Mother Jones

For our 50th anniversary issue, we did something that we try every once in a while: We produced two covers, one for subscribers and one for the newsstand.

The idea behind a split cover is to give different types of readers different experiences. In this case, subscribers got a rich, celebratory collage from artist Max-o-matic, stitching together some of the most iconic and aberrant figures of our half-century in print. For the newsstand, our art team took inspiration from Nirvana’s legendary second album to tease Casey Michel’s investigation of Jared Kushner’s (self-)dealings. With the help of ace illustrator Justin Metz, we had an insta-classic: Nevermind the Corruption.

Both covers blend stunning visuals and sharp design with the bold (and occasionally irreverent) writing inside the magazine—something we’ve been shooting for ever since our first issue way back in 1976. 

March 1976

For our premier issue, illustrator Dugald Stermer recasts The Spirit of ’76 with a movement vibe.

October 1977

Art director Louise Kollenbaum borrows her uncle Al’s Ford Pinto for the cover shot of the exposé that put Mother Jones on the map.

November 1977

“When Mother Jones asked me to write about women and success, I thought: How optimistic, so few of us are in danger of it.” —Rita Mae Brown

June 1978

Remember barcode moral panic?

December 1978

With the Center for Investigative Reporting, we dig into the quasi-religious self-help group EST.

January 1979

Tobacco companies pull years’ worth of ads as a result of this story.

July 1981

“The sailor pissing over the side is a more important source of pollution” than nuclear waste dumping, says a former Atomic Energy Commission official.

November 1982

A deep dive into STDs zeroes in on a mysterious illness “causing a trembling among doctors and gay men.”

January 1983

Christopher Hitchens memorably skewers Tom Wolfe’s chummy relationships with conservative elites.

June 1983

Co-founder Adam Hochschild and photographer Susan Meiselas expose the truth about a US-funded dirty war.

December 1983

Arlie Russell Hochschild, writing about men telling women to smile more, coins the phrase “emotional labor.”

October 1984

William Styron! Kurt Vonnegut! Al Franken! Carolyn Forché!

May 1985

Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau illustrates a still-familiar tension.

September 1986

Michael Moore’s first issue as MoJo’s editor, in what would be a fiery four-month stint. He famously took his settlement pay to help make Roger & Me.

October 1987

As Editor Douglas Foster later notes, the answer to this question is: “To win.”

June 1988

Or, as we call it, “the sex tornado issue.”

May 1989

A smoldering Bono in our “People, Politics, and Other Passions” era.

September 1989

Resting Spike face.

August 1990

The first of Ralph’s short-lived “Nader’s Nineties” columns.

June 1991

Bart Simpson’s second cover appearance, along with his sister Lisa—a MoJo reader if ever there was one.

February 1992

When the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons calls small breasts “deformities,” you have to put a boob on the cover.

February 1997

Artist Philip Burke captures the controlled chaos of political celebrity for several covers in the ’90s.

February 1998

Bill Gates, writes Editor Jeffrey Klein, was “instrumental in making a mindless world attractive.”

October 2000

We skewer the overhyped threat of a foreign terrorist attack—a year before 9/11. Whoops.

June 2005

The “scientists disagree” narrative has held up climate action for decades. We expose how ExxonMobil created it.

October 2006

An exhaustive timeline of how the George W. Bush administration—with the help of mainstream media—sold the Iraq War.

February 2007

Jack Hitt’s provocative essay could’ve run anytime in the previous—or following—decade.

April 2007

Here’s hoping we don’t end up making an Iran Handbook for Dummies cover.

February 2009

We didn’t know just how much of a balancing act the Obama years would be.

October 2010

Julia Whitty unmasks BP’s lies about its “cleanup” of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

December 2010

Nailed it.

August 2011

Co-Editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery unpack the “do more with less” trend.

April 2012

Gabriel Mac goes undercover in the e-commerce supply chain.

February 2013

Kevin Drum probes reams of research to deliver a compelling thesis: Lead exposure caused the spike in violent crime in the late ’70s and ’80s.

August 2014

Dan Schulman gives the dark-money Koch brothers the tabloid treatment.

June 2015

Our deep data dive finds that gun violence costs America $229 billion a year—more than $700 per person.

October 2015

Tim Murphy profiles Bernie Sanders, whose wild presidential run is still on the Mount Rushmore of populist insurgencies.

August 2016

Shane Bauer’s epic undercover investigation causes private prison company stock to tank.

October 2016

The first of our 18(!) Donald Trump covers. (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tie for second, with five covers each.)

August 2017

The definitive guide to the hack-and-leak operation that threatened American democracy.

December 2018

Okay, so maybe we were a bit optimistic…

April 2019

As many publishers cut deals with Facebook, we expose how it is poisoning the information ecosystem.

October 2020

While police protests grip the country, Samantha Michaels spotlights alternative visions of community safety.

June 2023

Frequent contributor Bill McKibben pushes progressives to build, baby, build.

February 2024

A year before Big Tech overlords join Trump on the inauguration stage, our oligarchy issue calls it what it is.

April 2026

This callback to our first cover features Pete Hegseth bringing up the rear, bottle in hand.

For more on our 50th anniversary, check out Exploding Cars, Office Monkeys, Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones; The Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones; and Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.

New York City’s right-wingers, who evidently cannot handle losing elections, are dealing with their anger by once again attempting to fearmonger Jewish Americans into leaving New York, the most Jewish city in the country.

Last night, allies of Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept the New York City Democratic primaries. Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—all of whom have condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza—each won a congressional seat, consolidating socialist power in New York. The socialist New York Jews of generations past might perhaps have jumped for joy. But the Republican party figureheads of today would like Jews, specifically, to panic instead of celebrating.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone. We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening,” Meghan McCain wrote on X. As a beautiful Jew in America, I was not initially sure what she was talking about.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer joined McCain in telling the one million Jews who call the five boroughs their home to go on ahead and pack their bags. Loomer, helpfully, made it clear that unconditional support for Israel is not and has never been about American Jewish safety: for her, it is about fighting the supposed “Islamic takeover of America.”

If you’re a Jew in NYC, now is your time to move. After tonight’s election in New York, nobody who is Jewish is safe.

I’d love to see the Trump administration address this Islamic takeover of America and the exploding Jew hatred.

We need leadership on this issue. It’s…

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 24, 2026

Loomer is, of course, a crank. But more serious people, like Dan Goldman—the Congressman ousted by Brad Lander last night—have also invoked the specter of antisemitism in this week’s elections.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), in concession speech: “Jews have given back so much to this country. As history has taught us, antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, some of which I heard personally on this campaign, will ultimately be the undoing of our democracy if we all don’t lean in…

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 24, 2026

Goldman, who is Jewish, lost by an absolute landslide to the also-very-Jewish Brad Lander, a man who named his children after a Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish labor organizer. Nonetheless, Goldman reportedly accused Lander of using “dangerous antisemitic tropes” to win. It is not clear whether the trope in question was Lander’s attack of Goldman for taking AIPAC money, something Goldman did do while publicly disavowing AIPAC donations.

Serious conversations beginning over whether there is a future for Jews in the United States. Israel is in a dangerous neighborhood but it controls its own borders. Nobody voted for the kind of migration that allowed New York to go from Jewish capital to capital of antisemitism.

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) June 24, 2026

Some serious thinkers have once again begun to wonder whether New York Jews might be better off living in Israel than in the United States. Joel Pollak of the California Post wasted no time casting the blame for antisemitism vaguely on “migration,” by which he presumably means “very scary Muslim mayor” and/or “very scary immigration.” Stephen Miller and Katie Miller joined in: “New York will now be run by foreign communists.”

Jews, who not so long ago were being blamed for encouraging hatred of white people by supporting immigration, are now being told that in a city of immigrants they should be afraid of immigrants, because some of those immigrants might not like Israel.

When Zohran Mamdani was elected earlier this year, the very same commentariat crowed for a Jewish exodus from Gotham. Such an exodus, by all accounts, did not happen then, and won’t happen now.

Why would it? Antisemitism is real, but it isn’t caused by critics of Israel winning elections. And it isn’t solved by Jews fleeing New York.

It was a good night for a young and charismatic nepo-baby, leveraging his name to inject new energy and ideas into a moribund Democratic party. But it was a very bad night for John F. Kennedy’s grandson.

On Tuesday, as a slate of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani knocked off two incumbent members of Congress and cruised to victory in another open House district, Jack Schlossberg finished a distant third in a race the Democratic Socialists had stayed clear of—the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The Kennedy scion, a Democratic activist and content creator, entered the race last fall as a front-runner, but, with most of the votes counted, was hovering at just under 11 percent.

Instead, the race for a seat centered on some of Manhattan’s most affluent neighborhoods became an extraordinarily expensive proxy battle between Silicon Valley donors. Alex Bores, a state assemblyman who positioned himself as a Big Tech skeptic, benefited from $11 million in spending from Public First Action, an Anthropic-funded vehicle. Leading the Future, a super-PAC that’s been funded by the venture-capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, spent $8 million attacking Bores—which boosted eventual winner Micah Lasher, another state assemblyman and a former Nadler chief-of-staff.

There’s an urgency in politics now that makes dynastic inheritance look small.

It would be unfair to view the results in the nation’s most geographically compact congressional district as a straightforward referendum on the Kennedy family (even if Schlossberg did helpfully include his more famous surname on the ballot). But the results suggest that voters weren’t exactly clamoring for a dynastic reboot, either—his loss is the third successive defeat for a prominent Kennedy in a Democratic primary, after uncle Bobby’s abandoned campaign against then-President Joe Biden, and cousin Joseph Kennedy III’s 2020 defeat to Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. Caroline’s 33-year-old son learned the hard way that the Kennedy brand just doesn’t mean what it used to. His strange campaign only underscores why.

Schlossberg is not the worst kind of Kennedy, by any stretch. He didn’t kill anyone, for instance. He didn’t appease Hitler, grope a waitress, send troops to Vietnam, promote eugenics, or publish a book trampling on the legacy of Reconstruction. If the decline of the WASPs (and their WASP-like Hyannisport cousins) has taught us anything, it’s that there are much worse things in this world than over-educated, well-meaning dilettantes. But you can also perhaps understand why, in this moment of all moments, the Democratic voters of Manhattan weren’t lining up for someone who so closely matched that description.

Schlossberg’s qualifications were slim. None of his previous jobs could historically be described as stepping stones to Congress. He was a political correspondent for Vogue for a period of several months. He was a Democratic content creator—a role that often consisted him doing weird vocal impressions of personas he’d made up. (“I think satire is a really powerful political tool,” he told the New Yorker, which is the kind of statement that never seems to accompany powerful satire.) He was part of the committee that handed out the Profile in Courage awards, a prize that takes its name from the aforementioned book his grandfather mostly didn’t write. He may have meant to merely shore up his district bona fides, but it felt appropriate that the first candidate I’ve ever seen list his pre-school on campaign literature was a Kennedy—and that it came with a boast that he’d graduated not just from Yale, but from Harvard. Twice. (Do you know how hard it was for Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandson, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s great-grandson, and President John F. Kennedy’s grandson to get into Harvard?)

In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash last May, Schlossberg boasted that his campaign was catching fire because it had released more policy plans than anyone else in the race. You could argue that the idea that people (including House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi) were lining up to support JFK’s grandson because of his position on Social Security was as insulting as anything in Profiles in Courage.

Again, there are worse things than having a familial sense of responsibility to public service that you don’t quite know what to do with—you could instead have a familiar sense of responsibility to selling cryptocurrency and hotels. As Reeves Wiedeman reported in a deeply illuminating New York magazine story last year, being one of the political Kennedys can be a grind. No one’s sitting around the old compound telling you you should really become a dentist.

But if there’s one thing Tuesday’s results showed, it’s that there’s an urgency in politics right now that makes dynastic inheritance look small. The energy that’s animating Democrats in the city where Schlossberg attended pre-school isn’t nostalgia for the lost Kennedy idyll. Across much of the city, primary voters showed up at the polls to tear down the old way of doing things, newly empowered by their 2025 defeat of Andrew Cuomo, another Kennedy-adjacent scion. Like it or not, they’re motivated by idealism and a desire for something new—ironically, the kind of vibe shift the family once purported to embody.

The last few years ought to have once and for all blown up the myth of Camelot—that it was desirable, that it was ever even real. American politics is haunted by a different sort of Northeastern family, ruled by a calcifying and domineering patriarch, digging its pincers into the national story and flaunting its multi-generational ambitions in the service of a misbegotten golden age. The Kennedys are down to their last and thorniest public servant—a sun-baked, worm-addled, crank incubated in a world of entitlement and unaccountability.

Now all that’s left is the ruins. I’m reminded, like a good Kennedy, of Shelley: Look upon their works and despair.

Yet another Trump administration effort to gain access to trans kids’ private health information has been, for the moment, halted. A district judge today handed down a temporary restraining order, preventing the Trump administration from forcing disclosure of the health records of trans children treated at New York University Langone and Mount Sinai hospitals in New York City. The injunction will remain in place at least until July 8.

The US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas sent out a grand jury subpoena to the hospitals seeking confidential information about patients under age 18 according to a statement released by NYU Langone May 11.

The Trump administration spent much of the past year seeking similar information from hospitals across the country via administrative subpoenas, none of which have succeeded in court. “ But undeterred by its disastrous showing in the courts, DOJ decided to issue nearly identical document requests in the form of grand jury subpoenas emanating from the Northern District of Texas,” District Judge Katherine Polk Failla said.

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”

“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter told me at the time. “This is mafia-type behavior.” Three families of trans kids sued in early June, alleging the subpoena violated their children’s rights.

“We’re thankful the court has granted our emergency request to protect the privacy interests of transgender New Yorkers and their families,” said Chase Strangio, Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project, in a statement. 

“For the past year, the Trump administration has not only decided that it knows better than these families and their doctors what their medical needs are, but has also sought to obtain troves of sensitive information about patients in New York.”

A division of the Defense Department has been rolling out posts on X that contain clear references to the QAnon conspiracy theory, for reasons they have, unsurprisingly, declined to explain. The X account for the so-called Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering produced three posts this week incorporating references to QAnon slogans and imagery, part of a broader pattern of weird, gross shitposting under Trump’s second administration. 

The posts purportedly celebrated President Trump’s Monday announcement that the United States would invest heavily in quantum computing systems to pursue “technological dominance,” an effort, the announcement said, that will involve “U.S. industry and research leaders” and stretch across “the Departments of Energy, War, Commerce, and the Intelligence Community.” In a related executive order, Trump said he would create a “National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee.”

In response, whoever runs the “Department of War CTO” X account posted a meme showing Donald Trump positioned in the middle of large letter Q, below the words “Quantum Dominance.”

“Are you enjoying the show? Refill your popcorn… you’ll love this next part,” it read.

“Enjoy the show” was a phrase that QAnon believers often repeated to each other, especially during the height of the movement, promising that a great battle was about to unfold in front of their eyes. The conspiracy theory broadly held that President Trump was, during his first term, secretly fighting a global battle against a cabal of evildoers, pedophiles, sex traffickers, and Hillary Clinton. A person claiming to have a “Q” level security clearance posted cryptic clues on the messageboards 8chan and 8kun, inevitably promising that some revelatory Trump plan was about to unfold. “Trust the plan” thus became another popular movement slogan, alongside the rallying cry “Where we go one, we go all.” 

A few hours after the first post, the same Defense Department X account shared another “Quantum Dominance” meme, this one reading “Trust the plan, patriots.” A third post on Tuesday showed a drawing of a gun-wielding soldier in the middle of the letter Q and the phrase, “Where We Go One, We Go Quantum.” 

The posts found their intended audience: QAnon adherents. “Q IS REAL!!!!,” celebrated one X user with multiple QAnon references in his bio. “These Government pages are getting more and more blatant! NCSWIC!!!!” (That acronym stands for “Nothing can stop what is coming,” another QAnon slogan.) 

When reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Joe Loewy wrote, “We have nothing for you on this.” He did not respond to followup questions.

While the first Trump presidency ended without QAnon’s promised great global battle where President Trump revealed and conquered forces of pedophilic evil, related ideas have nonetheless thoroughly suffused and saturated our culture. The conspiracy’s adherents have also committed acts of violence, often against those close to them: in 2021, for instance, a California father killed his young children after becoming more enmeshed in QAnon beliefs, claiming he’d murdered them to “save the world” from the “serpent DNA” he believed his wife had passed down. Edgar Maddison Welch, who shot up Comet Pizza in Washington D.C. in 2017 in an attempt to “save” children he delusionally believed were held hostage in the restaurant’s non-existent basement, died in a 2025 traffic stop shootout with police. 

The Trump administration, which has branded itself “the most transparent administration in history,” has previously refused to disclose the authors of its social media posts. Those posts have contained white supremacist language, virulently anti-immigrant statements, and even a Michael Jackson lyric that used an antisemitic slur. When journalists ask about these statements, the agencies involved tend to deflect, insult the questioner, or, as happened in this case, simply decline to answer.

The Defense Department itself employs Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson, who before her time in government had a long history of posting bigoted and xenophobic statements, including the extremist slogan “Ausländer Raus,” a phrase meaning “foreigners out” that is viewed as a neo-Nazi rallying cry in Germany. Wilson also explicitly supported the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which holds that non-white people are being deliberately sent to the United States to replace white populations.

The Pentagon also never responded to reporting about Wilson’s history of extremist statements. 

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

Not so long ago, the Central Highlands of Vietnam were blanketed by forests so dense they blotted out the sun. The American soldiers who slogged through the area during the Vietnam War complained about leeches, mosquitoes, and snakes, but those triple-canopy jungles also teemed with tigers, elephants, and monkeys. The unrelenting darkness and tropical monsoons that made the highland woodlands so inhospitable to humans made them excellent habitat for wildlife.

But now they’re blanketed by coffee farms.

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but your morning buzz kills nature. Agriculture is by far the leading driver of deforestation, and coffee is the sixth-leading driver of agricultural deforestation; coffee farms are also parching the aquifers and ravaging the soils they’ll need to sustain future harvests. A new report by the nonprofit Coffee Watch documents that in Vietnam, which grows about one of every five coffee beans on Earth, about half a million acres of Central Highlands forest have been cleared for coffee since 1990, an area the size of Luxembourg. There are no longer any wild tigers in the region, and very few elephants; the saola, an adorable local antelope known as the ​“Asian unicorn,” is feared to be extinct.

“Most people are good people; they’d never dream of going to Starbucks and ordering a latte plus a dead elephant,”

Again, I apologize for being a Debbie Downer. But while it’s fairly common knowledge that carbon-belching coal plants and gas-guzzling SUVs are environmental menaces, people should know that our diets also degrade our planet, causing most global water shortages, nutrient pollution, and habitat destruction while generating a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture has overrun nearly half of our habitable land, and it replaces more forests, wetlands, and other wildlands every day. That’s why I wrote ​We Are Eating the Earth—and as Coffee Watch founder and director Etelle Higonnet reminded me, we are drinking the Earth, too.

“Most people are good people; they’d never dream of going to Starbucks and ordering a latte plus a dead elephant,” Higonnet said. ​“But that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re raping and poisoning the planet with every cup we drink.”

Vietnam is now the No. 2 coffee-growing nation, behind Brazil; and it’s the leading producer of the cheaper ​“robusta” beans used for most instant coffee, serving nearly 40 percent of the global market. And over the last generation, Vietnam has had one of the world’s fastest deforestation rates; the Coffee Watch report used satellite imagery and other records to show that in the Central Highlands, forest cover has shrunk by a third, while coffee’s footprint has expanded fourteenfold. Traditional jungle provinces like Dak Lak and Dak Nong and Gia Lai have seen less destruction in recent years, but only because there’s so little jungle left to cut.

“If this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every café.”

At the same time, intensive irrigation is lowering the region’s water table, forcing farmers to extend wells as deep as 150 feet, while intensive chemical use is depleting soils, putting farmers on a ​“nutrient treadmill” in which they have to spray even more fertilizer and pesticide to maintain their yields. And when natural forests are cleared, the ecological services they provide—recharging groundwater, controlling erosion, buffering extreme temperatures—are lost with their trees. ​“The production system is eroding the ecological foundations on which it depends,” the report concluded. Droughts are already creating bean shortages, which contributed to record-high coffee prices last year, and as the climate warms, scientists believe half the area’s coffee acres might be unviable by midcentury. That could mean even more deforestation, as production expands elsewhere, and even higher prices.

“If this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every café,” Higonnet said.

Higonnet is a badass do-gooder, a Yale Law School graduate who was a human rights activist for Amnesty International before joining Greenpeace to focus on climate. She got frustrated by Greenpeace’s exclusive focus on the four most prominent deforestation commodities—beef, soy, palm oil, and wood/​paper—so she helped found a well-respected organization called Mighty Earth that works on rubber and cocoa as well as the Big Four; she was knighted by the French government for her efforts to stop child labor and slavery along with deforestation. But she always wanted to expose coffee farming, which also has extreme labor and poverty problems as well as environmental problems, so she started Coffee Watch in late 2024. Coffee is responsible for only about 1 percent of deforestation, but as she points out, it receives way less than 1 percent of the attention paid to deforestation.

Drinking a cup of coffee every morning contributes about as much to global warming as driving a gasoline car 100 miles.

The Coffee Watch report does make a compelling case that the world’s coffee addiction has destructive consequences for nature. There’s something depressing about losing a Luxembourg-sized jungle to farmland in a generation. Then again, Luxembourg is just about the size of Rhode Island; around the world, coffee has replaced about a New Jersey–sized swath of forest. That’s certainly not nothing, but cattle replaced an entire California-size area of forest between 2000 and 2015, more than 200 times what’s been lost in Vietnam, and twice as much as what was lost to all other commodities combined. Globally, pastures now cover an area about twice the size of South America. In the United States, we use about half our agricultural land to produce beef, which only provides about 3 percent of our calories.

So yes, we are drinking a bit of the Earth, but nowhere near as much of it as we’re eating; the 1 percent of current deforestation driven by coffee is a drop in the pot compared with the 40 percent by cattle or the 18 percent by soy and oil palm. I did some crude calculations using this emissions data, and it looks like drinking a cup of coffee every morning contributes about as much to global warming as driving a gasoline car 100 miles—maybe twice as much if you add milk, but that’s just another reminder that cattle are the real climate menaces. They’re coal plants with tails.

Of course, coffee’s relatively modest impact is no consolation to the Asian unicorn. It would be better for the planet if people drank less coffee. Since that probably won’t happen, because people love coffee, and since lab-grown coffee isn’t ready for prime time, there ought to be more pressure on major coffee buyers to green their supply chains.

Coffee grows well in the shade of other trees, and while most of the world’s beans come from monocultures, about 20 percent are now grown through more sustainable agroforestry practices that combine reforestation with production, like planting ​“doughnuts” or ​“zebra stripes” of trees around or through plantations. Brazil has also reduced deforestation by helping farmers get more efficient; in one generation, they’ve doubled production while reducing their land footprint, and Nestlé is developing new climate-resilient varieties that could boost yields even further. Governments can also encourage farmers to use less irrigation water and fertilizer, or ban imports of coffee grown on recently deforested land.

From a policy perspective, though, it makes more sense to focus on beef, even if nobody wants to hear that just before firing up the grill on July 4. We need to get the rich world to eat less beef, even if that means eating more chicken and pork, and helping ranchers produce more beef on less land. We have to go hunting where the ducks are.

The real lesson of the transformation of the Central Highlands is not that drinking coffee is uniquely damaging to the climate or the environment. It’s that everything we consume does at least some damage—and until we start taking that seriously, our diets and our farms will keep ravaging the natural world.

On the evening of June 11, 2025, Shailynn Bray-Waters joined hundreds of other protesters at a demonstration outside an ICE field office in Spokane, Washington. She’d learned through social media that two of her former ESL students—Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, both lawful asylum seekers from Venezuela—had been detained during a routine immigration check-in. Former Spokane city council president Ben Stuckart, who was sponsoring Alvarez Perez through a government humanitarian program, put out a call to action on Facebook: “I am going to sit in front of the bus. Feel free to join me.”

Bray-Waters did not sit in front of the ICE transport van. Nevertheless, public records show the Spokane police arrested her that night on a misdemeanor “failure to disperse” charge, confiscated her cell phone, and sent it over to the FBI for investigation.

Bray-Waters was one of 23 people whose phones were seized during a mass arrest that night. She wouldn’t see her device again until mid-August. On June 20, Spokane news outlet RANGE detailed the confusion swirling around the seized devices with the headline: “Where are the protesters’ phones?”

Now, an investigation by Mother Jones confirms that the FBI used software from the Israeli firm Cellebrite to secretly extract data from the phones of Bray-Waters and at least a dozen other protesters. A month later, one of those protesters, Thalia Ramirez, would be indicted as part of the Spokane 9 case, in which the federal government charged nine people with “conspiracy to impede or injure” officers at the June 11 protest. Every other protester whose phone was extracted in June had their misdemeanor charges promptly dismissed in city and county courts.

“This sounds like a case in which the government basically had a blank check to hoover up everyone’s data,” said Tom Bowman, policy counsel at the Security and Surveillance Project of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. The extractions, Bowman said, underscore the danger of sweeping conspiracy charges: “Your mere proximity to somebody else can be used to justify an invasive search into your entire digital life.”

I reviewed hundreds of pages of Spokane police reports from the June 11 protest, obtained via a public records request and shared with Mother Jones. One document, a “Property and Evidence Case Jacket” from the City of Spokane, lists numerous phones and personal items seized from protesters, as well as an envelope provided by FBI Special Agent Kevin Loader containing a storage drive with digital extractions from 13 devices. I cross-referenced the numbers assigned to those devices with phone triage forms and other documents in the public records dump to confirm the phones’ owners.

“If someone calls about their phone, inform them it is still being held for investigative purposes,” states a June 13 entry at the top of the evidence case jacket. “Do not send them to the FBI or inform them the phone is with the FBI.”

The FBI needed search warrants to extract data from the devices in June, according to Laura Moraff, staff attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. But it’s difficult to determine whether those warrants were obtained and what they said. The government is not required to notify people if their devices have been searched in an investigation—that information is normally only revealed through the discovery process in court. But 12 of the 13 protesters whose phones were extracted were never indicted. 

“Warrant procedures are ex parte—it’s the government going in and saying, ‘We need to do this,”’ said Moraff. “The defendant doesn’t have an opportunity to challenge that until they’re made aware of it, which is usually in a criminal case.”

“If someone calls about their phone, inform them it is still being held for investigative purposes. Do not send them to the FBI or inform them the phone is with the FBI.”

When I told one of the protesters, Shauna Lowery, that I had reason to believe the FBI had extracted data from her phone, she was unsurprised. Her SIM card, she said, had been removed and taped to the back of her device. Bray-Waters told me she’d had similar suspicions after getting notifications about an attempt to access her iCloud account from Seattle, the site of the nearest FBI office. 

The FBI did not address specific questions about whether the agency obtained search warrants for the phone extractions in June. The US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Washington, which brought the Spokane 9 case, also declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

One defense attorney involved in litigation, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that law enforcement will sometimes take an “extract now, search later” approach, creating copies of phones, but waiting to search the data itself until a warrant is acquired.

But even that aspect of the extraction, said Moraff, the ACLU attorney, should still have been done pursuant to a warrant. “The Supreme Court recognized the vast quantity and sensitive quality of information on cell phones in 2014 when it held that a warrant is required to search a cell phone—even when a phone is seized incident to arrest,” she told me. “At the least, the FBI likely extracted all data that [a] user can access on the device. That’s a highly intrusive seizure, and it shouldn’t be done without a warrant.”

The FBI’s investigation came shortly after an internal directive from the Department of Justice ordering federal prosecutors to aggressively pursue and publicize cases against anti-ICE protesters. “There should be no bottleneck of referrals for complaints,” wrote Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh. “Push out press releases whenever you file charges in these matters.” That email went out June 12, 2025, the morning after the protest in Spokane, and the same week that mass demonstrations against ICE swept Los Angeles.

My colleague Sophie Hurwitz covered the Spokane case in May:

Videos from the day show brief scuffles—protesters and ICE agents pushing each other—but no evidence of serious injury to anyone. “None of the protesters were hurt. Fortunately, none of the law enforcement officers were hurt either,” Richard Barker, then the acting US Attorney for eastern Washington, told PBS in March. Yet local police arrested more than 30 people on the scene.

During DHS’ high-profile occupations of cities like Minneapolis, Barker and almost 100 other federal prosecutors came under severe Trump administration pressure to prosecute ICE protesters. It was an order Barker resigned rather than carry out. In that March interview, Barker told PBS he “didn’t feel in this case that a conspiracy charge that would carry a six-year term of incarceration was true to who I was or who I wanted to be as a federal prosecutor.”

Public records show that the same day the DOJ memo went out, FBI agent C. Parker called the Spokane police and “requested that any cellular devices [in the department’s] custody would be processed by the FBI.” The next morning, officers met with Parker and Special Agent Loader to transfer custody of the 23 phones.

“That process was unbeknownst to me or my executive leadership team, and when we found out about it, it caused a little bit of consternation,” Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall told me. “From my standpoint, as a relatively new chief here at that time, this was unusual that line-level staff detectives would make the decision to go ahead and transfer phones or evidence to a federal partner without running that up the chain and making sure it didn’t impact the local investigation.”

Hall added that, after learning some evidence had been transferred to the FBI, the department “hit pause for a couple of days while we figured out exactly why that was occurring, and at whose behest.”  But public records show it was too late for the protesters’ phones: “I was also asked if evidence seized as a part of the investigation, namely cell phones, had been already turned over,” an officer named Zachary Storment writes in a police report. “This had in fact already been done.”

Another report by Officer Nick Geren states a lieutenant called him at home on the afternoon of June 13 and ordered him “not to release any further evidence to the FBI.” 

“I advised that we only had one item remaining in our lab area, a laptop that had also been seized during the arrests,” Geren wrote. 

Hall told me that, after conversations with the FBI and his legal team, he determined that the FBI should provide the Spokane Police Department with a subpoena to take custody of the devices. That subpoena was provided late in the day on June 13, Hall said, after the phones had already been transferred over. Hall said the subpoena authorized only the seizure of the devices and did not include information about a search warrant.

By June 20, nearly all of the protesters’ misdemeanor charges had been dismissed, and the FBI returned the phones and storage device containing extractions to the Spokane PD. At the time, the FBI advised that two of the phones not on the extraction list should continue to have their WiFi and cell signals blocked. Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that such a step is usually associated with ongoing investigations. “Making sure a phone doesn’t have a data connection is a best practice before forensic extraction,” he said. 

Nearly one month after the protest, on July 9, a federal grand jury indicted the Spokane 9 on felony conspiracy charges. Thalia Ramirez, Ben Stuckart, and four others took plea deals. The remaining three defendants—the “Spokane 3”— were convicted last month by a jury in a major, largely unexpected victory for President Trump’s war on dissent.

Justice Forral, one of the Spokane 3, also had their phone seized upon arrest in June. Forral’s device was not included in the list of extractions reviewed by Mother Jones, but their device was uniquely flagged in police documents as “out to external agency for investigation.” An extraction from their phone was eventually included as an exhibit in the Spokane 3 trial.

Court documents show that the government listed Loader, the FBI agent who obtained the cell phones from the Spokane PD, as an expert witness in that trial. 

“Loader will testify that he took custody of Defendants’ phones, used the forensic tools of Cellebrite and Greykey [sic] to retrieve data off of the phones, and provided that data to case agents,” prosecutors wrote.

Since the protest last year, Hall said the Spokane PD has “made some progress in leveling expectations, so that folks on the investigative side, as well as folks on the tactical side … know where I stand on how we address these types of incidents.” He added that his department has created a “dialogue policing unit, where you inject officers into the crowd just to have conversations, build rapport, and help facilitate First Amendment protected activities.”

It’s not uncommon for the FBI and other federal agencies to take extractions from cell phones in criminal investigations. “What I think is really new and really concerning, from a privacy and civil liberties perspective, is their use in cases that are directly related to free speech and association rights,” Bowman, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said.

Indeed, some of the phone evidence presented at the Spokane 3 trial included benign political expression.One FBI agent testified that messages on defendant Bajun Mavawalla II’s phone showed he’d discussed the June 11 protest on Reddit—but admitted that the messages didn’t evince any criminal activity. Another agent highlighted that defendant Jac Archer had sent fellow defendant and former city councilor Ben Stuckart’s Facebook post calling for the initial protest in Signal chats. (Stuckart took a plea deal in December.)

“This is one of the first pages in the authoritarian’s playbook,” said Bowman. “Identify the people who disagree with you by surveilling their free speech and association rights, and then conduct further surveillance to intimidate or suppress their speech.”

Bowman and Moraff pointed to the lack of guardrails governing the government’s use and retention of data from phone extractions—and the potential for that data to be resurfaced by police in future investigations. 

“We think police departments should be a lot more transparent about these retention policies, and should have restrictions on how long they can retain the data, especially after a case is closed or they decide not to bring charges,” said Moraff. “When an extraction is performed on a device, that’s obviously way more data than there was ever probable cause to seize. So even if we assume that the FBI followed all warrant procedures and sought a warrant within a reasonable amount of time, and then got a warrant that was limited to a search just for the information that there was probable cause to search for—even if they follow all those steps, then we still have this issue of what happens to the extraction.” (The FBI did not answer a question about its data retention policies. Federal law on the matter is not well established.)

The Spokane 3 now face up to six years in prison. As their attorneys appeal the verdict, the Trump administration has continued to pursue aggressive federal conspiracy charges against protesters across the country. Some of the government’s cases have collapsed spectacularly. But the FBI’s Spokane investigation highlights just how easy it is for protesters to become unwittingly swept up in a much larger network of state surveillance and secrecy, regardless of whether they’ve been charged with a crime. 

“This creates enormous distrust in government, and can have severe chilling effects on First Amendment–protected activity like protesting,” said Bowman. “People might be less likely to engage in protest activity if they think that there’s a chance that someday the FBI might take their data and spy on them with it.”

In Feburary, Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, one of the young men whose detention sparked the initial protest, was released on parole. A judge found his constitutional rights had been violated.

The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also overseen a now-problematic overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, given the White House a gilded makeover, bulldozed the famed Rose Garden, and even has plans for a so-called “Arc de Trump” that mirrors France’s Arc de Triomphe.

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So what’s behind all of this? Art historian Erin Thompson—author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments—says that whether it’s Romans repurposing idols of leaders who had fallen out of favor or the glorification of Civil War officers in the American South, monuments and public aesthetics aren’t just about the past. They’re about symbolizing power today.

“The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present,” Thompson says. “It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Thompson sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why Trump has decked out the White House in gold (so much gold), the rise and recent fall of Confederate monuments, and whether she thinks the Arc de Trump will ever get built.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in December 2025.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

This Supreme Court term has no shortage of high-profile immigration-related cases. But as the justices wait until the last minute to rule on the more controversial ones—namely birthright citizenship—on Tuesday, they delivered a decision in a sleeper case that could have implications for millions of green card holders living in the United States.

In a 6-3 decision signed by Justice Clarence Thomas, the conservative supermajority held that border officers don’t need to have “clear and convincing evidence” that a lawful permanent resident committed a “crime involving moral turpitude“—a vaguely defined immigration law term that can cover a wide spectrum of crimes generally involving intent to defraud or cause bodily harm—before jeopardizing their rights and ability to stay in the country. In other words, agents at the border have just been given exceptional discretion to bypass protections generally afforded to green card holders.

In the case at issue, Blanche v. Lau, Muk Choi Lau, a Chinese-born green card holder was charged in New Jersey in 2012 with trademark counterfeiting. Lau then traveled abroad and tried to re-enter the United States at the airport with his green card. Under federal statute, returning lawful permanent residents are supposed to be treated as having already been admitted into the country—meaning they are essentially just coming back home.  

But a border agent determined that, because of Lau’s pending criminal charges for a “crime involving moral turpitude,” he fit into an exception and could be classified as someone “seeking admission” (rather than already admitted) into the United States. Lau was paroled in, but had his green card confiscated. After he pleaded guilty to the charges, the federal government started removal proceedings against him.

An immigration judge found that Lau could be removed, but following an appeal, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The appeals court concluded that the border office didn’t have enough evidence at that time to show that Lau had committed a crime and that he should have been treated under the default presumption that he had already been admitted into the United States due to his lawful permanent status.

“Critically,” Judge Richard J. Sullivan and the appeals panel ruled last year, “the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] does not provide that an LPR (Lawful Permanent Resident] may be treated as seeking admission when he has been ‘charged with a crime’ or is ‘believed to have committed a crime; it permits such a treatment only when an LPR ‘has committed’ a crime.”

In Tuesday’s decision, the Supreme Court majority led by Justice Thomas vacated the Second Circuit’s judgment, arguing that the government had correctly reclassified Lau and that the federal statute didn’t actually require the border officer to “have clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral turpitude before deeming him an applicant for admission.”

The ruling in Blanche v. Lau is likely to create a chilling effect on lawful permanent residents traveling overseas. Notably, it follows proposed rules by the Trump administration to force immigrants to pursue green card applications from abroad, and make it considerably more expensive for green card holders to apply for US citizenship.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the Court’s decision undermined the “benefits and security that come with having a green card.” In the worst-case scenario, Justice Jackson reasoned, the government could “merely assume” at the border that a green card holder should be demoted to “seeking admission” and only justify that determination with “post hoc evidence.”

“I worry that the Court has now handed the Government a massive blank check.”

“I worry that the Court has now handed the Government a massive blank check,” Justice Jackson wrote. Green card holders, she added, “are as close to citizenship as one can get absent naturalization…Today, the majority ignores that crucial fact and empowers Government officials to act accordingly.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick with the American immigration Council noted on social media that the Supreme Court’s ruling does not mean that green card holders can simply be ordered deported by border agents. But classifying lawful permanent residents returning from abroad as “seeking admission” could open up a wide range of negative legal and practical consequences for them, including the possibility of detention and, eventually, deportation proceedings requiring a higher burden of proof for defense.

“It is very disturbing in the breadth of its reach, and I think we can expect border officers to overuse the power that they’re given here,” said Nancy Morawetz, a law professor and director of the Crimmigration Clinic at NYU. She worries about the implications for green card holders who could be subject to other grounds of inadmissibility, such as offenses involving controlled substances. “There are a lot of people who could be at real risk if the government doesn’t really have to have any proof…It’s very, very dangerous.”

Allen Orr, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the ruling lowers the due process standards green card holders are entitled to. “We’re giving a border officer the ability to determine if it’s a crime of moral turpitude and you might not even be guilty of it,” he said. “If the facts are clear and the person is excludable and does not deserve to be in the United States, then take their green card but afford them a process greater than some border officer at the port of entry.”

He warned on Bluesky: “The danger of this ruling is that it creates an incentive to use the border as a place where rights are diminished.” Orr said it further sends a troubling message to lawful permanent residents. “I already have clients who have green cards who are just afraid to travel,” he said, “because the government has said, as a green card holder, you’re just now a long-term visitor, we could deny you for anything.” The decision, he concluded, “aligns with the goal of excluding and removing people from the United States that are not US-born nationals.”

On Tuesday, eight protesters who the Justice Department accused of having connections to antifa were sentenced to decades in federal prison over a shooting outside a Texas immigration detention center that left one police officer wounded. 

The demonstrator who was convicted of shooting and wounded the officer, former US Marine Corps reservist Benjamin Song, was convicted of attempted murder in March and received a 100-year prison term. Seven other protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years. 

US District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush nominee, said the defendants in what has become known as the Prairieland trial, didn’t participate in a protest but “an assault on democracy.”

Justice Department prosecutors under the Trump administration have made extensive use of wide-ranging conspiracy charges in cases like Prairieland, where some of the defendants who received decades-long sentences were not involved with the planning of the protest in question and left when guards at the facility asked them to.

As my colleague Schuyler Mitchell wrote in September, the Trump administration signed a September 22 executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and a memo three days later, known as NSPM-7, assigning federal agencies to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” protesters engaging in “anti-capitalism,” “anti-fascism,” and “anti-Americanism.” The Prairieland trial was one of the first tests of the White House’s ability to make such claims stick.

The defendants, who were protesting the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas, denied that they were affiliated with antifa, a decentralized term for various left-wing activists and anti-fascist groups, and were demonstrating in support of immigrants being detained at the facility.

In November, seven other defendants who were present at Prairieland pleaded guilty to federal charges of providing material support for terrorism or damaging property. 

The Trump administration has deployed allegations of terrorism against protesters at an unprecedented scale. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, the Justice Department charged 15 Minneapolis-area residents last week with felony “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers,” and secured a conviction on the same charges against three Spokane, Washington, protesters. Both groups protested ICE facilities.

In a single opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday took a swipe at Congressional authority while at the same time stripping some victims of religious violations the ability to sue over illegal treatment. The decision weakens a law guaranteeing freedom of religious expression in federally-funded prisons. But with time, the ruling may prove far more disastrous and far-reaching, unleashing illegal behavior that both Congress and the victims are powerless to prevent.

The decision achieves this dual result by limiting Congress’ authority to require that terms in its funding laws can be enforced through private suits against the individuals who violate them—making it harder for Congress to give these laws teeth and for victims to seek damages. The Constitution “may confer on Congress the power to spend money for the general welfare,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion, but “it does not ‘endow Congress with [any] power to regulate conduct.’”

The majority’s decision demotes certain legislation to a mere contract.

This attack on Congress and the victims of unlawful behavior stems from a violation of one man’s religious rights while in a federally-funded prison. A former inmate with the Louisiana Department of Corrections, Damon Landor is a devout Rastafarian who follows the religious command not to cut his hair. When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor worried that the intake guards might shave his head, so he brought along a paper copy of a court case explaining his right to keep his hair long. The prison guards threw it in the trash, held him down, and shaved his head. Congress had passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to protect inmates against such abuses, and in that law, gave inmates like Landor the right to sue the individual guards who violated his rights. So in this case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, Lander sought damages under RLUIPA from the guards who shaved him.

Critically for this case, Congress enacted RLUIPA in 2000 under its broad Constitutional authority to spend money for the “general welfare,” or what is known as its Spending Clause authority. In today’s 6-3 decision along partisan and ideological lines, the court’s Republican appointees threw out Landor’s suit and, more broadly, limited Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause. In time, Landor and RLUIPA may prove to be vehicles through which the court’s conservative wing limits Congressional authority—while leaving victims of illegal behavior, like Landor, unable to seek damages.

Spending clause legislation is a common exercise of Congressional authority. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent points out, Congress has used the clause to protect people in federally funded nursing homes and people receiving emergency care at federally funded hospitals. It powers the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination in federal assistance, combats pollution under the Clean Air Act, and protects Medicare and Medicaid patients’ rights.

Yet the crux of the majority’s decision in Landor is to demote Spending Clause legislation to, essentially, a mere contract between the federal government and the party that receives the funds. Even though the Constitution says no such thing, the Roberts Court declares that Spending Clause legislation can only be enforced against violators who consent to be held liable, in the same way a contract is only valid of both parties consent. Under the court’s new holding, if, as in this case, prison guards violate RLUIPA, Congress’ only enforcement mechanism is to withdraw the prison’s funding. It’s a cramped vision of Congressional authority that could ultimately allow states and individuals to overrule Congress’ ability to govern.

The Democratic appointees found the notion ridiculous. The Spending Clause gives Congress the “power to legislate, not merely to negotiate,” read Jackson’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. “The Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party.”

This case is in line with the Roberts Court’s broader project to grow the powers of the president and Supreme Court while limiting Congress’ authority. Often, this happens through decisions that take powers once exercised by Congress and hand them to the president or the courts. But in this case, the court went directly after Congress’ power to pass laws.

It’s possible that Congress can get around this swipe by adding language to spending laws requiring, in the case of RLUIPA, that guards at federally funded prisons explicitly consent to personal liability under the law—providing that ingredient necessary to a contractual obligation. The majority decision acknowledges such a workaround could allow Congress to once again authorize private suits. But as the court pursues its limited view of legislative authority, such promises are unlikely to broadly preserve Congress’ Spending Clause powers.

One reason to be suspicious is that the majority’s decision invokes paeans to federalism and states rights—principles that the court has turned to in the past to gut civil rights laws. If Landor prevailed in his argument that the guards are liable under RLUIPA, Gorsuch writes, it “would be inconsistent with principles of state sovereignty and a federal government of limited and enumerated regulatory powers.” Perhaps, consent alone, achieved by Congress tweaking the language of Spending Clause legislation, will be enough to satisfy the majority’s objections to Landor’s suit and others like it.

But Landor‘s limits on legislators and citizens are no outlier. Just one year ago, the court, in another Gorsuch opinion, limited individuals’ ability to protect certain rights as Medicaid recipients through private suits. And on the same day as Landor, the same six-justice majority broadly interpreted one law in order to green light certain suits by oil companies, while shutting the courthouse doors to victims of human rights abuses under another law, the Alien Tort Statute.

“So tally today,” University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman posted after the court released its opinions, “victims of human rights violations & beneficiaries of public benefits programs can’t sue. oil companies can.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for nearly a decade that an influential 2013 scientific paper that concluded glyphosate is safe was actually ghostwritten by developer Monsanto. But the agency never informed the public and continued to rely on it, according to an EPA memo obtained by Mother Jones and revealed here for the first time.

The EPA cited the compromised paper as evidence that the world’s most widely used herbicide glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup—is safe to use in its 2020 assessment, despite its own internal investigation that concluded the research paper hid Monsanto’s role as an author. Now, nearly ten years after the agency came to its conclusion, the paper’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, said it has opened its own investigation into whether the paper was ghostwritten following a formal request made by a Harvard professor and her research associate to retract the study, as first reported by Retraction Watch last week. 

The EPA’s Inspector General’s Office opened its investigation into the research paper in 2017, a few years after the paper was published in the influential science journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology with independent toxicologists Larry Kier and David Kirkland listed as its authors.

The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct.”

But the EPA memo concluded that Monsanto and one of its employees—with the financial backing of a consortium of other glyphosate manufacturers—seemed to have contributed key criteria including the “intellectual content” of the report. The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct,” according to the memo, which was written by a US special agent in the EPA Inspector General’s Office’s crimes division. The memo does not make clear whether Monsanto disclosed to the consortium, known officially as the Glyphosate Task Force, that it would be a “ghost writer” on the report. 

This is the latest example to emerge of Monsanto’s concerted efforts to sway public understanding of its blockbuster herbicide glyphosate. In December, another influential review article that had found glyphosate to be safe was retracted after the publisher announced the paper’s authors had not disclosed Monsanto’s role. And a Mother Jones investigation about glyphosate being sprayed in forests found other examples of Monsanto’s hand in secretly orchestrating research papers. Now, Taylor & Francis said it is investigating both the 2013 research paper and a second peer-reviewed 2015 article also published in its journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology to assess whether they were ghostwritten by Monsanto employees.

Bayer, the German chemical company that purchased Monsanto in 2018 and continues to generate billions of dollars of revenue from Roundup every year, said in a statement that the EPA memo’s “allegations about the Kier & Kirkland paper was based on a limited set of documents that didn’t include elements such as sworn testimony from the authors.” Aside from the sworn testimony, it’s unclear what, if anything else, should have been included given the Inspector General relied on company emails and documents made public during litigation.

Since the late 1990s, studies by non-industry scientists showing glyphosate can damage genetic material in lab tests have set off a debate about whether the herbicide can cause cancer. According to the EPA Inspector General memo, a consortium of 25 glyphosate manufacturers wanted to publish their own research paper citing unpublished internal studies conducted by company scientists that showed glyphosate does not damage DNA. 

“But once they had pulled all of the various studies together on genotoxicity for this review paper,” wrote the special agent in the EPA memo, “it was hard to present a ‘story’ that glyphosate was not genotoxic, because of ‘…the complicated ‘noise’ out there,’”—meaning the growing debate about whether it causes cancer—and “‘the story as written stretched the limits of credibility among less sophisticated audiences.’”

So “to add credibility to the proposed manuscript” they decided to pay a scientist named David Kirkland—considered a “heavy-hitter in the area of genotoxicity”— to be one of the named authors, along with scientist Larry Kier. The report that was eventually published presented Kier and Kirkland as the “sole” two authors who were “independent” of Monsanto and the consortium.

Yet there was another person helping shape the paper’s assessment: a Monsanto employee named David Saltmiras, according to the EPA memo. While all three of their names are redacted in the memo, they are found in now-public company emails that were exposed during litigation brought by people who said glyphosate made them sick. 

In one of those emails from 2012, Kier said they should include Saltmiras as a co-author. “He is very deserving of this recognition and he was a co-author on the original literature review manuscript which was a predecessor to this publication,” Kier wrote.

Kirkland, in an email response, replied that if they included Saltmiras as a co-author they would no longer be “independent” of the company, and in that case he doubted the scientific journal would publish their report.

The Inspector General determined they hid Saltmiras’s contributions. “Because [Saltmiras] does not appear as a co-author on this manuscript, Monsanto’s involvement is also hidden,” wrote the US special agent, whose name was also redacted from the memo. The EPA memo continued: “Monsanto does have a vested interest in portraying glyphosate as a safe to use herbicide…By not making their involvement known in the manuscript discussed above, and the revenue generated by the sales of glyphosate products on a global basis, Monsanto appears to have a conflict of interest.”

The EPA memo concluded that the study’s named authors, Kier and Kirkland, “were not ‘the authors [which] had sole responsibility for the writing and content of the paper.’” The unnamed Monsanto employee Saltmiras “was a co-author of this report” for his substantive contributions on behalf of Monsanto, but was only named “in the acknowledgement section of this manuscript.” 

“Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?”

Kier could not be reached for comment, and Saltmiras referred questions to Bayer, his current employer. Kirkland disputed the EPA memo’s findings. “I believe the memo is incorrect and I reject the claim. Our 2013 paper was NOT GHOSTWRITTEN,” he wrote an email. Saltmiras “did not contribute to or influence the analysis of the reports I reviewed,” he added in a later email.

Yet two researchers, Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and Alexander “Sasha” Kaurov, who study corporate influence on science and who looked at the company emails made public during litigation came to a similar conclusion that the paper was ghostwritten. “The authors tried to mislead the public intentionally,” said Kaurov, a research fellow at Motu Economic & Public Policy Research in New Zealand. 

And he questions why the EPA would have continued to rely on it. “It’s upsetting. Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?” asked Kaurov.

For instance, in the EPA’s revised “Evaluation of Carcinogenic Potential,” issued as part of its glyphosate assessment that concluded the herbicide was safe in 2020, the agency relied on the 2013 report for its data and its summaries of 16 other studies, meaning the agency accepted the compromised review as essentially a collection of studies finding that glyphosate was safe to use.

An EPA spokesperson in a statement wrote that its review of glyphosate “evaluated more than 6,000 studies across human-health and ecological disciplines, and its determinations reflected that full body of evidence.” But the agency did not respond to the question of why it continued to rely on the 2013 study despite concluding it was ghostwritten. The spokesperson confirmed that the agency never informed the public or other regulatory agencies abroad about that discovery.

The 2013 paper did make its way abroad: The European Food Safety Agency also cited the Kier and Kirkland study for its 2023 re-assessment of glyphosate that determined the herbicide is safe. 

Evidence that glyphosate may be harmful to health continues to mount: Recent studies suggest the herbicide could contribute to metabolic disorders, brain inflammation, and damage to the gut microbiome. Notably, after a group of environmental and labor groups filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s 2020 assessment that glyphosate was safe to use, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the EPA’s safety assessment, ruling that the agency’s “errors in assessing human-health risk are serious” and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” a type of cancer. The EPA, which is currently relying on its 1993 safety assessment of glyphosate, is expected to release an updated review of the herbicide this year.

And Bayer is now on the hook for more than $12 billion in payouts to people who say the herbicide made them sick. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to shield Bayer from some of these lawsuits. The Trump administration, which reportedly said in 2017 that it had “Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation,” also intervened in the Supreme Court case to support Bayer. As Bayer argued in court, the company believes it should largely have immunity from lawsuits since the EPA concluded that glyphosate products were safe.

But it’s now becoming clearer that the EPA came to that conclusion based in part on compromised scientific research that Monsanto secretly orchestrated.

“It’s just sad,” Kaurov said. 

It was clear, almost from the start, that President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a war against Iran would be his greatest strategic blunder yet. Nearly four months later, Tehran’s repressive regime remains entrenched and more radical than ever. The mullahs still have their enriched uranium and plenty of drones and missiles, and now they’ve shown the world they have a kill switch for the Strait of Hormuz—and much of the global economy.

If the current peace negotiations stick, they likely will leave us where we were before, only at the cost of more than $100 billion, thousands of Middle Eastern lives—and 13 American ones, plus hundreds injured—and whatever bit of our allies’ goodwill Trump hadn’t squandered already.

Yet Trump isn’t the sole owner of this fiasco. There was Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who helped cajole him into greenlighting the attacks. And closer to home, there were the two inexperienced US envoys who led the pre-war negotiations with Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and whose bumbling talking points accelerated America’s lurch into armed conflict—and strategic calamity.

“I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism…It shows the catastrophe of this war.”

Kushner and Witkoff’s starring role has been nearly forgotten in the months since Iran backed the United States into a corner by closing the strait. Kushner in particular brought epic conflicts of interest to the negotiations, not only because of the billions of dollars he was soliciting from Iran’s regional foes for his investment fund, Affinity Partners, but also because of his cozy, decades-long relationship with Netanyahu, who even visited the Kushner family’s home when Jared was a kid. (Here’s a timeline.)

Kushner proselytized Bibi’s claim that Iran was weeks, if not days, away from building a nuclear weapon—a view widely dismissed by nuclear experts—and appeared naive as to how the Iranians negotiate. His antipathy toward Tehran was no secret. According to author Andrea Bernstein, Kushner bonded with the dictator of the United Arab Emirates over their mutual loathing of Iran long before the UAE began bankrolling his firm. But Trump wasn’t troubled by his team’s inexperience, ineptness, or conflicts of interest. Kushner, Netanyahu, and the other Iran hawks got their way, resulting in America’s greatest humiliation on the global stage since the Iraq War.

The widely discussed Memorandum of Understanding has only confirmed this defeat. Among its 14 points are assurances that the United States will begin lifting its punishing sanctions on Iran—which it just did, at least temporarily—and that Tehran will regain access to frozen funds worth at least $24 billion. The MOU also says that US and regional allies will develop a “definitive, mutually agreed plan” for Iranian reconstruction that’s worth at least $300 billion.

This leaves questions aplenty: Who will cover the $300 billion tab? How will that money be dispensed and to whom? What restrictions will be placed on the funds? How much of it will be shouldered by the US public, which has already paid at least $132 billion, per Moody’s Analytics, for Trump’s unnecessary war?

Kushner has kept largely mum about the MOU, even amid suggestions that he could profit personally from the deal. But experts familiar with his role in pre-war negotiations had some thoughts. “I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism, if we can talk about Kushnerism,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me. “The way I’d conceptualize it is sort of this mix of pro-Israel policies and corporate transactionalism…It shows the catastrophe of this war, and the failure of the negotiations that he and Witkoff were pursuing with the Iranians.”

Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.

The lead-up to the war helped make Kushner, now a billionaire, even richer, but the outbreak of armed conflict, and its outcome, has dealt a blow to Kushner’s geopolitical worldview. “If you go back to Breaking History, his memoir, one of the core arguments is that Iran is a bad actor that can’t be dealt with, and we have to muster this coalition against them,” Guyer said. “That’s why I think this is really a strategic defeat, because all these ideas that Kushner has been putting across since Trump’s first term have been totally shown to be not workable.”

The memo, notably, does nothing to lessen Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon in the future. It “kicks the most difficult nuclear issues down the road,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “The scope of Iran’s nuclear program remains unclear, there is no defined process for eliminating the highly enriched uranium, and there is little detail about US priorities for verification. The United States and Iran still need to overcome significant gaps to reach a deal.”

The US lifted sanctions against Iran temporarily on Monday as high-level talks continued in Switzerland, the New York Times reported. The status of the talks remains unclear; Kushner is present, but has refrained from commenting on negotiations, while Vice President JD Vance and the regime were sending opposing public signals on Iran’s willingness to allow UN inspectors into their nuclear facilities. (“Progress on Nuclear Issues is Muddy,” the headline noted.)

There’s a two-month timeline set for the negotiations, and with Kushner still deeply involved, no telling whether they will succeed. “It is possible to get an effective nuclear deal in the next 60 days, but it will require the Trump administration to rethink its negotiating process,” Davenport said. “Witkoff and Kushner need to engage in direct, sustained negotiations and listen to nuclear experts who understand what is necessary for an effective nonproliferation agreement. In past talks, Witkoff and Kushner’s technical incompetence led the Trump administration to miss critical opportunities to engage Iran and recognize where Tehran was demonstrating flexibility.”

The bungled negotiations, with Kushner at center stage, were but the latest in a litany of failures attached to him. As I wrote in an excerpt of my upcoming book for Mother Jones, Kushner has a knack for failing up. He flopped as a media owner and made a badly timed bet on a New York City office tower that became a financial albatross around his family’s neck for more than a decade.

Indeed, his attempts to bail his family out of that reckless investment helped seed the foreign financial entanglements that have made his role as a US diplomat so problematic. Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.

Kushner’s sole diplomatic achievement during Trump’s first term was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. But the accords sidelined Palestinian interests and thus have been cited, alongside normalization talks with Saudi Arabia, as a primary factor in Hamas’s catastrophic attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which prompted Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Even Trump’s Board of Peace, with Kushner as an executive board member, has been little more than a pay-to-play racket for foreign regimes to remain in the administration’s good graces.

With the Iran War, Kushner has unleashed yet another costly failure—this time, for all of us. The only shock is that anyone familiar with his story would be surprised by the outcome.

When Aliya Rahman’s lawyers approached her about filing a complaint with the civil rights office of the Department of Homeland Security, she almost laughed in their faces.

“It’s hard to imagine that sending a letter to DHS to ask them to respect our civil rights will do anything,” said Rahman, a disabled US citizen who was dragged from her car and detained by DHS agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Today, Rahman, who also has an ongoing civil tort claim against DHS, filed that complaint anyway. 

On January 13, ICE agents detained Rahman as she tried to drive to a doctor’s appointment, punching out the window of her car and carrying her by her arms and legs, ignoring her requests for mobility and communication aids, which Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act is meant to guarantee. Eventually, the pain caused her to black out in her cell. Rahman contends that the agents’ aggressive treatment violated her civil rights as a disabled person.

“I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying ‘Walk! You can do it. Walk.’”

“We request that DHS take corrective action to not only redress these violations, but also to ensure all individuals with disabilities who interact with DHS officers are treated with dignity and respect,” Rahman’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.

Rahman described how ICE agents harmed her in congressional testimony organized by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.): “Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground and people leaned on my back…I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury,” Rahman said:

“Agents repeatedly had to stop and ask how to do tasks. I received no medical screening, phone call, or access to a lawyer. I was denied a communication navigator when my speech began to slur. Agents laughed as I tried to immobilize my own neck. I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying “Walk! You can do it. Walk.” Agents did not know if the facility had a wheelchair. When I was finally placed in one to be taken to interrogation, an agent taunted: “You were driving right? So your legs do work.”

Section 504 prohibits discrimination against disabled people in programs and organizations that receive federal funding, which includes ICE. But Rahman’s experience, her lawyers said, was “not an aberration.” In one 2022 complaint, a Border Patrol officer allegedly took away the crutch of a child they apprehended and didn’t provide an alternative. Between 2019 and 2023, at least seven people with mental health disabilities were placed in solitary confinement in ICE custody. And in 2025, a Deaf DACA recipient was reportedly denied access to an American Sign Language interpreter for weeks. 

DHS’ Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), an internal body meant to investigate exactly these types of abuses, was gutted by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March 2025, reducing its workforce from over 150 full-time federal employees to fewer than 40 a year later, nearly all of whom are contractors.

DHS spokespeople did not provide current employment figures when asked, but stated that all of the office’s “All of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ “legally required functions continue to be performed, but in an efficient and cost-effective manner and without hindering the Department’s mission of securing the homeland,” further alleging that “these offices obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often functioned as internal adversaries.” 

Before CRCL was functionally dismantled, a complaint like Rahman’s would be read by its staffers, who would then issue recommendations. Now, though, she doesn’t necessarily expect that it will be read at all. “I don’t think I’m going to hear from these folks,” Rahman said. “Typically, what they do is put out social media content when they’re mad at me.” (DHS has issued posts implying that Rahman’s conduct was criminal.) 

“I’m still rocking my supervillain braces, my shoulders aren’t healed yet,” Rahman told me June 22, showing off her shoulder support gear. “I’m just trying to put my body back together.”

Thanks to her injuries, Rahman can only leave the house two or three days per week, she said. But as she heals, she’s become an advocate for others who have been detained or harmed by ICE, particularly those who are also disabled, many of whom don’t have the privileges she does: that she is a citizen, that she has savings, that she speaks English and has access to lawyers. 

“Many of them also had disabilities or chronic illnesses that were impacted by how they were handled, or they developed them afterwards,” Rahman said, and have learned—like her—that disclosing their disabilities can draw officers’ ridicule rather than accommodation. 

“People will say things like, you’re not disabled, you wear eyeliner,” Rahman said. “The guy inside [Whipple Detention Center] was like, ‘Your legs work, you were driving, right?’” Online, she sees families with autistic kids saying that they are terrified of any interaction with law enforcement. She doesn’t blame them. 

“I experienced people doubling down on violence when I raised that I was disabled, and that is not a society we can live in,” Rahman said.

While members of his cabinet stuff sauerkraut down their wives’ handbags to maintain diets, speculation is suddenly mounting over whether President Donald Trump may have received early access to retatrutide, the potent experimental weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly eagerly anticipated by millions.

The questions come amid a new report in STAT News pointing to a certain 79-year-old man with special insider connections who somehow managed to gain access to retatrutide, which has not received FDA approval, through the agency’s “compassionate use” program. You know, the kind of powerful individual with extraordinary ties to the Food and Drug Administration, as well as Eli Lilly, the same pharmaceutical company Trump bought stock in through the end of March and has partnered with the Trump administration to hash out pricing structures.

The White House on Tuesday denied that Trump was the applicant who made the retatrutide request. Eli Lilly, meanwhile, declined to outright deny the report. “In rare situations, when individuals can’t join a clinical trial and have run out of treatment options,” a spokesperson for Eli Lilly told Mother Jones, adding that the company does “not comment on the specifics of individual cases.”

None of which is likely to quell the theory. After all, Trump, according to his most recent health evaluation, just about hits the threshold of clinical obesity; he approvingly refers to GLP-1’s as the “fat shot” and has publicly complained about the high costs of accessing weight loss medications in the United States. Trump has also been something of a pioneer when it comes to experimental drugs. In 2020, after infamously suggesting people could inject themselves with bleach if they got infected with Covid, the president opted for an unapproved antibody treatment after testing positive himself months later.

But perhaps the biggest tell is the president’s unflinching record of indifference when it comes to outcries over inappropriate behavior, general shadiness, and conflicts of interest. So did Trump use the levers of power to gain unusual access to retatrutide? Time will tell if the president starts to debut a trimmed-down physique. It’s either that or the kimchi.

When the Kansas legislature took up a bill in early 2026 that would strip transgender residents’ driver’s licenses and bar them from government bathrooms, Bobby Joe Robertson Jr., a financial analyst at a petroleum refinery in the small town of McPherson, about an hour north of Wichita, decided to write her state representative a letter. 

“Technically, I wrote three,” Robertson says. There was the original letter, asking her legislator if he’d be up to meet with her, a trans woman, to discuss the painful effects the law would have on her family. And then a follow-up asking the legislator if he could please respond. “The third one,” she recalls, “was me telling him that I’m going to take his job.”

It will be an uphill battle. President Donald Trump carried McPherson by a more than two-to-one margin in 2024, as Robertson’s current Republican state representative was running unopposed in HD-73. A different Republican legislator had run unopposed in 2022. And 2020. And 2018. But this year, the incumbent has chosen not to seek re-election—and Robertson has been knocking doors after work for months, organizing her neighbors, and raising money for the race ahead. “I don’t think it’ll be a landslide or anything,” she said. “But I think I have the potential.”

“The power that is built in November in our state capitals…is going to have a national impact.”

Robertson is one of 18 Kansas Democrats contesting a state house seat this fall that went unopposed in the last election. Some of these districts have gone years without even token Democratic opposition—two will feature their first contested election since 2006. You have to go all the way back to 1990 to find this many Democrats running for Kansas’ legislature—incidentally, the last year they won a majority. Most of these races, in deep-red areas, will likely stay out of reach for the party. But Brandon Woodard, the Democratic minority leader in the lower chamber, believes another goal is achievable: that at least five out of the party’s more than 100 local recruits can flip districts—enough to break the Republicans’ supermajority—while turning out extra voters to keep the governor’s mansion in Democratic hands.

It’s not just Kansas. Across the country, Democrats are smashing downballot recruitment records, fielding more candidates in more races than they have in decades—or ever. For the first time, the party has a candidate for every Minnesota state legislative race, as it hopes to build on a one-vote majority in the state senate and break a 67–67 logjam in the house. In Texas, where Democrats are looking to make inroads in a Republican-dominated legislature and get out the vote for Senate candidate James Talarico and other statewide candidates, the party is also fielding candidates for every legislative seat for the first time in history. They’ve got candidates in every race in North and South Carolina (where the party hopes to break Republican supermajorities), and in Arizona (where it’s seeking to flip both chambers).

And in New Hampshire, in a bid for a governing trifecta, Democrats are contesting every state senate race, and at least 361 of 400 state house seats—57 more than Republicans. According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which invests in state-level downballot races, the party is also contesting a 21st-century record number of races in Indiana and Georgia.

As I reported previously, the DLCC has ambitious targets this fall, with hundreds of seats in play across the country. Democrats have been buoyed by dominant showings in 2025’s off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and a string of victories and overperformances in special elections—including, this spring, a win in the Florida state house district that includes Mar-a-Lago. DLCC president Heather Williams has argued this November has the potential to be “2010 in reverse”—a reference to Barack Obama’s first midterm shellacking, when Republicans picked up 700 legislative seats that allowed them to gerrymander their way to enduring majorities in states like North Carolina. Now, with both parties in the midst of a redistricting arms race, these elections could help determine which politicians control the next stages of the battle—a significance that will be felt far beyond any state’s borders.

“On the other side of this election, we’re going to sharply go into a continued conversation about redistricting, the need to shore up the path to the presidency, and ensure that our voting laws and our certification processes are strong as we go into a big 2028 presidential cycle,” Williams says. “On top of all of that, this Republican administration continues to move policy work of dealing with the issues of today into the states. 

“The power that is built in November in our state capitals is not only going to affect those that live in those communities,” Williams adds. “It is going to have a national impact.”

Downballot recruitment is no guarantee of success—particularly in the sorts of ruby-red areas Democrats like Robertson will be contesting. Republicans’ power in Kansas’ legislature will likely hinge on a small number of competitive districts. But the presence of candidates in almost every race is a useful barometer for an energized base and party organization. In Kansas, Woodard said, the numbers reflect, in part, a strategic shift. Last year, his caucus hired a political director earlier than it ever had, as the state party launched a tour of Republican-dominated areas to drum up interest from local parties and activists.

“If we’re having a wave year, some of those districts that are having the candidate on the ground doing the work might end up in picking up a seat that maybe wasn’t on our radar,” Woodard says. “More than anything, if we can move the needle on a district that we lose by 20 percent, and someone does the work and we only lose by 15 percent, that’s a win in my book as well.”

Other Kansas Democrats, like Pete Ferrell, a rancher and self-described “former Eisenhower Republican” who threw his hat in the ring for a seat east of Wichita, are running for less tangible reasons. No one has contested the district in ten years, and while Ferrell told me he hadn’t raised any money and wasn’t yet sure what his campaign would look like, to him it’s about the principle of the thing.

“I’m 73. I’ve probably got no business doing this,” he said. “But my God, I wasn’t gonna open that ballot up and not see a Democrat.”

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

When the United States took the pitch against Australia last week, millions of soccer fans tuned in. Anyone who hadn’t watched a match since the last World Cup might have noticed something new: players stopping midway through each half to drink some water. 

Introduced in the name of player safety, these mandatory three-minute breaks are a surprise controversy that has shoved climate change into the spotlight. Water-gate, blared a headline in The Independent, a UK newspaper. The chief sportswriter at the Daily Mail called the breaks a “momentum killer” and a “money-grabbing disgrace.”

“I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately…We’re inundated with commercials.”

Fans were equally outraged. Spectators at the match between England and Croatia booed when the referee blew the whistle, and comments poured in on Reddit. “I’m booing from home,” read one. Another said, “FIFA ruined the beautiful game.”

FIFA, the sport’s governing body and organizer of the tournament, declined to comment and referred Grist to its announcement of the policy in December. “The use of hydration breaks is part of a focused attempt to ensure the best possible conditions for players,” the statement read. 

Before this World Cup, cooling breaks only occurred when the wet bulb temperature—essentially a measure of air temperature and humidity combined—reached 32 degrees C, or about 90 F. Now the rule applies to all games, regardless of temperature, humidity, or other factors. It even applies to matches played indoors with air conditioning.

The move came after criticism of a tournament in the United States last summer, when the organization representing players, FIFPRO, said extreme heat should have canceled matches. “It has never been more important,” the organization said in a press release before the World Cup, “to give space to scientific knowledge and find mitigation strategies that protect the health and wellbeing of our players.”

There is no doubt that rest and water can help protect players in a world where extreme heat is becoming more common and increasingly dangerous. But many fans, and even athletes, think FIFA has gone too far. “If it’s really hot, obviously it will be good to put them in. But I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately, in my opinion,” said Virgil van Dijk, captain of the Netherlands’ squad. One Reddit user complained, “We’re inundated with commercials.”

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern.”

That’s been a frequent complaint, and it has led to speculation that FIFA implemented the breaks to boost the number of ads that are shown. Broadcasters aren’t required to go to full-screen commercials during hydration breaks—Telemundo and the BBC, for instance, don’t. FIFA also dictates that ads must start 20 seconds into the pause and end 30 seconds before play resumes. But that still creates 2 minutes and 10 seconds of extra ad time available per half, which can be extremely lucrative. The Wall Street Journal reports that a 30-second spot during early games sells for roughly $200,000 and rises to around $750,000 when the US national team plays. 

“They’ve essentially divided the game into quarters,” John Kosner, a former ESPN executive, told the Journal, “and made enormously valuable breaks.”

About 67 minutes into the opening game of the World Cup, the referee signaled for a mandatory hydration break. The American broadcaster, Fox, cut to commercials. But they ran longer than the respite, so players were left stalling and many viewers missed the restart entirely. Fox said it didn’t see the referee signal the start of the break because it came during a replay. FIFA doesn’t plan to punish the network. But the incident did little to quell people’s fears about commercialization—in part because the temperature at kickoff was a relatively balmy 74 degrees F.

FIFA has required the breaks in all matches as an effort to be fair across a tournament that sees teams playing in 16 stadiums and three countries. That argument, though, has again done little to ease criticism. “That doesn’t ring true to me,” said Chris Taylor, the head coach of the Vermont Green FC’s men’s team, explaining that every soccer game has different stoppages and different lengths. 

The Green are a climate-focused organization, so the dangers of extreme heat are particularly front of mind. Taylor sees hydration breaks as critical when the conditions warrant them, which they have numerous times during his decades-long career as a player and coach. Still, he questions FIFA’s motives at this World Cup. 

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern,” he said. “This World Cup has felt that every angle has been monetized.”

For years, some of Alaska’s most vulnerable children have faced harsh conditions for months at a time in locked psychiatric facilities. A new law aims to change that.

The legislation, HB 36, follows a 2023 Mother Jones investigation that found that the state’s Office of Children’s Services routinely placed foster kids at North Star Behavioral Health, Alaska’s only private psychiatric hospital for minors, when there were no available foster homes. Despite North Star’s troubling track record of assaults, escapes, and the routine use of seclusion and chemical restraints, foster children have been admitted to the facility hundreds of times in recent years. Some stayed for months after they were ready for discharge.

HB 36, which passed into law Monday and goes into effect in 90 days, will require a court to review a foster child’s placement at a psychiatric hospital within seven calendar days to determine if that child meets criteria for hospitalization. (Until the legislation passed, a preliminary injunction required a hearing within 30 days, but the hearings were sometimes delayed.)

“When this started showing up publicly, that made folks pay attention to it.”

Anchorage Democratic Rep. Andrew Gray, who first introduced the legislation in 2024, has said that the bill was inspired by Mother Jones’ reporting, as well as his own experience as a foster parent. Current and former foster youth rallied around the legislation, with dozens traveling to Juneau over the past three years to meet with lawmakers and testify about their experiences.

(Universal Health Services, the psychiatric hospital chain that owns North Star, did not respond to questions for this story but has said in the past that it adheres to policies intended to keep patients safe.)

“It was basically all-out chaos at the hospital,” says Amanda Metivier, who directs the nonprofit Facing Foster Care in Alaska. “When this started showing up publicly,” she said, “that made folks pay attention to it.”

But for Metivier and other foster care reform advocates, the legislative win was bittersweet. Last week, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed HB 52, another bill that aimed to protect vulnerable youth at psychiatric hospitals and had broad bipartisan support. It would have required the state’s health department to conduct unannounced inspections of psychiatric hospitals, including interviewing at least half of the hospital’s minor patients, and to provide annual reports to the legislature on the use of seclusions and restraints, among other things. Rep. Maxine Dibert, the Fairbanks Democrat who introduced the legislation, has said the bill was inspired in part by the prevalence of Native children in psychiatric facilities. 

“Everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection—not to actually fix the problems.”

In a letter to the house speaker, Dunleavy explained that he vetoed the bill because “psychiatric hospitals are already subject to strict regulatory and accreditation standards, and this bill adds duplicative inspection, reporting, and notification requirements in statute.”

Legislators attempted to override the veto on Friday but were four votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Rep. Zack Fields, an Anchorage Democrat, noted that even some North Star employees supported HB 52. Currently, the health department conducts announced inspections at the facility; in his floor speech speech, Fields anonymously quoted a North Star employee, who said that “everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection—not to actually fix the problems.”

Notably, North Star hired a lobbyist, Dianne Blumer, who was paid $41,000 in each of the past two legislative sessions to advocate on “issues related to mental health, workforce, background checks and State of Alaska budget.”

The institution of vulnerable youth in Alaska is a well-documented, long-standing problem. A landmark Department of Justice report in 2022 found that the state was violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by unnecessarily institutionalizing children far away from their families, often for months on end. Two years later, a state supreme court ruling concluded that children in state custody “are at substantial risk of being hospitalized for longer than they need, or when they do not need to be hospitalized at all.”

Like the Strait of Hormuz, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has exposed the limits of the power of the United States of America: President Donald Trump is also losing his war against algae.

In the face of thriving algal blooms and peeling “American flag blue” paint, the National Park Service on Monday began draining the pool for repairs. A contractor performing the work told E&E News that those repairs would not be done by July 4. The prior rehab, which Trump rushed to complete via no-bid contracts and more than $14 million in spending so far, has failed.

Trump, though, has blamed the problems on vandalism. And he has dispatched a hodgepodge army of law enforcement to protect the pool from “Radical Left Lunatics,” who he has said should face “Years in jail!”

Observing the action at the pool over much of the long weekend, we did not spot any antifa dumping algae, as MAGA conspiracy theorists allege. The hot temperature, shallow water and flawed filtration system means the green Scenedesmus algae can conquer the pool without human help.

There were, however, lots of cops. Walking around the pool at about 4 p.m. ET on Saturday, we counted at least seven US Marshals, some in “fugitive task force” tactical gear. They were supported by around 30 local police officers, volunteers who said they had been deputized for 30 days by the Marshals Service to help provide security for 250th anniversary celebrations. They came from Oklahoma City; Idaho Falls; Sarpy County, Nebraska; as well as Ontario, Wayne and Monroe counties in New York. They were mostly standing in the shade, and friendly. Some were hoping to catch Nationals game on a day off. They seemed sort of bored.

The cops were coordinating with a handful of Park Police officers and maybe a dozen National Guard troops from Georgia and Louisiana, who were patrolling the pool in small groups. Over the last few days, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have also appeared poolside.

On Saturday, there were issues with radio frequency connections, so a mounted Park Police officer rode a white horse between groups of officers to share information on potential threats to the pool. He was less chatty than the volunteer officers, but he said that the horse’s name was Delilah, and that she was 21 years old.

The officers explained that visitors could take paint chips, but peeling paint still attached was forbidden.

In the pool, seven or so Park Service employees, wearing boots, waterproof overalls and NPS hoodies for the sun—it was about 86 degrees and sunny—were vacuuming up algae using pumps attached to long poles. (They had by then given up pouring in hydrogen peroxide.) Machines were pushing what looked like white foam into the water: the “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that the administration has claimed would kill the algae. Generators powering the pumps hummed loudly as green-tinted water poured out into drains on the Mall.

Another dozen or so uniformed Park Service employees looked on from the shade. On the north side of the pool, a duck and eight ducklings sat on the edge of the water. A park ranger sitting nearby said neither the algae nor cleaning efforts would hurt them.

From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, tourists took pictures of the scene. A band, in traditional Polish garb, prepared to play folk music for a holiday marking the summer solstice. A tourist shop nearby sold $18 water bottles with stickers advertising Freedom 250, the semi-private group Trump is using to organize highly personal celebrations linked to the 250th anniversary.

By the pool, a person in a pink frog costume brandished a “Team Algae” sign and heckled two National Guard troops. “Let’s go algae, let’s go,” the frog chanted, along with something about “pond scum.”

A small boy, in an ice cream cone shirt, asked his mother if the critics were protesting the algae. “No,” she answered. “They’re mad at the president.”

“Did he mean to grow the algae?” the boy asked. “No,” she said. Then they went to get ice cream.

Near one of the drains, an older couple, maybe in their sixties, picked through the grass nearby for loose pieces of blue paint, having first checked with the Park Police that doing so was permissible.  

The officers explained that visitors were allowed to put their hands in the water. They could even take paint chips that were already detached. But peeling the paint still attached to the pool was forbidden.

The administration said Monday that Park Police have made five arrests and issued five citations for alleged vandalism. But an officer on the scene Friday evening said that they had also detained more than 20 people, in many cases without further action, for suspected pool tampering.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted that he had “just inspected the pool” and decried the vandalism he said he observed.

“WOW, who would do such a thing?,” Trump wrote. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!”

The president, though, didn’t view the pool from the ground. He appears to have formed his impression from a helicopter as he returned to the White House from Camp David.

Down below, one of the ducklings was photographed floating dead in water. (Experts note that most ducklings in the wild die before reaching maturity, so it’s not clear whether the algae or chemicals used to clean the pool were to blame.)

On Saturday around 5:30 p.m., the radios of the marshals we were walking past barked. “One male, black shoes, white socks, currently being detained,” someone said. “Eleven Charlie moved to intercept.” Two officers sped away in a golf cart.

Across the pool, Delilah galloped toward a group of National Guard troops surrounding a young man, in white socks, seated with his ankles crossed on the grass by the north side of the pool. A Park Police cruiser, siren on, pulled up.

By the time we made it around, a half dozen of the local police, seven National Guard troops and a couple Park Police officers surrounded the suspected vandal in a semi-circle, facing a small crowd of onlookers.

After a few minutes, they let the guy go. He declined to give his name. But he said he was from Indiana, and that he had stuck his hand in the water and pulled out a piece of floating paint. The officers had suspected that he pulled it off. He received a citation, he said. He walked off with his family, looking embarrassed.

The cops dispersed. There was a big pile of poop where Delilah had stood. In the water, the feds kept vacuuming the algae.

With more than 12.7 million members across some 46,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is massive. As easily the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it’s also one of the loudest voices in American religious life—it also runs six of the nation’s 10 largest theological seminaries, which train future pastors. As Bob Smietana, a veteran religion reporter with Religion News Service, told me last week, the SBC’s sheer size “gives them some kind of clout that other people don’t have.”

Or as William Wolfe, the president of the Center for Baptist Leadership, a group that aspires to make the SBC more conservative, put it to me in a phone call this weekend, “When the Southern Baptist Convention sneezes, the whole country says, ‘Excuse me.'”

Because of the SBC’s size, it’s also extremely influential politically—which is where the Center for Baptist Leadership, which Wolfe created with a handful of fellow SBC members, comes in. “The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks,” he says. “We don’t want to let them do that.”

“The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks. We don’t want to let them do that.”

There are signs that Wolfe and his allies are succeeding. Earlier this month, when tens of thousands of representatives from SBC churches met in Orlando for the annual conference, the group voted in favor of codifying an official ban on women pastors (though most SBC churches already allow only male pastors), affirmed robust immigration enforcement, and acknowledged the United States’ history of “sins such as slavery, racism, abortion, injustice, and sexual immorality.”

The group also elected a new president, Florida pastor Willy Rice, who is theologically and politically conservative, and has railed against critical race theory and decried the “woke riptide” in the denomination. The Center for Baptist Leadership endorsed Rice for SBC president; Rice has appeared on Center for Baptist Leadership podcasts and at events hosted by the group. Shortly after the meeting, on the Center for Baptist Leadership’s podcast, the group’s president, William Wolfe, hailed Rice’s victory as “the end of the SBC being steered by weaponized empathy.”

Indeed, the SBC appears to be making a significant course correction in the form of a sharp rightward tack—a major victory for Wolfe and his small but vocal group of right-wing leaders within the SBC, some of whom have ties to an ascendant movement of self-proclaimed Christian nationalists.

Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, submits a motion regarding women pastors during the Southern Baptist Convention on June 9 in Orlando.Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

The Center for Baptist Leadership emerged in early 2024 from what Wolfe and his colleagues see as a dangerous departure in the SBC from the conservative values—traditional family structures, clearly defined gender roles, a belief in the infallibility of the Bible—that have grounded the denomination since its founding. Over the last decade, the SBC moved toward the center, influenced by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and the movement to expose sexual abuse and harassment.

Wolfe and his colleagues oppose SBC leaders whom they see as “caught up in the spirit of the worldly ‘MeToo’ movement, DEI ideology, and social justice signaling,” according to the group’s website. Those misguided aims, the Center for Baptist Leadership claims, have led to a scourge of problems, including women pastors, financial secrecy, and an obsession with blaming the SBC as a whole for the sex abuse scandals in individual churches, thereby bringing “perverse, anti-Christian standards of justice to judge claims of abuse.”

But it isn’t just church matters that the SBC seeks to influence—it’s also national politics, a goal that Wolfe is well qualified to achieve. As I wrote two years ago:

Wolfe served in the first Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

Wolfe told me he believes that SBC members would largely agree with those sentiments. “It’s something Baptists historically believe, that we should be involved in politics and we should be unashamed about bringing our Christian beliefs and presuppositions into the political square,” he said. He said he could imagine a version of a Christian America where people of other faiths held office, though he noted that some Baptist founders “thought that only Christians should be able to hold elected office.” On the issue of women voting, he declined to weigh in, stating only, “I think that the 19th amendment was duly enacted and is the law of the land.”

On X, where he has 96,000 followers, Wolfe is a firebrand, regularly arguing against religious tolerance and multiculturalism: “The idea that ‘all religions deserve equal respect’ is one of the most disastrous lies of the modern age,” he fumed last week. On the same day, in another tweet, he wrote, “Mass migration is biological warfare waged by secular globalist elites against the native Christian peoples of the West.”

In our phone call, Wolfe stressed that his tweets don’t necessarily reflect the work of the Center for Baptist Leadership. But he also reaffirmed his social media statements, calling religious pluralism a “recipe for disaster” and arguing that “there are people who want to see native Christian Western populations diminished and negatively impacted by third-world migration.” He said he saw Hungary as an example of a country that has successfully handled immigration. “Hungary is a spiritually dead country in many ways, but it’s preserved its Christian heritage,” he said. “It’s preserved its people—they’ve not allowed their people to be replaced by millions of migrants.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

When I asked Wolfe what he meant by the statement about Christians being called to arms, he said it was more general than specific. “It was just sort of a basic point of Christians have been in that situation before many times throughout the centuries,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find ourselves in a position like that again.”

Wolfe isn’t the Center for Baptist Leadership’s only powerful connection to the Christian right. The fiscal sponsor of the group is American Reformer, an online magazine founded by Josh Abbotoy, an entrepreneur who also runs a venture capital firm that aims to build a Christian techno-utopian community in rural Appalachia. Abbotoy, who also serves as a visiting scholar at the Center for Baptist Leadership, told me via email that he sees the recent votes at SBC as indicative of a sea change in how Christians are beginning to relate to the broader culture. “I think we are starting to see a shift toward a cultural insurgency model,” he wrote to me, “in which evangelical leaders strategically adjust to the reality that broader society has become less amenable to Christian values.”

Michael Clary, a Kentucky pastor and Christian nationalist who serves on the advisory board of the Center for Baptist Leadership, also sees the SBC as needing a more muscular faith. In an email to me, he bemoaned a modern, excessively passive Christian culture, in thrall to a “loser theology” that demanded that the church “retreat into pietistic ghettos while we watch the world burn.” Instead, he wrote, Christians “should bring their convictions into public life, including their votes, their advocacy, and their cultural engagement.”

And there are signs that the SBC’s ties to Christian nationalists extend beyond the Center for Baptist Leadership. Consider Al Mohler, a prominent SBC leader who has served as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky since 1993. He has witnessed decades of social change, but put forth this year’s amendment to ban women pastors. He appeared last week on the podcast of Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor—though not a member of the SBC—who presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho. Mohler expressed frustration with what he considered a misconception that Baptist forefathers were “some kind of strict separationist when it came to Christian morality and the society.” Baptists, he said, actually had a lot in common with Christian nationalists like Wilson. “I have been calling for maximum Christian influence in the public square my whole life,” he said.

Smietana, the religion reporter, noted that the Center for Baptist Leadership’s contingent at the annual meeting, “didn’t have huge numbers.” The group’s budget isn’t publicly available because they exist under the financial umbrella of American Reformer, though Wolfe told me the organization is run “on a shoestring.” Still, Smietana said, “the group has really influenced the narrative and the public relations,” he said, through its social media presence, podcasts, and relationships its leaders have built with influential SBC members. The election of Rice and the other conservative victories, he said, “are a real win for them,” and a signal that the broader SBC may be open to their agenda.

Nathan Finn, a religion professor who leads the Institute for Faith and Culture at North Greenville University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, was careful not to overstate the Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence on the SBC. But he did acknowledge that it reflected a growing movement within the larger denomination toward a “populist distrust of institutions and elites.” 

The amendment that Mohler proposed to officially ban women pastors hasn’t been adopted yet; SBC leaders will hold the final vote at next year’s convention in Indianapolis. For Wolfe, this year’s meeting was confirmation of Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence—and a sign to continue the crusade. “Conservative reformers in the SBC aren’t the fringe,” he tweeted. “We are the representatives of what the broad base of grassroots Southern Baptists think & want. We are the center. Time to assume it and act accordingly.”