Political News

The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial is being sued by one of its billionaire investors, who claims the company froze his token holdings.

In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Justin Sun accused World Liberty Financial of “engaging in an illegal scheme to seize property.”

“They wrongfully froze all of my tokens, stripped me of my right to vote on governance proposals, and have threatened to permanently destroy my tokens,” Sun wrote in a statement on X on Tuesday night. While he said he remains an “ardent supporter” of Trump and his administration’s efforts to make crypto-friendly policies, Sun wrote that “certain individuals” associated with World Liberty were operating the venture “in a manner that goes against President Trump’s values.”

Sun backed the Trump family when they launched World Liberty Financial in 2024, investing $30 million. He spent another $45 million on 3 billion tokens just a few months later. According to Reuters, Sun owns about 4 billion tokens worth approximately $320 million. 

World Liberty Financial’s co-founder, Zach Witkoff, wrote in a Wednesday post on X that Sun’s legal complaint “is a desperate attempt to deflect attention from Sun’s own misconduct.” Witkoff did not offer more details on what Sun did but said the investor’s actions required the company to “take action to protect itself and its users.” 

As my colleagues Russ Choma, Dan Friedman, and Tim Murphy wrote in 2025:

Shortly after Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission—which had accused Sun of fraud in a federal complaint—agreed to pause its lawsuit while the parties pursued a “potential resolution.” That was one of more than a dozen lawsuits and investigations targeting crypto firms that the SEC reportedly backed off from after Trump took office.

Sun eventually resolved the case with the SEC in a $10 million settlement last month. 

The Trump family receives 75 percent of net proceeds from token sales. According to the Wall Street Journal, since the launch, they have received about $1 billion in proceeds as of December 2025.

The infamous Florida immigrant detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” can remain open, an appeals court ruled Tuesday, overturning a lower judge’s decision to close the facility because it violated federal environmental laws.

The ruling is the latest development in the months-long legal battle against the center, which was constructed in the Everglades last summer by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration when the Department of Homeland Security needed more detention space to house immigrants pending their deportations.

The center has come under fire for both its living conditions and its impact on the surrounding area. As I reported in March, thousands of people have been detained there despite ongoing reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, lackluster food, and limited water access. Last month, two US senators said they launched an investigation into reported abuses, including the use of “the box,” in which detainees were allegedly shackled and held in small cages in direct sunlight for hours at a time. (A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, told me recently that the allegations were “false.”) In recent weeks, the center landed in the spotlight once again after attorneys representing immigrants held there told a judge that guards had assaulted and pepper-sprayed detainees who protested after the phones were shut off, less than a week after a federal judge ordered legal access should be expanded at the facility.

Environmentalists have spent almost a year trying to shutter Alligator Alcatraz in an effort to protect the Everglades. The center was built on a little-used airfield next to the environmentally protected wetlands of Big Cypress National Preserve. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier quipped in a video posted on social media late last June. 

As I reported that month, environmental groups sued federal and state officials to halt the project. They argued that the construction had proceeded without an environmental review or opportunity for public comment, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They filed declarations in the case documenting how the camp could potentially affect the neighboring ecosystems and wildlife. Traffic to and from the detention site increases the likelihood of panthers being struck by vehicles, according to court filings, and light pollution could destroy the nighttime foraging abilities of bats in the area.

“Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades.”

Florida and Trump officials argued that NEPA only applies to federal agencies, and that the facility was operated and funded by the state, which has spent at least $390 million to run it. But in August, a federal judge in Miami concluded that Alligator Alcatraz “exists for the sole purpose of detaining and deporting those subject to federal immigration enforcement” and ordered it to wind down operations within 60 days. The state of Florida appealed and the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit blocked the judge’s decision, allowing Alligator Alcatraz to continue to operate.

Alligator Alcatraz has disrupted the vulnerable ecosystems that surround it, Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the plaintiffs in the environmental lawsuit, told me last month. The high-intensity lighting, for example, has affected about 2,000 acres of habitat for the Florida panther, an endangered species with a population of about 200. “The evidence of that harm is clear,” she said in a phone interview. 

The three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the case on April 7 and released a 38-page ruling late Tuesday afternoon. In the 2–1 decision, judges concluded that the environmentalists failed to prove Alligator Alcatraz was under federal control. Florida also hasn’t received any federal funding (though it is in the process of requesting reimbursement). “Federal authority is, at most, indirect: it is involved in the construction only insofar as it sets the terms for which the facility may be used for detention of aliens, but Florida officials dedicated its land to that use,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, in the majority opinion. 

Judge Nancy Abudu, a Biden appointee, wrote in her dissent that immigration is ultimately a federal obligation and the majority’s ruling is “just plain wrong.” “So long as Florida remains a willing participant in the federal government’s immigration detention scheme, it subjects itself to the federal government’s substantial control over the parties’ joint efforts,” she wrote. 

The case was sent back to the district court. “This fight is far from over,” Samples, the Friends of the Everglades director, said in a statement Tuesday night. “Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades, and we look forward to returning to the District Court to advance our case to shut it down.” 

Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.

Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.

The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.

Even as the company struggled, Nunes prospered. In 2024 alone, his pay outstripped any revenue the company has made over its lifetime—he drew a salary of $1 million, a bonus of $600,000 and was awarded stock worth another $46 million.

To be fair to Nunes, he was asked to oversee a company that despite having one of thet world’s most recognizable faces as its power user, had a remarkably scattershot approach to everything.

When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.

Of those grand dreams, under Nunes, Trump Media managed to launch Truth Social and a tepid streaming service, that runs for free and mostly provides content that is also free on YouTube. Truth Social may have as few as several hundred thousand daily active users, while Elon Musk’s X is estimated to have around 224 million. Those kind of numbers place it firmly in 24th place among social media companies, a few spots behind YouTube Kids.

That’s not how things were supposed to go. At its launch, a slide presentation distributed to investors and filed with the SEC suggested that by 2026, the company expected to have about $3.3 billion in revenue, 40 million users on Truth Social and another 81 million spread across the company’s other services.

Under Nunes, the company has, instead, struck out in seemingly random directions. It has, among other things, launched:

• “Personal freedom” oriented ETFs.
• A crypto “token”—a non-tradeable blockchain-based digital asset which, despite having no value, is slated to be given to shareholders and would grant them discounts on the company’s products.
• A Bitcoin treasury: following in the footsteps of controversial Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, Trump Media announced in 2025 that it would begin accumulating as many Bitcoins as possible, based on the theory that Bitcoin’s precipitous increase in value would also make the company more valuable.

The last initiative, which was announced in May of 2025, a few months before a massive decline in Bitcoin prices kicked in, is responsible for most of the $712 million in losses. The company had purchased roughly $2.5 billion in bitcoin, and the latest data suggests that after declines in the price of Bitcoin and sale of some of the company’s Bitcoins, the treasury is now worth just $753 million.

Trump Media’s boldest move under Nunes might have been the idea to pivot to nuclear power—specifically the largely experimental method of nuclear fusion. In nuclear fission, which is the method used for decades, atoms are split, but in fusion, pushing atoms together generates even greater energy—but the process has never been made commercially viable. In late 2025, Trump Media announced it would be merging with TAE Technologies, a longstanding player in the fusion field, which despite having previously secured funding, was still struggling to build an actual power plant.

The merger, which is supposed to be completed in June, would have made Nunes co-CEO of the social media, streaming, web-hosting, financial products, Bitcoin treasury and nuclear fusion company.

All that is a lot of responsibility for Nunes who began his career working on the family dairy farm in southern California in the early 1990s (he has a degree in agriculture). First elected to Congress in 2003 and served for 19 years, including several as the chairman of the House Intelligence committee, where he and one of his staffers—Kash Patel—became two of Trump’s loudest backers in accusing a “deep state” in the intelligence community of having targeted Trump.

Nunes had no specific experience running a technology company before taking over as CEO of Trump Media, but in 2019 he sued political strategist Liz Mair and two anonymous parody Twitter accounts, including @DevinCow, which purported to be one of the cows on his dairy farm, for defamation. Nunes asked for $250 million in damages, but the case was dismissed.

Nunes confirmed his departure from Trump Media but did not say what he would be doing next. He remains chairman of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

A version of 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.

On Saturday, Donald Trump convened a meeting on the Iran war in the White House situation room. At the table, according to news reports, were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, envoy Steve Witkoff, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Missing from this list: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. This was another opportunity for administration officials to snicker that DNI stands for Do Not Invite.

You might wonder what’s the point of having a director of national intelligence who’s routinely not included in major deliberations about national security. Gabbard’s value for Trump is not in her oversight of the 18 agencies in the intelligence community, which is ostensibly her job. Nor in her intelligence experience, which is slight. It is in her willingness to serve Trump’s lust for vengeance against those he deems his political enemies. That includes her enthusiasm for politicizing and weaponizing intelligence to an extent never seen in US history.

Last summer, she did this by releasing highly classified intelligence documents that she claimed proved that President Barack Obama, his CIA chief John Brennan, and other Deep Staters had committed “treason”—a crime punishable by death. She accused them of falsifying intelligence to show that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had covertly intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Trump. The memos clearly did not show that. (Investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee have confirmed Putin attacked that election to boost Trump.)

Here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.

Gabbard’s stunt was a despicable act of immense gaslighting. And she and Trump each called for Obama, Brennan, and others to be prosecuted. Trump went so far as to post an AI-generated video of FBI agents violently handcuffing and arresting Obama and tossing him into a prison cell. In the video, Obama is on his knees before Trump. Never has intelligence been so abused by an administration for purely political purposes. Gabbard’s move led the Justice Department to mount a criminal investigation of Brennan and others that is ongoing.

At the time, Gabbard also declassified and made public a secret report that cited Russian intelligence material from 2016 that claimed Hillary Clinton suffered from “intensified psycho-emotional problems,” was on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers,” and had schemed to set up the Trump-Russia scandal to distract from her email controversy. But US intelligence analysts and FBI agents had previously judged this Russian material to be unreliable and possibly disinformation. So here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials who worried its disclosure could compromise sources and methods—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.

Trump loved it. Gabbard had been on the outs with the White House prior to this for several reasons, including her release of a video that implied she opposed military action against Iran. Now Trump proclaimed her a “star.”

Recently, Gabbard was again in the hot seat. In March, the day after her ally Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the Iran war, Gabbard testified before Congress on threats posed to the United States. Trump, according to Axios, was displeased that Gabbard at this hearing did not wholeheartedly endorse his war in Iran and personally scolded her. He was also apparently mad that she had protected Kent, who had publicly undercut his rationale for the war. (In his resignation letter, Kent said Iran posed no “imminent threat” to the United States.) Trump began asking his top advisers if he should give Gabbard the boot.

Gabbard showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe.

MAGA activist Laura Loomer tweeted that “Tulsi was done” and that the White House was about to show her the door. But this didn’t happen. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser who was found guilty of lying to Congress during the Trump-Russia scandal (and subsequently pardoned by Trump), took credit for interceding with Trump and rescuing Gabbard. Axios quoted “a source familiar with Trump’s thinking” saying, “Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi.”

Whether Stone’s influence mattered or not, Gabbard last week showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe and to reveal yet another purported Deep State conspiracy against the president.

This time, the target was the whistleblower who in 2019 filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, about the infamous phone call during which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch investigations to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, who was then running for president, and to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election. The whistleblower maintained that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.

When the acting DNI, John Maguire, declined to share this classified complaint with Congress, Atkinson informed Congress of its existence, triggering a brouhaha that soon led to Trump’s first impeachment. 

Trump was not convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate, but he has always been steamed by the impeachment. Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.

Last week, she released a handful of documents that she asserted exposed “a coordinated effort by elements within the Intelligence Community (IC), including a former Inspector General (IG), to manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump in 2019.” She insisted these records show that Atkinson “did not follow standard IG procedures and relied upon politicized, manufactured narratives” and that he took “actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction.”

Once more, she insisted that Trump was the victim of a nefarious cabal: “Deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States.”  

Yet again, Gabbard is pulling a big con. The materials she released do not back up the charge that Atkinson mishandled this case, and they certainly don’t prove a narrative was manufactured. In fact, the whistleblower’s complaint was largely confirmed when the Trump White House, under pressure, released a summary of his call with Zelenskyy. And that summary played a more critical role in the impeachment proceedings than the whistleblower’s complaint. During the Trump-Ukraine controversy, Maguire testified that the whistleblower “did the right thing.” Maguire also testified that Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint was done “by the book” and consistent with the law. 

Gabbard went further then pumping out more disinformation. She sent the Justice Department criminal referrals for Atkinson, who Trump fired in April 2020, and the whistleblower, who has never been officially identified. (Conservative media, Donald Trump Jr., and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul revealed his name during the impeachment.)

A pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position.

This is another dangerous action from Gabbard, who once again is abusing intelligence to gin up a criminal case to feed Trump’s revenge fantasy. There is no case here. There was no Deep State plot. This is all about payback—and Gabbard keeping her job.

A few days ago, a pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position. This MAGA influencer called this conduct reprehensible, noting that if Gabbard has evidence of Deep State conspiracies, she ought to put it all out.

But none of the material Gabbard has released so far proves the conspiracy theories she’s peddling. As an apparatchik for Dear Leader, she’s misrepresenting once-classified material to set up show trials and demonstrating she will lie and cheat for Trump—and to stay employed. Such a disingenuous DNI is a threat to national security. Nothing she says—in private to the president or in public—can be trusted.

Gabbard’s most recent efforts to deceive the public have not received the media attention they deserve. They ought to be front-page news, for Gabbard also is leading the administration’s effort to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Remember when she was photographed at the Atlanta site when FBI agents seized voting records and machines?

If Gabbard will manufacture false narratives and bogus evidence to support baseless criminal prosecutions of supposed Deep State conspirators and Trump critics, what might she do to cook up proof of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 elections or to concoct phony evidence of fraud in the coming midterm elections?

Gabbard is a careerist chameleon. In 2018, as I revealed last year, she spoke at the Bernie Sanders Institute and slammed Trump as a supporter of “genocidal war.” In 2019, when she was running for president as a progressive Democrat, she blasted Trump for being “on the brink of launching us into a very stupid and costly war with Iran.” Now she’s a Trump loyalist. She clearly will flip positions and jettison supposed principles to attain power. And she has demonstrated she’s willing to go far beyond that.

Gabbard may not be in the room when the big decisions about war are being made. But she’s prosecuting her own war on the truth to score retaliation for Trump. To date, her war has targeted a handful of people whom Trump craves to see crushed. But with her focus also on elections, it’s a war that could affect the future of American democracy.

A majority of American adults say that the US House should vote to impeach President Trump—including one-in-five people who voted for him in 2024.

A new poll by Strength in Numbers, a data-based news website, and the market research platform Verasight found that 55 percent of respondents said they support the US House voting for impeachment. Out of the 1,514 Americans surveyed between April 10 and April 14, 37 percent said they opposed and eight percent reported they were unsure.

While this is just one poll in a collection of many, it is clear that Trump’s approval ratings are sinking. The New York Times’ daily average of dozens of polls has the president at a 38 percent approval rating. On January 27, 2025, the first average calculated following Inauguration Day, the Times recorded Trump’s approval rating at 52 percent. 

The numbers are striking, but there are few avenues for popular sentiment to achieve tangible results in Washington. There have been numerous calls from lawmakers to impeach and convict Trump or invoke the 25th Amendment, especially following his threats of genocide against the people of Iran. But they appear unlikely to succeed given the Republican majorities in the US House and Senate, as well as large support from his cabinet.

However, as I wrote on Sunday about Trump’s approval rating falling to its lowest point of his second term, if Americans see the upcoming midterms as a referendum on the failures of the current administration, then it could swing elections across the country.

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

Enormous new batteries keep appearing on the grid, making it devilishly tricky to keep track of which is the biggest in a given region. That’s certainly the case in New England, where acute power needs and robust state climate goals are fueling a buildout of big batteries that keep breaking capacity records.

Canary Media recently covered the inauguration of the 175-megawatt Cross Town battery in Gorham, Maine, which was the largest in New England when it began operating in late November. But that trophy has already passed to a 250-megawatt facility in Medway, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston and about 10 miles from the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.

The Medway battery came online fully on February 25, according to developer VC Renewables, a subsidiary of global energy trader Vitol. “To be fair, I don’t expect Medway to hold that title for very long, either,” said Tom Bitting, managing director at Advantage Capital, which supported the project with a $158 million tax equity deal. ​“There are other batteries being developed in New England that are bigger, but I think it is all just a sign that we need all of it, and there’s huge demand for it.”

“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone.”

For instance, Jupiter Power, a heavyweight in Texas’ booming grid storage market, is developing the 700-megawatt/2.8-gigawatt-hour Trimount battery plant at a former oil-storage site in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Jupiter aims to finish the project in 2028 or 2029. Trimount is slated to be among the largest stand-alone batteries in the whole country—Vistra’s battery in Moss Landing, California, set that record with 750 megawatts/​3 gigawatt-hours, before much of that capacity burned up in a disastrous fire.

The wave of battery megaprojects marks a new chapter for the region, which until recently was focused on building small-scale batteries. Massachusetts encouraged this by requiring energy storage alongside many distributed solar projects that received payments through the state’s main solar incentive; this rule led to a buildout of systems in the range of 1 to 5 megawatts.

Bigger batteries started taking off in the late 2010s out West: In California, Arizona, and Nevada, where developers can sign long-term contracts to deliver grid capacity; and in Texas, where they can bid into a uniquely competitive market.

The first three big batteries in New England—Plus Power’s Cranberry Point and Cross Town, as well as Medway, which was previously developed by Eolian—won seven-year contracts in 2021 to provide capacity for the New England grid, but the grid operator subsequently shortened that kind of contract to one year. After that change, developers have struggled with the lack of long-term capacity revenue; they can still charge up when prices are low and sell when they’re high, but that’s an unpredictable revenue stream that financiers might not want to underwrite.

Massachusetts has succeeded in building a robust fleet of small-scale solar—on recent sunny spring days, it has generated close to half the region’s demand. But leaders knew they needed batteries to keep cleaning up the grid in the hours when solar doesn’t produce. So they created a new policy driver for storage investment called the Clean Peak Standard, which officially took effect in 2020.

The rule orders utilities to serve a percentage of their peak-demand hours with clean electricity, and the target grows with each passing year. Companies that use batteries to save solar energy for the evening—when electricity consumption rises as people get home from work and school—earn credits that they can sell to utilities, providing some revenue certainty outside the wholesale market.

The administration of Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, views storage as a key lever to improve energy affordability, Undersecretary of Energy Michael Judge said, because it makes better use of existing grid infrastructure to meet peak demand.

Batteries can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without smokestacks or pollution.

“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone,” he said. ​“You don’t have to run these peakers, and you get all the emissions benefits and integration of clean energy benefits, too.”

It took several years for the rule to actually spur batteries in the multihundred-megawatt range, but now that era has begun. Advantage Capital, for example, factored in revenues from the Clean Peak Standard when it analyzed and underwrote the investment in the Medway project, Bitting noted. A total of 725 megawatts of battery storage had qualified for the Clean Peak Standard as of early March, according to state data.

Stand-alone grid battery projects are also bolstered by a federal tax credit that can cut investment costs by 30 percent, an incentive that the Trump administration preserved in last summer’s budget law even as it slashed support for wind, solar, and electric vehicles.

Clean Peak cash alone doesn’t pay the bills; battery developers still need to make money in the marketplace. Though New England lacks long-term capacity contracts, storage companies in the region have at least two factors working in their favor: some of the nation’s highest electricity prices and growing demand for power.

“It’s very difficult to get additional generation online in an area with high population density, because regardless of what type of power generation you’re building, it requires a lot of space,” Bitting said. Batteries, though, can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without the smokestacks or pollution that make it hard to build new fossil-fueled plants in populous areas.

Batteries compete directly with gas power plants to serve the peak hours of demand, when prices are highest. That’s especially valuable in New England, where gas supplies are stretched thin between power generation and home heating on the coldest days of the year.

“When it’s cold, the households are going to continue to demand it,” Bitting said. ​“But if we can ease some of the peak on the utility side, that will provide a relief valve to supply.”

Jupiter Power’s colossal Trimount project will continue New England’s foray into large batteries, with the ability to discharge enough power for roughly 500,000 homes, per the developer. Trimount was the largest of four battery projects selected in December from Massachusetts’ statewide solicitation to bring on more Clean Peak power. Previously, battery owners could sell off their Clean Peak credits on a quarterly or annual basis. The new solicitation was designed to produce ​“cost-effective” long-term contracts for storage, giving developers more stable revenue to plan around. Furthermore, Healey doubled down on grid storage in a March 16 executive order that calls for another 5 gigawatts installed by 2035.

“That kind of policy signal, combined with the state’s grid reliability challenges and its decarbonization commitments, creates the conditions for investment at scale,” Hans Detweiler, senior director for development at Jupiter, said in an email.

Massachusetts officials also hope to speed development with new permitting rules, which run large battery applications through a state-level body instead of piecemeal local processes. Community members still get to weigh in, but the program has a clear 15-month timeline and allows just a single appeal to the state Supreme Court, to ensure a more timely resolution of conflicts in the permitting process.

The true test of all these policies will be whether the recent megabatteries kick off a trend, or remain bold outliers in the region’s energy system.

The most parasocial relationship I have is with a family of eagles that lives in Big Bear Valley, California. I watch them for hours every day through a camera mounted above their nest that is streamed live onto YouTube. There is a mother and a father who’ve been named Jackie and Shadow by the Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the webcam. They have two little chicks that, for now, are nameless. Eventually, the two chicks will have their names selected by a group of third graders in Big Bear.

I turn on the livestream when I start my work day, usually watching on my second monitor, but occasionally parking myself on the couch and opting for a more full-screen experience on the TV. I spend my day typing Slack messages, and Jackie and Shadow spend theirs hunting and feeding their babies and maintaining their nest and watching for threats.

When my husband calls on his way home from work to check in I tell him about these developments.

“How was your day?” he asks.

“It was good, but a little stressful because Jackie and Shadow had to leave the chicks to chase off some ravens that were getting too close to the nest.”

“Oh,” he says, “that is stressful,” kindly refraining from pointing out that this information tells him nothing about my day.

My day, usually, is good too, if not also a little stressful. I run the fact-checking department for Mother Jones. I read the news, and like my colleagues, I live in it. I read their reporting carefully, looking for any leaps in logic or possible factual discrepancies or potential legal issues. I believe strongly in what I do, what we do here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and I like doing it too. Sometimes though, I am overwhelmed by the responsibility of being a journalist in today’s world, or by the news or by just being a person existing.

But I look up from a court document or new draft of a story or an email from a writer when I hear Jackie start to crow. My dog hates the sound, and she’ll pace the living room, looking for the source. Usually, Jackie is shrieking in delight as Shadow delivers a fish from the lake, and she will immediately jump up to feed her chicks. They are just about two weeks old now, but they are growing so fast. They have to, because they’ll fledge the nest in just about eight weeks.

It reminds me of when my husband returns home from work, sometimes with a little treat he’s picked up on the way: a piece of chocolate or a small bag of chips. I crow with delight too, though I have spent the entire day only feet from my kitchen and its full pantry, while Jackie has spent hers 145 feet in the air in a Jeffrey pine tree.

Everything about watching these birds delights me, and simultaneously makes me feel totally insignificant. I get cold and I turn on our heat. Jackie braves snowstorms, creating a canopy with her wings to keep the snow off her chicks. I send more Slacks. Jackie shows her babies how to fly.

Sometimes Jackie stares directly into the camera, and I imagine she’s looking right at me. She can see through the camera and into my living room, me in my enormous stained sweatshirts, my dirty dishes around me, staring at my laptop screen. I wonder how it makes her feel about her nest way up there. I wonder, if from her vantage point, we look as small as I feel.

As NASA’s Artemis II journeyed into space earlier this month, one of the astronauts took a photo of Earth lit by the moon. Known as “Hello, World,” it’s the first published photograph of our planet taken by a human since 1972. “You could see the entire globe from pole to pole,” Commander Reid Wiseman, who took the photo, said when describing what Earth looked like from space. “It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.”

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“Hello, World” and the Artemis mission have reinvigorated mankind’s awe of our planet. But for Earth to remain a habitable place for humans to flourish, it requires us to take care of it. On this special Earth Day episode of More To The Story, we’re featuring interviews with three influential environmental leaders: former Vice President and founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project Al Gore; longtime activist Catherine Coleman Flowers; and journalist, author, and activist Bill McKibben.

All three acknowledge the challenges of fighting climate change to protect our planet, especially at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back federal environmental protections. But they’re surprisingly hopeful about our capacity to protect the Earth for future generations.

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

Last summer, when Donald Trump began pressuring GOP-controlled states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade, Republicans had a lofty goal: pick up a dozen or more seats in an effort to fend off a coming blue wave and retain the House in the midterms.

Trump scored early wins in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. But the gerrymandering arms race he started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned. The approval by voters in Virginia on Tuesday of a new congressional map that could net Democrats up to four new seats shows how Democrats have fought Trump to a surprising draw in the redistricting wars.

Right now, the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer. The new map in Virginia makes it even more likely that Republicans will lose the House in November, given Trump’s tanking approval numbers and the fact that Cook Political Report forecasts that Republicans have to win three-quarters of toss-up races to remain in control, calling Democrats “substantial favorites.”

This is not how Trump and his allies envisioned things going. After easily securing the new maps in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, Trump suffered a humiliating defeat when Indiana Republicans refused to redraw their districts. Other GOP-controlled legislatures, including Kansas and Nebraska, also balked. Ohio passed a compromise map that, while favoring Republicans, could have been much worse for Democrats. The courts in Utah struck down the state’s existing map, leading to a likely Democratic pickup. And Missouri voters could have a chance to block that state’s new gerrymander at the polls in November, all of which helps Democrats.

Democrats in California, meanwhile, pulled off an improbable ballot measure to offset the Texas gerrymander by redrawing the Golden State’s maps. Now, Virginia Democrats have followed suit, despite the fact that the process in Virginia was actually much trickier. Democrats had to retake control of the legislature and governorship last November in order to kickstart the redistricting process. Then they had to convince voters in a state that is much less blue than California to pass a constitutional amendment authorizing the very type of partisan gerrymandering that Virginia voters had sought to limit just six years earlier, when they passed a separate constitutional amendment giving a bipartisan commission the power to draw congressional maps. The takeaway is that voters dislike gerrymandering, but they now seem to hate Trump even more.

That said, the redistricting wars are far from over. Florida is planning to convene a special session next week to redraw its congressional map, which could net Republicans between two and five more seats. The Supreme Court could issue a decision any day now striking down the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, which could shift a handful of seats toward the GOP—though whether those maps would take effect before November’s elections depends partly on the timing of the decision. (It’s probably too late for most Southern states to draw new maps before the midterms.) And the Virginia Supreme Court could still strike down the new voter-approved map; the court allowed the referendum to proceed after Republicans challenged it but has yet to issue a final decision on the constitutionality of the redistricting effort.

Trump has threatened to “take over” the election system, and the mid-decade gerrymandering spree he started is part of a multi-faceted plan to interfere in the midterms. But while that has deeply destabilized American democracy, the president hasn’t succeeded in stopping Democrats from racking up a series of electoral victories over the past year. The passage of the redistricting referendum in Virginia is the latest sign of Democrats successfully fighting back.

In a scathing ruling describing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an “unserious” and “unsafe” leader, a federal judge in Oregon issued an order that will protect doctors and hospitals, and the transgender kids they treat, from the federal crackdown on gender-affirming care.

On Saturday, US District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai ruled that Kennedy was acting illegally when he attempted last December to unilaterially cut off federal funding for healthcare providers treating kids with gender dysphoria. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Kasubhai wrote in his ruling, adding that Kennedy’s actions “caused chaos and terror for all those people and institutions of our great nation.”

The case began last December, when Kennedy issued a declaration falsely claiming that gender-affirming medical treatments for trans youth “fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care.” In reality, such treatments—including puberty blockers for kids entering adolescence and cross-sex hormones for older teens—are considered necessary for some patients under mainstream medical guidelines, and they’re supported by virtually the entire medical establishment. (And it’s worth noting that the treatments are actually quite rare, despite the amount of political attention paid to them.) Kennedy dubbed the treatments “sex-rejecting procedures” and claimed the right to pull all federal funding from any hospital, clinic, or doctor, found to be providing them. Soon, his department had referred over a dozen children’s hospitals for potential defunding, and hospitals hoping to avoid the federal crackdown began preemptively cutting off treatments for kids with gender dysphoria.

“I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic.”

A coalition of 21 mostly Democratic-led states and Washington, DC, immedialy sued, arguing Kennedy had skipped the legally required procedures for such a drastic policy change. Last month, Kasubhai agreed that Kennedy had overstepped his authority and issued an order temporarily blocking the declaration. “The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as sacred,” the judge said at the time.

But Kasubhai’s first order wasn’t stopping the Trump administration. While the court case played out, HHS began going through the formal rule-making process, proposing a sweeping regulation that would strip federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from any hospital that provides trans youth health care, which I wrote about in depth last week. Such a regulation, if implemented, would force hospitals nationwide to cut off trans kids’ care or else face financial devastation. A former Trump policy aide has referred to the proposed rule as a “nuclear weapon.” A second proposed policy would ban federal insurance programs for kids in low-income families from covering the treatments.

Now, Kasubhai has thrown a new wrench in the administration’s plans. His ruling on Saturday makes permanent his prior order blocking Kennedy’s declaration. But the judge also went further, prohibiting HHS from enacting any similar policy “which supercedes or purports to supercede the professionally recognized standards of care” in the states that sued. “Despite repeatedly emphasizing their commitment and obligation to protect children, Defendants have sweepingly wielded the Kennedy Declaration to threaten children’s hospitals that provide life-saving care to children,” Kasubhai wrote.

Such a broad order was necessary, Kasubhai wrote, because the Trump administration has a track record of “evading or flouting” prior court orders.

The judge also took particular exception to an argument made by HHS that Kennedy’s declaration couldn’t be blocked because it was simply an example of the secretary exercising his right to free speech. The department’s arguments are based on “the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care,” Kasubhai thundered. “Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated.”

Kasubhai’s order is sweeping enough that it likely blocks not just Kennedy’s declaration but also the soon-to-be-finalized Medicaid and Medicare regulations, according to Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law. “This administration has tried to come back multiple times and do the same thing and then try to characterize it as something new,” she explains. “The court wanted to prevent that from happening.”

The Trump administration could appeal Kasubhai’s ruling. But now, if it tries to finalize its regulations in their current form, the states defending trans youth health care can go back to Kasubhai and argue that HHS is violating the injunction, Levi says. As a result, it seems likely that the regulations will be promptly blocked—if the Trump administration does decide to finalize them.

And that matters because hospitals across the country are watching this legislation closely to figure out if it’s financially and legally safe enough for them to offer trans youth health care. Could those hospitals who ended treatments restart them on the strength of Kasubhai’s new ruling? “I think they certainly could, and I think they should,” Levi tells me.

On April 18, government surveillance giant Palantir Technologies published a fascist manifesto on X. In response, I pointed out the screed's flagrant fascism.

Among other things, it called for Silicon Valley elites to become a militant arm of the state and suggested imposing a system of compulsory military service.

Two days later, on April 20, I received notice that my X account has been permanently suspended. It was the most fascist response possible to a criticism of fascism—and on Hitler's birthday, no less. Soon, I will have more to say about Palantir's fascist manifesto, which summarized the main points of The Technological Republic, a recent book by Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

Coincidentally, today's episode of the Nerd Reich podcast focuses on Purge Palantir, a campaign to raise awareness of the need to get Palantir out of our government and our lives. Purge Palantir is working with organizers across the country to put a spotlight on the company and its abuses—and anyone can join.

I interview Jacinta Gonzalez and João Paulo Connolly, two organizers at the forefront of the struggle. They explain the reason for their campaign, how Palantir is aiding the authoritarian regime—and how you can get involved.

Please click below to watch the episode (it helps other discover the show!).

Or listen on your favorite audio platform:

Nerd Reich on Apple podcasts

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Full transcript below:

Purge Palantir: Taking on Silicon Valley's All-Seeing Eye

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

GIL: Palantir, one of the most well-known tech companies in the world—and one of the most hated. It's a surveillance giant named after an all-seeing stone wielded by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. The company even called its Palo Alto office the Shire.

Its co-founder, Peter Thiel, was recently in Rome, obsessed with a different mythology, lecturing Catholics about the machinery of the Antichrist, as he called it — tools that will create a global authoritarian government.

In response, an advisor to the Pope himself publicly accused Thiel of building the very machinery he claims to warn against.

It's really weird, and also really scary. Because here's the truth: Palantir is now embedded in the Army, the NSA, the FBI, ICE, Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and Britain's National Health Service. Members of Congress and Trump officials are buying Palantir stock while handing it billions in contracts.

Just like the fabled all-seeing eye, it's working with the White House to merge every federal database to see everything about you — your health records, your financial transactions, your location data, everything — into one system.

In this episode of the Nerd Reich Podcast, I speak with two organizers from the Purge Palantir campaign. It's a drive to raise public awareness and put pressure on politicians to stop taking Palantir money. My guests are Jacinta Gonzalez, head of programs at Media Justice, and João Paulo Connolly, organizing director at Working Partnerships USA. These are two activists on the front lines fighting Palantir's power grab. It's a struggle with major consequences for the future of every human being on the planet.

In the books, the palantír stones corrupted those who stared into them. The real-world Palantir might do the same to our democracy, which makes our opposition to it all the more important.

I'm Gil Durán, and this is the Nerd Reich Podcast.

Jacinta and João Paulo, welcome to the Nerd Reich Podcast.

JOÃO PAULO: Good to be here.

JACINTA: Thank you so much for having us.

GIL: So Palantir is quickly becoming one of the most reviled companies in the nation, if not the world, due to its enthusiastic complicity with the Trump agenda. It was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and others. These are names that have become increasingly familiar during this Trump fascist regime that we are witnessing here in the States. And this is a company that literally takes its name from The Lord of the Rings. A palantír is an all-seeing magic stone wielded by an evil wizard who's trying to take over the world in The Lord of the Rings. And Palantir's offices are named things like the Shire and Rivendell. And this is not just whimsy. This is a worldview performed out loud. It's weird because they're trying to reverse it. They act like they're the hobbits, but they've got the palantír. What they're really doing, in a subtle, twisted way, is identifying as the villains of the story.

More and more people are seeing exactly what that means in 2026. And as Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. From the very day they were named, Palantir's goals were obvious. Before we get deeper into the company, I want to start by grounding people in the reality of how Palantir is affecting our lives. So I'd like to ask each of you to describe one specific person or community or moment where we can see Palantir's reach in the real lives of people today.

JACINTA: I come out of organizing in the immigrant rights sector. I've been organizing against deportations for almost two decades now. And so the way that I got to know Palantir was actually by following what was happening on the ground with immigration enforcement. During the first Trump administration, we would get calls from people across the country being like, "I don't know how they know where my house is. I don't know how they know who my family is. How do they know where I work? What car I drive?"

As we were looking at it, we're like, they can't be getting this information from local police, right? So we had to do the research to find out how Palantir was connected to all of this.

When I think of people affected by Palantir, I think of Maria, a worker who was part of the Mississippi poultry plant raid during the first Trump administration. She was detained, criminally prosecuted for working without documents, separated from her baby while she was breastfeeding, and deported and separated from her kids. And this was because of this raid. One of the things that they used to be able to conduct that raid was a Palantir tip line. So for us, being able to trace back how Palantir is impacting what we're seeing on the ground right now with what ICE is doing, with what the Department of Homeland Security is doing, is really key in terms of understanding the story of how they started, but also how they've continued to evolve and intensify their attack.

GIL: João Paulo, how are we seeing the impact on lives from Palantir today?

JOÃO PAULO: Since Jacinta already lifted up the immigrant experience, which is so critical in the communities that we work with as well — and the ICE persecution of our folks in our streets and in our communities and neighborhoods — I also want to lift up workers. It's interesting because the fight against Palantir, as you noted, is a fight that connects so many of us because they touch so many different sectors in different ways. So maybe you think, "Well, I'm not an immigrant. ICE is not a concern for me."

But now we're hearing from nurses who work in hospitals for these large hospital corporations. Palantir is developing software and technology — uses AI tools — to automatically do scheduling for workers. So it's part of not only this gigification, but the disempowerment of workers. It really profoundly harms worker schedules, and nurses are really feeling the pain caused by this Palantir app, Timpani.

So here, on the one hand, we have immigrants in our communities — ICE coming into our neighborhoods. On the other hand, we have nurses in hospitals also talking about the impacts of Palantir. I myself am concerned about the impacts of Palantir. I'm an American citizen. The news, this information that they're working with the federal government to assemble all of our data into some kind of large centralized database — data sets that were once separate and protected for privacy reasons, like data from Health and Human Services — data sets can now be integrated in one large database. I think that is scary to every single American. And so it means that none of us are safe.

GIL: In a lot of ways, the Trump administration seems like a huge data raid that's being conducted in conjunction with all of these tech companies who are trying to get their money funnels and their data funnels into the U.S. government. There's competition between OpenAI and — Musk tried to do it with xAI, Anthropic, this whole drama we've seen. There's like a gold rush for releasing these systems on our data, on our government.

I know it's been explained a few times, but what exactly is it that Palantir does? Obviously it's helping to gather data and surveillance and sort it and arrange it, make it more easy for governments to use. It has different platforms like Gotham and Foundry for different applications. One critic described it as an attempt to create an operating system for the entire government. Of course, it's not just used in governments, it's used in hospitals and other places as well. So if you had to describe to somebody who's not familiar with what Palantir does — Jacinta, what would you say?

JACINTA: This is definitely a tricky question to answer in some ways, because they also make it so hard to understand. One thing that is important to note is that data is being created constantly on all of us. There's information about us that we are creating ourselves on our phones and what our behaviors are. There's files that different government agencies have. Palantir is not creating that data. It's figuring out how to process that data, to put it into one single place.

When you think about it that way — when you also think about this metaphor they had of the palantír, "we can see everything, we can track everything, we can know where things are going" — that's really the system they're creating. Their software isn't that great in terms of what the product is. It's not that it's that complex.

What stands out about Palantir has been who's behind them, right? What the interest is, what the political connections are, what the vision is of what they want to use this technology for. And the fact that, because of that, they will go in and do the dirty work that other companies might not want to do. When ICE is saying, "I want custom-made software for my raids. I want to take all of this data so that when I go out, I can be as efficiently cruel as possible" — the people that raise their hand and say, "I'll go in there and try to clean up your data set and work with you in the field" — that's Palantir. So it isn't actually that their technology is that unique, to be very honest. It is actually the way that they use their technology, the way they position themselves, and the fact that they're able to be in these spaces to create that worldview, to be able to create these programs.

GIL: And they don't just send in their software, they send in engineers, right? They send people to be on the ground and wield it. That's an important part of their model. João Paulo, do you have anything to add?

JOÃO PAULO: Well, I think Jacinta did a great job describing it. I think this piece around their fundamental lack of regard for some of the basic principles and boundaries that others have typically abided by — or pretended to abide by — there's just such a long track record with this company. Their involvement with predictive policing in Los Angeles, which literally targeted communities of color with this idea that you could draw profiles of people who are more likely to be suspects and you could just spy on those people all the time. And then their involvement with HBGary Federal, where they were literally plotting to help cook up dirt. Instance after instance of these situations where Palantir just happens to be in the middle — some of the scandals that Edward Snowden helped expose. Why does Palantir happen to be a contractor in all of these situations? And do they not have boundaries?

I think what makes it more nefarious is they also use this kind of fascinating doublespeak, and they're very willing to deploy this kind of doublespeak. Stuff that is directly invasive of our privacy gets repackaged and billed to people very loudly by Alex Karp as somehow being protective of the Fourth Amendment, when it's the exact opposite of that. I think that also makes it even more nefarious.

GIL: They seem to enjoy being nefarious in a very twisted way, where they claim that their being nefarious is actually them being good. The way they try to twist The Lord of the Rings, for instance, into somehow being a justification for their actions — which are obviously the actions of the villains in that narrative. I find that they're actually the villains in every narrative. They're the villains in sci-fi. They're the villains in The Lord of the Rings. They're the villains in the Bible, largely. And they try to twist all of these narratives into somehow them being the hero. They're very much into reversals, almost to a satanic degree — everything being backwards and upside down with a lot of these guys. And we did a whole deep dive on Peter Thiel's obsession with the Antichrist, which I'll bring up a little later in the show, because it is very relevant to Palantir, apparently.

One of the interesting things about Palantir's origin story is that it really started with an investment from the CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel. From the very beginning, Palantir was designed to serve the national security state. This is in the aftermath of 9/11, when surveillance and security were all the rage.

Speaking of weird twists and reversals — Peter Thiel for a long time claimed to be a libertarian. Well, libertarians are against big government intrusion. Libertarians are against invasions of privacy. And so here's a guy who claims to be a libertarian, one of the most prominent libertarians in Silicon Valley, who goes full-on into government authoritarian power, surveillance, and control. In fact, it was former Department of Defense official John Poindexter who helped build their first network of government advocates. So what they really saw was a chance to do big business. Their supposed political beliefs didn't really matter. But now the world has come to reflect their political beliefs, which are not libertarian — which are quite clearly authoritarian.

Let's talk a little bit about the degree to which Palantir is now integrated into our government. They've got contracts with the Army, with the NSA, with the FBI, with ICE, with Border Patrol, the Pentagon. Over in the UK, they have contracts with the NHS, the National Health Service. Billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer money going to Palantir. Every time you turn around, it seems like there's a new deal or a new contract that they've scored. What does it say that we have so many of these private companies now taking a role that might have once belonged to government? Part of the story here seems to be the privatization of public duties and public responsibilities.

JOÃO PAULO: Yeah, well, when you privatize, there's less direct oversight, and it's harder to obtain real information about what's happening inside these companies. As broken as they often can be, there are oversight systems in the federal government, there are more checks and balances. When you outsource this stuff to these companies, you really enter this gray area where you can get away with a lot more.

The other side of it is — what you're pointing out is that Palantir's whole business model really relies so heavily on this cronyism. This cronyism that any libertarian should be condemning. They rely on this heavy revolving-door model. You have people who work inside these government agencies, and then they exit and get jobs at Palantir, and then they help Palantir win contracts inside those same agencies. An unprecedented new level of cronyism that we're beginning to explore here, blurring the boundaries between the public and private sector in really new ways.

JACINTA: What is really interesting about Palantir — because I agree completely with you, João Paulo, the revolving door, the relationships. JD Vance, our vice president: his campaign for Senate was basically financed by Peter Thiel. Thiel has led him in his political career. So the lines between where the loyalties lie, what are the politics of what's happening, are completely blurred.

When we first started to do research around this and launched the No Tech for ICE campaign in 2018, we were like, "No, this is profiteering." We'd been talking about private detention centers profiteering over the detention and deportation pipeline. But actually, it's tech companies. It's deeper than that and more nefarious than that, in the sense that they are both naming the policies and then benefiting from them in a way that is also controlling the infrastructure itself. So we're not in a position where it's only that they're benefiting economically. They actually control the system.

Is it a private government? Is it a corporation taking control of a government? There's a lot of nuance there that we can unpack. But you start to see it, for example, with the Big Beautiful Bill — the budget that was passed, all of these billions of dollars in the name of defending the homeland, defending security, immigration enforcement. Really, what they're doing is using it as a blank check to build up the surveillance system that they want to have, to have political control.

I think it's really important to also be pushing back. They have all of these ideas of defending liberty. What we're really debating is the role of government. On one hand, they're saying, "We need billions of dollars of our taxpayer money to go to war, genocide, a war on immigrants here at home." Anything related to healthcare, anything related to education, anything related to the environment is completely gutted. So it's not that they believe in small government. They actually want to have a very large government that is just focused on anything that has to do with militarization. That is their model in terms of business, and that is also their model in terms of political control.

GIL: They always want small government when it comes to things that are good for people. They have no problem with wasting billions of dollars killing children in Iran. There's always money for more bombs, never money for children, for families, etc. And this is a long-running problem in the country between the Republicans and the Democrats especially. The Democrats often buy into this idea that we should shrink the social safety net in order to get toward some mythical center that doesn't really exist. That search for the center has led us into this far-right trap where the Democratic Party is essentially silent or invisible as these guys openly, corruptly push the government into authoritarian territory.

What's also interesting is the degree to which the corruption is so open. You've had all these members of Congress and members of the Trump administration buying Palantir stock, which then surges far beyond what many experts think the company is worth. So there's a scam and a corruption on multiple levels being played, where not only do you get campaign contributions, but you can personally enrich yourself by buying in to the project. I think the degree of open corruption we're seeing that Palantir is right at the center of — and the people around it are at the center of — is unprecedented. There will have to be some serious consequences for that. We've basically got this corrupt Silicon Valley capitalist privatized shadow government, and it's hard to distinguish which is which, because now the Trump family has become crypto billionaires and who knows what else they're up to.

That's why I want to bring the conversation now to your campaign, Purge Palantir, which is very focused on this company, bringing attention to its abuses, making the public aware. But it didn't come out of nowhere. You've had a previous campaign to keep the pressure on these companies. Tell us a bit about the theory behind the campaign, what you hope to accomplish, and what you've accomplished so far.

JACINTA: I think maybe I can tell a little bit of the history, and then João Paulo can bring us into the current state. As I was telling you before, during the first Trump administration, a lot of us were starting to see changes in the way that ICE was behaving and understanding what's going on. So we put out a report called Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations. It uncovered that actually it was not only Palantir, but it was companies like Amazon that were providing cloud storage, or companies like Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis offering data. And so we were able to map out and track — and that was a very big part of the No Tech for ICE campaign, where we were organizing to stop these tech companies from having these contracts with ICE.

It's one of those things where you start to research a little bit and you pull the string, you pull the string, and all of a sudden you realize just how big it is. I think we're at a point where we realize that the work that they started to do with the Department of Homeland Security, with the CIA, with the Department of War — all of these contracts were just the beginning. The aspiration that they have and where they're going encompasses all of them.

So that is where there was a desire of: how do we actually create an effort that's not just about the genocide that is happening, that's not just about the new wars that are occurring, that's not just about immigration enforcement, that's not only about worker rights, that's not only about surveillance — but where we can all come together and have a multiplicity of tactics, a multiplicity of strategies in terms of how we go in and how we organize around this. I always tell people, there's not going to be one way that we win. These companies, in their influence and the ideology that they represent, are very deep. And so whether it's going after investors, whether it's workers taking over, whether it's people coming out and protesting, whether it's politicians refusing to take their money — all of us have a role to play. All of us can do something. That's the spirit behind the efforts around Purge Palantir.

JOÃO PAULO: To get into a little bit of where the campaign is at right now — really, going back to a point that you made at the beginning, Gil, where they lean into this supervillain character. One of the reasons they lean into the supervillain character is they want to make themselves come across as all-powerful and scary and really intimidating to us. And while a lot of what they do and profit off of is inherently creepy and evil — bringing ICE into our communities, the violence that we've been seeing in our neighborhoods — they're not an all-powerful company. Really, we start from the understanding that we have a lot of power over them, and we have the power to take them on. We, the people, can take down Palantir. Yes, their tentacles reach deep into the government, but their vulnerabilities are many. As I mentioned earlier, their software is not this irreplaceable magical tool. There are many other folks that could provide similar tools — and that do — and a lot of what they deploy in the government are these consultants. We have the ability to say, "This kind of business model that profits directly off of harm and predation — we're not going to get behind that."

So where do we have power over them? Well, we have power over them, first of all, as voters. We have power to say, "We don't want our elected champions on the Palantir payroll." If you go to purgepalantir.com and you go to the Palantir Payroll tab, you can actually see all the politicians in the United States, Democrats and Republicans, who are on the Palantir payroll — who have taken Palantir money. You can say, "Am I down for mass surveillance? If I'm not — Democrat or Republican, or wherever on the spectrum I am — I don't want my elected champion on the Palantir payroll." You can join the campaign to get your member of Congress off the Palantir payroll. And some champions have done that. Ro Khanna here in the Bay Area was very courageous in coming forward — we want to commend him — saying, "I am paying forward, donating forward, all the contributions that I have received from Palantir executives in the past, and I'm now signing this pledge to not take Palantir money moving forward." There are other electeds around the country who are signing on to that same petition.

As consumers, we have power because although Palantir has its tentacles in the government, they also provide their software services to many consumer-facing businesses. Take high-profile brands — some of them luxury consumer goods, luxury products. You have Ferrari, for instance. Palantir is very proud of how much time they put into their partnership with Ferrari. There's a lot of public marketing material tying Palantir and Ferrari's image together. Well, there's this question now: sure, I don't drive a Ferrari, but there's a long list of celebrities out there who do. And I wonder how many of those folks proudly driving their Ferraris are on board with the mass surveillance of all Americans, with the kidnapping of children in our streets and all of that. How about Dave & Buster's? How about John Deere? How about a number of these different major corporations that we do interact with and that are happily right now doing business with Palantir? Can we raise the cost as consumers?

And then we have power over them as workers. Nurses, anyone in a workplace where Palantir software is trying to be deployed — if you're a union member, you can fight to get it in your next contract to say, "We do not want this invasive, nefarious, immoral company doing business where we work." You can fight to get Palantir out of your workplace as a worker.

And last but not least, as engaged community members, we all have access to our city councils. We have access to our boards of supervisors and our counties. We have the ability to show up to meetings and say, "We don't want our local government doing business with Palantir either." There are so many fronts in which we do have the power to take on Palantir and to say, "This kind of business model is not acceptable with what we want for the future of our democracy."

GIL: What have you been able to do so far in terms of organizing people to purge Palantir? And what success do you think is possible? What do you see in the next five to ten years if your campaign is successful?

JOÃO PAULO: Some of the success we've seen really is with the elected officials who have publicly come forward and said, "Moving forward, we're not going to take this money." So you have elected officials distancing themselves from Palantir, noting that Palantir's model really relies so heavily on their ability to tip the scales in their favor politically. And then you have communities, coalitions being formed all around the country — in New York, in Nevada, in Los Angeles, here in the Bay Area. All around the country, you have communities of people coming together to say, "Let's look at our county governments and let's see where our counties have contracts. Let's see where our cities have contracts with Palantir or with Flock Safety, which is another Peter Thiel company. Let's take those contracts on. We do not want this in our local government either." So there's a lot of momentum growing there.

When I think of success, I think of a world where we have removed the tentacles of Palantir from the federal government, where Palantir is no longer able to continue with this crony business model, and where there are other alternatives, other solutions. Where the government needs genuine data integration services, the government is no longer looking to corporations like Palantir to do this work moving forward. And then it's worth noting: we do not want ICE terrorizing our communities anymore. We don't want them in our streets. We don't want them in our neighborhoods. A national movement really calling to abolish ICE, to rethink the way we do immigration enforcement, to find other solutions and not to move forward with ICE, is also a call to rip out one of Palantir's big sources of money.

JACINTA: I agree 100%. I'm on board with João Paulo's vision of where we're going. The thing I would add is: sometimes when companies particularly — the politicians too — when you get a good villain like this, they are doing things that are really horrible for humanity, but they are also a sign, a symptom of what is really going on underneath. Part of the test that we have at hand is: Palantir is awful, but they're also awful because of what they represent. If you take out Palantir and replace them with another company, it's going to be a very similar issue, because really this is all part of the broader fight against authoritarianism. What we just have to grapple with is, it's not only that we're facing authoritarian figures like Trump — we're also confronting authoritarian figures like Thiel.

One of the things that gives me a lot of hope is watching how they've had to shift to be relevant in the moment. When we first launched the No Tech for ICE campaign, Palantir would actually say, "We do not work with the Enforcement and Removal Operations. We only work with Homeland Security Investigations." These are two arms of ICE. Folks who have been in the movement know, for a long time they've always both done horrible things and deportations, but this felt like a line in the sand that they could say, "We're not doing that, but we're doing this."

Now they're very openly saying, "No, any immigrant, anyone — we're going to defend whatever the vision is of the white supremacists in the White House. That's going to be the political line that we're going to take." You start to realize, they are vulnerable. For a long time, Palantir has actually wanted to have this business model where Thiel will take folks on the right and Karp would take folks right in the Democratic center. Now that is broken in some ways. So they've revealed themselves. For me, it's an opportunity to actually show what's at stake, why this is so dangerous, why we all have to be really vigilant around how corporations — whether it's Palantir or other big tech companies — are controlling our political system, our economic system, the way we think about safety and who belongs.

All of these things to me are brought together. So to me, it's both: what can we do against Palantir, but also what kind of movement can we build that actually sees the threat of a company like Palantir and understands that to have a democracy, to have human rights, we actually have to take them head on and make sure that they're not a defining force of where we're going.

GIL: It seems like there has been a great unmasking during these Trump times, where they feel more comfortable — or at least they've been forced into defining their position. You have Alex Karp, it seems like every other day, saying completely insane things in public, barely able to control his physical movements as he says these things. Bragging that Palantir helps kill people. That AI is going to disempower educated Democratic voters and empower white vocational workers — which nobody really believes, but obviously he's trying to hedge against the growing working-class fear and hatred of AI. Actually, it's spreading through all classes of American society.

You've got Joe Lonsdale, one of the co-founders of Palantir, who said that Palantir was designed to kill communists — which most of these right-wingers define as people who vote for Democrats. He also recently called for a return to public executions, which some of his critics felt was a great idea, but that we should execute billionaires.

Then you've got Peter Thiel roaming the planet talking about the Antichrist. I have had the misfortune of reading through his entire Antichrist lecture series and tracing his fascination with the Antichrist back for decades. To get down to the point Thiel seems to be making: the Antichrist would be a force or a person who rises to totalitarian power under the guise of peace and safety to establish this one-world rule. Sort of "one ring to rule them all," to use Lord of the Rings — or one surveillance data mastery program that is embedded through all aspects of our life, like Palantir. When Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, it is hard not to draw the assumption that he's not talking about his own business activities. He's in Rome right now lecturing to the Catholics on the steps of the Vatican about the Antichrist, and one of the responses from the Vatican priest was that he's the one creating this machinery — that this is a violent assault on the liberal world order and on human dignity. It is in a way a gift that we can see these men so publicly revealing their true purpose and true goals, and sort of falling apart while doing it.

My fear, if Democrats do manage to retake power, if we do have elections, is that they're going to continue to let Palantir operate with the status quo. They're not going to take it on. For instance, people like Gavin Newsom, who are very critical of Trump in all caps, they have very little to say on these more specific matters. I wonder the degree to which Palantir is active in California in different capacities. So I do think it's an uphill fight, but I'm glad you all are fighting it, because people do need to know the names of these companies and what they do. Someone has to be watching. Someone has to be pushing back.

So how can people get involved? Is there a role for the average person in Purge Palantir? What can they do? Because I think your movement is just growing, and I think it's going to get bigger, but I think it's going to include a lot more companies. Because, and this is what I'm writing my book about, we are in a war for the future of democracy against a very small, interconnected group of companies and billionaires who have a very pronounced vision of what that future is going to look like. And believe me, it's not going to include most of us. The good news is there's only 3,000 billionaires in the world. There's 8.2 billion people. So this is the easiest trolley problem ever, if one side or the other has to be disempowered or eliminated. How can the average person do something about Palantir?

JOÃO PAULO: That's what's really exciting about this campaign — there's so many opportunities, and we've only really begun to scratch the surface around what can be done. If you're a parent taking your kids to Dave & Buster's on the weekend, would you like to know that Dave & Buster's is using the same software tool, Foundry, that ICE is using to track people down in our neighborhoods? If you're a farmer, or maybe you're doing some yard work and you go to John Deere, do you want these companies to be doing business with Palantir and receiving your dollars?

If you go to the Purge Palantir website and you look at the Palantir Payroll page, you can see if there's anyone near you who's on the Palantir payroll, and you can join the campaign and start writing letters and start calling them out and inviting them to really purge Palantir.

The other thing you can do is you can go to the Quakers. They put up a great website, the American Friends Service Committee, where you can actually see a map of everywhere there's someone doing business with Palantir or someone receiving Palantir money. You can use that map to really understand and start to map out where Palantir is present around the country. There's a little form that makes it really easy — you can use that form to send a letter to the CEO of every single company in your state that does business with Palantir. So there's a lot of basic steps that you can take right now. There will be much more, but there's so much to do. I'm really excited to be working with everybody who loves democracy enough to stand up to Palantir and call their bluff.

GIL: Wow. So the Quakers have engaged in the battle against the Palantichrist. Yes, they have. That's good. See, it's like The Lord of the Rings, where all the different good tribes have to come together against all the evil ones here. Jacinta, what can the average person do to get involved? Those were some good tips from João Paulo. Can they join Purge Palantir? Can they become a member or participant?

JACINTA: I really do think that this is a time where we can be in space together and come together to grow our movements. So recently, for example, Palantir moved their headquarters to Miami. First, they were not welcome in San Jose. We hosted an unwelcome party for them in Colorado. They stayed for a few years, didn't like it, went to Miami. Unwelcome party ready for them right there. There are opportunities, as João Paulo was saying, that come up all the time.

But this is part of a broader movement of communities coming together to say, "We want democracy. We don't want this tech oligarchy to be running our lives." To me, that means: if you're locally fighting against Palantir, that's great. If you're trying to close down a data center or make sure one isn't built in your backyard, that's great. If you're fighting to make sure we have independent media because the tech companies are actually buying up all of the ways that we get information — that's great. This is actually a broader movement that is coming together to fight these things.

But what they represent in terms of being fundamentally anti-democratic, fundamentally violent, fundamentally believing in genocide — I think we really have to pay attention to what's happening around the world to understand these are warnings. They are not only human rights atrocities. They are not only things that we have to stand against, but they are warnings of how far they are willing to go.

For us, all of these fights are connected — whether you're fighting against ICE, whether you're fighting against the genocide, whether you're making sure that communities are able to vote and get out to the election, all of these things are connected. Wanting to make sure that folks see that, because you might be doing work in another area and it's connected to the fight against Palantir. We don't have to choose just one way of organizing. We can actually believe that all of these things are needed. So wanting to encourage people, yeah, let's purge Palantir, let's make sure these companies know — but let's also make sure that we are holding true the values that we want to see. If we don't continue to say human rights matter, democracy matters, we actually need to have government that listens to its people, and we need a planet to live on — full stop — if we don't continue to say those things out loud, they're going to win. So for me, it really is about building the power of the people, building, organizing, and folks just plugging in wherever makes sense to them.

GIL: And we'll be right back after this break.

Plugs

R.R. ROBBINS: Thank you, Gil. This is producer R.R. Robbins with this week's plugs. This week, it's Purge Palantir. Go to the website at purgepalantir.com. Find a way to take action, and then do it. Also, as João Paulo mentioned earlier, the Quakers — yeah, the Quakers — have a great site and a Palantir money map to see everywhere the Palantir money is going. Find out about it at the American Friends Service Committee site at afsc.org.

Finally, if you haven't done it yet, pre-order Gil's book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Releases this August and makes a great belated Independence Day gift. Because if any book says America right now, this one does. And now, back to the pod.

 

GIL: João Paulo, where are we going to end?

JOÃO PAULO: I just wanted to add that this is also very much a bipartisan fight. This is a fight that extends beyond political parties. This isn't Democrats versus Republicans, blue versus red. This is people who live in the United States, or anywhere in the world, who are deeply concerned about this particular business model — corporations acquiring this kind of tentacular power in government. Anyone who thinks that that's just a line that no one should be allowed to cross can join this fight. We don't always have to agree on everything, but we can agree that this is particularly dangerous and harmful, and that if we want to have, as Jacinta said, a government that responds to the people, a government that responds to us, then we can't have a government that's powered by corporations like Palantir.

I invite my friends, my colleagues, people who may be watching this who don't typically vote Democrat but who think that some of this business about building databases with all Americans' data — that sounds really scary. I invite them to stand up to Palantir as well. I look forward to joining them in the fight against Palantir, because we need all of us to come together on this one.

JACINTA: To share: your fear of Democrats being a little too timid on this, I share that fear 100%. I share it because, look around — we actually are seeing multiple examples of that. When I think about who's built up, for example, ICE's ability to do what they're doing now, Democrats and Republicans have been equally complicit in that creation of that paramilitary force that is creating that harm now. So as part of this, we know that hopefully we're going to continue to organize to ensure that we continue to have elections, and we will vote whatever way we have to be able to protect our communities in those elections. But that does not mean that we don't also have to push the Democratic Party in general around these issues of mass surveillance, detention and deportation, war and genocide. Those are all issues that they continue to be, in many instances, very weak on. So we have to continue to push so that we actually have a line of political resistance.

GIL: I really think it needs to be a litmus test in the next election. Democrats cannot support a presidential candidate who will not pledge to not only purge Palantir from our government, but to punish violations as well. If we don't have that, then — what I've been saying, and it's not an optimistic message, though I'm optimistic in many ways — is that if we do not address this cancer that's growing in our society, in our government — not just Palantir, but the entire venture capital apocalyptic fascist culture that has risen up and that is in power under Trump — we're just going to get to the same place on the slower path. These guys want to accelerate it and bring it all down quickly, but we're going to get there on a slower path.

I think Gavin Newsom, if you're listening — anyone who's not going to pledge to take on and break up Palantir should not be president of the United States. So there's another thing we can all do as voters: make sure we're not going to support somebody who is going to support the literal enemies of democracy and humanity.

Jacinta, João, thank you so much for joining me today on the Nerd Reich Podcast.

JOÃO PAULO: Thank you for having us. Was a pleasure.

JACINTA: Thank you so much.

R.R. ROBBINS: And that's a wrap on the pod. Today's show was produced, edited, and announced by yours truly, R.R. Robbins. It was written and hosted by journalist and author Gil Durán. The Nerd Reich book drops this August. Pre-order today. Special thanks to our guests, Jacinta and João Paulo. Check out their work at purgepalantir.com.

As a reminder, this podcast is available in audio and video. For you ear-only people — or those who think I'm just getting a little too crazy on the video editing — you can listen via Spotify or anywhere you get audio pods. For everyone else, this podcast and all our pods are available on youtube.com. Check out our old ones like the Antichrist Playbook — you'll understand today's subject, Peter Thiel, a lot more when you do. And subscribe for new episodes when they drop. We'll be doing a lot more with the pod as we build up to Gil's book this summer. Also subscribe to the newsletter at thenerdreich.com.

Today's final words from J.R.R. Tolkien, via Pippin after he peeped a palantír: "If all the seven stones were laid out before me now, I should shut my eyes and put my hands in my pockets." Smart Hobbit advice. See you next time.