saturday, President Trump nominated Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma State Trooper, to serve as the Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If confirmed, he would become the agency’s first permanent director since 2017. The pick signals a broader push to integrate local and federal law enforcement.

Schroyer has 29 years of state law enforcement experience, but his federal resume is thin. A former member of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s security detail, Schroyer only joined ICE in March as a senior advisor. But according to Mullin, Schroyer is still qualified for the job because, in his role as a State Trooper, he worked “alongside state and federal partners to remove illegal aliens from Oklahoma under the 287(g) program.” 

The 287(g) task force program, expanded by executive order at the start of Trump’s second term, essentially allows ICE to deputize local police and jails, transforming traffic stops and local arrests into a pipeline for federal deportation. Over 1,200 local partner agencies have reportedly signed up for ICE bounties. Schroyer’s selection is another step towards merging local law enforcement with ICE, integrating the controversial and violent agency further into America’s day-to-day policing apparatus. 

While Schroyer worked on Oklahoma’s 287(g) program, Oklahoma police departments held some of the largest ICE contracts of any state. Second only to Florida, Oklahoma law enforcement agencies held at least $47 million in ICE contracts as of March, according to a payout ledger obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein. At least 30 Oklahoma agencies signed 287(g) agreements under Schroyer’s watch—mostly local police departments, but also further-afield groups like the state narcotics agency. In March, one rural K-12 school district police chief almost entered into a collaboration with ICE by accidentally signing a 287(g) agreement. 

A February ACLU report showed that the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol, as part of its ICE partnership, orchestrated “mass arrest events.”

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol used traffic stops and “Oklahoma’s ports of entry” to conduct two major operations in fall 2025 targeting drivers, interrogating more than 1,000 people and making 193 immigration arrests. “We set up a command post at the port, we provide troopers, our emergency response troopers, that come out to process them,” Oklahoma Commissioner of Public Safety Tim Tipton told a local outlet. “It’s really a mass arrest event once you do that, when you have hundreds of people that you’re detaining.

Immigrants’ rights advocates have stated that the 287(g) program takes resources away from local law enforcement—and that it makes immigrants less likely to report crimes such as domestic violence, out of fear that police will use any interaction as a pretext to hand them over to ICE. 

At the National Sheriff’s Association Conference earlier this month, Mullin encouraged local police departments to work with Schroyer, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mullin said that Schroyer, then a major in the Oklahoma state highway patrol, had joined DHS to advise agencies newly joining the 287(g) partnership program. 

“We have him on staff. You guys want to talk to him? You guys want to utilize him, see how he does it,” Mullin said. “He is fully committed and understands that the 287(g) program can be a tremendous asset to you and to the country.”

Current Acting ICE Director David Venturella, a former private-prison executive who took office earlier this month, will continue in his role until Schroyer is confirmed by the Senate, a DHS official told the Associate Press. 

A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool scandal…

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Anti-abortion advocates, including Republican lawmakers and state officials, want the EPA to review mifepristone as a water contaminant. By Jenae Barnes for The 19th Anti-abortion advocates, including Republican lawmakers and state officials, want the EPA to review mifepristone as a water contaminant. Scientists say there’s no evidence it harms the environment or people.

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From dead ducks to some mysterious organization of vandals, everyone seems to have it out for the Reflecting Pool ever since President Donald Trump completed his totally-not-shitty renovations. The algae-covered mess has become quite the eyesore for Washington, D.C., but the hideous puke-colored stain has turned out to be the perfect metaphor for the shit show that is Trump’s second term.

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Every once a while I encounter a quote that brings me up short and helps reframe how I see the world. Such was the case when I came across this quote by Theodor Adorno as I researched the rise of Nazi Germany and the origins of the Holocaust: “A wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

Adorno meant it as a critique of life under capitalism, but out of context, I interpreted it to mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (Jewish, Sinti, disabled), nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good ones,” or being life worthy of life. No matter their character, achievements, or capability, a “wrong life” can have only a negative value to society. The only way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum to zero on both sides.

This thought stopped me in my tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it explained everything I was both feeling and seeing over the past year. It was the grand unification theorem of my inner world and explained what I was seeing that was external to me.

I am wrong life in the United States. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter. Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication. Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the content of our character and not by government fiat that people like me are incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that ultimately decided I must be destroyed.

I’m being kicked out of the National Guard. I can’t legally use a public bathroom on federal property or at most airports. As a veteran, I have a free pass onto national parks that I effectively can never use because I’m wrong life. I will never be able to work in my field again because I am wrong life. At the VA, the only treatments I can receive are essentially reeducation—namely, unwanted therapy and medical treatment aimed at detransition.

I spent decades of my life as a service member, and in my final years I chose to be a MEDEVAC pilot to save people rather than kill them. I volunteered as a superhero cosplayer to raise money for desperately ill children and their families. I spent my summer flying as a firefighter, saving ranches owned by Trump donors, properties owned by the Mormon Church, and Bible camps run by people who would never let people like me attend.

I went on to fly air ambulance helicopters in one of the reddest parts of the country while awaiting my Canadian permanent residency paperwork. When I was flying people around who needed urgent medical care quickly, I could take a pretty good guess that they were likely the sort of people who voted for Trump and would happily support “putting all those transgenders in mental institutions where they belong.” But they couldn’t because they were intubated, and I was busy flying them to a better hospital, regardless of what they might think of me.

But none of it matters. My government, and the people who voted it into office, have declared me wrong life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the president explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life; it was a feature and not a bug. His campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting the idea that anyone who doesn’t want wrong life eliminated is against the Herrenvolk. It was messaging straight out of the Nazi playbook, just targeting a different group.

At the same time, this sentence helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust than other civil rights atrocities in American history. At the end of the day in that history, for most other marginalized groups, it was still possible to be one of “the good ones.” For Black people, there was room for acceptance of those who “knew their place.” Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy. Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater of Operations. Hispanics and Latinos were long used for their labor or valued as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other Americans’, but it wasn’t a negative number.

Mine is.

And that’s the fundamental difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as noncitizens of the Reich than previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place” as second-class citizens.

The Adorno quote snapped into place why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of German history than within that of the United States. It’s also the most useful framework for understanding why Republicans around the country are targeting transgender people with literally over 1,000 bills per year designed to make life impossible enough that they either emigrate, detransition, or live in a country (this one) where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.

They see us as wrong life. And even those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is the dark side of politics: It looks like the quick and easy path to power to take this position in public. Any Republican who does not behave as if transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party, and away from the levers of power. Democrats and hospital administrators in blue states aren’t generally willing to enforce their own civil rights laws for fear of the federal government and the belief that transgender people aren’t worth the effort of protecting.

I have expressed some of these frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of, “Well, I don’t think of you that way.” While I am appreciative of such support, people saying this simply doesn’t matter since they have no institutional power. My own sense of self-worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is meaningless if I’m spending my last moments holding my breath and trying to claw my way through concrete with my fingernails while taking a “shower” with 100 strangers.  All it provides is a further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared us to be “wrong life.”

If this seems like exaggeration: It’s not. One of the cruelest ironies is that my friends and I constantly receive messages that are some variation of “Kill yourself, tranny faggot,” sent by the same sorts of people who five years ago smugly informed us that “all lives matter.” The world’s first trillionaire routinely brags about “killing the woke mind virus” on his own social media platform.

Only the government’s opinion matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in their eyes. That incumbent party has made it clear it intends to remain in power in perpetuity at any cost, no matter how people vote. I would always be wrong life if I remained in the United States. The only way to change the equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can have some value greater than zero.

I want my life to have a positive value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a relief it was when I did not have to spend every waking moment aware of being wrong life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, it’s being in a constant state of sadness, betrayal, and futility at the possibility of leading a life that matters. 

BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels. Its key work, a paper known as “Wedges,” guided climate discourse for a generation. By Maddie Stone, Drilled; additional reporting by Amy Westervelt, Drilled, and Katie Worth, ProPublica It is rare that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge…

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Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 250 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. We are coming to the end of Black Music Month. Sometimes the artists featured here are not Black but are known for…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump deflects from Reflecting Pool failure by arresting ‘vandals’…

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This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For decades, climate scientists have issued warnings about positive global warming feedbacks, vicious cycles in the Earth system in which rising temperatures from burning fossil fuels beget more warming. The best tools we have to understand these feedback mechanisms are climate models, which simulate how the atmosphere, oceans, and land will respond under different emissions scenarios. Many feedbacks, like the loss of sea ice as the planet warms, are well-accounted for. Others, such as changes in cloud cover, remain far more uncertain but are still included in models. Feedbacks in which ecosystems emit more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere are so complex that they are often left out entirely.

For example, how much more carbon dioxide will be emitted as wildfires increase? How much more methane will bubble up from fermenting wetlands or seep from thawing permafrost? Remarkably, these so-called warming-induced emissions are poorly represented or absent from the most influential climate models—that is, those that inform the assessments of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Fires and permafrost melt have caused northern tundra to become a source of emissions, after acting as a sink for millennia.

A new study from a group of leading climate researchers suggests this information gap could make it even more difficult for nations to limit the rise in global average temperatures to well below 2 degrees C, the target set by the Paris Climate Agreement. The study found that emissions from natural systems could add as much as 0.6 degrees C to the rise in global average temperatures. That’s in line with earlier work that suggests such emissions could shorten by 25 percent the amount of time it takes to exceed 2 degrees C of warming. Shortcomings in climate modeling, scientists warn, could lead countries to overestimate how much fossil fuels can be burned before breaching climate targets.

“If you’re not including all the emissions going into the atmosphere, you’re hamstrung from the get-go,” says Brian Buma, a climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “People are recognizing that the longer we go without taking these emissions into account, there’s just going to be a bigger gap.” 

“Four decades ago, the scientific community was saying we think there are going to be these surprises in the Earth system as the planet warms,” says Benjamin Poulter, the lead scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that aims to identify climate “blind spots,” include them in policy frameworks, and assess the best way to deal with them. “Now, we’re starting to see these feedbacks become the reality.”

The biggest sources of warming-induced emissions are wildfires, wetlands, and permafrost—all of which have shown recent indications of rapid change. Since 2001, global carbon emissions from wildfires have increased by 60 percent. In 2020, researchers reported an alarming spike in the concentration of methane in the atmosphere, attributed partly to wetter conditions expanding wetlands in Africa and Asia and partly to warming temperatures, which accelerate the rate at which plants decompose in water. 

Colder regions are seeing some of the fastest shifts: The 2024 Arctic report card found that wildfires and permafrost melt have caused the northern tundra to become a source of emissions, after acting as a sink for millennia. Hotter, drier conditions fuel Arctic wildfires, while thawing ice allows microbes to more rapidly decompose soil organic matter, releasing both CO2 and methane.

The challenges are exacerbated, experts say, by a lack of data from remote places, from the Congo basin to Siberia.

Those regional changes add up to global trends. In 2023 and again in 2024, record heat reduced the land carbon sink—the difference between the amount of CO2 emitted and the amount of CO2 absorbed by all terrestrial ecosystems—and contributed to a record jump in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In 2025, the land sink appears to have recovered to its previous strength, although tropical forests in Southeast Asia and South America flipped from sink to source due to deforestation, wildfires, and more decomposition. 

Like 2023 and 2024, 2026 will be an El Niño year, with elevated Pacific Ocean surface temperatures that are expected to boost global temperatures. These events are associated with hot, dry conditions in the Amazon, which can amplify wildfires and weaken the region’s carbon sink. The heat can also slow photosynthesis and increase the rate of decomposition in other tropical ecosystems.

Researchers are alarmed by these changes. “We’ve been worried about this for a long time,” says Rob Jackson, an environmental scientist at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of researchers tracking flows of carbon through Earth systems. Yet climate models have largely set the problem of warming-induced emissions aside: Of the 11 Earth system models used in the most recent IPCC assessment, none included warming-induced emissions from all of the main sources—wildfire, wetlands, and permafrost. Five included wildfire; just two included permafrost.

That’s largely because of the difficulty of the problem: The scientific challenge amounts to predicting the response of every ecosystem on Earth to warming temperatures. “It adds computational processing time, complexity, and there’s no good agreement about how to represent wetland emissions, permafrost, wildfire,” says Poulter. Modeling all of these emissions requires simulating diverse, nonlinear processes that behave in ways that can be difficult to predict. The basic modeling challenges are exacerbated, experts say, by a lack of monitoring in hard-to-access ecosystems, from Siberia to the Congo basin.

Just how much warming might be missing from the picture? In the new study, Poulter and a group of colleagues from leading climate modeling groups used a simplified climate model to estimate the volume of emissions that might be expected from these sources under a range of scenarios, using past estimates of the scale of the feedback for each source of warming-induced emissions. They then modeled how much those emissions would raise temperatures on top of the contribution from human emissions.

If humans quickly rein in their emissions, the researchers found, emissions from forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems might amount to anywhere between zero additional degrees and 0.4 additional degrees C this century, an amount that would accelerate warming due to human emissions by up to 60 percent.

Under a more pessimistic scenario, in which human emissions peak around 2060 and then decline, they found emissions from ecosystems could raise temperatures from between 0.2 to 0.6 degrees C. The lion’s share of the uncertainty stemmed from how researchers estimated ecosystems would respond to warming, rather than from the choice of warming scenario or any inherent ambiguities in the models.

“You can’t turn a wrench on a wetland,” Jackson says. But there are ways warming-induced emissions might be addressed directly. 

Keeping the rise in average global temperatures well below 2 degrees C is already a huge challenge. “Something like these warming-induced emissions makes that harder,” says Chris Jones, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office working to integrate these emissions into climate models. Warming feedbacks could also add to the danger of overshooting Paris Agreement goals, given that they may not be reversible, he says. While a coal-fired power plant can be replaced with renewables, he explains, melting permafrost will continue to melt after a certain amount of warming. 

To put the scale of the problem into perspective, the researchers estimated that by 2100, the annual contribution of warming-induced CO2 emissions could be equivalent to those from today’s power and building sectors, which together make up about half of global CO2 emissions due to direct human activities. Warming-induced methane emissions could be almost equivalent to today’s annual fossil methane emissions from Asia and North America combined, they found.

Now that the signal of these emissions has emerged, researchers say it is essential to get a better grip on how they work and what they mean for the future of the climate, and to get countries to start counting them. “We can quantify and measure these emissions, but then we also need to develop an accounting framework so that we can do something about them,” says Poulter.

Since launching last fall, Spark’s program on warming-induced emissions has connected more than 20 independent modeling groups from around the world to add those emissions to models, improve measurements, and explore ways to potentially reduce those emissions. “There’s a community of people now that are building this field,” says Poulter. Their aim is to make robust projections that can be used in the next IPCC climate assessment and thus play a role in global climate policy.

Work on the assessment is already underway, with a final report due by late 2029. The modeling work also feeds into efforts to improve measurements of ecosystems—to understand how they are changing and what role warming is playing. Modelers can identify gaps in observations and make decisions about where limited resources should be placed.

Scientists aim to make projections that can be used in the next IPCC assessment and thus play a role in climate policy.

One of the first projects coordinated through Spark’s warming-induced emissions campaign is the installation, by a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, of dozens of methane sensors at wetlands in central Africa, which are known to be major emitters of methane. Another measurement effort led by Jackson focuses on improving measurements of wetland emissions in the Amazon. In both regions, Jackson says there is a lack of data on baseline CO2 and methane emissions, which are essential to making reliable future projections. This also makes it challenging to know what is driving the change in emissions: Is it wetlands growing with more precipitation, or is it a warming-induced increase in microbial respiration, or other factors?

Unlike a leaky natural gas well, Jackson says, “you can’t turn a wrench on a wetland.” But there are ways that warming-induced emissions might be addressed directly. 

Bronson Griscom, an ecologist and founder of a natural climate solutions company called Ceiba Earth, sorts ideas for addressing warming-induced emissions into three buckets. The first promotes the continuation of projects that will work even as temperatures rise. For example, reforestation efforts in temperate woodlands might actually see more growth and therefore more carbon storage with elevated CO2. Fuel reduction efforts, such as thinning and conducting controlled burns, will also reduce emissions. 

The second bucket contains tweaks to existing projects to account for future warming. Teams working on restoration in the Amazon, for example, might consider picking tree species that are more resilient to hotter temperatures, says Griscom, something researchers are already experimenting with.

The third bucket of ideas addresses warming-induced emissions directly. In the Arctic, Cansu Culha, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, is looking to slow the melting of permafrost by applying insulating “blankets” of vegetation to permafrost slumps, where the land is releasing carbon most rapidly. Jackson and other researchers have considered ways to manage wetlands to reduce the amount of methane they generate by changing cycles of wetting and rewetting, altering water chemistry to influence microbial activity, or reconnecting them with seawater. Managing a natural wetland in this way is complicated and controversial, but some of the approaches have been tested with success in rice paddies—another major source of methane.

Researchers and policymakers who are trying to tackle emissions say they would benefit from a clearer picture of feedback mechanisms as the signal of warming-induced emissions begins to emerge from the noise. “People are seeing this stuff happening,” says Buma. “It’s in front of their eyes.” Climate modelers are scrambling to catch up.