A lot of people want to get a hold of James Talarico these days. The 36-year-old Texas state representative and seminary student is a rising Democratic star. You—like 5.6 million others—may have seen him in your social-media feed, calling a proposal to place the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom “un-Christian” and the mark of a “dead religion.” Or perhaps you caught his recent two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Joe Rogan—who told him he should run for president. (He’s thinking about running for Senate.)

He’s also on the lam. The state speaker of the house ordered arrest warrants for Talarico and dozens of Democrats who left the state last weekend to prevent a vote on a mid-decade redistricting plan that would likely give Republicans five more congressional seats. “Right before we got on the flight to leave Texas, we all gathered in an interfaith prayer, holding each other’s hands, because this is not just a political struggle, it’s also a spiritual struggle,” Talarico says. I spoke to the legislator via Zoom from an undisclosed location outside Chicago on Thursday, hours after Republican Sen. John Cornyn—a man he may end up running against next fall—announced that the Trump administration would assign FBI agents to help “hold these supposed lawmakers accountable.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tim Murphy: Sen. John Cornyn says the FBI has agreed to help locate you. How does it feel to officially be wanted by the FBI?

James Talarico: Well, I mean, I think Senator Cornyn is trying to stay relevant in his primary battle with Ken Paxton. So I understand the gimmick, but I think it should trouble us that any politician is trying to use the resources of the state to arrest or remove duly elected legislators who are exercising their constitutional right to break quorum. The Texas State Constitution gives us this tool in our toolbox as the minority to check the abuses of the majority, and so we’re not doing anything wrong. And there’s about 200 years of history in this country of legislators breaking quorum, including Abraham Lincoln. You know, we’re here in Illinois, in the Land of Lincoln. And that’s appropriate because, because Abraham Lincoln broke quorum in 1840 as a state senator by jumping out of the window of the Illinois State Capitol. And thankfully, I didn’t have to jump out of any windows back in Texas. But this is not unusual. It is a tool the minority has. And so for Greg Abbott to threaten to remove us from office, for Ken Paxton and John Cornyn to be threatening our arrest, it is unacceptable in a democracy, and this is a page out of an authoritarian playbook we’ve seen in other countries, and it should be alarming to all of us, regardless of our political party.

TM: So what’s at stake here? Why are you here—wherever you are?

JT: Trump is asking Texas Republicans to redraw the maps that they just drew in 2021 to get him five more seats to protect his majority in Congress, because he’s worried about losing it in the next election, and it’s because his policies are unpopular, right? He’s starting wars and wrecking the economy. He’s protecting pedophiles. He’s kicking millions of people off their health care to fund tax breaks for billionaires, and those policies deserve to be evaluated by the American people and the only way we can hold the most powerful politician our country accountable is through free and fair elections, especially in the midterms, and that’s what’s at stake here. And it’s not just a Texas problem. It’s an American problem.

TM: What persuaded you to actually leave? Because it seems like there was a bit of debate among Democrats, and not all of your colleagues actually have left the state.

JT: When Donald Trump asked Georgia Republicans to find him 11,000 more votes after he lost the 2020 election, they said, No, sir. But when Trump asked Texas Republicans to find him five more congressional seats ahead of the 2026 elections, they said, How about Thursday? So the responsibility to defend and fix this representative democracy of ours fell to Texas Democrats, and 57 of us answered the call, and we’re proud to do so, regardless of what consequences we may face.

TM: Can you tell me a little bit about where you are, as much as you’re able to say?

JT: Well, we’re here in Illinois, and in a nondescript hotel room, as you can see, and that’s for security reasons. As you may have read, we had a bomb threat called into our hotel, and Ken Paxton has put out a tweet asking his followers to “hunt us down.” And so, you know, we’re trying to keep all of our members safe, all of our staff members safe, as we do this important work of fixing this democracy of ours so that it can work for every Texan and every American.

TM: What was that bomb threat like?

JT: It was early in the morning. I woke up to the bomb threat, and a lot of my colleagues did. And it was certainly scary, because we all had to evacuate, and law enforcement swarmed the premises, and we were outside for hours. But I think it’s a reminder that what we’re doing is very important. They wouldn’t be trying to bomb you if you’re not doing something consequential. And we feel that we are at the front lines of protecting and hopefully advancing the American experiment, because if people—Democrats, independents and Republicans alike—can’t hold their elected officials accountable in a midterm election, if they’re not able to change their government from the bottom up, if they’re not able to elect the representatives of their choice, then we no longer have representative democracy and and we’re not ready to accept that.

TM: Texas legislators make something like $7,200 a year. You’re not swimming in inherited wealth or anything like that. Are you putting everything on your card while you’re up here or is somebody else paying for the hotel room? How does this work financially?

JT: It depends. You know, we’re facing financial penalties, fines from the state legislature for breaking quorum. It’s about $500 a day. Those we’re going to pay ourselves, which certainly won’t be easy to do depending how long this lasts, but we will be paying those fines ourselves. Travel, food, lodging—that we’re able to pay out of our campaign accounts, out of the caucus’ account. And thankfully, you know, we have been flooded with grassroots donations from all across Texas, from all across America. You know, $5, $10, $15—regular people funding this operation of ours. And it’s appropriate because we’re fighting for the people, not just Democrats, but independents and Republicans too, and it’s appropriate that those people are the ones funding this effort.

TM: What did you expect from this episode, versus what you’ve gotten? Because it seems a bit more intense than what you went through in 2021.

JT: I think that’s right. I’ve been frankly shocked at how Texas Republicans have conducted themselves, you know, endangering the safety of their colleagues, threatening to remove those colleagues from their duly elected positions and  then, you know, people like Donald Trump sending in the FBI to find us. So that kind of rhetoric, those kind of actions, should be deeply disturbing to every American, regardless of their political affiliation, because we’ve seen how this authoritarian playbook works out in other countries, and it doesn’t lead anywhere good.

TM: There’s been a lot of legal threats swirling around this, from Ken Paxton, John Cornyn, Donald Trump, Greg Abbott. How much of this is kind of jockeying for the primary, as you mentioned, and how much of this is like real legal threats that you’re concerned about?

JT: It’s hard to tell. And you know, we think they’re on pretty dubious legal ground but unfortunately, our courts have become highly politicized. They’ve been bought by big money, particularly in Texas, and so it may not matter what the law says. It may just matter what the  politics requires, and so we’ll see how this plays out. But my colleagues and I are not going to be deterred. We are here to fight for our constituents and fight for all Texans. We’re here to fight for free and fair elections for every single person in this country and we’re participating in a long American tradition of standing up to bullies, of speaking truth to power, of civil disobedience, of good trouble.

TM: There’s a push to have Democrats respond in kind with redistricting elsewhere. It’s something that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has called for. Do you think that that’s something that Democrats can actually level the playing field with or is that a losing battle against a party that controls a lot more states?

JT: Our ultimate goal is to get the politics out of redistricting everywhere. We should ban gerrymandering across this country, in every state, red states and blue states alike. It’s why I filed a bill in the Texas legislature to create an independent, citizen led redistricting commission so that voters can choose their politicians instead of politicians choosing their voters. That said, if one side is intent on cheating—which is exactly what Texas Republicans are doing and what Donald Trump is doing by redrawing the maps in the middle of the decade at the direct request of the most powerful man in the country—they are attempting to rig the next election. There’s no other way to describe it. And so if that’s the case, if one side’s going to cheat, all bets are off. And Democrats should not unilaterally disarm, but we should maintain our vision for how we can ultimately fix this democracy so it can work for regular people all over the country.

TM: Do you really think that you can stop this particular redistricting effort from advancing, if you come back and Greg Abbott just calls another session and another session after that?

JT: If every American who took a brave stand throughout our history did it because they knew they were going to win, we’d probably have a very different country right now. Sometimes you have to stand up, even if you’re not sure if you’ll be successful. But I can just tell you, over the last four days of this special session and of this quorum break, we have shined a national, an international spotlight on this power grab in Texas, and that, in and of itself, is a victory. People and the media are talking about this in a way they weren’t before. Sometimes the media needs conflict to be able to report on the news, and so we’re happy to provide that to make sure that all Americans are informed about what’s happening in their name and what’s happening in their government, and how the most powerful politician in the country is trying to rig the upcoming midterm elections. But if we can inspire blue states to respond in kind, if we can inspire acts of courage across the country to stand up to these would be tyrants, then we’re going to consider that a victory.

TM: What would you like to be working on in a special session if you were back in Austin, not not dealing with redistricting?

JT: I think the top of the list is relief for those flood victims and their families in the Texas Hill Country, an area of the state that means a lot to me personally, where I’ve spent a lot of time, where my family has lived, and so we need to get that relief to that community, and we’ve got to prevent a disaster like that from happening ever again in our state. We showed up two weeks ago at the beginning of this special session, and we begged our Republican colleagues to prioritize flood relief and disaster mitigation, and they refused to do so. They held 12 hearings on redistricting, and they held two hearings on flood relief. They didn’t even file a flood bill, and so instead, they put flood victims and their families at the end of the agenda and used them as leverage to try to rig the next election and pass these correct maps. It’s cynical politics at its worst. It’s deeply immoral, and it should outrage all of us, regardless of our party.

TM: You’ve been floated as a candidate for US Senator and governor. Have you narrowed that search at all, or the timeline for that?

JT: Well, I am seriously looking at the US Senate race, but frankly, it’s kind of been put on hold. I was hired by 200,000 people in Central Texas to fight for them at the state capitol. I’m basically their attorney in state government, even though I’m not an attorney, I’m a former teacher. But that’s my job, to defend them and their interests, and that’s what I’m doing by breaking quorum and stopping their voices from being silenced, and I intend on doing this job before I start applying to other jobs. So once we stop this power grab and kill these corrupt maps, I’ll start thinking about other ways I may be able to serve in the future.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

It took Casey Moore, who relies on his power wheelchair, four months to get it repaired in 2023—and six months, from 2024 to this year, more recently.

“It’s this hiccup in my whole life,” said Moore, who works with Oregon Spinal Cord Injury Connection. “I had to use this junk chair, waiting on a simple part that, if I had access to it, I could have been back up and rolling within the week.”

In a 2022 survey by the consumer advocacy network PIRG, 40 percent of wheelchair users reported waiting 7 weeks or longer for repairs—more than seven weeks of lost mobility and autonomy.

Power wheelchairs in the United States are under the control of a duopoly, the subject of a 2022 Mother Jones article by Paul Roberts. The firms, National Seating & Mobility and Numotion, are both owned by private equity investors; each boasts an estimated annual revenue of over $400 million. Responding to Roberts in 2022, both firms acknowledged delays but argued that speedy repair was the norm—and, in Numotion’s case, contended that repairs were unprofitable. (Neither firm replied to a request for comment for this article.)

A strong right to repair law, “should require the manufacturer to provide… access to all the parts, tools and information you need to conduct the repairs.”

Many of those repairs could be performed by outside technicians, or users themselves—but, as a rule, the firms won’t sell the necessary parts, forcing most consumers to go straight to them for support.

That’s led to a proliferation of state-level campaigns for the right to repair: laws designed to prevent monopolies on maintenance, limiting manufacturers’ power to permanently lock customers in for repairs and regular service. Imagine not being able to go to a neighborhood mechanic, electrician, or locksmith: similar binds have sparked right-to-repair movements for everything from consumer electronics to farm equipment, beginning as early as the 1950s with a Justice Department finding that IBM held an illegal monopoly on business computer repairs.

Various right-to-repair laws have now either passed or been introduced in all 50 states, with movements in the 2010s extending to a wider range of electronics and appliances. In 2013, the Repair Association, which includes PIRG, was founded to push for right-to-repair laws, and led a coalition campaign for the right to repair personal electronics. For consumers, such laws push back against tech and industrial corporations that increasingly count on products breaking (or just becoming obsolete) as part of their business model.

Since 2022, some six states—California, Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—have passed strong laws allowing wheelchair users to seek third-party or DIY repairs (some laws, like California’s, apply only to power wheelchair users). Many of those campaigns involved some assistance from PIRG, supporting local activists on the ground.

Without such laws, advocates argue, companies that sell durable medical equipment like wheelchairs are under no real timeline to help their customers get back to rolling through life. “It doesn’t cost the state any money to pass this bill and just empower people with disabilities to make decisions on their own,” Moore said.

A strong right-to-repair law, said Nathan Proctor, PIRG’s right-to-repair campaign manager, “should require the manufacturer to provide, on fair and reasonable terms, access to all the parts, tools and information you need to conduct the repairs.”

No national bill in Congress has focused on the right to repair wheelchairs specifically, but Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in October to the Department of Health and Human Services that they were “especially concerned by the problems wheelchair users face, which are emblematic of challenges related to PE [private equity] involvement in the health care industry more broadly.”

“Currently,” the senators wrote, “wheelchair users seeking to repair their equipment face significant barriers as a result of a wheelchair supply market that is largely controlled by two PE-owned companies—National Seating and Mobility and Numotion—which fail to provide adequate support for timely repairs.”

In addition to corporate lobbying, right-to-repair advocates face challenges from the National Coalition for Assistive & Rehab Technology, a nonprofit group representing suppliers and manufacturers of Complex Rehab Technology, acknowledges that slow wheelchair repairs are an endemic problem but argues, in part, that “power wheelchairs should be serviced by professionals who are familiar with and properly trained to address the intricacies of their products”—namely, professionals associated with the power wheelchair duopoly.

In 2025 alone, New York’s state Senate unanimously passed the Consumer Wheelchair Repair Bill of Rights Act, while Florida’s state House unanimously passed the Repair of Motorized Wheelchairs Act. (A similar bill introduced in Alabama died in committee.)

New York state Sen. Patricia Fahy, who chairs the body’s Disabilities Committee, introduced that state’s legislation after working to pass a right-to-repair law for electronics. With New York’s 2025 legislative session over, the bill can’t enter law until next year, but Fahy told me she was willing to alter the bill if it meant getting it passed and signed next year.

“I don’t want to spend 10 years on this,” Fahy said. “When I did right-to-repair on electronics, we made so many changes in an effort to break the dam.”

It took two sessions for Washington’s state legislature to pass a right-to-repair bill that included wheelchairs, said Marsha Cutting, a wheelchair user and Washington resident who was closely involved in that fight. Cutting, who said she had a wheelchair scrapped as a result of repair errors by one of the wheelchair duopoly firms, said the bill first died in 2024, then stalled in the state House the following year, only passing after prolonged legislative back-and-forth this year.

Still, Cutting said, “We kind of have the best bill, because we managed to pass it without any amendments,” covering almost all possible types of mobility devices.

In Iowa, which has a more limited right to repair for wheelchair users, state Rep. Josh Turek—a wheelchair user and former account manager for Numotion—said he was disheartened by the challenges power wheelchair users, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, faced when trying to get repairs.

Matthew Clark, a wheelchair user, calls right to repair wheelchair laws a “stop-gap solution.”

“On a daily basis, we were inundated with the amount of denials and delays for wheelchairs and also wheelchair repairs,” said Turek, who may mount a Senate campaign. “These are folks that don’t have time for that kind of delay.”

In Iowa, as in many other states, power wheelchair users on Medicaid needed a doctor’s in-person prescription for repairs; in 2024, Turek put forward a bill to end that practice. Although it passed the state House unanimously, Iowa’s state Senate didn’t take it up.

“The Iowa Senate is a conundrum,” Turek said. “Tribalism is really set in thick there, where they don’t want to vote for even a good idea if it’s a Democrat idea.” Regardless, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services still implemented Turek’s proposal in July 2024.

A central argument against wheelchair right-to-repair laws, as with other such laws, is that users cannot be trusted to fix their own wheelchairs correctly. But many disabled wheelchair users, undeterred, have been doing just that—even where the law is against them.

Matthew Clark, who lives in Washington state, got his first wheelchair in preschool. Clark’s dad worked with him to fix it at home—long before 2025, when Washington passed its right-to-repair law—so that “learning wheelchair maintenance was just part of my everyday life,” he said. Even so, Clark calls right-to-repair laws a “stopgap solution.”

“If all things are equal,” Clark said, “I would much rather have my insurance pay [and not] have to pay out of pocket.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In October 2016, when an audio recording surfaced of Donald Trump bragging to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that he could kiss and grope the genitals of any woman he pleased because he was a star, one of America’s most venerated evangelical scholars withdrew his endorsement of Trump’s presidential run. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Wayne Grudem’s reversal. Pastors, theologians, and academics revered the Harvard and Cambridge-educated ethicist, co-founder of The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and translator of the English Standard Version of the Bible.

Just three months before the tape was released, Grudem had penned an essay for the politically conservative publication Town Hall titled, “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice.” In it, he wrote, “I did not support Trump in the primary season. I even spoke against him at a pastors’ conference in February. But now I plan to vote for him. I do not think it is right to call him an ‘evil candidate.’ I think rather he is a good candidate with flaws.” His first reason justifying this support was what Clinton would do to the Supreme Court. Three months later, after the tapes were released, he told the same publication that Trump’s remarks were “morally evil.”

Fast forward to 2020, and Grudem would do another U-Turn and re-endorse Trump. This whipsaw would become a pattern for evangelical giants.

Still, way back in 2016, evangelicals did hold to certain standards. Those were the days before the president of the biggest evangelical institution of higher learning, Liberty University, was caught literally with his pants down (well, unzipped) aboard a yacht and next to a woman not his wife. It’s worth mentioning that the disgraced Jerry Falwell, Jr., was also an early religious adviser to Trump. Both Trump and Falwell would feel the heat of evangelical opprobrium—and then be subsequently reinstated.

Trump did face a day of reckoning immediately after the release of the Access Hollywood clip. Pastor James MacDonald, then of the enormous Harvest Bible Church in Elgin, Illinois, and a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Committee, condemned what he heard on the tape as “lecherous and worthless.” What’s more, he publicly resigned from his coveted role on the campaign. The next day, the hugely popular Christian Post would report that a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll revealed that Trump’s evangelical support had “plummeted” by 11 points. Clearly, this wasn’t the end. Both Grudem and MacDonald would return to the fold and applaud Trump’s accomplishments. In a post-election interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Pat Robertson, Evangelical publishing titan, Steven Strang, of Charisma Media, pointed out that “God intervened” and evangelicals voted for Trump in record numbers, even though Trump was a guy “we didn’t even necessarily like.”

And so it all began. One of the maddening—and seemingly unanswerable—questions for many concerned Americans is how deeply religious Christian voters have remained so loyal to President Donald Trump despite his many divorces, relentless vulgarity, flagrant dishonesty, and conviction for sexual assault. And now with the recent controversies around the Epstein files, Trump’s friendship with the convicted child trafficker, and the vast conspiracy theories surrounding it all, this question seems even more urgent and baffling. How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?

How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?

To understand this frustrating phenomenon, one must appreciate that for white American evangelicals, Trump’s MAGA movement is, at its core, religious, which is how deeply religious voters experience it. Religious commitments don’t die or even change quickly or easily.  What drives the MAGA-religious is passion, identity, and even something so transcendent that it elevates a believer’s consciousness to unshakable sublimation to the leader—there are no unforgivable transgressions, and that includes pedophilia and sexual violence. For them, the Epstein affair is a ruse ginned up by God-haters who want to bring down the man who embodies their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, and their country. I know because, for much too long, I helped lay the groundwork for what is taking place today.

For over 40 years, I’ve been an evangelical minister, educated in evangelical institutions, serving in evangelical churches and organizations, and occupying top posts in evangelical denominations. I know my people well. My life and profession were devoted to advancing the Christian Gospel, but for 30 of my 40 years of ministry, I was also convinced that conservative political activism was an essential part of my calling. I attacked “liberals” from the pulpit and worked tirelessly to end legal abortion in America. It was a matter of faith for me and my colleagues that we were engaged in nothing less than a religious war, pitting right against wrong, the righteous against the godless, the Republicans against the Democrats.

But a few years before Donald Trump became president, I recognized how mistaken my fellow Christian nationalists and I were in conflating our religion with our politics. Some deep research for my late-in-life doctoral dissertation about the role of the German Evangelical church in supporting Hitler was the catalyst for a new conversion. I found myself almost looking in the mirror when reading about the unholy marriage of faith and politics and the catastrophic results of these compromises. I broke with my religious tribe and co-conspirators. Since then, I have been part of two very different worlds. One is occupied by (lower case “o”) orthodox Christians who believe the Bible is God’s infallible revelation to humankind and holds the keys to temporal and eternal happiness. The other is dominated mainly by skeptical secularists, who see some positive elements in religion but have concluded that American Christianity has mostly damaged efforts for social justice and undermined fundamental human rights.

Nothing since Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released has underscored the deep hypocrisies within my community as its reaction to Bondi’s Epstein decision, defying her earlier promise to disclose the perpetrator’s client list and everything else about him in the government’s possession that had been a hallmark in conspiracy theories about the so-called deep state. She made that promise to none other than Fox News, the top news source for white American evangelicals. There was also FBI director Kash Patel’s assurance included in an official DOJ news release that “we will bring everything we find to the DOJ to be fully assessed and transparently disseminated to the American people as it should be.”

The files, of course, involve Epstein’s indefensible record of sex trafficking and pedophilia. Obviously, this is beyond the bounds of any acceptable behavior, and for members of faith communities, any level of sexual transgression constitutes a particularly grievous sin. While ministry celebrities can sometimes get away with sexual impropriety—see Jerry Falwell, Jr. above—pastors of smaller, evangelical churches are often summarily dismissed from their posts and defrocked, leaving them essentially unemployable.

And we have been just as rough on politicians. When then-President Bill Clinton’s hookups with a White House intern became known in 1998, my colleagues and I at the conservative National Clergy Council, representing a wide spectrum of conservative church leaders, organized a news conference to demand his immediate resignation. Similarly, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia and conservative icon, was denied what had previously been enthusiastic support from evangelicals when he came under fire from Democrats and Republicans for ethics violations.

We would have given him a pass on the 84 ethics complaints against him that focused mostly on financial improprieties, but evangelical House member (and former NFL star) Steve Largent of Oklahoma, among others, made sure we knew that Gingrich was an adulterer. (Something Gingrich admitted to years later in a radio interview with beloved ministry figure James Dobson.) Though we weren’t certain about him cheating on his wife—who also suffered from cancer—the fact that Gingrich was a convinced Darwinian evolutionist obsessed with dinosaurs made us suspicious enough to abandon him. After all, an adulterous Darwinian was twice unforgivable. He ended up resigning both his speakership and congressional seat.

But there is nothing in our political history to compare with the evangelicals’ devotion to Trump. No matter how the Epstein files controversy unfolds—and even what the files might reveal, if and when they are ever released—or the related backlash from right-wing podcasters, or the resulting tensions within the GOP, nothing will break their support. The reason goes to the heart of how Trump and his enablers have marketed MAGA to religious voters, how those voters now experience the movement, and the role that conspiracy theories circulating among evangelicals play in the drama. Most born-again types don’t embrace the wildest QAnon plots like elites kidnapping children to harvest youth serum from their bodies, or that JFK Jr. is still alive. But our culture club does harbor its own tall tales, including one about a secret Satanic government run by Freemasons. Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of evangelicals knows that we’ve always been susceptible to the sensational, spectacular, and, frankly, the simply unbelievable.

Trump knows how to use our collective gullibility for his benefit. He can read a room, and when he summoned some 1000 top ministry leaders to a Times Square hotel ballroom in June 2016, he immediately understood what it would take to woo them away from the other GOP presidential hopefuls, co-religionists Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. I declined the invitation, but a close colleague texted me throughout his time in that room.

Trump asked the assembled clerics what they cared about, and they told him Hillary Clinton’s anti-Christian elitism, ending Roe v. Wade, and stopping LGBTQ progress, especially reversing the Supreme Court’s Obergefell opinion legalizing same-sex marriage. My contact reported to me that as attendees made their comments into microphones set up for that purpose, Trump listened and nodded his head with interest. The impression I got from my friend’s texts was that Trump played to his audience’s fears and grievances. He assured them they were right about everything and that he’d do what was necessary to fix what was wrong, in particular, appoint anti-Roe justices. He said he would fight for Christians and defend Christianity. He received a standing ovation, and from then on, Trump had virtually every prominent evangelical influencer in his pocket.

Hats reading, “God, Guns and Trump,” and “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” are sold at a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio in 2024. Jessie Wardarski/AP

But what Trump didn’t know is that evangelicals have a long history of falling in line when presented with charlatans and manipulative, vainglorious narcissists masquerading as saviors. Since the 16th century, during the early days of the German Reformation, when the term Evangelisch first appeared, evangelicals have attracted flamboyant, extravagant, even vulgar hucksters and opportunistic divines. Consider Thomas Müntzer, the son of a wealthy burgher in the Harz Mountains, the land of the Grimms’ fairytales. A mystic and hypnotic speaker, he could also inspire hilarity in a crowd by calling his detractors “donkey-farting fools.” His apocalyptic call for the rout of anti-Christian earthly governments and his insistence that God would use the common folk to overthrow the elites eventually led to his role in the Peasants’ War, the greatest European insurrection until the French Revolution of 1789.

Two hundred years after Müntzer, the towering British evangelist George Whitefield arrived in the colonies, and no less than Benjamin Franklinwrote in his Autobiography, “The Multitudes of all Sects and Denominations that attended his Sermons were enormous,” observing “the extraordinary Influence of his Oratory on his Hearers, and how much they admired & respected him, notwithstanding his common Abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half Beasts and half Devils.” In the centuries after Whitefield, a host of mesmerizing pulpiteers emerged in the United States. During the Great Awakening in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the fierce Jonathan Edwards and fiery Charles Finney captivated the new nation, sought after as much for their entertainment value as out of religious conviction. In the late 1800s, the exotic tent revivalist Maria Woodworth-Etter gained notoriety for her showmanship by regularly falling into a trance while preaching. At the new century’s dawn, scores of colorful clerics crisscrossed the nation, filling halls and arenas, among them famed Philadelphia Phillies base-runner-turned-anti-liquor-crusader Billy Sunday. Credited with helping pass the 18th Amendment banning alcoholic beverages, Sunday is remembered for his eye-popping stage gymnastics, including jumping atop chairs and tables.

In the roaring twenties, at the mammoth Los Angeles megaphone-shaped mega church, Angelus Temple, the Reverend Amie Semple McPherson staged dramatic productions that rivaled Hollywood’s silent films and later talkies. In 1923, she launched a religious radio station, KSFG (for “Kall [sic] Foursquare Gospel), debuting its signal with an eye-catching float in the annual Los Angeles Rose Parade. McPherson was not only the first woman granted a federal broadcasting license, but she was also one of the first media ministers to be the subject of a sex scandal. In 1926, McPherson disappeared from a California beach, only to reappear on another beach in Mexico five weeks later, claiming she had been kidnapped and resuming her ministry. After her death from an overdose of unprescribed secobarbital in 1944, several biographers unearthed evidence that church staff and others had suspected she and her radio studio technician had enjoyed a tryst while sequestered in a cabin not far from where she went missing.

A more sober version of evangelical celebrities emerged in the 1940s, and with them came an impressively sophisticated and well-monied Christian entertainment industry that recruited hundreds of thousands of patrons.

Personalities like Charles Fuller of the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, Percy Crawford of the Young People’s Church of the Air, and Donald Grey Barnhouse of the Bible Study Hour won millions of converts, who also became a ready market for magazines, books, vinyl sermon records, and, with the arrival of Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures in 1951, full-length films with spiritual messages. By the 1970s, evangelicalism was on the cultural ascendency, with the largest churches in any given location becoming “mega-churches,” filling the airwaves with multiple AM, FM, VHF, and UHF stations, and routinely achieving capacity crowds for events held in sports stadiums, concert halls, and open-air music festivals. That set the stage, literally and figuratively, for politicians to exploit, which is just what Ronald Reagan did in 1980, winning the presidency by an electoral landslide.

Evangelicalism encompasses many styles and streams—fundamentalist, holiness, Bible churches—but none are as dynamic and fecund as the Pentecostal sects. Each has a singular approach to MAGA, Trump, and Epstein, but none are more ardent than the Pentecostals. Disparaged as Holy Rollers and Tongues-Talkers for their highly emotional worship and ecstatic prayers, even by fellow born-again believers, numbering approximately 600 million worldwide, with ten percent of them in the US, making them the dominant strain of evangelicals. A subset of Pentecostals, called Charismatics, form the core of MAGA’s religious adherents. Within that group is another theological variant often called the “prosperity gospel,” referring to a teaching that purports health and wealth as marks of divine approval. Its luminaries are usually the ones you see in those Oval Office prayer photos, placing their outstretched arms towards Trump, with the biggest winners having shoved their way close enough to lay their open hands on his shoulders, or, if especially lucky, the skin of his neck.

With origins at the turn of the last century in the New Thought Movement and its mind-over-matter theory of human improvement, the Christianized version of the Prosperity Gospel gained traction after the 1952 publication  of New York’s famed Marble Collegiate Church minister Norman Vincent Peale’s blockbuster book, The Power of Positive Thinking. (Trump claims Peale as his first and most influential pastor.) The concept was given a Pentecostal gloss in the late 1960s by Oklahoma celebrity preacher Kenneth Copeland, who started as a chauffeur for another health-wealth pioneer evangelist, Oral Roberts. Today, the 86-year-old Copeland is an evangelical oligarch with his own airport for his private jet fleet.

Which brings us to contemporary Florida megachurch pastor Paula White (who also owns a jet), one of the first evangelical backers of Trump in his quest for the presidency. He called her after seeing her on television in 2002, bringing her to his Atlantic City casino for private prayer and Bible studies. He has since twice appointed the thrice-married White, whose current husband is a former member of the rock band Journey, as one of his top White House religious liaisons.

White has taken Peale’s positive thinking theology into the 21st century with her perfectly coiffed blond hair, haute couture wardrobe, strutting on her church stage in gold stiletto sandals. During a January 2025 sermon, “How to Fight and Win in Spiritual Warfare”, an Elton John look-alike keyboardist provided syncopated background riffs while White, on this occasion, in skinny jeans, over-the-knee high-heeled boots, and a chic faux shooting jacket, warns listeners about a malevolent “league” of people who don’t even like each other coming together to “work treason against God’s people.” She repeats the word “treason” with added emphasis.

Like White, many lesser-known self-proclaimed prophets and visionaries produce massive “revelatory” content for numerous television and radio shows, websites and podcasts, social media posts and reels. Because these soothsayers are virtually all charismatic, they overwhelmingly endorse Trump’s politics. After his 2016 victory, Oklahoma-based “Messianic rabbi” (meaning a Jewish clergyman who believes in Jesus) Curt Landry wrote to his supporters that Trump was God’s “anointed.” He could prove this assertion with simple math: the 45th president would be “70 years, 7 months, and 7 days old on his first day in office,” alluding to a sequence of three numeral sevens, which many charismatic Christians believe symbolizes God’s perfect work on earth.

“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.”

One of the superstars in the prophetic circuit is Jonathan Cahn, another messianic rabbi, who tells of being converted to Christ after being hit by a train locomotive when he was a teenager. Cahn checks all the right boxes for evangelicals eager to receive messages from God: as a Jew by birth, his ethnicity places him closer to the flesh-and-blood Jesus; a bearded, short, and stocky dark-complexioned man, he conjures the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures (it doesn’t hurt that he almost always dresses exclusively in black, head to toe). As a prolific author of a string of best-selling books with titles like The Harbinger, The Book of Mysteries, The Dragon’s Prophecy, and the Oracle, he feeds readers a constant stream of dopamine hits, claiming God’s spirit directly delivers writings to him. Cahn has been the most explicit and detailed apologist for Trump’s divinely appointed role in God’s end-times plan for the salvation of souls and the restoration of divine order in the universe. He stresses the mystical connections between Trump’s last name, birthdate, election, and relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, vigorously defending Trump’s post of a meme declaring himself on a “mission from God.”

In Cahn’s video message, “The Mystery Behind The Trump Assassination Attempt,” he weaves an elaborate comparison between the Bible’s description of the consecration of the high priest in the Book of Leviticus, with blood being applied to the subject’s ear, thumb, and toe, to what happened on July 13, 2024. The significance of Trump’s damaged ear is obvious, but the absence of Trump’s shoes after the melee is also laden with power because “the priest was shoeless. So Trump was shoeless when the blood was touching at every point. In fact, based on the biblical evidence and the Levitical writings, the removal of the shoes was part of the ministering of the priest.” Among the 7300 comments garnered after some two million views was this one from@pattyfowler9987, “I also noticed. [sic] A change in the temperament of Trump after his near-death experience. That is when I became a supporter of Trump. There has been a transformation in him. Just the way his voice sounds, the words he says, and the way he cares for people. Praise God for mighty works. Amen! Pray for America!”

As a “prophet,” Cahn and hundreds like him are to be paid deference, if not obeisance, because even questioning or challenging them is considered to be a form of spiritual rebellion that risks defying God’s chosen instrument. To contain dissent, pastors often quote a verse from the Book of First Samuel, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.” The line of reasoning is obvious to any believer: Witchcraft and idolatry are associated with Satan, so anyone rebelling against God’s prophetic vessel is in league with the devil. No self-respecting evangelical wants that. So, to be an obedient child of God, you learn to suppress doubts, keep your mouth shut, and do what the divine emissary tells you to do.

Evangelical supporters of Donald Trump are being led in prayers inside the El Rey Jesus church in Miami in 2020.Adam Delgiudice/SOPA/Zuma

As more and more evangelicals joined the Trump train, his rallies took on features that looked and felt a lot like what evangelicals experience in church on Sunday morning or in a revival tent: fervent opening prayers, gospel and country music groups, and emotional testimonials of how patrons were once on the other side, but they came to see the light and get behind the only true patriot leader, Donald J. Trump.

Episcopal priest Nathal Empsall told the NBC News THINK site in 2022 that the final moments of a Youngstown, Ohio, Trump rally resembled what evangelicals know as an “altar call.” It’s a prayerful and reflective moment after a service when preachers or worship leaders admonish attendees to examine their hearts to see if they are right with God. Just as would be done in a church or evangelistic meeting, serene music played in the background.

For faith-centered voters, it was perfectly natural when spin-offs of main MAGA events took on explicitly religious characteristics. Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour, which added immersion baptisms to its program offerings, was reminiscent of America’s two Great Awakenings. Former multi-level marketing genius Jenny Donnelly’s 2024 “A Million Women” pro-Trump event on the Washington Mall recalled the epic 1997 Promise Keepers’ “Stand in the Gap Sacred Assembly,” which claimed to have assembled a million God-fearing men in the same location. Not only that, but the updated Trump event was decreed from its stage by Prophet Jonathan Cahn as a “mass exorcism revival.”

Employing Christian language, music, and “ordinances,” like baptisms and exorcisms, has not only been a clever marketing device for MAGA promoters, but it has also successfully laid out the explicit terms of the relationship for deeply spiritual but heretofore apolitical constituents. During my years circulating in Charismatic and prosperity gospel churches, I never fully felt comfortable with their more extreme expressions of spirituality, but I did respect the congregants’ needs and desires to do so. I came to know hundreds of Charismatic Christian leaders, lay and ordained, and shook the hands of thousands of attendees in church lobbies. Back then, my greatest frustration was how uninterested most of the people in the pews were in politics. They saw campaigns, elections, and policy as worldly distractions from the far more important spiritual realm. Trump’s devotees have solved that problem by sacralizing every step of the MAGA initiation process. Ministry Watch, a donor watchdog group, reports that while Trump addressed the February 2024 convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, “One vendor in the NRB exhibition hall turned a MAGA chant of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—meant to send an obscene message to President Biden—into ‘Let’s Go Jesus’ flags, hats and shirts.”

Over time, these techniques have helped MAGA followers engage in a momentous transfer of power: Moving their devotion from Jesus to Trump as the embodiment of God’s favor for America, shifting their respect for their pastors to MAGA celebrities as mouthpieces of truth, and channeling the heavenly exhilaration they feel during worship inside a sanctuary to the group high of belonging to a much larger movement on the ascendency of unrivaled earthly power.

“One vendor in the National Religious Broadcasters exhibition hall turned a MAGA chant of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—meant to send an obscene message to President Biden—into ‘Let’s Go Jesus’ flags, hats and shirts.”

The fusion is inseparable once the transition from God and church to Trump and MAGA is complete—and the 2024 election sanctioned that completeness. For these Christians, MAGA is their new denominational home. Like baptized Catholics, cradle Methodists, and multi-generational Pentecostals, what I now call *MAGA-*anity (as distinct from *Christi-*anity) forms a follower’s deepest, most meaningful, and resilient identity. And because it’s transcendent, the bond cannot be loosened by outside forces—not by reports of a souring economy, not by videos of shrieking moms being separated from their children by masked ICE agents, not even by the call of Christianity Today magazine to release the full Epstein files. About the possibility that Trump may be implicated in Epstein’s crimes, the Reverend Kenneth Johnson, a long-time friend of mine and widely-admired conservative evangelical leader in deep-red Adams County, Ohio, along the Kentucky border, said of the Trump voters he ministers to, “If Trump is accused, most of his followers still would not believe it.” Of course, for the few outside Adams County who might believe it, there is always the Bible’s King David, who committed both adultery and murder, but was forgiven and was called “a man after God’s own heart.”

For right-wing Catholics, politicized evangelicals, and socially frightened Pentecostal-Charismatics, MAGA is the new American religion. The experience believers have in their relationship to it is anything but rational. I have struggled to find a parallel phenomenon in American history. The closest I can get is the early days of Mormonism, a uniquely American religio-political-cultural movement. Today’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is a far cry from founder Joseph Smith’s early 19th-century millenarianism, characterized by euphoric visions and dreams, encounters with angelic apparitions, and magical glasses enabling the prophet to know and understand what really was going on in the world. Smith practiced plural marriage, taking upwards of 40 wives, many of them in their teens, while typical Mormon men of the era would keep two wives. And then there’s this: The Mormon founder’s last act on earth was running for president in 1844. Unlike MAGA’s founder, God did not spare Smith from an assassin’s bullet.

Defeating MAGA’s appeal to religious voters will not happen because of continued inflation, mistaken government abductions and deportations, nor will it happen because Donald Trump kept uncomfortably close company with a child molester. Even constitutional arguments will not emancipate them from the cult-like clutches of their new spiritual overlord. For those who see the Bible as the only authoritative rulebook for themselves, their country, and the people of the world—and who interpret the Bible only as the MAGA prophets instruct them to—the Constitution can be more of a problem than a solution. After all, the Bill of Rights applies to all Americans—believers, non-believers, every race and ethnicity, of any political stripe, or none at all—including those who don’t agree with Donald Trump. For MAGA devotees, this kind of equality is a recipe for our country’s failure, not success.

When you see the United States as a “Christian country,” as the MAGA religious do and are convinced that white people of European descent are best suited to rule it, you might think we’d be better off without the Constitution or even democracy in any form. True believers are convinced Christ will return to earth not to establish a constitutional democracy but an absolute theocratic monarchy in which the ruler can never be questioned. In the end, this both explains what we are witnessing in the evangelical dismissal of the Epstein scandal and encapsulates the gravest danger we face as Americans.

Defeating MAGA will only happen over time. It will require the passing of its charismatic, deified leader, either by term limit, dementia, or death, but only if that epochal event is preceded by a vigorous and unrelenting challenge to MAGA ideas, operations, and personalities using religious concepts, language, and biblical texts. Even with all of that, it will be at least a generation before MAGA is either socially domesticated or tamed into a marginal and largely inconsequential fringe group. Until then, we can mitigate MAGA’s damage to human lives, the social fabric, and public and private institutions by tirelessly exposing its nefarious intentions and actions to the light of day. As another favorite Bible verse of evangelicals reminds us, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

The United States is home to millions of small businesses that form the backbone of countless communities. Even during the best of times keeping shops solvent can be a struggle, but when climate-driven disasters strike, the impact on mom-and-pops can be particularly devastating—and prolonged.

“The news coverage has definitely focused on the physical destruction,” said Kyle McCurry. He is the director of public relations for Explore Asheville, an organization that promotes the North Carolina city, which Hurricane Helene pummeled with torrential rain and flooding last fall. “But sometimes what’s less visible is the economic impact on small businesses in our community over time.”

Whether it’s hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, or ice storms, small businesses are more vulnerable to climate shocks than larger businesses, said Shehryar Nabi, a senior research associate at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. He co-wrote a recent report outlining the hurdles small businesses face from severe weather. They can be hobbled by a range of challenges, from limited preparation resources  to a lack of post-disaster financing.

“One reason we focused on small businesses here is because of their importance to the US economy,” said Nabi. That was certainly the case in Asheville, a city known for its artists, breweries, and boutiques. Helene not only destroyed homes and upended lives, it sent the region’s economy into a tailspin.

In 2023, McCurry said, visitors to the area spent $2.9 billion. Last year, Helene hit Appalachia right before the busy fall foliage season, when tourists flock to places like Asheville to see the leaves turn. McMurry says the storm, which knocked out some municipal services for weeks, led to a 20 percent to 40 percent drop in annual business revenue.

Ten months later, a  slew of businesses haven’t reopened: Vivian’s restaurant, Pleb Urban Winery, and TRVE Brewery, to name a few. Another was New Origin Brewery, which started pouring in 2021 and soon had fans lauding it as their favorite brewery in Asheville. Although the floodwaters inundated the business, the bulk of the destruction occurred when railroad cars floated off nearby tracks and crashed into the building.

“There’s not a way to get money for damages in that scenario,” said Dan Juhnke, one of New Origin’s founders. Even after maxing out the brewery’s flood insurance claim, it wasn’t enough to cover the damage. The only other option was to take on more debt from the federal Small Business Administration, or SBA, which didn’t seem prudent. Ultimately, Juhnke and his business partner decided to apply for a Federal Emergency Management Agency-funded buyout program that purchases flood-damaged property and limits rebuilding as a way to mitigate the damage from future storms.

“We signed up for it and have been waiting almost a year now,” said Juhnke.

“The natural tendency for many small business owners [is] to be reluctant to really engage with the risks that they’re exposed to.”

McCurry estimated that, overall, around 85 percent of Asheville businesses have reopened in some form, which is relatively good news. According to 2014 national data from FEMA and the Department of Labor, 40 percent of small businesses do not reopen after a natural disaster and another 25 percent shutter within a year.

These waves of impacts are coupled with limited support options for small businesses in both the long and short term. While FEMA has individual and public assistance programs, there is little if any funding for businesses. The SBA often offers low-interest loans, but the paperwork can be burdensome and the money might not start arriving for months.

Only 14 percent of businesses were able to rely on support from the federal government, according to an analysis of the 2021 Small Business Credit Survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Support makes a meaningful difference,” said Nabi. “For a lot of businesses it is the difference between closing down and surviving, but it doesn’t reach all the businesses that could benefit.”

State and local governments, private lenders, and community fundraising are other potential sources of money. New Origin, for example, raised more than $100,000 via a GoFundMe campaign but fell short of its $300,000 goal. A fund that Explore Asheville established has brought in $2.1 million, which has been awarded to more than 500 businesses.

Still, Nabi said, these avenues don’t usually address one of the toughest challenges facing businesses after a storm: liquidity. Even a month or two of disrupted cash flow can devastate some operations, which is why experts point to pre-disaster planning as one of the most effective steps a business can take to help protect itself.

“Often businesses see contingency planning as a distraction from the core thing they want to do,” said Benjamin Collier, an associate professor in the Department of Risk and Insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business. But things like better understanding your insurance coverage, or where to move inventory in the event of a threat, should be routine steps for business owners and generally aren’t expensive.

“The natural tendency for many small business owners [is] to be reluctant to really engage with the risks that they’re exposed to,” he said. “This is a call to have more buffers and be more cautious.”

Nabi also underlined the importance of planning, but says structural change could help as well. Greater use of parametric insurance, which automatically pays out when a specific event like a disaster happens, would allow quicker access to funds. Shifting more money to pre-disaster preparation could help businesses avoid the worst impacts of a storm, too. “The financing for preparation is limited compared to what’s available post-disaster,” said Nabi.

Pat Nye is the regional director for the Los Angeles Small Business Development Network. Earlier this year the counties he oversees saw historically devastating wildfires, and one thing that he noticed was that unlike with residential properties, insurance companies hadn’t offered small businesses discounts for any improvements they might have made to make their buildings more fire-resilient.

“As it stands, there is no incentive that exists for this work,” said Nye. “A lot of stuff just focuses on homeowners.”

Governments often don’t do enough to include small businesses in their recovery plans either, contends Kristen Fanarakis, the associate director of small business policy and innovation at the nonprofit Milken Institute. She pointed to a landscaper in the Asheville area who spent weeks helping clear debris after Helene without pay and ended up facing eviction. Those are the kind of businesses, she said, that municipalities should be hiring and including in rebuilding efforts.

More broadly, a report Fanarakis wrote called for a cross-agency “small business resilience czar,” standardized disaster assistance forms, and quicker grant dispersal, among other recommendations. She called the current system “very reactionary” and argues for increased attention to not just the immediate impacts of disasters but the long-term economic fallout as well.

“When we think about fortifying small businesses,” she said, “it’s about going beyond a physical structure.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In 2018, while on a medical mission near the Gaza border, an Israeli sniper shot Dr. Tarek Loubani in both legs. Despite this, Loubani, an emergency room specialist and activist, has returned to Gaza almost every year from his home in Canada to help treat Palestinians. For the last two months, he has been working out of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

The reports coming out of Gaza over the last month have been grim. Aid groups say a “worst case for famine” is playing out in the strip. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations report that only a fraction of the needed aid has been delivered to a starving population. One in three people have not eaten for days, according to a recent UNICEF report, and 80 percent of deaths of children in the region are due to starvation. A whistleblower told Mother Jones that aid distribution in the region is “abhorrent.”

These reports come in stark contrast to the publicity around efforts by the Trump Administration, including the touting of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF). Last week, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and President Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff spent more than five hours touring a GHF food distribution site in Rafah, where the UN says more than 1,373 Palestinians have died trying to access aid since late May.

 ”President Trump and everybody around him belongs in jail.  What they have done is to actively support and perpetuate a genocide.”

“Over 100 MILLION meals served in 2 months,” wrote Ambassador Huckabee in a post on X shortly after his trip. This week, Huckabee said that the US would throw in its support to expand the GHF from 4 sites to a total of 16 sites across Gaza. This is despite the Financial Times reporting the sites are “death traps” where hungry Palestinians go for food only to be shot at by the Israeli Defense Forces. (In a statement, the Gaza Humintarian Fund said reports about its failures are part of a “disinformation campaign” and some doctors in the region are “not aiding civilians, they’re aiding Hamas.”)

Dr. Loubani is about seven miles from Rafah. He spoke to Mother Jones last week about conditions on the ground.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve said that you’ve seen starvation in every patient that you’ve seen. What is that like in medical terms?

So when I first came, I understood that Palestinians hadn’t eaten for two months. But I was in denial about how bad it was. What I saw was that every day, patients were bad. I remember the first time that I saw a little girl, she was eight months old, brought to me—she was sticks and bones and she was dead. And her father had brought her for resuscitation because he assumed there was something we could do.

Realizing this is real… The patients kept getting thinner over the two months I’ve been here, until the point around a month ago, where I had to admit to myself that I’m not seeing any patients with fat anymore. I’m not seeing any patients where I can’t make out their ribs, or I can’t make out their spine.

The starvation, truly, is a hundred percent. What I can tell is that somebody used to be overweight before—you know, you can see how much skin they have or had. But right now every single patient that I see is suffering from some level of malnutrition, and most of the patients that I see are suffering from moderate to severe forms of malnutrition.

Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Ambassador Mike Huckabee just made an unprecedented trip into Gaza, supporting the claim that the Gaza Humanitarian Fund has had 100 million meals served in just two months. Based on what you’ve been seeing, do you find that to be an accurate estimate?

The idea that a hundred million meals have been served is laughable.  It would mean that there wouldn’t be such a level of famine, which is clearly not the case.

Palestinians are literally in a death run every single time that the GHF opens.  Everything that my patients tell me is that they have to cross Israeli lines while under fire. They have to bunker down, wait until the GHF opens, and some days they don’t.

On the issue of starvation in Gaza, President Trump told Axios that “we want to help people. We want to help them live. We want to get people fed. It is something that should have happened [a] long time ago.” What would you say to President Trump?

 President Trump and everybody around him belongs in jail.  What they have done is to actively support and perpetuate a genocide. Words with no actions are completely meaningless. President Trump can, with quite literally one phone call, as we saw in January, end this thing; the American government can literally end this thing. These statements don’t bother me in the sense that I don’t think about them. I don’t wonder about the veracity. I see how fake this kind of news is and how much these people are lying. If Trump genuinely cared about Palestinians, then he wouldn’t be behaving as he’s behaving now.

 There is no sane human being who can look at the situation and not see a pile of war crimes and evidence of genocide everywhere that they look at this point. Anyone who doesn’t recognize what’s happening in Gaza as war crimes and a genocide is not serious. They are propagandists and that is it.

 The only reason why people wonder if it is genocide is because of the tremendous interest in not declaring a genocide by very important countries—because that triggers legal obligations.  Once you call it a genocide, it puts you under obligation. And what we’ve realized now is that for all of these countries that wrote these laws about genocide, they were never actually interested in putting themselves in uncomfortable positions against allies. They just wanted to use them as batons against other countries.

There has been some recent activity of Western countries coming out and expressing their support for recognizing a State of Palestine over the last few weeks, notably France and the United Kingdom. In light of the current state of the state, how does the prospect of this kind of international recognition translate on the ground?

 What’s needed is not recognition of a Palestinian state. Palestinians don’t need their state to be recognized. It exists—and it’s happening. What the Palestinians need is for participants like France, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom to stop arming Israel.

You’ve been to Gaza several times in the past, but after being cleared on this recent trip, what were you expecting to see, and what have you been surprised to see?

 I wanna draw you a little picture. I first came to Palestine, to Gaza, in 2011. I have been spending four months a year here ever since, until this war.  I’m very, very familiar with this place.  I remember making this realization in the 2010s that, oh my God, as bad as it is, and as much as I would always say to myself, it can’t possibly get worse than this, it always got worse because there were always more ways to turn the screws on Palestinians.

 So I knew it was gonna be bad when I came. I knew it was gonna be bad.  But there is no preparing you for this. During the previous wars, kids got killed. Of course, they got killed. They got crushed. They got bombed. They got shot. But this war, it’s as though the kids are the only targets. There are so many kids, and it’s so devastating, and there’s so little I can do for them.  Nothing could have prepared me for that.

In every other war, there has been something missing. In 2014, we ran out of gauze. In 2012, we didn’t have stethoscopes. This war, we’re missing everything. And so what’s different this time on in terms of the the patients is that I have nothing that I can do for most of them, but sit there and watch them die—knowing that even if I can do a little bit to get them to the next step, they’re probably not going to heal well because they’re starving.

That’s the biggest difference for me.

Some readers might be asking themselves, “What can I do?” So, what do you think they could do to perhaps apply pressure to change the situation that’s taking place in Gaza right now?

 I think the first thing to recognize is that everything people have done so far has helped. Every protest people have gone to, every letter they’ve written, every donation they’ve made—it has all helped. We think of things in terms of, you know, I’ve been to 10 protests. Why hasn’t it stopped? That’s because we’re not strong enough to make it stop in 10 protests.

But there is also a war of attrition happening, not just in the field, in Gaza, but also politically.  So, for example, what the UK is doing right now is directly the result of their weekly protests and their increased organizing. It has been political attrition. Also, the tremendous boycott movement has resulted in economic attrition.

 So, I think what this kind of person should look to do is to extract the highest cost possible on Israel and its supporters, like the United States, especially so that they can take an account of how much they’re losing and rethink this—by continuing to make sure that you run people in elections, that you keep it an active political issue, that you protest, that no politician who supports the genocide is comfortable.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

If anyone was wondering if South Park was going to ease up on the scathing Trump plot lines, this week’s follow-up offered an answer: Hell no.

On Wednesday night, the adult cartoon ripped into the Trump administration yet again, this time targeting JD Vance and right-wing podcast bros. But the episode’s harshest ridicule was directed at none other than Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who is depicted as a wine-guzzling, Botox-loving, puppy-killing, tyrant as the leader of ICE. (The show spends much time ruthlessly skewering the agency, too.)

The episode, in its specific way, holds a comedic mirror to our cruel reality: ICE’s desperate recruitment efforts, an administration hellbent on disappearing immigrants without due process, and “torture.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

After a few hours in the air, Neri Alvarado Borges and the other Venezuelans on a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight landed in Honduras. Alvarado was hopeful. He had been detained by ICE in Texas in early February. Told he could face years in detention, he agreed to be deported. It was March 15, and Alvarado assumed he would soon be home.

During the brief stopover in Honduras, Alvarado recalls officials giving him and the other Venezuelans boxes of pizza. “Eat,” they said, “because later on we have another surprise for you.” When the plane landed a second time, an ICE agent told the men, “this is the surprise.” Opening the windows, the men realized they had been sent to El Salvador.

Confused, Alvarado asked why they were not in Venezuela. “Those are orders from the President,” the agent replied. The ICE officer told Alvarado to get off the plane quietly because the guards in El Salvador were different. “They are not like us,” he said. “They are going to treat you badly.”

“They knocked out one of my teeth. They messed up my knees. They messed up my ribs.”

The Trump administration had shipped Alvarado and more than 230 other Venezuelans deprived of due process to a notorious megaprison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. In exchange for roughly $5 million, the Salvadoran government agreed to hold the men, who had been accused with scant or nonexistent evidence of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua.

In March, our reporting showed that Alvarado and others had been targeted because of benign tattoos that had no connection to the criminal group. One of Alvarado’s tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with the name of his younger brother, Neryelson. Alvarado’s story became emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s decision to disappear Venezuelan migrants to a foreign gulag, where they were held incommunicado for four months.

In his first media interview since the men were released from CECOT on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap deal, Alvarado described to Mother Jones the nightmare he and the others lived through from the first moment they arrived.

Alvarado, 25, said when the plane landed, Salvadoran police officers dragged him off in shackles and violently pushed him onto a bus as if he were a “trash bag.” As he tried to get his bearings, the officers hit him in the head; they cursed, yelling at him to keep his face down. The men were driven around for about half an hour before arriving at CECOT. “Welcome to El Salvador,” the police said.

As they entered the maximum-security prison, Alvarado remembers being thrown to the floor on his knees. He saw hair everywhere. All around him, guards shaved the men’s heads. (The process was recorded and shared as propaganda by the administration of President Nayib Bukele on social media.) “They grab me by the sweater and they were practically choking me,” Alvarado recalled. “It felt like they were choking me for about 15 to 20 seconds, which were the longest 20 seconds of my life because I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

The guards gave them five seconds to change into the white prison t-shirt and shorts. If detainees took longer, they were beaten. The Venezuelans were then taken to Module 8, a warehouse-like wing of the prison with 32 cells. On the way, Alvarado said a guard asked him who he was and where he was coming from. “From Dallas,” Alvarado said. “What gang are you in?” the guard asked. Alvarado told him he was not a gang member. “But if you’re not a gang member, what are you doing here?” Alvarado wondered the same thing.

In the prison, he recalled seeing blood all over the floor. “They’re going to kill me here,” Alvarado thought. “If I survive, I’ll be locked up my entire life.”

Neri Alvarado reuniting with his family in Venezuela after being released from CECOT.Courtesy photos

Alvarado and two other Venezuelan men sent to CECOT spoke with Mother Jones about the horrific conditions they were held in. Their stories corroborate reports from others flown to El Salvador, who described CECOT as a place where detainees feared death and torture.Some men contemplated suicide. “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience,” Juan José Ramos Ramos told ProPublica. Guards in the prison enacted a “perverse form of humiliation,”Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas told the Washington Post: “The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile.”

Wuilliam Lozada Sánchez, 27, told Mother Jones that he and other men were beaten with batons upon arriving at the Salvadoran prison. “They knocked out one of my teeth,” he said. “They messed up my knees. They messed up my ribs.”

Before leaving for the United States in 2023, Lozada worked at a factory that made jeans in Colombia. His goal was to save enough money to open a pants factory in his home state of Táchira. Instead, he ended up spending more than a year in US detention before being taken to CECOT in March. Lozada said they experienced a form of torture in the prison.

While being processed, the men were made to line up in a row and kneel. Then, according to Alvarado and other Venezuelans, the prison’s director told the men: “Welcome to hell.” “He told us that we were not going to leave anymore and that he was going to make sure that we never again ate meat or chicken,” Julio Zambrano Perez told Mother Jones. The only way out of that place, the director said, was in a black bag.

On a video call from Venezuela, Zambrano showed a cut on his left eyebrow that he said was from beatings he endured right after arriving in El Salvador. That first night at CECOT, Zambrano couldn’t sleep as he thought about how his life had been ripped away from him. In North Carolina, Zambrano, who, like Alvarado, turned 25 while at CECOT, worked shifts at a hotel and a restaurant to provide for his wife, Luz, and their two daughters, one of whom was born while he was in ICE detention. The family had applied for asylum in the United States.

During the months inside, Alvarado held on to a Bible verse for hope: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”

In late January, Zambrano had what he thought would be a routine check-in appointment with ICE. Instead, the agents took him to a room and started interrogating him about his tattoos, a rose and a crown with his name on it. He tried to explain it was normal for Venezuelans to have tattoos, but to no avail. ICE kept him detained and later moved him to Georgia and from there to the El Valle Detention Facility in Texas. “They never had any evidence to say that I belonged to a gang,” he said. 

Alvarado had a similar experience. Originally from Yaritagua, a city about four hours west of Caracas, he studied psychology in school but had to abandon his studies for financial reasons. Alvarado went on to get certified as a personal trainer and worked as a swim instructor. (While he was at CECOT, members of the swim club in Venezuela where Alvarado coached made a video demanding his release.) In 2023, he decided to leave for the United States—partly in hope of being able to help pay for the medical bills for his brother, who has autism. Like many others, Alvarado made the grueling journey through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama before eventually reaching the US-Mexico border.

After he turned himself over to Border Patrol agents, Alvarado spent about 24 hours in custody before being released. He said border officials reviewed his tattoos and concluded that they were not indicative of gang membership. Along with the autism awareness ribbon, Alvarado has three tattoos written in English and Spanish: One reads “self love,” another “brothers,” and the third “familia.”

Once in Dallas, Alvarado started working at a Venezuelan bakery. It allowed him to send about $500 per month back home to help support his family and his younger brother. But his life was upended in February, when he said ICE and DEA agents, with guns drawn, arrested him outside his apartment. The officers took Alvarado to ICE’s Dallas field office, where he was questioned about his tattoos and gang affiliations.

Alvarado said during the interview he was struck by the ICE agent’s appearance. The man questioning him was covered in tattoos from his hand to his neck. The officer, Alvarado said, even had a tattoo of a rose—one of the tattoos that ICE has used as evidence of membership in Tren de Aragua.

When the agent asked Alvarado about his tattoos, Alvarado—who had been charged earlier in the Trump administration with the misdemeanor offense of entering the country illegally in April 2024—said he showed him the autism awareness ribbon on his leg. “Wow, that’s nice,” he remembered the agent saying in response. The officer then checked Alvarado’s phone and social media accounts before concluding that he had no relation to the gang. “Well, you came to the United States to do good,” Alvarado recalled the ICE agent telling him. “You have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.” Moments later, a different ICE agent decided to detain Alvarado. (DHS did not respond to a request for comment about whether it sent Alvarado to CECOT in error.)

At his final immigration hearing, Alvarado said there was no mention of Tren de Aragua. He explained to the immigration judge that he had a valid Venezuelan passport and could return home on a commercial flight. Alvarado recalled the judge saying that it was not necessary. ICE would fly him back home soon.

Julio Zambrano Perez with his wife Luz and their daughter Danna.Courtesy of Julio Zambrano Perez

In CECOT, the men settled into a bleak daily routine. They slept on metal beds without mattresses, sheets, or pillows. Their diet was largely rice, beans, and tortillas. On occasion, Zambrano said, the guards would serve them a slightly better meal, only to snap a photo and take it away before they could eat. The lights were always on, and the men were allowed a single shower at 5 a.m. When they sought medical attention, they were given a pain pill and told to drink water—the same water they bathed in.

For a while, they were only allowed out of the cell twice a week to hear a few minutes of a religious sermon. To pass the time, they made dice out of tortillas. They tried to exercise inside the cell every day. “If we kept our minds busy,” Alvarado said, “we wouldn’t think so much about the situation we were going through.” During the months inside, Alvarado held on to a Bible verse for hope: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”

Alvarado and others say that those who resisted or complained about the conditions were brutalized in a small isolation cell they called la isla, the island. “What they did there was torture us,” Zambrano said. “They always wanted to take us to la isla for whatever reason.” He said he spent two days in the dark, confined space. When the guards weren’t kicking and beating them, they would hit the doors, laugh, and tell the men they would rot in there. Alvarado recalled hearing the screams and the thud sound from beatings. “They hit them everywhere, on the head, on the legs, on the back, on the abdomen, on the ribs,” he said.

One day, some of the men started protesting in their cell. The guards responded with tear gas. They hit one man so hard he passed out. “They left him there lying on the floor,” Zambrano said. Fearing he had been killed, the Venezuelans started a hunger strike that went on for a few days. “If we’re going to get out of here, dead or alive,” Zambrano reasoned, “then let’s get out defending ourselves.”

As the weeks dragged on, the men started wondering if they had been forgotten. Lozada said he had no idea that their cases were the subject of major legal battles in the United States. “They were telling us that our country—that our president—had abandoned us,” Lozada explained. “That our families had abandoned us as well, and that we were going to die there in prison…that no one was fighting for us.”

Alvarado recalled the Salvadoran guards saying, “There’s no family here, there are no lawyers here, nobody exists here.” During the four months at CECOT, he saw the sun only once.

Wuilliam Lozada reunited with his parents in Venezuela. Courtesy of Wuilliam Lozada

Like others, Alvarado said conditions improved slightly on the days when US officials like Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem or the Red Cross visited. They’d be given a thin mattress and a pillow, as well as deodorant, soap, and toothpaste. But, after the visits, everything was taken away. (El Salvador’s Vice President Félix Ulloa denied that the men were mistreated to ProPublica.)

After nearly four months, Alvarado said the men were asked to provide their shoe and clothing sizes. Soon after, they had check-ups with a dentist, a nutritionist, and other doctors. The next day, they were given a new pair of underwear and socks, along with deodorant and shampoo. Alvarado suspected something was about to happen, but was not sure what.

Finally, in the early hours of Friday, July 18, the guards woke them up and told them to get ready in five minutes. They were taken to the airport, where they were received by Venezuelan officials. But it wasn’t until the plane took off that they believed they were headed home. The men cried and applauded. “For a moment, we thought it was going to be impossible to get out of there,” Zambrano said. “It’s the first time we’ve seen a person get out of that prison alive.”

After arriving near Caracas in Venezuela, Zambrano called his wife, whose number was the only one he remembered by heart. He spent two days in a hotel and then was let go, late at night on a Sunday, to reunite with his mother. “I started to cry, we started to cry,” he said. “I imagined all the suffering they had gone through not knowing about me.”

Zambrano’s children and wife are still in the United States. He has yet to meet his youngest daughter, who’s only six months old, in person. When they had their first video call after his release, he said he barely recognized her because she had grown so much. Zambrano said he would like to go back to the United States to be with his family and continue to fight his asylum case. But he is scared of being detained again.

For now, the family talks on the phone every day. And he hopes for an acknowledgment of the evil done to him and othersand the fact that he is now separated from his wife and daughters. “The first thing I want is to clear our names and for justice be done for everything that happened to us there in El Salvador,” he said.

The day he arrived home, Alvarado said his block was packed with people waiting to greet him. He became overcome with emotion when he saw his family. “It was like I could breathe,” he said, “like finally I’m here.”

Still, the four months in CECOT have taken a toll on his mental health. He has had nightmares about being back in the prison before waking up and realizing with relief that he’s home. And if he sees a police officer or a patrol car, he grows anxious. “I remember everything that happened in CECOT,” he said.

Like Zambrano, Alvarado also hopes for accountability. “Now we’re free in our country,” he said, “but my life was already established in the United States. I was helping my family and now they have sent me back here, where I have to start from zero.”

His main goal, Alvarado said, is to support the younger brother whose name adorns his autism awareness tattoo.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Chemical pollution is “a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change” but decades behind global heating in terms of public awareness and action, a report has warned.

The industrial economy has created more than 100 million “novel entities,” or chemicals not found in nature, with somewhere between 40,000 and 350,000 in commercial use and production, the report says. But the environmental and human health effects of this widespread contamination of the biosphere are not widely appreciated, in spite of a growing body of evidence linking chemical toxicity with effects ranging from ADHD to infertility to cancer.

“I suppose that’s the biggest surprise for some people,” Harry Macpherson, senior climate associate at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), which carried out the research, told the Guardian.

“There isn’t necessarily the need for a massive collective action; it can just be demand for safer products.”

“Maybe people think that when you walk down the street breathing the air; you drink your water, you eat your food; you use your personal care products, your shampoo, cleaning products for your house, the furniture in your house; a lot of people assume that there’s really great knowledge and huge due diligence on the chemical safety of these things. But it really isn’t the case.”

Over eight months, as part of a project funded by the Grantham Foundation, Macpherson and colleagues spoke to dozens of researchers, nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs and investors, and analyzed hundreds of scientific papers.

According to the DSV report, more than 3,600 synthetic chemicals from food contact materials—the materials that are used in food preparation and packaging—alone are found in human bodies, 80 of which are of significant concern. PFAS “forever chemicals,” for example, have been found in nearly all humans tested, and are now so ubiquitous that in many locations even rainwater contains levels regarded as unsafe to drink. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of the global population breathes air that breaches World Health Organization (WHO) pollution guidelines.

When these chemicals contaminate our bodies, the results can be disastrous. The report found there were correlational or causal data linking widely used chemicals with threats to human reproductive, immune, neurological, cardiovascular, respiratory, liver, kidney, and metabolic systems. “One of the main things that came out quite strongly was links between pesticide exposure and reproductive issues,” said Macpherson. “We saw quite strong links—correlation and causation—for miscarriage and people basically struggling to conceive.”

The DSV research adds to previous findings by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research that we have already far exceeded the safe planetary boundary for environmental pollutants, including plastics. On Sunday, another report warned that the world faces a “plastics crisis,” which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age amid a huge acceleration of plastic production.

The report also highlights critical shortcomings in current toxicity assessment, research and testing methods, exposing the ways in which existing checks and balances are failing to protect human and planetary health.

“The way that we’ve generally done the testing has meant that we’ve missed a lot of effects,” Macpherson said. He singled out the assessment of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which are substances that interfere with hormones, causing problems ranging from infertility to cancer. These have been found to confound the traditional assumption that lower doses will invariably have lesser effects.

“One of the things is that when you have a chemical which is interfering with the endocrine system, it sometimes has a nonlinear response. So you’ll see that there’ll be a response at a very low dose, which you wouldn’t be able to predict from its behavior at a high dose.”

DSV describes itself as a “venture creator” that spins out companies aimed at tackling big problems in environmental and human health issues. Part of the purpose of the report is to identify problem areas that can be tackled by innovation.

Currently, chemical toxicity as an environmental issue receives just a fraction of the funding that is devoted to climate change, a disproportionality that Macpherson says should change. “We obviously don’t want less funding going into the climate and the atmosphere,” he said. “But this we think—really, proportionally—needs more attention.”

However, there were features of the problem that mean it lends itself more easily to solutions. “The good thing is that this can be potentially quite easily consumer-driven if people start to worry about things they’re personally buying,” Macpherson said. “There isn’t necessarily the need for a massive collective action; it can just be demand for safer products, because people want safer products.”

For his part, since starting the research, Macpherson is careful about what touches his food. He cooks with a cast-iron skillet. He especially avoids heating food in plastic. “Unfortunately, it is a recommendation to eat more organic food, but it is more expensive in general. So at least washing fruit and vegetables before eating them, but organic if you can afford it.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is apparently so desperate for staff that they are abolishing the agency’s age restrictions to allow any adult to apply to join the force.

On Wednesday, ICE announced that it would do away with its prior requirements that job applicants be at least 21 years old, no older than 37 to be considered for a criminal investigator role, and no older than 40 to be eligible to be a deportation officer, with few exceptions.

“In the wake of Biden’s open borders disaster, our country needs dedicated Americans to join ICE to remove the worst of the worst out of our country,” the agency’s announcement reads, under an Uncle Sam recruitment photo. In a social media post touting the change, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrote: “We’re taking father/son bonding to a whole new level,” alongside an illustration of both a younger and older man in camouflage tactical gear.

Recruits will still need to be at least 18 and go through medical and drug tests, and complete a physical fitness test. The Wednesday announcement also reiterated a slate of perks available to new ICE employees, including a signing bonus of up to $50,000, student loan repayment and forgiveness options, and “enhanced retirement benefits” after the passage of Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The legislation allocated funding to hire 10,000 new ICE agents to join the 20,000 currently on staff to help meet the agency’s deportation goals.

The move to eliminate the age restriction comes as the Trump administration scrambles to fulfill his campaign promise to carry outmass deportations—specifically, a goal of one million deportations per year, according to an April report in the Washington Post. So far, the administration appears to have fallen far below that goal: Since February, the administration has deported an average of about 14,700 people per month, according to an NBC News report published last month. The administration’s efforts to bolster those numbers have included reviving old cases focused on immigrants who have since become citizens or died.

But reports suggest the sky-high deportation quota, coupled with the administration’s general inhumanity when it comes to the treatment of immigrants, has left morale within the agency plummeting. And while DHS Secretary Kristi Noem boasts about a recent surge in applications, related moves within ICE, including the agency reportedly forcibly poaching employees from across the federal government and other law enforcement agencies, appear to contradict those claims. The American Prospect reported on Wednesday, for example, that probationary Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees—those with under a year of service—were being reassigned to ICE or threatened with losing their jobs if they did not accept. A DHS spokesperson told the Prospect that the FEMA employees were being temporarily moved to work with ICE for 90 days, “to assist with hiring and vetting,” and claimed that the moves “will NOT disrupt FEMA’s critical operations.”

So will the elimination of the age limit make any difference? Time will tell, though Trump’s prior promises of a massive hiring spree for ICE and Border Patrol agents during his first term did not come to fruition. So far, though, the change has led to at least one newrecruit: 59-year-old former Superman actor Dean Cain.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

For years, Republicans have sought to consolidate power at the state and federal level by controlling the redistricting process through which congressional boundaries are drawn.In places such as Wisconsin and Ohio**,** they have crafted cartoonishly distorted districts that have literally drawn Democrats out of power. But the longstanding battle between Republicans and Democrats over redistricting exploded recently when, with the encouragement of Donald Trump, Texas Republicans proposed a new congressional map—outside of the typical 10-year cycle—that could yield Republicans five congressional seats in next year’s midterm elections.

Democrats, who have historically abstained from the most glaring, self-serving forms of gerrymandering, insist they are now going to re-draw maps in states they control to help them offset their potential loss of seats from the GOP-drawn maps. “They’re not screwing around,” California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said of Republicans’ redistricting plans, which extend beyond Texas. “We cannot afford to screw around either. We have got to fight fire with fire.”

“We have a really asymmetric pattern of unilateral disarmament, and so if Democrats want to do what Texas is doing, they would have to undo some of the reforms they put in place over the last couple of decades to fight gerrymandering.”

But in addition to the tight timeline between now and the midterm elections, Democrats may encounter another problem: their own firewalls. Through efforts to keep extreme partisan bias out of redistricting, some states—like California and New York—have self-policed themselves into instituting independent commissions that shape the districts. Critically, it may prevent them from carrying out their threat of revenge.

“We have a really asymmetric pattern of unilateral disarmament, and so if Democrats want to do what Texas is doing, they would have to undo some of the reforms they put in place over the last couple of decades to fight gerrymandering,” says Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos.

In the last week, they’ve started to try.

“We’re already working on a legislative process, reviewing our legal strategies, and we’ll do everything in our power to stop this brazen assault,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said at a press conference this week. “The gloves are off, and I say ‘Bring it on.'”

The terms “redistricting” and “gerrymandering” are often used interchangeably in today’s political environment, but they aren’t supposed to be.

Redistricting is the legal process in which new congressional district boundaries are drawn to take into account changes in population since the last census. Gerrymandering is using the opportunity to redistrict to manipulate boundaries to favor one’s party over the other.

Yet, in most states, the majority party in the state legislature largely controls the redistricting process, especially when that party maintains the governor’s mansion too. Whether or not the party admits it, holding the gavel typically enables lawmakers to impose more favorable maps.

The “independent commission” model of redistricting reflects the Democratic Party’s intention to honor the democratic principle of “one person, one vote,” New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins tells Mother Jones.

But, she says, Republicans have left Democrats without another option but to try and change the independent commission method in New York, at least temporarily.

“Republicans have decided that whatever they want to do, they should do. Democrats really have no choice but to look at what it is we must do in order to preserve democracy,” says Stewart-Cousins, who is also chair of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), the party’s national arm for state legislative races.

The DLCC announced a more aggressive approach to redistricting as a coalition-wide objective on Monday. “The DLCC isn’t going to sit back and allow Republicans to cheat the system to keep themselves in power,” the group’s president, Heather Williams, said in a statement. “All options must be on the table—including Democratic state legislatures using their power to fight back and pursue redistricting mid-cycle in order to protect our democracy.”

The Democratic National Committee has also tacitly supported the DLCC’s move. In a statement, DNC chair Ken Martin said members of the party should be able “to combat Trump and Republicans’ craven scheme to rig the maps in their favor.”

But despite the buy-in, mid-cycle redistricting won’t be as easy as ripping up the old maps and drawing new ones over the next few months.

Democrats in the New York legislature proposed a state constitutional amendment last week that would allow state lawmakers to forgo the independent commission process and do their own re-districting in the middle of the usual 10-year cycle, but only if another state did it first. If it passes the legislature, the amendment would then go before New York citizens as a ballot measure.

Asked whether she could foresee New York Democrats successfully redistricting before the 2026 midterms, Stewart-Cousins said, “I am not aware of a way to do that… People are, I’m sure, taking a look to see what could be possible.”

There are similar challenges in the other Democratic-led states that have expressed desire to use Republicans’ own tactics against them.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has said “nothing is off the table” in terms of retaliatory redistricting. But maps in the midwestern state already disproportionately benefit Democrats. (There are only three congressional districts in the state that are not represented by Democrats.) Republicans have even pointed to the Illinois map in defense of their plans to regroup Texas.

California is another state with a willing governor and Democratic majorities in the state legislature. The state may be Democrats’ best—if only—option at picking up more than a couple of blue districts before the midterms, which is why Gov. Newsom has encouraged California Democrats to put new district maps in front of voters in a special election that would precede the midterms. This would be temporary, he says. The maps would stay in place only through 2030, at which point the independent redistricting commission would have the power again.

“Things have changed. We’re reacting to that change,” Newsom said at a recent news conference. “They’ve triggered this response, and we’re not going to roll over.”

In the short-term, Democratic lawmakers in Texas have blocked Republicans from carrying out their plan by fleeing the state to preempt the vote on the new districts. The strategy is almost inevitably temporary; the Texas legislators face $500-per-day fines for not appearing for legislative duty, and Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to expel them from office. He’s also able to call another special session whenever he wants.

But beyond the questions of strategy and ineffectiveness, there is also the quandary about whether this is a path Democrats should even venture down.

“Now that we’re opening the door to re-redistricting, it really makes it impossible to dislodge gerrymanders,” says Stephanopoulos. “At least in the past, you could maybe hope by year six, year eight, or year 10 of a map that it’s less effective than it was in year one. But if Texas redraws the lines now, why not redraw them again in 2028? And again in 2030?”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Two months after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, in June 2022, Idaho’s trigger ban outlawing most abortions—one of the strictest nationwide—took effect.

The fallout soon made headlines. The Biden-era Department of Justice sued, alleging that the Idaho ban violated a federal law that required hospitals to stabilize people who arrived in their emergency rooms facing threats to their life or health—including by providing abortions when necessary. (That kicked off a legal battle that made it to the Supreme Court last year, which avoided deciding the case on its merits.) And within months of the state ban taking effect, a maternity ward in rural northern Idaho closed, citing the state’s “legal and political climate.”

“When those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that [walks] out of that state. It’s a big dang deal.”

As all this was happening, another shift was quietly unfolding across the state: obstetricians (OBs) in Idaho—doctors who specialize in delivering babies and providingcare for pregnant people during and after pregnancy—were leaving their jobs as they faced the threat of jail time, fines, and felony charges for providing abortions, even in the case of life-threatening emergencies. While there have been some reports of these departures, there has been limited data quantifying how many OBs the state lost after Roe was overruled—until now.

According to a new peer-reviewed paper published in JAMA Network Open last week, Idaho lost more than a third of its OBs—94 of 268 total—between August 2022 and December 2024. That figure combines the 114 who left their jobs and 20 OBs who moved to Idaho during the study period. It includes physicians who left the state—the most common outcome, accounting for about half of the total departures, according to J. Edward McEachern, the paper’s lead author—as well as those who stopped practicing obstetrics, closed their in-state practices, or retired. The new research supports the hypothesis that experts and abortion rights advocates floated after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Abortion bans create ripple effects that harm other forms of health care.

“When those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that walk out of that state,” said McEachern, who is also a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Boise State University and the chief medical officer at St. Luke’s Health Plan. “It’s a big dang deal,” he added.

AnnaMarie Connolly, a physician and the chief of education, workforce, and well-being at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), told Mother Jonesthat the findings are “a clear example of the damage abortion bans cause beyond abortion access.” Candace Gibson, director of state policy at the reproductive rights advocacy and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute, agreed, saying the data “shows how abortion bans destabilize the entire reproductive health system.” Other research has also illustrated this: A 2023 survey of more than 500 OB/GYNs conducted by KFF, for example, found that 68 percent of respondents said the Dobbs decision negatively impacted their ability to manage pregnancy-related emergencies. Reporting from ProPublica has also shown that sepsis and maternal deaths surged in Texasfollowing both Dobbs and the state’s six-week abortion ban, which was implemented in 2021.

To come up with their calculations, McEachern and three other researchers initially consulted a federal database of health care providers to find a list of licensed OBs in Idaho; then, they consulted another set of sources—including databases maintained by ACOG and the Idaho Medical Association, physicians’ and hospitals’ websites, and the actual physicians themselves—to verify both the amount of physicians practicing obstetrics in the state and those who had stopped doing so or left Idaho. While the new study did not try to establish causality by asking the physicians if the state’s abortion ban played a role in their decision to stop practicing obstetrics in the state or overall, McEachern points out that none of the OBs who researchers tracked moved to states with abortion bans. The Idaho Coalition for Safe Reproductive Health Care also found in 2023 that more than half of the 240 health care providers surveyed said they were considering or definitely leaving the state within the year in light of the new abortion ban.

I found a similar trend in my own reporting, when I covered the fallout of the hospital in rural northern Idaho, Bonner General Health, that discontinued its obstetrics care in 2023; the four OBGYNs who previously worked at the hospital all moved to states where abortion is legal, and they all told me Idaho’s ban contributed to their decisions to move.“Thinking about what our community has lost—that is gutting,” one of those doctors, Amelia Huntsberger, previously told me; Huntsberger relocated to Oregon that year.

Dr. Amelia Huntsberger unpacked some of the remaining boxes in her new home in Eugene, Oregon after moving from Idaho, in October 2023. Moriah Ratner/Washington Post/Getty

This exodus contributes to maternity care deserts, defined as areas that lack access to maternity care providers, which account for about 33 percent of counties nationwide. In Idaho, nearly 30 percent of counties are maternity care deserts, and nearly 20 percent of women have no birthing hospital within a 30 minute drive, according to the most recent data from March of Dimes. McEachern’s study signals this is only getting worse: It found that 85 percent of the state’s remaining OBs are concentrated in Idaho’s seven most populous counties. That leaves 23 OBs to serve more than 560,000 people in the remaining 37 counties—or, as McEachern puts it, “a very brittle and fragile system.”

“If one person gets hurt or retires or moves on,” he said, “it creates a system that is unsustainable.”

None of the obstetricians tracked moved to states with abortion bans.

Experts say the new data reveals the urgent need to bolster the state’s health care landscape. Connolly, from ACOG, said, “when a state’s OB/GYN workforce is already struggling to meet the volume of patient needs, like Idaho’s, each loss means more people who have to travel long distances for basic health care—or go without it altogether.”

Dr. Megan Kasper, an OB/GYN and president-elect of the Idaho Medical Association, called for “common sense changes to our law to ensure Idahoans have access to maternal health care now and in the future” in response to the study. While Idaho lawmakers have largely resisted calls to amend the state’s abortion laws, advocates have continued pushing for change, including by seeking to gather enough signatures to put an abortion rights ballot measure before voters next year.

McEachern and the other researchers, for their part, plan to continue tracking the losses of Idaho’s obstetricians. They also have several other related research projects planned, including one focused on the amount of time people have to drive to reach obstetrics care in Idaho, with the hope that collecting more reliable data will help improve health care access across the state.

As McEachern put it, “We want this place to be better.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to hide what you are doing in Washington, announce it on a Friday evening in the heat of August. Better yet, in place of clarity, reference some pages in another document, so that people have to track that down and read it in order to grasp what you are telling them.

That is precisely what the Supreme Court did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: The Republican-appointed justices have decided it is time to fully destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Republicans argue equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters.

Sixty years ago, the Voting Rights Act ended the Jim Crow regime and transformed the country, finally, into a multiracial democracy—albeit an imperfect one. But, with the court’s quiet announcement it would return to a paused case, the justices are now preparing to take us back to a time when elected officials at all levels of government were white, and the rights of minorities were trampled. The court’s eventual decision will impact how political maps are drawn, and will certainly hasten the precipitous decline of American democracy.

In its most recent term, the justices heard oral arguments in a redistricting case out of Louisiana. The state’s population is one-third Black, but after the 2020 census, the Louisiana legislature drew a Congressional map for its six seatswith just one majority-Black district. After two courts found that this map violated the Voting Rights Act’s mandate that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, the legislature drew a new map with two Black-majority districts. That should have been the end of the saga, but a group of non-Black voters sued, arguing that the consideration of race in creating a second minority-majority district violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

It’s a perverse argument. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce the vision of equality enacted that animated the 14th and 15th Amendments. Indeed, the VRA was enacted under Congress’ express authority to use legislation to enforce the equal protection and voting rights guarantees of the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Now, Republican lawyers are attacking the law, arguing that equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters. The amendments that ushered in a Second Founding of political equality are being reinterpreted to resurrect white supremacy.

Under the Roberts Court, equal protection has become a sword to wield against programs, policies, and laws intended to create an equal system. The lingeringLouisiana case now presents the Republican justices an opportunity to hollow out one of the few remaining protections of the VRA, the requirement of minority-majority districts, under this twisted reasoning.

Last term, rather than decide the case, the court punted on its final day of opinions in June. Then, on Friday night, it announced it would rehear the case in the coming term. This time, the court wants the parties to submit briefs on “Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

The court’s Friday order doesn’t mention the VRA. For that, you have to follow the breadcrumbs it leaves by referring to three pages from the brief of the non-Black voters. In those pages, the litigants argueusing race as a factor in drawing district maps under the VRA is unconstitutional, and that the time has come for the court to eliminate the use of race in political-map drawing. The court is accepting this invitation.

The Supreme Court’s assault on democracy and President Donald Trump’s are tightly intertwined. On Sunday, Democrats in the Texas House fled their state in order to block the Republican majority’s plans to redraw its Congressional map to create five new GOP seats in Congress—and help Republicans hold the House after the 2026 midterms. The plan came down from Washington; supported by Trump and given a veneer of respectability by a legally-ludicrous DOJ letter to Texas leaders alleging five seats held by Black and Latino representatives are illegal racial gerrymanders and requesting they redraw the map. Assuming new lines are enacted, a state with only a small majority of Republican voters will have boldly pushed through a map that gives three-quarters of its congressional seats to the GOP.

“It would be an earthquake in politics and make our legislative bodies whiter.”

Trump may be behind this plan, but it was the Supreme Court that made such brazen partisan gerrymandering possible. In 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, a 5-4 GOP majority announced federal courts could not hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering claims. Texas, and any other state that doesn’t have its own constitutional checks on gerrymandering, were greenlit to go ahead and rig their maps as much as possible. Nevermind that when the politicians pick their voters, the democratic mechanism of voting is diminished, if not extinguished.

Now, consider what might happen in the 2026 midterms and beyond if states are not only free to engage in partisan gerrymanders, but, as the GOP justices are presumably preparing to make reality, free from an obligation to create majority-minority districts. This week, UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen laid out the consequences in Slate: “It would end what has been the most successful way that Black and other minority voters have gotten fair representation in Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies. It would be an earthquake in politics and make our legislative bodies whiter and our protection for minority voters greatly diminished.”

Perhaps this sea change will come next June, when the court generally releases its biggest decisions at the end of the term. But the court set an early October due date for the new briefs, leaving open the possibility that if the Republican-appointed majority wants to give their party another leg up in the midterms, it could hear the case again this fall and release an opinion by January, giving states enough time to rush through new maps that replace minority (and usually Democratic) seats with white Republican ones in time for the midterms. Not all gerrymanders are enacted by authoritarians, but authoritarians use gerrymanderingto rig elections and hold onto power.

Whenever the justices release their opinion, they will undoubtedly couch the decision in principles of fairness, equality, and even democracy. But the movement to destroy the Voting Rights Act is closely tied to the MAGA movement and the Republican Party it has taken over. Take, for example, the man who represents the non-Black litigantvoters from Louisiana, who wrote the brief that the justices are likely to turn into law, a Missouri lawyer named Edward Greim. As I wrote earlier this year, “In 2020, Greim was one of the lawyers who tried to halt vote-counting in order to help President Donald Trump win the election. According to the Wisconsin Examiner, Greim later represented a fake elector from Wisconsin who was part of the plot to overturn the election results.” According to Politico, he also represented seven witnesses before the January 6 Select Committee investigation.

There are different ways to rig an election. Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 was one of them. This is another. Neither is compatible with multiracial democracy as we have known for the last 60 years.

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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.

A wildfire that has closed the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park raged out of control over the weekend and is now the largest currently burning in the country. The Dragon Bravo fire has burned more than 133,000 acres and was only 13 percent contained as of Wednesday morning, according to a federal interagency website that tracks wildfires.

The blaze, which was sparked by a lightning strike on July 4, has destroyed about 70 structures, according to the National Park Service, including the historic Grand Canyon Lodge and North Rim Visitor Center. The damage was bad enough to prompt the service to close the North Rim of the park for the rest of the 2025 season.

Thirty-nine large wildfires are burning across the country, covering about 523,000 acres in total, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Dry and windy conditions pushed the Grand Canyon fire out of control last month, and it is now one of seven large fires burning across Arizona, more than in any other state.

The fires come as the National Park Service and other federal agencies face large cuts to their workforces, including personnel who help fight wildfires. Multiple reports have suggested that cuts made by the Trump administration to US Forest Service staffing have hampered the agency’s ability to fight fires.

The National Park Service has lost 24 percent of its permanent workforce under the Trump administration, according to an analysis last month by the National Parks Conservation Association. The group said the cuts have reduced visitor services and weakened wildfire response.

Pollution from wildfire smoke has become an expected part of summer across North America in recent years.

A Park Service spokesperson said in an email that the agency’s priority has been the safety of firefighters, staff, and the public, and that it had successfully evacuated about 900 people from the North Rim area. The spokesperson added that “extreme weather conditions and a shift in wind overwhelmed” the service’s efforts to contain the Dragon Bravo fire and that “these rapidly evolving conditions were the primary cause of the fire’s expansion.”

A White House spokesperson noted that no one has died in the fire, saying that outcome “is a direct reflection of coordinated evacuation efforts, interagency support, and proactive incident management before and during the fire’s rapid expansion.”

The spokesperson added: “It’s a shame that there are those who want to politicize this situation while firefighters are still putting their lives on the line,” and said that more than 7,200 Interior Department employees were qualified to respond to wildfires, about 800 more than in 2024.

Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, which supports park service staff, said he had not heard anything to suggest that staff shortages played a role in allowing the Dragon Bravo fire to grow out of control. But he said he is concerned the cuts could harm the service’s ability to respond to fires in the future.

Wildfires have closed parts of other national parks, too, including Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.

Climate change is worsening wildfire activity globally. Wildfire seasons have grown longer, and the smoke and climate pollution that fires emit is getting worse.

That pollution has become an expected part of summer across North America in recent years, casting an eerie haze through the sky and prompting air quality alerts across large swaths of Canada and the United States. Detroit, Toronto and Montreal were all among the 10 most polluted cities worldwide at one point on Monday, according to IQAir.

The total area burnt across the United States so far this year is below the 10-year average, but north of the border, Canada is having one of its worst wildfire seasons on record.

Increasingly, wildfires are also contributing to climate change by releasing greater volumes of carbon pollution into the air. Fires in Canada have released 180 million metric tons of carbon this year so far, the second most on record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, which has been collecting data for 23 years. Arizona saw its worst July on record in terms of emissions, with 1.5 million metric tons of carbon released.

“It used to be that the main fire season was during the warmer part of the summer,” said Wade. “Now in many places, there’s no such thing as a fire season,” because the blazes burn throughout the year.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

United Nations-backed food security experts say the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” in the Gaza Strip, home to roughly 2 million Palestinians. One of the few organizations still on the ground trying to feed Palestinians at risk of famine is the Gaza Soup Kitchen.

Abe Ajrami is one of the Gaza Soup Kitchen’s leaders. He was born and raised in Gaza and now lives in the US, where he helps coordinate the organization’s food aid. “This is manmade starvation,” Ajrami says. “There are thousands of people who are starving because the Israelis decide to use hunger as a weapon.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Ajrami sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the Gaza Soup Kitchen’s extraordinary efforts to help prevent famine in Gaza, the debate over whether the Israeli government is committing genocide against Palestinians, and whether a two-state solution is still achievable.

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This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: What are you hearing from the people you know in Gaza right now?

Abe Ajrami: What I’m hearing is a call, and people are praying, “Oh, God let the judgment day start.” I mean that’s really a common prayer is that people, this just, end this whole thing.

Can you unpack that for me? What do they mean when they say that?

Pretty much saying, let the end of time happen. Let’s, as faithful people believe that this whole life will end one day and we are all going to meet our Creator and there’ll be heaven and hell and all this stuff. And they’re saying just let it happen now.

And another thing, they often see those who were killed already in the war are the lucky ones. For example, I lost my oldest, one of my sisters, 72 years old, Halima, second week of the war. And it was a shock when it happened. And now my brothers and other siblings are looking back at it and saying, “She was the lucky one. We’re the one that’s unlucky to go through this hell for the past two years.” So that’s, that describes how bad things are happening. Everything is a struggle. Staying alive is a struggle. Finding food is a struggle. Finding drinking water is a struggle. I mean, just every minute of it is a brutal experience.

When I hear you say that and that phrase, it makes me feel like the people of Gaza just have no hope anymore, that this is like the status quo and it’s going to remain this way.

And that’s very true. The first one, the first things started going people, that’s not their first rodeo. So they thought, “Okay, we’ve been through this. It’s going to last for a month or two, going to rebuild again.” And then things were getting worse and they thought, “Okay, maybe the world would wake up and intervene to stop the genocide.” When the ICT, for example, took the case and declared that the war must stop, that these are indeed war crimes and issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister, people thought that’s the highest legal entity in the globe. Something must happen. Well, nothing happened since then. People will tell you this, talk about human rights, this talk about Western democracy, this talk about the Geneva Convention is meaningless because none of those conventions and laws help stop the genocide.

You call what’s happening in Gaza, a genocide. And I think there’s a debate. A lot of people have been pushing back on labeling it as a genocide. What would you say to them?

It seems to me only there are very few places in the world where that description is disputed and mostly in the American politics and to some extent some UK parliament. But the whole world, the United Nations is calling it genocide. Amnesty International is calling it a genocide. And so even so, Israeli human rights organization recently called it a genocide. So all these legal scholars calling it, and I challenge anyone who’s not even just, any ordinary citizen, look up the definition of genocide and see what’s happening in Gaza and look me in the face and tell me this is not a genocide.

I mean there are two things. The actions and the intent. The Israelis are not hiding their intent. As far as yesterday they said, “Our intent is to force Gazans out and settle Gaza with more Israeli settlements.” Their defense minister, before the war started, he said, “We are going to shut water, shut medicine, shut food, shut electricity of Gaza.” That’s collective punishment. That’s a war crime. So when you’re talking about as of yesterday, 60,000 Palestinians get killed, around 20,000 of them are kids, 70% are women and children, and there are thousands are still missing under the rubble. It’s obvious that the Israeli government is using food as a weapon.

And when you hear the peace talks and they say, well, Israelis agreed to let air drops happen, drop in food or allow certain countries to supply Gaza with food, that tells you they’re the ones shutting the borders from entering food. So you’re talking about 2 million people who were intentionally starved by another country.

I’ve seen a lot of talk about widespread hunger and the famine happening in Gaza right now, but a lot of times when I see the news coverage, they talk about the famine as in like this just happened. Like there’s nobody really responsible for it. Suddenly Gaza is now in famine conditions. Can you speak to that specifically?

Right. This is artificial. This is a manmade starvation. People aren’t hungry. They are made hungry by the siege and the Israeli bombing and closing the Gaza. It’s mind-boggling to hear my Jewish friends, the slogan of, “Never again.” And I love the slogan, I have several Jewish progressive friends who are great advocates of human rights and they’re using the history of the Nazi and the Holocaust to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Unfortunately, it’s happening in Gaza because the irony is that you have thousands of people who are starving to death and right a mile across the Egyptian border, there are miles and miles of trucks full of food. So that’s really, it’s extremely sad that the world is watching this live on TV, seeing the irony of you get food on this side, plenty of food. And right across the border there are thousands of people who are starving because the Israelis decide to use hunger as a weapon to subdue the population and force them to leave Gaza.

I want to talk a little bit more about your organization and how it works. How many food distribution centers does the Gaza Soup Kitchen currently have operating?

Currently we have 11 feeding centers and the numbers change based on the situation. There are many factors. It’s not your typical, you go to Christ’s kitchen and it’s open and you eat a meal and eat and leave. It’s very hard. If you see the pictures, these guys either in a school that turned shelter for families or they’re out in the street behind demolished and rubble and they’re cooking.In addition to those centers that feed the neighborhoods where they at, we have meal delivery to hospitals. We send meals to the staff and patients at the Al-Ahli Hospital and most recently to the children hospital, Nasser Hospital. We also have a medical clinic that’s staffed by physician and every once in a while we have a classroom for kids that gives some basic education and some entertainment services.

And how many people are running them?

Total employees averages between 60 and 65 people between the chefs and the workers that manage, and let me just expand on this. The whole process is extremely difficult. I mean, you collect donations here, that’s the easy part. Try to get that fund into Gaza is very, very difficult because all the banks were forced to shut down. So there is no standing financial system in Gaza. So you rely on money exchangers, just people who have some money and you go through, whether it’s Egypt or Turkey, any third party to get that money into Gaza. So we try to talk with farmers, with people who are providing what’s left of ingredients and vegetables in Gaza about accepting money transfer from a phone app to a phone app in lieu of cash. And we’ve been working for several months now. So there is trust relationship or they’ll accept the payment and people sometimes realize they’re helping their own communities, so they’ll help us get food one way or another. So, that’s just a cash part.

Trying to find fire logs is a challenge. So you try to scavenge a few logs here and there and wood often from houses that were bombed, try to find that wood and light because there is no propane, there is no electricity, no gas. So that’s how you fire up the pots is wood logs. And then find chefs who know how to cook. And sometimes the hardest part is how do you control the crowds? Because more to our, the three things we can never cross is one, you want to provide good quality food, decent food with dignity, and definitely treat people, these guys who cook are neighbors, we cook for our neighbors or friends. We’re not some third party coming in to Gaza to provide food. We are it. We are the Gaza people, so those who cook are locals, the chef is local, everybody that works. So that’s, the hardest thing sometimes is how do you control the crowds?

You’re talking about hundreds of hungry people and the lines extend so far. And initially the first few parts, everything goes well when those in the back start realizing there is only half a pot left, so I may not get to fill my plate and our instructions to these guys, and they know it. If somebody is so hungry that they’ll come attack and grab something, let them take it. He’s not being ugly, he is hungry. So that’s really the hardest part is finding enough food for these people and trying to feed as many people.

Do you have any idea how many people you’re able to serve each day?

On average, each feeding center feeds about between 250 to 400 people depending on the prices. And what, because that a hundred dollars can buy you a hundred meals if the prices are decent, it may buy you 20 meals if the prices are high, but on average is somewhere between 250 to 500 give and take depending mostly on the prices.

The UN says more than a thousand people in Gaza have been killed since May while trying to access food. And that most of those deaths, more than 760 have been near distribution sites run by an organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Let me ask you specifically about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It’s an Israeli and US-backed organization that was started this year and meant to replace UN efforts to distribute food. What are your thoughts on that group?

Right. Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is as close to humanitarian as the devil is close to enter into paradise. I mean, this is Gaza Humiliation Foundation in reality. And as recent as last week, a US ex-military employee, he worked in Gaza, came out and blew the whistle on what’s happening there and informed the world that actually these guys were shooting at hungry people. So people get killed, many get injured, it’s a scam. It’s really a trap where thousands of people get in. It’s such a humiliating, if you look at the videos and the footage of showing people just piled up, stuck between fences and those are starved people given the choice, you either stay home, die out of hunger, or you walk kilometers several miles to get to the GHF Feeding Center and you may get killed there. So these are the choices.

And I talk to people, I talked to my sister the other day and she said, “Guess what? My son walked several kilometers to the GHF site to get flour.” And I said, “Why? Isn’t that crazy?” And she said, “What were we going to do?” And I said, “So what happened?” She said, “I don’t know.” She said, “I’m still waiting. I’m hoping that he’ll come back alive.” I mean, that’s how bad the situation is, and it is just the whole thing is shady. You cannot feed people while drones are hovering over them and the bullets are flying over their heads. So that’s really, it’s a horrible thing that adds to the Israeli war crimes.

What does the Gaza Soup Kitchen do differently to try and protect people seeking food?

The thing is, just like any organization or charity, when you go seek food at Christ’s Kitchen or any place in the world that provide food, those who are giving the food aren’t carrying guns and aren’t masked. So what really sets us apart as an organization is that we’re purely local organization. Everybody that works in Gaza is part of the community. So when my brother goes and works in a feeding center, he’s feeding his neighbors, he’s feeding his friends in the neighborhood. So everybody knows everybody. Those who provide the food, the ingredients, those who light the fire, the chef that’s cooking and responsible for the recipe is a local in the community, and that’s what sets you apart. People trust our guys and our guys are part of the community. So not only we provide food, but we provide food with dignity.

So recently France, the UK and Canada announced support for a Palestinian State. I’m just curious, do you think that’s genuine support, political theater or something else?

It is way overdue. I mean, this should have been done many years ago. And ironically, even the US government for many years throughout all these administrations believe that the two state solution based on the 1967 border is the way to go. But yet when the issue is submitted to the Security Council to recognize the State of Palestine, the US government veto it. I mean, that’s your own stand. Why don’t you recognize Palestine as a state if you believe the two state solution is the way to go? So that’s way overdue.

Second is that either two opinions. I talk to my family and friends then they’re people who think, “Oh, that’s great. That’s better late than ever.” So they think it’s a good step forward. Others believe it’s just a stunt. It’s a fake cover for the Arab countries like Saudi and Bahrain and those countries to normalize relations with Israel because it would be very shameful on the eyes of their own people. You want to normalize relation with Israel, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, so shame on you.

So they’re trying to show, well, actually we gained a lot of good things for the Palestinians. Look, we’re working with France and Britain and Canada and all these countries to recognize Palestine as a state, about the same time we have to recognize Israel. Well, if you recognize Palestine as a state without further actions, it would be meaningless. What recognition would change the status of those hungry people in Gaza? What is the British and Canadian and French recognition would help those farmers who losing their land in the West Bank?So based on that recognition, if they truly recognize Palestine as a state, then those Israeli soldiers carrying the guns and roaming the streets of Gaza become illegitimate. It becomes an occupying force of another land, of another country. Those countries need to put sanctions on the occupying force, just like putting sanctions on Russia for occupying another country that’s called Ukraine. So that political recognition of Palestine as an entity has to translate into punishing Israel for occupying and subjecting Palestinians to all this brutal war and rewarding Israel if the Israeli government agreed to this two-state solution by opening borders with Arab countries and normalizing relationships. But the mere recognition itself, it carries symbolic political, a good thing that’s happening, but unless it translates to change the life on the ground, it won’t be that important.

Yeah. Abe, thanks so much for talking to me today and also thank you for your work in feeding people who are facing an extreme crisis right now.

Thank you, sir. If I may add-

Please.

And just something that I really shared with the American Jews and the Israelis themselves. I mean, we can continue to kill each other to the end of time, or we can sit together and say, how can we build a better future for our children, our grandchildren? It’s not about Hamas and it’s not about anything. It’s everybody knows that the source of the issue is that there are people called Palestinians who live in under occupation, and people throughout the world will pay a price no matter how high, to gain their freedom and get their dignity and have the right to self-determination. How long would it take the Israelis to realize this and the earlier and the faster we get to that point, see each other as humans, not as enemies, I think the closer we can get to a solution.

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On July 24, US Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Latina Democrat from Houston, traveled to Austin to testify before the Texas House against the mid-decade congressional redistricting plan pushed by Donald Trump that was designed to give Republicans five new seats in the US House. Garcia said Republicans were motivated not just by political expediency, but by a broader desire to weaken the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which prohibits electoral changes that discriminate against voters of color.

“The short-term game is getting five seats to retain the gavel of the House,” Garcia told members of the special committee on redistricting. “That’s the power grab. The long-term game is to repeal the Voting Rights Act.”

Texas has a long history of violating the VRA. The state’s current congressional redistricting map, adopted in 2021, is being challenged in court by civil rights groups, who note that 95 percent of the state’s population growth over the past decade came from people of color, but the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead.

“They’re trying to take away the last tool the Supreme Court has not fully dissolved to stop the gross manipulation of elections.”

The Trump-inspired new map unveiled by Texas Republicans last week worsens that skew in representation by further increasing the number of congressional districts with white majorities and dismantling seats held by minority representatives, including Reps. Al Green in Houston and Greg Casar in Austin. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed the maps needed to be redrawn because of a Department of Justice letter alleging that four districts in the state, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

“They are thumbing their noses at the Voting Rights Act,” former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder told me.

The VRA, which turns 60 on Wednesday, is widely regarded as the country’s most important civil rights law. It played a pivotal role in ending Jim Crow by eliminating the suppressive tactics, like literacy tests and poll taxes, that disenfranchised Black Americans in the segregated South. When he signed the law at the US Capitol on August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson called it “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.”

The results were almost unimaginable in 1965. Because of the law, the number of Black registered voters in the South increased from 31 percent to 73 percent; the number of Black elected officials rose from fewer than 500 to 10,500 nationwide; and the number of Black members of Congress grew from 5 to 60. The four congressional reauthorizations of the VRA lowered the voting age to 18, eliminated literacy tests nationwide, and expanded protections for language-minority groups like Hispanics in Texas, Asian-Americans in New York, and Native Americans in Arizona. The VRA became the prime vehicle for expanding voting rights for all Americans.

But today the law is a “shadow of its former self,” says Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It is being attacked from every angle, gravely weakened by a series of hostile court decisions and under sustained fire from Republicans at the state and federal level.

The imminent threat to the VRA was brought into sharp relief last Friday, as the Texas House prepared to pass Trump’s mid-decade gerrymander, when the US Supreme Court announced new legal briefings in a Louisiana redistricting case to decide “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

That raises the prospect that the court’s conservative majority could rule next year that districts drawn to comply with the VRA that give people of color the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates may be unconstitutional, which would all-but-destroy the remaining protections of the law. “They’re trying to take away the last tool the Supreme Court has not fully dissolved to stop the gross manipulation of elections,” says Nelson.

The conservative effort to erode the VRA dates back decades. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, John Roberts worked strenuously to weaken the law, which he claimed would “lead to a quota system in all areas.”

Roberts lost that fight when Congress voted overwhelmingly to strengthen and reauthorize the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice. In the 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts wrote the majority opinion gutting the heart of the VRA, ruling that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That provision of the law blocked more than 3,000 discriminatory voting changes from 1965 to 2013.

Roberts argued that “things have changed dramatically” since 1965, but his decision has led to a proliferation of new restrictions on voting and racially gerrymandered maps. At least 31 states have passed 115 restrictive voting laws since Shelby County, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, including at least 44 laws in states that previously had to approve their voting changes.

Roberts claimed at the time that the Shelby County ruling “in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in Section 2” of the VRA, which applies nationwide and prohibits voting changes and redistricting maps that discriminate against voters of color. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been steadily working to weaken that remaining part of the VRA, as well.

Roberts tried to limit the power of Section 2 while serving in Reagan’s Justice Department, writing upwards of 25 memos arguing that “violations of Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” Eight years after the Shelby decision, in 2021, Roberts joined the conservative justices in a ruling, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, upholding new voting restrictions from Arizona that made it made it significantly harder to challenge laws that target minority voters under Section 2.

The court’s conservative majority has given the same green light to egregiously gerrymandered redistricting maps.

The decision offered a road map for how legislators could camouflage efforts to target communities of color by claiming they were motivated by partisan politics instead.

In the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts could not review, let alone strike down, claims of partisan gerrymandering. That has emboldened states like Texas to enact blatantly skewed new maps. Indeed, Texas Republicans have repeatedly cited Rucho to justify their new mid-decade redistricting effort.

“I’m not beating around the bush,” Republican State Rep. Todd Hunter, who introduced the new Texas map, said at a legislative hearing last Friday. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.” He admitted the map was being redrawn “for partisan purposes.”

The Rucho decision has also made it easier for states to get away with racial gerrymandering.

In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices upheld the constitutionality of a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court had previously found diluted the power of Black voters and deemed a “stark racial gerrymander.” The Supreme Court disagreed, finding that South Carolina Republicans were motivated by politics, not race, and “acted in good faith.” The decision offered a road map for how legislators could camouflage efforts to target communities of color by claiming they were motivated by partisan politics instead.

Perhaps encouraged by these rulings, conservative appellate courts have gone to even greater lengths to undermine the VRA. Last year, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that minority groups who form a combined majority, such as Black and Hispanic voters in Texas, are not protected under the VRA. The DOJ cited that decision to justify its letter objecting to the state’s current redistricting map.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an even more extreme decision in 2023, ruling that private plaintiffs could not bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the VRA. The opinion said that only the US Attorney General could bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2, which would decimate enforcement of the law, since more than 80 percent of successful Section 2 cases since 1982 were brought by private plaintiffs.

The Supreme Court recently paused that decision while deciding whether to hear the case, but three justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas—would have affirmed the 8th Circuit, signaling how a fringe legal theory has moved into the mainstream.

A rare exception to the court’s hostility to the VRA occurred in June 2023, when the Supreme Court invalidated Alabama’s congressional map because it did not include a second majority-Black district in a state that is 27 percent Black. That led to the drawing of a new majority-Black district that sent a Democrat to the House.

But the victory was tempered by an ominous warning sign. In a concurring opinion, Brett Kavanaugh stated that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future,” suggesting he was open to killing the last remaining part of the VRA.

That death blow could arrive in the Louisiana case. The state drew a court-ordered second majority-Black district following the Alabama ruling, which a group of self-described “non-African American” voters challenged in court. The facts of the case were very similar to the Alabama one. But the Court, instead of issuing a ruling after holding oral arguments in the spring, instead re-scheduled the case for the next term to examine whether majority-minority districts violate the Constitution.

“I’m very concerned about that,” Holder told me. “The way they have posed the question is extremely troubling. No court has ever ruled that Section Two of the Voting Rights Act violates the Constitution. That’s because the argument is an absurd one that harkens back to the Jim Crow era. Those are the kinds of things that people said back in 1965 and shortly thereafter, when opponents of the Voting Rights Act were trying to say that it was unconstitutional.”

Indeed, so many of the arguments that were made against the VRA at the time of its passage by Southern segregationists have now been embraced by the court’s conservative majority in a more respectable form.

Nelson hopes that the national attention focused on the Texas gerrymander will enlighten the public about the consequences of a gutted VRA. “The Texas example is a stark one and it shows how the manipulation of the most vulnerable voters de-legitimizes our democracy for everyone,” she says. “It’s hard to be hopeful in this moment. But I hope that people, with what’s happening in Texas, may begin to see the essential value of the law as a whole.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

An old-fashioned Western showdown is happening in Texas right now.

On one side you have Texas House Democrats who fled the state over the weekend to stop Texas Republicans from carrying out Trump’s orders to redraw the state’s maps. And Texas governor Greg Abbott who is very, very upset about it all. As of this writing, the move seems to have worked: the Texas House has failed to reach a quorum for two consecutive days. Now, Texas Senator John Cornyn wants the FBI to hunt down the Democrats and arrest them.

In this video I explain the standoff, the stakes and how both Republicans and Democrats are using the tool at their disposal to advance—or impede—competing visions for America.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Since resuming office, President Donald Trump has sought to rewrite American history, rejecting any signs of historical division and exalting some of the nation’s most notorious oppressors.

On Monday, the latest chapter of this quest unfolded: The National Park Service (NPS) announced that officials will restore and reinstall a Washington, DC, statue of a Confederate general that protesters toppled during the June 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd‘s murder by Minneapolis police. NPS’ press release said that the statue of Albert Pike, which was authorized by Congress in 1898 and stood in Judiciary Square, honors his “leadership in Freemasonry,” the male-only secret society. What it does not mention: Pike was a Confederate States of America general who fought to preserve slavery, may have been involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1860s, and commanded Native American troops in an 1862 battle in which they scalped at least eight Union soldiers.

Video obtained by the Washington Post shows protesters pulling down the Pike statue with ropes to cheers in June 2020, which Trump called “a disgrace to our Country!” in a social media post at the time. It was one of nearly 100 Confederate monuments that were removed from public spaces that year, according to a 2021 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).A report issued by the SPLC earlier this year found more than 680 Confederate monuments still standing.

The NPS cites two of Trump’s executive orders—”Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History“—as part of its justification for reinstalling the Pike statue. The news release adds that the statue has been in storage since its removal and is currently undergoing restorations, and will likely be reinstalled by October. Spokespeople for NPS and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon on the cost of the restoration or Pike’s history as a Confederate general and supporter of slavery.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s non-voting Democratic delegate to Congress, said in a statement on Monday that she will reintroduce a bill to permanently remove the statue. “The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling [his] statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable,” she said.

“A statue honoring a racist and a traitor has no place on the streets of DC,” Holmes Norton added.

As jarring as the move may be, it is just one of a series of measures Trump has taken to try to remake the nation’s history in MAGA’s fantasized image—that is, as an historically colorblind and virtuous society. He has attacked the Smithsonian, alleging they have “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and ordering officials to “remove improper ideology” from their properties; that led to the Smithsonian removing references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit at the National Museum of American History, the Washington Post first reported last week. (The Smithsonian subsequently announced that the information would be restored within weeks.) Trump has also, implausibly, declared English the country’s official language.

His edicts have led the US Army to restore seven bases to prior names honoring Confederate leaders, and NPS to remove references to gender non-conforming and transgender people and slavery from its website. Trump’s sycophants in Congress have also tried to make DC a more Trump-friendly town, introducing legislation to rename Dulles International Airport after the president and the Kennedy Center Opera House after First Lady Melania Trump.

The latest news is just more proof that, as my colleague David Corn wrote back in April:

Trump has launched a crusade not only against public servants, legal and governmental norms, commonsense economics, science, higher education, DEI programs, and his critics and political rivals, as he vies for wide-ranging power that will allow him to rule as an autocrat. He is striving to become the Big Brother who determines which parts of the American story are legitimate and which are to be suppressed and deleted.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

It was Father’s Day, and Suya Joint, a celebrated West African restaurant in Boston, was slammed.

Normally, Cecelia Lizotte, the restaurant’s owner and chef, would call her brother, Paul Dama, if she were in a pinch. Lizotte and Dama balanced each other out: Lizotte was the chatty boss who wore chunky jewelry and bright colors, the outgoing face of a restaurant that was a James Beard Award semifinalist last year, while Dama was Suya Joint’s quiet, attentive manager. It was Dama who picked up ingredients from New York, fixed the ticket machines and plumbing, and cracked jokes in the kitchen when things felt tense. Dama also worked as the house manager at a residential facility for elderly people with developmental disabilities, and the work came naturally to him—he had a way of putting people at ease.

“When I see him coming through the door,” Lizotte said recently, “I feel really, really safe.”

“I felt like someone just sucked my blood, my air,” she said. “Like, how do you live?”

But Lizotte couldn’t call her brother to pitch in on Father’s Day. That morning, on his way to church, Dama had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

When Lizotte got the call from Dama saying he was in custody, “I felt like someone just sucked my blood, my air,” she said. “Like, how do you live?”

Dama came to the United States from Nigeria in 2019 on a visitor visa and applied for asylum the following spring. Records show he had a Social Security number and a work authorization valid until 2029. But according to ICE spokesperson James Covington, Dama had been living in the United States illegally ever since 2019, when he “violated the terms of his lawful admission.”

Paul Dama and his sister, Cecelia LizotteCourtesy Cecelia Lizotte

There was an eerie familiarity to Dama’s detention. Dama fled Nigeria because he was kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2018. Then, too, armed men had pulled him over. Then, too, Lizotte had received a terrifying call—this one from her sister, saying that the militant group had taken their brother captive. At the time, Dama was a crime reporter working for the Nigerian Television Authority; his captors, who told him they had targeted him because of his work, made him vow to give up journalism in Nigeria if he were released. For four hellish days, Dama was beaten while his family scrambled to generate the $13,000 ransom, selling most of their property.

After his release, police advised Dama to leave the country because they could not guarantee his safety, according to his asylum application. “That is why I am here in the US,” Dama wrote, “where I feel safe and my freedom guaranteed.”

Lizotte used to feel the same way. She’d experienced the American dream herself: She’d become a citizen, a business owner, a mother of American children. Now, that idealism has soured.

“Literally right now as we speak,” Lizotte told me, “I just feel like, here’s another second kidnapping.”

Lizotte and I first met at Suya Joint in early July, two weeks after Dama had been detained. The restaurant has a relaxed, inviting feel, with Nigerian prints lining yellow walls and Afrobeats on the speakers. But Lizotte seemed to be running on adrenaline, speaking almost breathlessly. Talking with a reporter seemed like one more item on an endless to-do list.

And in a way, it was. Dama had a joint asylum and bond hearing in a few days, and preparing for it had become something of a full-time job. Lizotte had spent the weeks since Dama’s detention finding an attorney, collecting character statements, and gathering the necessary paperwork. She had to be there for her daughters, who were distraught—Paul was like a father to them; and for her staff, who were spooked; and for her family in Nigeria, who wanted constant updates. She kept her phone glued to her in case Dama, who was being held at a correctional facility in Dover, New Hampshire, happened to call.

“I did not include my brother being picked up by ICE in my whole entire business plan,” Lizotte said.

She was also raising money for the quickly accruing costs: $13,000 in attorney’s fees for the asylum case, $3,000 for the bond hearing, roughly $200 each week for Dama’s phone calls and basic needs in detention, not to mention all the costs that Dama would normally pay, but couldn’t—his rent, his phone bill, his car insurance. And, of course, there was the cost of losing a key employee at the restaurant.

“I did not include my brother being picked up by ICE in my whole entire business plan,” Lizotte said.

As the fees added up, Lizotte asked for help in an unusually transparent statement on the restaurant’s website. “Dear Suya Joint Family, I’m writing to you today with a heavy heart to share that we are facing an incredibly difficult moment at Suya Joint. My brother and our beloved manager, Paul, was recently detained by ICE while on his way to church.” While the restaurant wasn’t closing at the moment, Lizotte wrote, she was being forced to “seriously consider” what was best for the team and her family.

Support poured in. Within two weeks of Dama’s detention, a GoFundMe for his legal expenses had generated $32,000. Colleagues, friends, and family members wrote character statements. Agnes Hodges, an 84-year-old woman whom Dama helped around the house, wrote, “Who would take care of me the way Paul does?” Massachusetts state Sen. Liz Miranda wrote in, as did Rep. David Morales of Rhode Island, where the restaurant has a second location.

Dama’s detention even caught the attention of Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who had been to Suya Joint and reached out to ask what her office could do to help. “Rather than being met with the compassion he deserves, ICE has ripped Paul from his home,” Pressley wrote in a statement to Mother Jones, noting his “immensely meaningful” contributions to the community.

In jail, Dama has become the go-to guy for detainees who didn’t have family on the outside fighting for them, sharing his lawyer’s name and reading up on immigration law. But he also sounded cold, tired, and hungry.

Even after a successful crowdfunding campaign, Lizotte knew that her brother’s asylum case wouldn’t be easy. Late last year, Dama was charged twice with misdemeanors for operating a vehicle under the influence. On both occasions, he had allegedly pulled over and was sleeping in a stopped car. At the time, he was in a dark place, grieving the sudden loss of his mother; he told his family that he’d pulled over to sober up. Court records show that the charges were continued without a finding: If Dama completed a yearlong probation through December 2025, paid a fine, and finished a program for impaired drivers, the charges could be dismissed. Lizotte says the incidents served as a jolt to Dama, who decided to go to therapy.

The charges also made him far more vulnerable to immigration enforcement. They fall under a category of offenses that are not criminal convictions, but are treated as such within the immigration system. Under previous administrations, someone like Dama would have been a “low or non-priority for enforcement,” says Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, but “this is an administration who’s choosing to apply the law in the harshest way possible.”

In addition, Dama’s status as an asylum seeker no longer affords him the protections it once did. Until recently, immigration enforcement rarely detained asylum seekers who posed no public safety threat. But under Trump, asylum seekers who have been living in the country for years are targets. “They’re putting into detention people who have valid work authorization, who followed the rules and applied for asylum and are just waiting for their court date,” Gupta says. “It’s a way for them to say, ‘We arrested someone, we hit the arrest goal, and we threw somebody in immigration detention who’s not a citizen.’”

Over the phone from the detention center, Dama sometimes sounded to Lizotte like his usual calm, thoughtful self. He had become the go-to guy for detainees who didn’t have family on the outside fighting for them, sharing his lawyer’s name and reading up on immigration law. They had even given him a new nickname: “president.”

But Dama also sounded cold, tired, and hungry. Sometimes, dinner consisted of two pieces of bread. He and other detainees took to saving their food from breakfast and lunch and eating it with dinner—that way, they felt more full.

Lizotte’s daughter, Vanessa, a 19-year-old college student who works at Suya Joint on the weekends, said she usually tells her uncle everything. But lately, talking to him on the phone, she struggled with what to say.

When we spoke after the hearing, Lizotte’s breathless tone was gone, replaced by exhaustion.

“How am I supposed to talk to this man about my day and tell him about all the things I’m doing when I’m just feeling so guilty?” she said. Should she tell him, she wondered, about the day before, when she and her mom had gone to Fenway Park for a Nigerian cultural night? Should she tell him she’d gotten to go on the field and hug the Red Sox mascot? Should she tell him how excited she was?

“These are dreams coming true,” she told me. “And I feel so bad saying these things—like, he’s telling me about the food that he’s eating, how people are just being taken in the middle of the night.”

A few days after the July hearing, Lizotte and I spoke again. Her breathless tone was gone, replaced by exhaustion.

Immigration Judge Yul-mi Cho had denied Dama’s bond, and his asylum hearing was pushed back to September. Dama remains at the correctional facility in New Hampshire.

“I’m just getting more and more defeated,” Lizotte said. “Very, very much getting sick—mentally, emotionally. There’s just a void.”

Lizotte used to eat full meals at her restaurant, but lately, she’s lost her appetite. She cries easily. She wakes in the middle of the night to make sure she hasn’t missed important calls. She’s terrified her brother will be transferred to a facility further away.

Every now and again, Lizotte catches her customers’ sympathetic glances. They ask how she’s holding up.

The reality is that sometimes she wants to give up. Close down the restaurant, go back to Nigeria. Her daughters and employees don’t like her to talk like this. They’re holding onto her, they say, and they need her to stay strong.

“And I’m like, ‘Okay, I understand that. Where’s my brother?'” she said recently. “Like, who am I holding on to?”

But occasionally, she’s able to cling to hope of her brother’s release. During a recent phone call with Dama, another detainee—a new friend of Dama’s—asked to talk to Lizotte. The friend, an African DJ who had been living in Maine before he was picked up by ICE, had an important message. If he and Dama got out, he wanted to DJ an event at Suya Joint. It would be a three-day party—Friday, Saturday, Sunday. They’d call the celebration Freedom.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

In early July, the Bureau of Land Management quietly announced plans to trade away 2 million acres of public land along Alaska’s Dalton Highway. The immense stretch of boreal forest totters into tundra, an area almost three times the size of Rhode Island. It will be handed over to the state, likely opening the door to mining and development.

The exchange is one of many moves by the Trump administration to privatize public land and roll back climate and environmental protections. In just six months the White House has announced plans to shrink iconic national monuments, reopened oil and gas leasing, rescinded watershed protections to pave the way for mining, and opened millions of acres of national forest to logging. These decisions have been joined by a broader dismantling of climate and environmental regulations, including efforts to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to curb greenhouse gases.

Even as he continued upending how the country’s natural resources are managed, President Donald Trump signed an executive order vowing to “Make America Beautiful Again.” His directive, issued July 3, called for balancing environmental stewardship with economic growth, and established a commission to “advise and assist the President regarding how best to responsibly conserve America’s national treasures and natural resources.” It is unclear what policies this commission might develop or how much authority it will hold.

“Most conservatives understand the issue…They’re just tired of the moralism and want solutions aligned with their values.”

Benji Backer, a 27-year-old conservative conservationist, hopes to influence some of those details. He has built a national platform around the idea that caring about the environment and climate change is a bipartisan issue. After founding the nonprofit American Conservation Coalition, or ACC, eight years ago, Backer launched Nature is Nonpartisan this spring. While ACC was “strictly meant for conservatives, by conservatives,” he sees the new organization transcending partisanship, pursuing environmental action regardless of who holds political power. “If there’s a future for our environment, there has to be a center voice that’s willing to call balls and strikes, and not care about who they could potentially piss off,” he said.

The group’s board includes notable conservative figures like David Bernhardt,a lawyer who served as interior secretary during the first Trump administration and was investigated for failing to recuse himself from decisions affecting Halliburton, a former client. He now consults for oil and gas firms. Other advisers include Chris LaCivita Jr., a political consultant and son of the president’s 2024 campaign manager, as well as more centrist figures like Van Jones and David Livingston.

Shortly after the president took office Backer delivered a draft order to the White House containing a list of policy goals he’d developed in consultation with groups like Ducks Unlimited and the National Wildlife Federation. These included goals like restoring forests and combating plastic pollution. Though the final order, announced at the Iowa State Fair, does not explicitly mention climate change, Backer says it helps the EPA administrator and interior secretary “move in the right direction.” Based on his conversations with them, Backer says, “They’ve been focused on cutting. It’s my hope that they start building soon.”

“Our message to conservatives is that this country is worth protecting,” says Benji Backer.Grist/Courtesy of Benji Backer

Though the Trump administration’s revisions substantially altered the order, Backer was quick to celebrate it. “Working with the White House on this EO for the past six months has been an honor,” he posted on X shortly after Trump signed the document. “This is an incredible step that will leave a positive mark for our environment for generations!”

Backer’s optimistic tone marks a shift from a letter he co-signed with nine other Republican leaders in December, stating that Trump’s win “raises serious questions about both the durability of recent climate gains and the prospects for future progress.” At that time, the coalition statement focused on the election of climate-engaged Republicans like representatives John Curtis and Marianette Miller-Meeks, both members of the Conservative Climate Caucus. Like many liberal organizations preparing for a Trump administration, the letter also discussed shifting focus to state and local climate action.

Lobbying efforts by the American Conservation Coalition and its advocacy arm have met mixed success with the Trump administration. They appear to have spent $2.65 million trying to preserve key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, particularly clean energy tax credits. “The tax credits empower the private sector to invest in clean, reliable energy,” Danielle Franz, ACC’s chief executive officer, told Grist. “It’s important to use our resources to reward innovation, and to have those free market or market-based incentives.”

“You’ve got to watch what [Republicans] are doing, not just what they’re saying,” says former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman. The gap “is pretty stark.”

The budget bill debate also demonstrated how effective conservative voices can be in shaping environmental policy. When Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee proposed requiring the sale of millions of acres of federal land, it sparked swift and broad backlash, including from hunters, anglers, and right-leaning influencers like Joe Rogan. After widespread conservative criticism, Lee scaled back the bill, then withdrew it—underscoring the significant influence GOP conservation groups like ACC can have in determining environmental policy.

It was, Backer says, “a perfect example of what is possible. It basically just allowed us to go out there and show that millions of Americans are willing to stand together for the same environmental outcome.” He hopes to build on that momentum with practical goals: Nature Is Nonpartisan is developing a short list of priorities he believes are politically feasible, including providing more funding for easing water pollution, reforming the Endangered Species Act, and tackling the backlog of maintenance in America’s 63 national parks. (His list made no mention of climate change.) To garner support, Backer recently organized a coalition meeting of conservation groups, including right-leaning organizations like American Forests and Safari Club International, as well as more liberal conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy.

It’s part of a broader effort to tap into what he and others see as a growing awareness among conservatives. As Franz puts it, if you asked most conservatives if “climate change is real, they would say yes.” She points out conservation has deep roots in the Republican Party, from Teddy Roosevelt championing the creation of national parks to Ronald Reagan approving the Montreal Protocol to address the ozone hole.

She added that the document Grist obtained that outlines the lobbying effort was a “leaked, outdated draft that was never finalized or published,” and “appears to conflate” ACC and its advocacy group’s work. Those efforts ultimately failed: The reconciliation bill made significant cuts to clean energy policy, effectively halting federal incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects. The bill did retain some support for nuclear and geothermal power. Franz declined to criticize the decision or discuss specific energy policies, saying “in any bill you’re going to have give and take.”

Public opinion has shifted sharply since then, however. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, only 11 percent of Republicans consider climate change a great personal threat, down from 29 percent a decade ago. A Pew Research Center survey reveals that while a majority of Republicans support concrete policies like expanding solar farms and joining international climate agreements, only 12 percent say climate change should be a top national priority—underscoring how political polarization shapes broader attitudes. Though there may be pragmatic support for specific policies, Republicans still consistently prioritize consumer costs, and fossil fuels over renewable energy. “Most conservatives understand the issue,” Franz says. “They’re just tired of the moralism and want solutions aligned with their values.”

In the past, ACC has advocated for streamlining permitting and boosting nuclear energy, promoting an “all‑of‑the‑above” strategy that includes renewables. Franz says ACC is happy with Trump’s “energy abundance” strategy, arguing that traditional energy produced in the United States has “a net reduction for global emissions” because “American-made fossil fuels are cleaner than some other countries.”

The data tell a different story. The International Energy Agency has been unequivocal: To stay within global climate goals, no new fossil fuel development can move forward. Studies show US methane emissions are severely undercounted, especially from shale gas fields, and claims of American fossil fuels being cleaner obscure the urgent need to shift away from them altogether. “Look, I’m not here to defend what Trump’s done on the environment over the last six months,” Backer said. “This is not a black-or-white thing. This is a four-year administration, and we’re trying to shift them in the direction towards conservation as much as we possibly can.”

But hoping for a gradual course correction is at odds with the urgency of the crisis and the need for swift action, said Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who led the EPA under President George W. Bush. She is upset by the Trump administration’s dismantling of that agency, saying the president “has no respect for science.”

In the absence of climate leadership from Washington, Whitman said states will have to step up with their own agreements, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a coalition of 11 eastern states that aims to limit and reduce emissions from the power sector. Although each of those states is currently led by a Democrat, several of them have had Republican governors since the coalition’s inception in 2005. “There are Republicans that really care about the environment and are doing work,” Whitman said. But while she agrees bipartisan advocacy is essential, she says there’s a clear disconnect between the rhetoric in Make America Beautiful Again and the administration’s policies. “You’ve got to watch what they’re doing, not just what they’re saying,” she added. The gap, she said, “is pretty stark.”

Still, Franz is optimistic about building conservative consensus around a sustainable future. “Our message to conservatives is that this country is worth protecting,” she says.

In its first six months, the Trump administration has aggressively expanded oil and gas leasing, rolled back critical environmental regulations, and weakened methane emissions, reversing previous conservation protections and US progress on global climate commitments. Asked about these policies, Franz said, “I think oftentimes these pieces want to relitigate and relitigate and relitigate the past, instead of talking about the future that conservatives see.”

Franz and Backer see themselves as guardians of a tradition that protects a natural heritage alongside economic freedom. They don’t see a gulf between a livable future and the reality unfolding in Washington—a White House that praises abundance while leasing away the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; an administration that talks about stewardship while gutting the laws that made it possible.

Franz recently became a parent, an experience that’s deepened her commitment to her work. She wants her 4-month-old son to grow up seeing the north woods of Minnesota the way she did—deer tracks in the snow, the bite of a November wind, the smell of rifle oil. Franz talks about caring about outcomes, not performative belief tests, how conservatives are tired of virtue signaling, and focusing on solutions. She doesn’t see a tension between supporting oil and gas and promoting conservation at the same time. “It assumes a binary choice between use and between care, and I think that we can do both.”

Whether that’s true is no longer just an ideological debate. It’s a matter of time. As Franz says, “It’s not really a question of, ‘Do you believe in climate change?’ anymore. It’s more a question of, ‘What do you want to do about it?’”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

For the past 30 years, former Graham County, Arizona, sheriff Richard Mack has been railing against federal overreach and warning of encroaching governmental tyranny. As an antidote to this threat to freedom and liberty, Mack, who hasn’t actually been a sheriff since 1997, founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in 2011. Its mission was straightforward: to promote his view that elected sheriffs have the authority to defend their citizens by arresting federal agents they believe are violating the Constitution.

“The President of the United States has no power, no jurisdiction—I don’t care if it’s George Washington himself—to tell anyone in your state to change one damn thing,” hetold an audience of about 100 anti-government “patriots” and “strict constitutionalists” at a 2010 conference in Valley Forge convened by people fighting the “New World Order.”

So, naturally, I thought of Mack in June, when Trump sent the Marines in to occupy Los Angeles and federalized the California National Guard before deploying it to assist with ICE raids in the city against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. I’d spent some time with Mack in 2021 when I wrote a profile of him. I knew of his history of involvement with anti-government militia groups and fighting everything from gun control laws to mask and vaccine mandates. Surely, I thought, Mack will mobilize his supporters to protest this outrageous federal assault on states’ rights. Isn’t this just the sort of tyranny he’s been warning us about?

Ok, maybe I didn’t really believe Mack would publicly oppose Trump. He’s a supporter. But in early July, when federal troops in tactical gear and Humvees descended on MacArthur Park in Los Angeles to terrorize residents, I did wonder whether it bothered him. After all, he’d been on the frontlines when supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy took up arms against Bureau of Land Management agents who tried to confiscate cattle that he was illegally grazing on federal land. “We don’t believe that bureaucratic policies and regulations supersede the Constitution,” he told one crowd.

“We don’t believe that bureaucratic policies and regulations supersede the Constitution.”

Mack even stood with Bundy’s son Ammon to protest the prosecution of two Oregon ranchers accused of setting fire to BLM-managed range land shortly before Ammon staged an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Trump’s military invasion of Los Angeles seemed like exactly the sort of thing Mack lived to fight. So I decided to reach out and ask him why he hadn’t come to defend the citizens of LA from this unprecedented federal incursion.

“I think Trump’s doing a very good job,” he told me from his home in Arizona, where he was getting ready to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. Mack believes that Trump was completely justified in sending federal troops into LA to crack down on rioting and violence. “I’ve researched it and studied it out,” he said. “When Governor Wallace refused to allow black students to enter the U of Alabama, JFK brought in federal troops. I totally support what he did, and what President Trump did.”

Mack’s position isn’t unusual. Since 2009, I have spent a lot of time covering right-wing groups, tea party activists, the Bundys, and other anti-government extremists who have couched their opposition to the federal government or Democrats in the language of the Constitution. They have plied me with multiple copies of their favorite pocket Constitution, put out by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group founded by the late anti-communist W. Cleon Skousen, whom Mack credits for his “conversion to constitutionalism.”

These activists fiercely proclaimed their unshakable commitment to the foundational document, which many of them believed was divinely inspired. Yet in May, when Trump was asked if he had to uphold the Constitution, and he replied, “I don’t know,” Mack and his ilk uttered not a peep, even though so much of what they once warned about—and which was dismissed as the rantings of paranoid extremists—seems on the verge of coming true.

Former tea partiers, mandatory mask and vaccine opponents, or elected officials like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who insisted in 2015 that an ordinary military training exercise known as Jade Helm was an attempt by President Obama to invade Texas—none of them have objected to Trump’s use of the military on domestic affairs. And you’d be hard pressed to find a “strict constitutionalist” on the right who has spoken out against Trump’s actions that many courts have already found to be unconstitutional, such as his punishing law firms he doesn’t like. And not a word from any of them about his unprecedented and likely illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to dispense with due process in deporting immigrants.

Consider Glenn Beck, who brought Skousen’s interpretation of the Constitution back into popular circulation during the rise of the tea party movement in 2009. He spent hours warning viewers that “the Constitution is hanging by a thread,” and that Obama was planning to invoke martial law to impose a totalitarian government, possibly by creating FEMA camps that it would use for mass detention of the regime’s enemies. (Eventually, after much criticism, he conceded that the FEMA camps were an unfounded conspiracy theory.)

But in July, FEMA announced it would be sending more than $600 million to the states to build detention camps. And the Trump administration has been sending immigrants to “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, where the original plans literally would have used FEMA tents to hold immigrants before deporting them to places like South Sudan without due process. And where is Glenn Beck? Supporting Trump.

At the end of July, Beck even devoted 10 minutes of his radio show to lampooning CNN for its coverage of the Florida detention center, which included reporting on the facility’s overcrowding and lack of running water or sewage system. “That is the same story for many mobile home parks in Florida, surrounded by alligators,” Beck said, cracking himself up.

The Tea Party Patriots is one of the original grassroots conservative groups that sprang up after Obama was elected. “Our vision is for a nation where individual liberty is cherished and maximized, where the Constitution is revered and upheld,” its website says. “One law for all and equal application of the law is a founding principle that distinguishes America from the lands immigrants fled to escape oppression. No American President, Republican or Democrat, should ever go around the Constitution, no matter how important the issue.”

The group’s co-founder Jenny Beth Martin once warned tea party activists against falling for Trump’s siren song in 2016, saying, “Donald Trump loves himself first, last, and everywhere in between. He loves himself more than our country, he loves himself more than the Constitution.”

In 2013, Tea Party Patriots filed a suit, alleging that the Obama administration was violating their First Amendment rights by weaponizing the IRS to hold up approval of their nonprofit application. More than three dozen other tea party groups also filed suit, represented by Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the conservative counterpart to the ACLU, the American Center for Law and Justice.  He told Congress in 2015, “To be very clear, the IRS was—and is still—used as a weapon against the Obama Administration’s political enemies.”

As it turned out, the IRS was also scrutinizing liberal groups’ nonprofit applications, and there was no evidence that Obama had had anything to do with its handling of the tea party nonprofits, some of which clearly deserved a second look. In 2017, the lawsuits were settled favorably on the tea partiers’ behalf. Today, Trump is openly threatening to have the IRS revoke the nonprofit status of Harvard University and nonprofit groups whose work he opposes.

Once more, there has been no outcry by these constitutional conservatives. Sekulow went on to lead Trump’s first impeachment defense team, and Martin is now one of the president’s most sycophantic supporters. Neither Beck, Sekulow, nor Martin responded to requests for comment.

KrisAnne Hall, a lawyer who helps Mack conduct law enforcement trainings with seminars on the Constitution, is also a veteran of the tea party movement who fought mask and vaccine mandates during the pandemic. When I reached her by email to ask why she wasn’t suing the Trump administration over its constitutional violations, she asked me why I’d never contacted her to ask about President Biden’s unconstitutional activity. She answered none of my questions.

Mack was a founding board member of the Oath Keepers, a militia group made up of many current and former law enforcement and military members. Their very “oath” involved refusing to follow orders from a president if they believed those orders were unconstitutional. Among the examples of an order the Oath Keepers pledged to defy was entering “with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor,” which is exactly what Trump did with the Marines and National Guard in California.

The Oath Keepers went on to play a significant role in orchestrating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, for which many were convicted of sedition and other serious crimes. After taking office in January, Trump pardoned them or commuted their sentences, so perhaps their acquiescence isn’t a surprise.

Yet Mack, who was smart enough to avoid participating in the Capitol siege, has also been pretty subdued since Trump took office again, perhaps because right-wing media isn’t doing a very good job of informing their audience of Trump’s potentially unconstitutional activity. When I talked to Mack in July, he claimed to have no idea that US Marines were still occupying Los Angeles, long after any civil unrest had taken place.

While he didn’t completely believe me that this was the case, he acknowledged that allowing federal troops to cross the country for domestic reasons conflicted with the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of federal military personnel for domestic law enforcement. (California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the administration of violating the act when he sued over its having federalized the California National Guard in June.)

The act has long been an article of faith for many militia groups. “At first glance, this would be a violation, what Trump did,” Mack conceded. “Federal troops can be at the border, but they can’t be policing the streets of America.”

Mark Pitcavage—a longtime extremism researcher at the Anti-Defamation League who is writing a history of the U.S. militia movement—says the silence of the anti-government groups and militias during the Trump administration is noteworthy. Historically, the anti-government extremists and militia groups have deeply distrusted every president, from George H.W. Bush to Obama.

“Trump was the first major party nominee that the militia movement has ever supported…They’re basically in his pocket.”

“Trump was the first major party nominee that the militia movement has ever supported,” Pitcavage marveled. “They loved him as a candidate, they loved him as a president, even though he did things that if an establishment Democrat or Republican had done, they would have raised bloody hell. They’re basically in his pocket.”

One person who isn’t in Trump’s pocket is Ammon Bundy, who has long been something of a folk hero for people in the patriot movement. I first started covering Bundy in 2017, when he was on trial in Nevada along with many of his family members and supporters on charges related to the armed resistance to the BLM.He spent more than a year in jail before that case ended in a mistrial because of prosecutorial misconduct. (He’d also been prosecuted in Oregon for the wildlife refuge takeover, only to have a federal jury find him not guilty in 2016.)

In 2021, I wrote a profile of him when he was fighting mask mandates and lockdowns during the pandemic and gearing up for his unsuccessful run for governor in Idaho. Bundy is never without his pocket Constitution and even gave whiteboard lessons on the document to his followers while he was occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But unlike Mack and the other alleged constitutionalists on the right, Bundy told me by text that he found the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and use of the military in Los Angeles “very concerning!”

He said he was ashamed that his recent troubles thus far have prevented him from being more outspoken about Trump’s unconstitutional actions. (He’s currently avoiding a $50 million legal judgment in Idaho and an arrest warrant for failing to appear in court.) “Gavin Newsom is a tool,” he told me from an undisclosed location while making breakfast for his large family. “He is a very despicable politician in almost every manner. But he is right about Trump’s violation of the Constitution in invading California with the US military.”

A devout Mormon, Bundy had been critical of Trump’s immigration policies during his first administration and lost some followers when he spoke out about it. He is nothing if not consistent, which he acknowledges is not the case with many people who claim to revere the Constitution. “It has been my sad experience that most people will set principles, justice, and good aside to spite those whom they despise,” he said.

Bundy and his supporters have long suspected that the Obama administration had authorized a drone strike on his family ranch. He said people with “more socialist ideas on the left” would have supported such a move, “just as the nationalists on the right have no problem when the president mimics the SS policies in rounding up people who have committed no crime against anyone.” He finds the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts “exceedingly dangerous” and in direct conflict with the Founders’ intent.

“The principles enshrined in the US Constitution apply to all people equally and are intended to protect the rights of every individual within the jurisdiction of the United States,” Bundy told me. What Trump is doing by sending masked ICE agents out to grab people off the street “stands in direct opposition to the founding principles of this nation.”

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Should democrats be revenge gerrymandering?

“Hell yeah,” says Texas congressional candidate, Isaiah Martin.

On Sunday evening, Texas House Democrats fled the state to try to block an effort by state Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map and flips five districts from blue to red. Some Democrats are now looking for blue states to return the favor. I asked Isaiah Martin, candidate for Texas’s 18th congressional district, for his thoughts on how Democrats should approach this moment.

Martin, 27, has skin in the game. A Houston native, he’s spent much of his young life working in politics, including as an advisor to the late Congresswoman Shiela Jackson-Lee. Last week, Martin made headlines when he was arrested for disrupting a local redistricting hearing when he refused to yield once his time had expired.

“We should be talking about the fact that we live in a state that is unaffordable for people, our economy is wrecked, people cannot find good jobs, ” Martin said, “and you choose to go and gerrymander people out of their seats.”

Martin told me that he believes that Democrats should use every single tool at their disposal to fight back, and that they should be asking themselves if they are willing to “lose the country” because they are “playing into a moral high ground dilemma.”

WATCH:

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Every day, Americans are bombarded with the bad news of Trump 2.0: concentration camps; cruel ICE raids targeting law-abiding residents; health insurance being yanked from millions; elite universities, media companies, and law firms yielding to mob-like extortion; crypto deals and other brazen grifting tied to a corrupt White House; rampant abuses of governmental power and threats of sham criminal prosecutions against the administration’s critics and political foes; drastic cuts in food assistance; assaults on women’s rights; the withholding of disaster relief; the reckless shutdowns and eviscerations of crucial government services and agencies that will result in hardship (and, in some cases, death) for Americans and people overseas.

This is, of course, a partial list. And it is exhausting to keep track of and absorb each new outrage. That is the clear intent. The Trump transgressions come so fast they distract from each other. Public attention rarely remains focused on any one atrocity. We’re bludgeoned by the never-ending stream of misdeeds and affronts—which each day come wrapped in propaganda extolling a new Golden Age and assorted false glories of Dear Leader. When one is caught in the crossfire, it is hard to see, let alone address, the big picture.

Trump and his gang are deconstructing America. It is the story that must be conveyed to the citizenry.

That is to Donald Trump’s advantage. For a long time, commentators have noted that he relishes generating chaos and believes he can exploit disorder for political advantage. It’s an escape route for him. The dizzying whirlwind he creates places critics and opponents off-balance. And perhaps best of all for him and his crew, it hides their overall plan and inhibits the development and promotion of an overarching counternarrative. Their foes are stuck decrying the individual acts of villainy, one at a time, without doing what is most necessary in American politics: telling a story.

Trump and his gang are deconstructing America. This is their purposeful goal and an obvious one, if you look past the daily barrage of absurdity, indecency, corruption, wrongdoing, and abuses of power. It is the story that must be conveyed to the citizenry.

For years, Trump’s lieutenants and allies—folks like alt-right leader Steve Bannon and the arch-conservative eggheads at the Heritage Foundation—have decried what they call the “administrative state” and urged its abolition. By this, they meant the permanent civil service that does the work of government, such as enforcing laws and implementing policies, regulations, and safeguards. It’s been a long-term desire of right-wingers to smash the state and disempower these public servants—and make way for an economically libertarian and socially conservative regime that, in the case of Trump, would be ruled by an autocrat. Government would no longer have the potential to be a countervailing force to the power of corporate interests and wealth. This is the dream shared by Elon Musk and the reason he jumped aboard the Trump train. Like many of his Silicon Valley brethren, he envisions a world in which profit-driven tech overlords plot our collective future free of the pesky meddling of government.

Trump’s master plan extends far beyond government. He is seeking to weaken and intimidate other influential sections of society that might provide a check on him and a corporate-friendly state.

To achieve something of this sort, Trump, following the playbook of Project 2025, is attempting to shift the basic balance of power in the United States and revoke a fundamental agreement of American society: The rich and the powerful get to be rich and powerful, while government constrains their excesses and looks out for the common interest of the rest of us. Under Trump, that deal—which often in American history has been executed shoddily and not infrequently ignored—is null and void. Look at artificial intelligence. Last month, Trump gave free rein to the tech firms to develop this new technology—which might present a risk to humanity—as they wish. There will be no consideration of the public interest or public safety.

But Trump’s master plan—of which he is hardly the main author—extends far beyond government. He is seeking to weaken and intimidate other influential sections of society that might provide a check on him and a corporate-friendly state. Embracing a decades-long crusade of the right, he has assaulted the media, looking to discredit news outlets and undercut their ability to hold him and his allies accountable. And big guns of corporate media—ABC News and Paramount, the owner of CBS News—have buckled, agreeing to pay Trump millions of dollars in extortion fees. A wave of baseless defamation suits from Trump and his confreres have sent chilling waves through the media. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has issued not-so-veiled threats against news organizations and media companies that rely on broadcast licenses issued by the federal government.

Trump has gone after powerful law firms in the same Sopranos-like manner, several of which settled and agreed to pay huge fees though they had committed no wrongdoing. Now big law firms are more reluctant to take on cases that might offend Trump. This week, Reuters published an investigation that concluded, “Dozens of major law firms, wary of political retaliation, have scaled back pro bono work, diversity initiatives and litigation that could place them in conflict with the Trump administration…Many firms are making a strategic calculation: withdraw from pro bono work frowned on by Trump, or risk becoming the next target.”

The Trump White House also zeroed in on Ivy League schools. So far, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown have settled bogus cases deployed against them by the administration. Columbia will pay $200 million directly to the government and be subjected to an independent monitor. Brown escaped such an intrusion and agreed to pay $50 million over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island. Harvard, which initially seemed to be a front of resistance, is now reportedly in negotiations to forge an agreement with Trump that could entail a payment of $500 million. Universities and colleges across the nation are undoubtedly watching all this and discussing how to avoid the wrath of Trump.

Trump and his posse are waging an inexplicable war on science. Is that because they see science as a fount of liberalism, as if reality has a political bias?

As is Corporate America. Trump has been good to many executives and firms by slashing their taxes and weakening regulatory enforcement, especially for polluters and financial firms. (Tariffs are another matter.) But the men and women in the C-suites are no fools and realize that a price will be paid if they end up at odds with Trump. (See Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.)

Trump has annihilated one of the centers of influential thought in the nation: the scientific research community. Slashing billions of dollars in funding for medical research and other scientific endeavors, he is wiping out a generation of science and scientists. One of the driving engines of American society and the US economy is being deprived of fuel. The United States is on its way to losing its preeminent standing in the global scientific community. That means lower likelihoods of breakthroughs in the search for treatments and cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases, as well as increased challenges once the next pandemic strikes. Dramatic reductions in NASA’s budget will cause a severe decline in basic scientific research. Trump and his posse are waging an inexplicable war on science. Is that because they see science as a fount of liberalism, as if reality has a political bias?

With his mass deportation effort, Trump has turned a slice of American law enforcement into a police state. He has spread fear through many towns and communities, as his masked marauders round up law-abiding residents and threaten small businesses. Why go after people who are working hard, paying taxes, and contributing to their communities? It’s difficult not to see a racial motive and a desire to reverse the demographic diversity that is a key and dynamic ingredient of American society. At the same time, Trump has moved to make the United States less secular. His IRS issued a ruling to allow churches and other places of worship to become more directly involved in elections. On Monday, his Office of Personnel Management released new guidance that would allow federal employees to display religious items in the workplace, pray in groups, and proselytize their fellow workers.

It’s an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy to reshape America to the fancy of an autocrat and far-right advocates who crave blowing up the foundations of America they regard as liberal, woke, or otherwise at odds with their MAGA theology.

What Trump and Co. are doing brings to mind Christian dominionism. Fundamentalists who adhere to this theology believe that Christians ought to have dominion over the vital sectors of society: family, religion, government, education, media, business, and arts and entertainment. Trump is striving for such domination. He even seized control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. (Republicans have proposed renaming it the Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts.) His White House has muscled the Smithsonian Institution to eschew exhibitions that in the Trumpers’ view reflect DEI concerns. As a result of pressure from the administration, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Art History removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit on impeachments in US history. In 1984, the Party has a slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

It’s an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy to reshape America to the fancy of an autocrat and far-right advocates who crave blowing up the foundations of America they regard as liberal, woke, or otherwise at odds with their MAGA theology. And it entails amassing political clout unlike a president has ever done, with Trump illegally assuming powers he doesn’t possess (such as to impose tariffs and deport people without due process) and trying to rig the system (see the latest gerrymandering by Texas Republicans).

One huge question is how to tell this story? The individual components are so troubling they warrant their own headlines, and the conventional media is not adept at consistently portraying overarching narratives in a down-to-brass-tacks fashion. The key word in the last sentence is “consistently.” In today’s fractured and bubble-ized media ecosystem, plotlines don’t punch through unless there’s repetition and force in the presentation. It’s too easy to be distracted. Each day we are hit by thousands of impressions—social media posts, ads, emails, news stories, videos. How does an idea—such as, Trump is deconstructing American society—cut through the immense and never-ending clutter and register with a large number of people?

Before you quickly say, “The Democrats should be doing this,” I’ll note that, yes, the Democrats should be doing this. But let’s be real. There are few Democrats these days who have a national platform from which they can broadcast such a message. That’s not only because most are awful as communicators in the digital age, but also because the party locked out of the White House and the congressional majorities usually has difficulty gaining the attention of those Americans who don’t obsessively pay attention to politics.

The challenge of how to reach voters who do not engage with news or politics is the No. 1 problem for Democrats. You can’t rebrand if no one sees you trying to rebrand. Trump, a creation of reality TV and celebrity culture, commands attention—and even did so when he was not in office. There’s no Democrat with such standing. Thus, no Democrat is well positioned to inform Americans of the grand scheme underway.

The president was acknowledging he would use instruments of state power to try to lock up his political enemies. Richard Nixon musing about such things on the Watergate tapes was a massive scandal. Nowadays, it’s just another Tuesday.

That’s not to say that Democrats shouldn’t try. If enough of them use the daily outrages to illuminate the larger narrative and do so repeatedly, the message will reach some people. But this would require much repetition and discipline, as well as imagination and creativity regarding how to connect with people not looking for connections with politicians. At the moment, beating the Epstein scandal drum probably seems more effective for many Democrats, as they try to ride a wave of protest and upset created by Trump’s own base.

Reporters and commentators in the media could help share this story. But that might require breaking free of certain industry conventions. The gravitational pull within much mainstream media is toward neutral language and presentation. That aids bad-faith actors. It was shocking that when Trump recently said, “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” this remark did not lead to front-page headlines and days of high-octane coverage. The president of the United States was acknowledging he would use instruments of state power—in this instance, the intelligence community and the Justice Department—to try to lock up his political enemies. Richard Nixon musing about such things on the Watergate tapes was a massive scandal. Nowadays, it’s just another Tuesday.

Perhaps “deconstructing America” is not the best phrase for this task. “Destroying America” seems a touch vague and for some it might come across as hyperbolic. The “No Kings” slogan that apparently arose organically via national protests against Trump caught on, and it works as effective shorthand. But it may be too personalized, fixating on Trump’s pathological appetite for authoritarian rule, without sufficiently covering the transformational and wide-ranging attack on the nation that he and the right are perpetuating. I’m open to suggestions.

The point remains: The full impact of Trump’s rule has not seemed to register with most Americans, even as he slips in the polls. It is a frightening tale. He and his co-conspirators are forcing profound changes upon the nation—policies that do not have the support of the majority and that will cause much damage and be difficult to remedy. This is the narrative that needs to be conveyed, for if the people do not understand the sweeping dark reality of Trumpism, they will not be able to stop it.

From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This article is a collaboration between Mother Jones and Agência Pública.

On July 16, Paulo Figueiredo, a Brazilian right-wing influencer and grandson of a former military dictator, stood in front of the White House. At his side was Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian ex-president who is on trial for an alleged coup attempt. The two scions had just had “a very important round of meetings” with high-level US government officials, Eduardo said in a video posted online. They wanted to share with their followers what might happen next.

In early July, President Donald Trump announced a 50 percent tariff onimports from Brazil to the United States. Trump explained it as, in part, a rebuttal of what he decried as a “witch hunt” against Jair Bolsonaro and the “insidious attacks” on free speech by Brazilian authorities probing a 2022 plot to keep the defeated president in power. In the video, Figueiredo, a self-proclaimed journalist in exile based in Florida, said the tariffs marked the “beginning of a journey that could be dire for Brazil.”

For months, Eduardo and Figueiredo have been spearheading an international campaign to lobby the United States to impose sanctions. In particular, the pair is targeting Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice overseeing the investigation into Jair Bolsonaro’s alleged role in the failed coup. They accuse Moraes, who has forcefully cracked down on social media platforms over the spread of disinformation, of being a “de facto dictator” censoring conservative voices in Brazil. A couple of days after their reported White House talks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the revocation of US visas for Moraes, his allies, and family members. Figueiredo would also later welcome the tariffs as “the right move”—in line with the pair’s push to punish Moraes, who has now been formally sanctioned in the US.

Figueiredo is a key articulator of the Brazilian far right’s agenda in the United States, which includes a call for amnesty for the former president—barred from running for office until 2030—as well as his jailed supporters involved in the violent January 8, 2023, riots and others perceived as having been politically persecuted. But as Figueiredo’s sphere of influence in Washington appears to grow, he’s also drawing more scrutiny. Brazil’s Agência Pública and Mother Jones found that his company in Florida has been cited as a defendant in one of hundreds of complaints filed in a federal bankruptcy case seeking recovery of transfers allegedly made as part of a sprawling fraud scheme led by the Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui.

Guo, who was arrested in March 2023, has been convicted of nine criminal counts, including money laundering and racketeering. Self-exiled in the United States since 2015, Guo—also known as Miles Guo, Ho Wan Kwok, and Miles Kwok—had business dealings with Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who is close to the Bolsonaro family. The Chinese tycoon was also an investor in and reportedly controlled the platform Gettr, which sponsored events supporting Jair Bolsonaro’s 2022 reelection bid.

Guo gained notoriety as a self-styled critic of the Chinese Communist Party and supporter of the US far right, helping spread conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid. He paid Bannon at least $1 million in consulting fees related to his network of media ventures and organizations, which included a group they co-founded to serve as a supposed parallel government outside of China. As Mother Jones previously reported, Guo was accused of deceiving thousands of online followers into investing in businesses under his control and diverting more than $1 billion to fund his lavish lifestyle.

The adversary proceeding complaint against Figueiredo’s company International Treasure Group—registered in Florida since 2017—claims that a transfer of $140,000 to the business was fraudulent. Public court records filed in February 2024 in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Connecticut indicate the alleged transaction came from a shell company owned by Guo, HCHK Technologies Inc.

“This transfer was actually fraudulent, because the Debtor effectuated it as part of his ‘shell game,’ and it was made with the intent to hinder, delay, and/or defraud the Debtor’s creditors,” the complaint states. The 15-page document does not include information on the exact date or nature of the transaction, but according to the records, it took place sometime before February 15, 2022, when Guo filed for bankruptcy. (The filing does not allege wrongdoing by the recipient of the funds.)

Although he owned a $37 million yacht, lived in a $67 million penthouse overlooking New York’s Central Park, and was widely reported to be a billionaire, Guo claimed in court that he had “insufficient assets to pay his liabilities and that his luxurious lifestyle is funded by his family.” He declared only $3,850 in assets but was accused of operating shell companies to conceal his wealth and file for bankruptcy. Court records state he used these firms “as personal piggy-banks, funding the lavish lifestyle to which he and his family had become accustomed.” In March 2023, Guo was charged with 12 criminal counts, including money laundering, racketeering, wire fraud, and securities fraud. He was convicted in July 2024 of nine of them.

His web of “labyrinthine finances,” as characterized in a bankruptcy court filing, moved funds through about 500 accounts held by at least 80 entities or individuals, including HCHK Technologies, the company through which the transaction to Figueiredo’s firm was allegedly made. The complaint against the International Treasure Group seeks to recover the transferred amount. Figueiredo received a notice of the complaint but failed to respond by the deadline, resulting in an entry of default against the company. As of the date of publication, the proceedings were moving forward through the appointment of a mediator.

A former senior Gettr official, speaking under condition of anonymity, told Agência Pública and Mother Jones that Figueiredo was involved in the initial efforts to launch the social network globally. His role at the company took place “in the early days, before Gettr’s corporate documentation was finalized.” The source said that “mutual friends brought” Figueiredo to Gettr and that he worked “helping to recruit social media influencers to join the platform” after its launch. Gettr previously acknowledged to Mother Jones paying right-wing figures to use the website.

Figueiredo didn’t address a list of questions about the complaint or his alleged connection to Gettr. In an email, he called the questions “bullshit” and threatened: “I know how to deal with people like that.”

The US trustee in Guo’s bankruptcy case also sought to recover paymentsallegedly made to Gettr and two of Bannon’s companies, Warroom Broadcasting & Media Communications LLC and Bannon Strategic Advisors. Reached for comment about the complaints, Bannon said: “It’s standard bankruptcy proceeding—been going on for years—and all the leftwing media in Brazil like yourself working for Lula [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] can go fuck yourself.” (Bannon continued: “Ask Lula how it feels to be crushed by President Trump. LOL.”)

One complaint reviewed by Agência Pública and Mother Jones states that HCHK Technologies and another shell company allegedly controlled by the Chinese billionaire, Lexington Property and Staffing Inc., “transferred funds in the amount of $353,000” to Jason Miller, a former Trump adviser and ex-CEO of Gettr. In a response filed in bankruptcy court in May, Miller argued that there was no connection between Guo’s “crimes and the transfers at issue.”

The MAGA-friendly social media network, which arrived in Brazil in July 2021, has served as a space for the spread of misinformation aligned with the pro-Bolsonaro movement and has come on the radar of the Brazilian federal police in a “digital militias” inquiry into the existence of a criminal organization operating online against Brazilian democratic institutions. (Elon Musk, the owner of X, was also included in the investigation.)

Days after launching Gettr in the United States, Miller, then the social network’s CEO, announced the company’s interest in entering the Brazilian market. “Brazil will be a major market for Gettr,” he celebrated on his profile on the platform on July 6, 2021. In 2022, an election year in Brazil, the “Gettr Brasil Oficial” profile boosted the image of Jair Bolsonaro, who was then the incumbent president running for reelection. The account covered the president’s weekly live broadcasts, advertised his schedule, shared announcements from the government’s communications department, and hosted livestreams with supporters of the president.

Miller visited Brazil at least three times between 2021 and 2022 and took part in a pro-Bolsonaro rally in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the presidential elections in September 2022. During one visit to the country to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference, Miller was briefly questioned by Brazilian authorities investigating fake news and anti-democratic acts. On a recent podcast appearance, Eduardo Bolsonaro credited Miller, who has called Moraes the “single greatest threat to democracy in the Western Hemisphere,” with helping “draw President Trump’s attention to what’s happening in Brazil.”

Paulo Figueiredo speaks outside the US Capitol in March 2024.Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty

The grandson of João Figueiredo, the last president of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship, Paulo Figueiredo is among 34 people indicted by the attorney general’s office in connection with the investigation into the attempted coup. A former commentator on a right-wing radio station, he allegedly used his influence to “pressure” members of the military to support the efforts that led to the January 6-like attack on Brazil’s capital. Figueiredo’s case has yet to be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

As Agência Pública reported, Eduardo Bolsonaro sees Figueiredo as the “brain” behind his international maneuvers. The Brazilian congressman took a leave of absence and relocated to Texas earlier this year to dedicate himself full time to convincing the Trump administration to defend Jair Bolsonaro and impose sanctions on Moraes and the Brazilian government. “I will stay and work harder than ever,” Eduardo said in a March video. “Alexandre, my life goal will be to make you pay for all your cruelty toward innocent people. I will be fully focused on this objective and will only return when you have been properly punished for your crimes and your abuse of authority.”

In July, after the announcement of the US tariffs on Brazil, the former president’s son and Figueiredo boasted of their “intense dialogue” with Trump administration officials, saying it “confirms the success in conveying what we have been presenting with seriousness and responsibility.” The measure, they said, aims to make Brazil’s “political, business, and institutional establishment,” which they claim is complicit with Moraes’ “authoritarian escalation,” bear the “cost of this adventure.” (When Agência Pública revealed in April 2024 that Eduardo and a delegation of Brazilian lawmakers were lobbying for sanctions against Brazil in the United States, the congressman recorded a video denying the information. “Our intention is to bring the truth abroad,” he said.)

Figueiredo has been known within Trump’s circle since 2013, when he partnered with the real estate businessman to build a Trump Hotel in Rio de Janeiro. The dictator’s grandson, whose Facebook profile displays a photo with the US president, has said he met Trump at one of his golf courses in Florida.

In 2016, the Trump Organization pulled out of the project before construction was completed and just weeks after an investigation into the hotel development was launched. The Trump Hotel, as initially conceived, never came to be. Operating under the name Lifestyle Laghetto Collection, the beachfront hotel continues to function normally in a high-end neighborhood of the city.

As of May 2025, the development owed 15 million Brazilian reais (about $2.7 million) in property taxes to the Rio de Janeiro city government but has not paid, claiming it has been under judicial recovery since 2019. The legal action to collect the debt is ongoing in the courts. The Polo Special Situations investment fund, which loaned money to the enterprise in 2016 in the form of debentures, is seeking repayment from Figueiredo, as well as eight other individuals and 18 legal entities.

Figueiredo served as CEO of Polaris Projetos e Empreendimentos, a firm that provided consulting services for the hotel’s construction, in addition to being a former partner at LSH Barra Empreendimentos Imobiliários SA, the hotel’s developer. In 2019, Figueiredo was arrested in the United States as part of Operation Circus Maximus, a Brazilian federal police investigation into an alleged bribery scheme involving current and former executives of BRB, the state bank of Brasília, in exchange for investments in several projects, including the construction of the former Trump Hotel.

Residing in the United States since 2016, Figueiredo has participated in two US House of Representatives hearings. In May 2024, appearing before a Foreign Affairs subcommittee, he reiterated calls for sanctions and refused to say whether he repudiated the period of 1979 to 1985, during which his grandfather served as one of the presidents of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Speaking with Mother Jones in June 2025, Figueiredo described the hearing as a “turning point” in his yearslong campaign to inform US public opinion and lawmakers about the context in Brazil, or what he calls the deterioration of a “consolidated democracy.” This work, according to Figueiredo, began after the 2022 Brazilian elections and has involved appearances on popular US podcasts and in right-wing media outlets.

He also said he has had meetings with at least 40 Congress members, including discussions about bills to pressure Brazilian authorities. He claimed that it was the actions of Moraes—who Figueiredo said canceled his passport and froze his assets in Brazil—that got him “out of his comfort zone” and motivated him to engage in this advocacy. Figueiredo now considers what he called the initial “awareness” phase to be complete. Trump’s return to the White House, he said, made it possible to begin the “implementation” phase, with the ultimate goal of securing financial sanctions against Moraes.

In June, in testimony before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, Figueiredo again urged the swift adoption of sanctions against the Supreme Court justice under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The law, signed by former President Barack Obama in 2016, has been used to impose sanctions on terrorist groups, individuals involved in corruption schemes, and those accused of human rights violations.

His call hasn’t gone unanswered. On July 18, Moraes and seven other Brazilian Supreme Court justices had their US visas suspended. On July 30, the Treasury Department sanctioned Moraes, invoking the Magnitsky Act. “De Moraes is responsible for an oppressive campaign of censorship, arbitrary detentions that violate human rights, and politicized prosecutions—including against former President Jair Bolsonaro,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. Eduardo and Figueiredo celebrated the sanction as “mission accomplished.”

Figueiredo sees the pro-Bolsonaro movement’s efforts in the United States as a way to strengthen the group’s power in Brazil. “I would say that if Bolsonaro had done the international work we’re doing now—if he had valued it, and he didn’t—he wouldn’t have left office, he wouldn’t have. [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] wouldn’t have come to power,” he said during a livestream in early 2024.

Dan Friedman contributed reporting.

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On Sunday evening, Texas House Democrats made the fateful decision to flee the state to block Republicans from quickly passing a new Trump-ordered redistricting plan that could give Republicans up to five new seats in the US House, rigging the midterms before a single vote has been cast.

It’s a risky and expensive strategy for Democrats; each member who leaves will be subject to $500 in fines per day. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to arrest and expel Democrats who leave the state, citing a nonbinding legal opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that will ultimately be up to the courts to decide. But denying Republicans a quorum was the only way Democrats could at least temporarily stop Trump’s Texas takeover and put pressure on their party to devise a national response.

“Republicans are stealing our democracy right before our very eyes,” Texas Democratic Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer said when a large contingent of Democratic House members arrived on Sunday outside Chicago, Illinois, joined by Gov. JB Pritzker. “Texas Democrats are here and we have a message to Donald Trump: not on our watch.”

“You’re saying to Texas voters: you don’t get to pick who represents you. Donald Trump picks who represents you.”

The decision by Texas Democrats to go to blue states like Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts underscores how nationalized this battle has become compared to the last time Democrats left the state to attempt to block a mid-decade redistricting plan, when they fled to Ardmore, Oklahoma in 2003.

Democrats left in a hurry because Texas Republicans were doing Trump’s bidding at lightning speed. On Friday, the Texas House redistricting committee held the only hearing on the GOP map, voted it out of committee on Saturday morning on a party-line vote, and were set to pass it through the House on Monday.

“In this moment of democracy survival, people need to be prepared to do anything in order to ensure that our constitutional system of government continues to exist,” former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder told me on Monday. “The authoritarian move that was dictated to Texas by the White House needs to be opposed by any means necessary.”

Instead of investigating how more than 135 Texans died in horrific flooding, the GOP-controlled legislature made re-gerrymandering the state their top priority.

Abbott claimed the new redistricting map was intended to address “constitutional concerns,” referencing a legally dubious letter from the Justice Department alleging that four districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” But Republicans in the legislature admitted it was all about picking up as many seats as possible to further Trump’s plan to manipulate the midterms and insulate their party from an angry public through extreme gerrymandering.

“I’m not beating around the bush,” Republican Rep. Todd Hunter, who introduced the map, said at a legislative hearing on Friday. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.” Contra Abbott and the Justice Department, he admitted the map was being redrawn “for partisan purposes.”

“This bill was not based off that DOJ letter,” added Rep. Cody Vasut, the chair of the House special committee on redistricting. “This bill was based off of improving political performance.”

The GOP plan would create 30 districts, out of 38, that Trump carried by 10 points or more, up from 25 in the current map, and reduce the number of seats that Trump carried by 10 points or less from two seats to zero.

“The Republican members on this dais have outsourced our democracy to Mar-a-Lago and the Oval Office,” responded Democratic US House Rep. Greg Casar, whose Austin-based district is effectively dismantled under the new map. Though non-white voters are 60 percent of Texas’s population and fueled 95 percent of new growth in the state over the past decade, the plan increases the number of majority white districts, from 22 to 24, and dismantles the districts of two lawmakers of color, Casar and Rep. Al Green of Houston.

“You’re saying to Texas voters: you don’t get to pick who represents you,” Casar said. “Donald Trump picks who represents you.”

Demanding that Texas redraw its maps mid-decade, when the legislature is practically the same as the one that passed the last congressional redistricting in 2021 and that map is being challenged in court for discriminating against voters of color, is yet another way that Trump is normalizing something that is deeply abnormal. And he’s setting off what Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calls “a race to the bottom” that will lead to even more extreme gerrymandering nationwide.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already vowed to respond, floating a complex plan to convince the legislature to pass new maps targeting vulnerable Republicans and bypass the state’s independent redistricting commission, which voters would then be asked to approve in a special election this November. Other blue states could follow, although their options are complicated either by independent commissions or because Democrats have already maximized the number of seats they can pick up in such states. A case in point: Democrats already control more than 80 percent of US House seats in Illinois, where most Texas Democrats arrived on Sunday evening. That map received an F for partisan fairness from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) on Monday called on Democratic state legislatures to “pursue redistricting mid-cycle” while noting that their party will be at a distinct disadvantage in a gerrymandering arms race. According to the DLCC, “Republican state legislative majorities oversee 55 Democratic Congressional seats while Democratic state legislative majorities oversee only 35 GOP Districts.”

Holder, who has long supported an independent redistricting process, compared the Democrats newfound embrace of aggressive redistricting tactics to the US embrace of Joseph Stalin during World War II. “This is a perilous moment for our democracy, and so you have to do things that you wouldn’t necessarily support, and that over the long term, I do not support,” he told me. “I’m concerned about a race to the bottom where gerrymandering just proliferates all around the country. It’s what we’ve been fighting against. But what they are trying to do here in Texas really is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, a threat to our democracy, and as a result, extreme measures have to be taken to fight it.”

Red states, from Ohio to Florida to Missouri, and beyond, are sure to respond, engaging in the very type of behavior that voters abhor and that super-charges public distrust in political institutions: self-interested politicians pre-determining election outcomes to benefit themselves and their party while depriving the electorate of meaningful choices and representation.

It’s hard to see where this ends or how it ends in a good place for American democracy.

“If there’s a gerrymandering arms race, it ends with the American people being cheated of their democracy,” Holder said. “It ends with the American people being deprived of their most essential right, and that is to cast a meaningful ballot. These are temporary measures that the Democrats have to take, and then we’ve got to get back to fighting for fairness.”

The last time Texas Democrats broke quorum, to block a sweeping voter suppression bill in 2021, they went to Washington to lobby Democrats to pass federal legislation that would’ve banned this type of egregious partisan gerrymandering.

That effort failed when two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, joined with Republicans to filibuster it. The consequences of that inaction, along with Supreme Court decisions effectively legalizing partisan gerrymandering and gutting protections against racial gerrymandering, are on full display today.

“This quorum break is not about the Democratic Party,” Martinez Fischer said on Sunday. “It’s about the democratic process.”

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Even before the immigration detention camp deep within the Everglades officially opened, the name of the facility, Alligator Alcatraz, had become apunchline for jokes within MAGA circles.

“People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was the first to announce plans for the project, quipped in a video posted on social media in late June. A few days later, the US Department of Homeland Security shared on X an AI-generated meme of alligators wearing baseball caps emblazoned with the acronym ICE standing guard outside a detention facility. “Coming soon!” the post read. By the way, Alligator Alcatraz is not some clever nickname that appeared on social media. Florida officials have made it the official name of the site.

The humor didn’t let up during President Donald Trump’s tour of the camp in July. “They have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators,” the president said outside one of the white tents where immigrants are detained, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis standing by his side. “You don’t have to pay them so much. But I wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long.”

The juxtaposition between reports of life inside Alligator Alcatraz and the comical branding of the facility by Republicans could not be more jarring. Since opening in early July, Alligator Alcatraz has been accused of dire conditions for the roughly 900 migrants detained there. As I reported last month, reports of theinhumane circumstances have emerged, such as mosquito infestations, malfunctioning air conditioning, and no access to attorneys. Detainees live under tents within chain-linked fenced areas that hold up to 32 beds and three toilets. The facility is at the center of lawsuits filed by environmentalists and human rights groups.

“This just looks like political theater,” Marsha Espinosa, a Biden-era assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s public affairs office, told ABC News last month. “If the goal is to enforce immigration effectively, building a camp in the middle of a swamp just doesn’t do it. The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”

“The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”

Even as Alligator Alcatraz has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s relentless deportation machine, Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general, is selling branded merchandise on his campaign website promoting the facility. Among the swag for sale are shirts with the phrase, “Nowhere to Run. Nowhere to Hide,” a gator ominously peering above the words. They include stickers, baseball caps, and beer koozies. The Republican Party of Florida is also selling similar merchandise, including a shirt for $30 with an image of a correctional facility being guarded by a giant alligator and python.

But the thrill of creating merch from a facility fraught with accusations of human rights abuses is not restricted to Florida. Others are also capitalizing on the camp’s notoriety. A search for “Alligator Alcatraz” on Amazon brings up shirts, hats, car decals, mugs, and flags. One $35 shirt reads, “Make Alligators Great Again.”

In fact, the narrative that alligators would be interested in human prey is inaccurate, according to Axios Tampa Bay. The creatures don’t consider humans a food source. And references of “the alligator lusting for human flesh is rooted in racism, dating back to Jim Crow, when tourists could buy postcards illustrating Black children as ‘gator bait,’” Axios reported.

Marcus Collins, a marketing professor from the University of Michiganwho studies culture and its impact on human behavior, has observed a connection between the days of Jim Crow and today. “This is a bit of a stretch, but it doesn’t feel too distant from when people used to take pictures of lynchings and sell them as postcards,” he says. “This consumption is signaling that these people aren’t people, at least not in the frame of how we evaluate humanity.”

We’ve seen what Collins describes in more recent history.A Business Insider story published in 2019 showcased items the US Navy was selling near the prison,where stories of human rights abuses of detainees emerged in the past. Items for sale included shirts with the phrase “JTO GTMO (meaning Joint Task Force Guantanamo) Detainee Operations” and baseball caps that read “Straight Outta GTMO,” a reference to the 1988 NWA album “Straight Outta Compton.”

I wanted to understand the motivation behind all the Alligator Alcatraz swag and how sales for shirts and other merchandise were going, so I reached out to Uthmeier’s campaign and the Republican Party of Florida for an interview. My emails and phone messages went unanswered.

David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, has written about the allure of Donald Trump for certain voters. He says that connecting the facility with merchandise or a nickname, and making “it sound like a tourist attraction as opposed to something like a concentration camp,” normalizes the facility. Political campaigns have always relied on merchandise to attract and unite supporters, but the Trump administration has “turned up the dial a little bit more than everybody else,” he noted. “You’re more likely to see a van or a pickup truck tricked out in MAGA.” The sale of Alligator Alcatraz swag is just the latest example of that.

Who the individuals and institutions are that market the merchandise also boosts its legitimacy. In this case, the items for sale come directly from powerful sources, such as Florida’s attorney general and the Republican Party. Supporters of Alligator Alcatraz receive tacit permission to engage and purchase the merchandise without fear of judgment. “These consumption patterns become a way of facilitating social coordination so we can find people who are like us,” Collins says. “For some, it’s repugnant. For others, it’s reality.”

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