‘A massive power grab’: White House proposal threatens funding that helps disabled Americans vote
By Lisa Song for ProPublica Without Amy Miller, some elderly and disabled people wouldn’t be able to vote. The attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska travels the state, investigating the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As she reminds the residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month…
Reports of a Lethal Virus Outbreak in Russia Follow the Death of a Researcher
Reports out of the Irkutsk region of Russia reveal a potential public health crisis developing in the area, after a lab accident released a “particularly dangerous infection” to a researcher, who later passed away.
Twenty-eight-year-old Darya Shipilovia, a lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died two days after she was hospitalized, following exposure to a “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” according to Rospotrebnadzor, a federal agency that oversees health and safety. The virus in question has been said to be the deadly but treatable pneumonic plague.
BREAKING:
5 hospitals have been closed for quarantines in Siberia due to a possible plague outbreak.
The 28-year-old lab technician Darya Shipilova, died yesterday after breaking a test tube with live Yersinia pestis the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute on September 25th while… pic.twitter.com/N6tKLRyAJ5
The Russian government has not released an official announcement of the patient’s death, according to the independent news organization Meduza:
Governor Igor Kobzev said the regional government had convened a special meeting of the regional commission on sanitation and epidemic prevention. The meeting was called in response to information “about a suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection in a resident of the region.”
He did not specify the infection. Anna Popova, Russia’s chief sanitary officer, traveled to attend the meeting. According to Kobzev, Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, is taking “a full range of epidemic-control measures.” People who had been in contact with the patient were “placed under medical observation.” They have no signs of illness.
According to several outlets, hospitals are under quarantine, with the number of shutdowns ranging from three to five. Reports from independent news sources such as The Moscow Times say that nearly 200 workers have been placed under observation.
BREAKING: Plague outbreak expands, Russia BSL-3 lab accident – FIVE hospitals now quarantined
The plague outbreak in Siberia, Russia has expanded w/5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE: Irkutsk Hospitals No. 1, No.3, No.10, Ivano-Matreninskaya Children's Hospital, and an… pic.twitter.com/DhPkS2ILiW
Dominic Hauschild, the defense correspondent of Britain’s The Sunday Times noted that establishing any of the facts about the situation has proved to be difficult because of the Russian government’s “secrecy.” But, he added, “There are fears this could be another Wuhan situation.”
This is a developing story.
GOP senator sheds his dignity to kiss Trump’s ass
Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions. Senate Republicans continued to make utter fools of themselves this week in their continued efforts to paint President Donald Trump as a victim. But no one was a bigger clown than Sen.
Schmitt head
A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | GOP senator’s gotcha question blows up in his face…
Can this Democratic pastor flip a House district in Iowa?
Lindsay James, a Presbyterian pastor and politician, is ready to shift into fall soup mode with her two teenage children. But first, she has an election to win. Across Iowa’s 2nd District, James has been talking with voters ahead of her competitive race. As it stands, the polls show James in a dead heat with Republican Joe Mitchell. A state representative, James is “very familiar with…
Trump’s Appearance in Ohio Underscores All the Reasons the GOP Is Unpopular
On Saturday, President Donald Trump hosted a campaign rally for Ohio senatorial and gubernatorial candidates, John Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy. As part of his campaign to revive GOP turnout and avoid what is widely predicted to be a Democratic sweep, he appeared in Ohio following weekend visits to Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. With his signature lack of subtlety, he encouraged the state’s voters to head to the polls.
“Just get out and vote,” Trump told a crowd that barely filled a high school gymnasium in the city of Vandalia. “If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big. And we’re going to shove it up their ass.” Ohio, a state that Trump has won three times, has become a battleground for the same reasons that the GOP is predicting a bleak forecast in this year’s midterms: skyrocketing gas prices, bipartisan disdain for data centers, high costs for food and utilities, and Trump’s unpopular war with Iran.
All of this was highlighted during last night‘s rally, starting with the venue. Less than a week earlier, a nearby factory had laid off 1,400 workers in the community. Meanwhile, Trump swore that the state’s fledgling economy would be saved by AI data centers.
“There’s so much money to be made for Ohio. You can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China,” Trump said. As my colleague Anna Merlan has reported, the Trump administration has made support for artificial intelligence a hallmark of its platform, tying the unregulated use of this technology not only to economic prosperity, but also, weirdly enough, masculinity. Merlan writes:
It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
But despite Trump’s insistence that all criticism of AI and data centers is fake news, the polls make it clear that people are not buying what the he is selling—and this has been true in Ohio, Florida, and many other states. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz reported, data center opposition is proving to be a winning strategy for both Republicans and Democrats alike. Meanwhile, Husted, who’s been branded the “face of data centers” by Brown, has faced bipartisan backlash for his support of these tech developers. Recently, Senate Democrats shut down Husted’s bill aiming to prevent data centers from causing potential utility bill spikes, calling the legislation “toothless.”
According to a poll conducted by USA Today, former senator Sherrod Brown is currently leading with 47 percent of voters’ support, compared to Husted’s 44 percent. Democratic candidate Amy Acton is also pulling ahead of her opponent, with a nine-point difference in favorability over Ramaswamy, according to a poll from Suffolk University.
Trump’s 93-minute speech reportedly did little to address people’s concerns with data centers and made no mention of the recent layoffs or rising grocery and gas prices. But he did make sure to get potshots in on Husted’s opponent, praising the Republican’s athletic prowess and dunking on Brown’s alleged lack thereof.
“That guy can’t tie his shoes,” said Trump.
Since the rally, both Ramaswamy and Husted have tweeted very little about the president’s appearance, with Husted instead opting to shoutout his University of Dayton college football teammate, John Gruden, who resigned as a coach to the Las Vegas Raiders after emails of his containing racist and misogynistic language were leaked to the public. Ramaswamy, on the other hand, did post a video of himself nodding along approvingly as Trump called Acton “a radical left lunatic pretending to be a moderate.”
We beat Kamala Harris in Ohio in ‘24 and we’re going to beat the Kamala Harris of Ohio in ‘26. pic.twitter.com/YerPACs735
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 4, 2026This rally is just one of a thirty-two-stop campaign tour that’s supposed to resuscitate the Republican Party’s waning political support, with Trump planning to travel to 17 states—even once reliably red ones like South Carolina—before November 3rd.
NEW — President Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are both planning visits to South Carolina as the Senate race draws increased attention, per @nytimes.
Annie Andrews (D) has outraised and outspent Sen. Darline Graham in a state Trump carried by more than 17 points.
AOC slams ICE atrocities, and Republicans keep screwing up
The midterms are less than a month away, and the GOP is desperately trying anything to convince voters they should stay on a sinking ship. Unfortunately, the Republican platform is not only unsatisfactory, but it’s actively driving people away in droves—and recent actions by Senate Republicans didn’t do anything to help. And it was all on video. GOP senator’s gotcha question…
Super El Niño to cause 451,000 heat deaths
Climate scientists are calling the hotter temperatures resulting from El Niño a “postcard from the future.” By Arcelia Martin for Inside Climate News More than 451,000 people are projected to die across the globe in the next six months from the additional heat brought by a super El Niño, according to estimates from climate scientists released Wednesday. The El Niño—the warm…
How a Bolsonaro Biopic Ended Up at the Center of Brazil’s Presidential Election
This article is a partnership with Agência Pública.
In May, now-presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, shared on his social media a “leaked” trailer for an upcoming biopic about his father. The “most anticipated movie of the year,” Flávio said then, would depict the story of a “true hero.” In the trailer, which had a “disclosure prohibited” watermark, a wig-wearing Jim Caviezel—the American Hollywood actor perhaps most famous for his role as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ—plays Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest for a failed coup attempt after his 2022 electoral defeat.
Director Cyrus Nowrasteh described Dark Horse as a “tense political thriller about power, media, and faith under fire.” The movie’s trailer, which centers on Bolsonaro’s first presidential run and rise to power in 2018, frames the ex-president as “the voice of the people” and a leader who “fought the system” that tried to silence him. It includes a dramatic reenactment of his stabbing during the campaign. “IF YOU CARE ABOUT OUR ELECTIONS,” Caviezel, who is also known for the more recent Sound of Freedom, posted on Instagram earlier this year, “watch my newest film coming out September 11, 2026!”
The production company behind the movie advertised it on X. “A trailer that circulated online was enough to put the Dark Horse at the center of discussions for months,” says the post in Portuguese. “Now, anticipation continues to grow for one of the most awaited international productions inspired by events that marked Brazil.”
Um trailer que circulou na internet foi suficiente para colocar The Dark Horse no centro das discussões por meses.
Agora, a expectativa continua crescendo para uma das produções internacionais mais aguardadas inspiradas em acontecimentos que marcaram o Brasil.
#DarkHorse pic.twitter.com/3y6E422qpL
That September 11 date went by and the movie, which was shot in English, has yet to be released in Brazil; it won’t come out before the first round in a nail-biting presidential race set for Sunday, October 4. These federal elections, which include congressional and gubernatorial races alongside the presidential contest, have been dogged by accusations of meddling by the Trump administration, prompting incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to send a clear message to the US leader: “Brazil does not fit in anyone’s backyard.” While Dark Horse has not featured as a centerpiece in that conversation, it has certainly had its own share of controversy even before hitting the big screen.
The Brazil-US joint production has become the subject of an ongoing investigation that has sent shockwaves through the presidential campaign of one of the main candidates in a high-stakes, knife-edge election. Brazilian authorities are actively looking into the financing of the movie by a now-disgraced businessman accused of leading one of the biggest bank frauds in the country’s history. That financial scandal involves banker Daniel Vorcaro, former owner of the liquidated Banco Master, who is jailed for alleged fraud in a complex billion-dollar scheme involving worthless credit portfolios. The imbroglio has rocked the 214-million-people nation and thrown the Brazilian Supreme Court into an unprecedented institutional crisis, ensnaring justices, including Alexandre de Moraes—a polarizing figure credited by some with having stopped Bolsonaro’s coup plot and vilified by others for judicial overreach—and high-profile politicians and public officials with alleged ties to Vorcaro.
Among them is Brazilian senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who is cited in the investigation by Brazil’s federal police into the financing of the movie for “possible participation” in alleged crimes involving “money laundering, illicit capital flight, corruption, and other related offenses.” Last May, the Intercept Brasil exposed audio recordings and messages exchanged between Flávio and Vorcaro in which the senator asks the banker for money to fund Dark Horse. Documents from the federal police indicate Flávio was a “direct interlocutor” in negotiating with Vorcaro about the financing of the movie production.
The bombshell reporting revealed that Flávio, the primary opponent facing off against Lula, who’s vying for re-election, negotiated a $24-million-dollar investment from Vorcaro. At the time, documents obtained by the Intercept Brasil showed that Vorcaro had made payments for the movie adding up to at least $10.6 million, between February and May 2025; the total has since climbed to $12.3 million, according to the federal police.
In a voice message to Vorcaro from September 2025, Flávio pressed the banker on pending payments, stressing the importance of getting the movie across the finish line. “Imagine us defaulting on Jim Caviezel, on Cyrus [Nowrasteh], these guys, man, hugely renowned in American and global cinema. Man, that would be really bad,” Flávio said in the audio, a transcription of which is cited in the federal police’s inquiry. He added: “Now that we’re in the final stretch, we can’t slip up, we can’t fail to honor the commitments here, because otherwise we lose everything.”
The Bolsonaro camp had high hopes for Dark Horse, originally projected for release three weeks before election day. “We’ll touch the hearts of a lot of people,” congressman Mário Frias, who was involved in the development of the project and is also named in the investigation, told Vorcaro, “and it will be very important for our country.” Ahead of the election, Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential hopeful, has found himself having to provide explanations. He has dismissed the payments from Vorcaro as “private sponsorship” for a private project, underscoring that no public funds were used in the movie, and denied any wrongdoing.
Unsealed court documents state that payment transfers for Dark Horse were made via an intermediary company and processed through the Texas-based Havengate Development Fund managed by a Brazilian lawyer close to Flávio’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is self-exiled in the United States since last year following a lawmaker’s request for him to be investigated for allegedly lobbying against Brazil’s national interests. This June, Eduardo, who was stripped of his congressional seat for being absent, was convicted of “coercion” for attempting to secure interference from the Trump administration on Brazil’s internal affairs; he sought to persuade them to impose tariffs on Brazil and sanctions on Brazilian justices to help his father’s case.
Investigators looking into the origins of the money and its destination have raised the “hypothesis” that Eduardo, who lives in Texas, “directed the management of resources on foreign soil.” They also are investigating whether funds from Havengate may have been used to cover Eduardo’s living expenses, according to multiple reports by Brazilian media outlets. Flávio has maintained that all the resources allocated to the fund went towards the movie production.
On X, Eduardo has denied receiving money from the Texas fund, saying his immigration status wouldn’t have allowed it. (He has recently obtained a green card.) “During my immigration process,” he said, “I explained to the American authorities the whole origin of my assets and I didn’t have any problems.” He added that “all the investments were made in the US because the production was American, with American actors.”
Agência Pública, Brazil’s largest nonprofit newsroom, recently reported on Eduardo’s lavish lifestyle; he resides in a luxury home in Southlake, owns a $43,800 SUV, and travels frequently—20 times in 18 months—including to attend a gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, watch a World Cup match in Miami, and surf in Abu Dhabi. Eduardo has previously explained his financial circumstances by saying he lives off of “passive income.”
The former lawmaker denied having any management role in Dark Horse, but a production contract signed in 2024 and obtained by the Intercept Brasil mentioned the ex-congressman as an executive producer in the movie. In response to the article, Eduardo said that he had signed a contract when the project was still in the early stages and invested $50,000 to get a Hollywood director attached to the movie, but he was later repaid and left the project once other investors were secured. Agência Pública contacted Eduardo’s press team but didn’t hear back before publication.
Go UP Entertainment, the US-based production company behind Dark Horse, is led by Karina Ferreira da Gama and Michael Brian Davis. (Ferreira da Gama and an NGO she directs are the target of a separate inquiry into whether public money was used to finance the movie.) According to an audit commissioned by Go UP, production costs in Brazil were $3.73 million. Costs in the United States amounted to $9.66 million—or more than 70 percent of the movie’s roughly $13-million reported spending. The expenses in the United States, according to the audit, included soft production, pre-production, project development, filming, and post-production. On LinkedIn, a production manager who worked on the movie described it as “the largest-budget feature filmed entirely in Brazil.”
”It’s not a film that will be nominated for an Oscar. It won’t be in contention for a nomination, but it has that Hollywood seal of quality.”
The movie’s reported expenses have raised eyebrows among industry insiders, who have compared the numbers to those of an Oscar-worthy production. The company spent $2,000 on a rental wig for Caviezel and about $135,000 in hotel accommodation for the star and his agent and security, based on bank statements and invoices provided to the federal police. ”It’s not a film that will be nominated for an Oscar,” Wilson Feitosa, director of the company responsible for the distribution of Dark Horse, told O Globo newspaper. “It won’t be in contention for a nomination, but it has that Hollywood seal of quality.”
The federal police noted that, even accounting for “complex variables” in estimating the costs of film productions, there was an “apparent mismatch between the projected cost of the production of Dark Horse and the parameters usually practiced in the Brazilian audiovisual market,” saying it warranted further investigation into the “effective allocation of resources” and the purpose of the operation.
Registered in Florida since 2021, Go UP Entertainment listed, until recently, its place of business as Davis’ home address in Raleigh, North Carolina. In June 2026, the address was changed to a commercial location in the same city. The company’s website only mentions an address in Westlake Village, California. A google search for that address leads to another production company, Damascus Road Productions, focused on “family and faith content.” (Ryan O’Quinn, the president of Damascus Road Productions, has promoted Dark Horse on his social media and is listed on the movie’s IMDb page as a producer. He didn’t respond to an email with questions or return a voicemail message.)
“Go UP Entertainment hereby clarifies that it conducts its business activities and the production of the film Dark Horse in a documented and transparent manner and in compliance with its contractual obligations,” the company said in a statement to the Brazilian magazine Piauí. In an email, Davis declined an interview for this article, saying “we will not provide comments on confidential budgets, private agreements and contracts, or unrelated business matters.”
Go UP’s website, which appears to have been revamped this year, states that the company “was born from the union of two creative forces: Go 7 and UP Tone.” Go 7 seems to be a reference to a different company operated by Davis’ co-partner Ferreira da Gama in Brazil. Go 7, which has reportedly never released a movie or TV production in the country, has its registration status with Ancine—the Brazilian regulatory film agency—listed as “irregular.” (Go UP Entertainment’s status is “regular” and Ancine granted Dark Horse a foreign work registration.)
Uptone Pictures is a self-described “independent film production company” in North Carolina that names the Dark Horse producer, Davis, as founder and executive producer. The movie releases featured on Go UP’s page appear to be examples of Uptone’s previous work. Among them are the 2014 A Long Way Off, a modern-day retelling of the prodigal son parable; Paul’s Promise from 2022, a Christian drama about a “firefighter-turned-pastor” produced and starred by O’Quinn; and the Brazilian-American Destiny Road, based on a book by a televangelist. Uptone Pictures lists Dark Horse as one of its credited productions. On Facebook, the company calls itself “your fixer in Brazil.”
Davis has Brazilian citizenship and lived in Brazil in the 1980s, where he learned Portuguese and became a São Paulo soccer team fan, before moving to the United States, according to the BBC News Brasil. Besides Go UP Entertainment and Uptone Pictures, he’s linked to several other entertainment businesses in North Carolina, some of which have been dissolved over the years.
Davis has reportedly said that, on the advice of lawyers, he won’t hand over Go UP’s company documents without a judicial order in the United States. The producer wrote in an email to his business partner included in the investigation that “requests from Brazilian authorities involving documents or data under American jurisdiction must be formalized exclusively through the competent diplomatic and international legal cooperation channels.”
Mother Jones emailed Davis a number of questions about his partnership with Ferreira da Gama, the founding of Go UP Entertainment in 2021, and the company’s office addresses. We also asked him for details about the production and budget of Dark Horse, the company’s audit and expenses in the United States, as well as his reason to refuse a federal police’s request for evidence. Finally, the email included questions about Davis’ business history.
In a note, Davis replied that “given Mother Jones’ far-left editorial orientation and the framing of several of your questions, we do not have confidence that our participation would result in a fair and balanced account of Dark Horse.” He wrote that the “inquiry takes a broad, scattershot approach combining questions about the film with historical business affiliations, registered addresses, and other companies.” Davis also said, “several questions” contained “assumptions, speculations, or characterizations that we do not accept,” but didn’t explain what those were.
Meanwhile, select audiences in the United States have already had a sneak peek of Dark Horse. Back in June, Eduardo attended the first public screening of the movie at the Fraud Fighter Summit in Las Vegas. Speaking at a panel, Eduardo suggested the biopic could have a similar enduring impact to Terminator 2. “This movie,” he said, “is going to be a nightmare for the Left.”
Remembering when there were ‘Stax’ of soul musicians in Memphis
This story originally ran Oct. 16, 2022. Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 270 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. Here at Black Music Sunday, we’ve been making our way through cities…
Another bumper crop
A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Trump keeps screwing farmers. Will they finally push back?
Accidental Environmentalist? How Trump’s War Exposed the Fragility of Dirty Energy.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Of all the epithets hurled at Donald Trump since he became US president, perhaps the most unusual was delivered last month—that he is, in fact, some sort of environmentalist.
Trump is the “greatest gift” to the environmental movement, argued Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, due to the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran.
“He’s woken the world up to how vulnerable we are to petro-dictatorships, how vulnerable we are to disruptions in the Middle East,” Newsom told The Guardian during Climate Week in New York. “This war has completely gutted any sort of romantic notions of energy security and it’s compelled folks to think differently. It’s accelerating investments and clean energy and renewables.”
If Trump has been an accidental environmentalist, it’s been in the international sphere. The Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports usually flow, is now starting to open up but has been routinely snarled since the Iran War began in February, causing the cost of these fossil fuels to soar around the world.
Countries reacted by scrambling to cut their oil and gas use while turning to cleaner forms of energy such as solar and wind (although there’s also been a small rise in coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels).
The overall consequence has been a positive one for our shared climate, with global fossil fuel emissions set to drop by 0.5 percent this year due to the crisis, Carbon Brief has estimated. The peak in oil consumption may have been sped up enough to arrive this year, rather than the previous estimate of 2029, according to the International Energy Agency.
By launching the war, Trump is set to achieve something only dreamed about by climate advocates and not seen outside global economic crashes or the Covid pandemic—an annual reduction in the emissions that are overheating our planet. The president’s imposition of tariffs and importation of foreign ground beef, meanwhile, may also end up hurting the US cattle industry, another major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
“All of the oil that is produced will be burned… The people who predict that there will be a reduction in [greenhouse emissions] are simply lying or blind.”
“It’s a curious thing to say, but I believe it,” Newsom, a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, said of Trump as a sort of unintentional biophile. “This moment will mark how we can’t go back to our original form.”
Yet the idea of Trump as an environmentalist, even an accidental one, can still appear faintly absurd. His administration has eviscerated pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants, funnelled taxpayer cash and favors to the fossil fuel industry, and set about unilaterally cancelling renewable energy projects.
Trump, who has never by available evidence ever set a Florsheimed foot in any of the US’s national parks, has called environmentalists “terrorists,” the climate crisis “a hoax,” and has slashed conservation rules to the extent you can now kill a protected species as long as it wasn’t provably intentional.
Perhaps tellingly, when asked during the 2024 election campaign about his environmental credentials, Trump cited his Florida golf course getting awards for “the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water.”
Critics say this record overshadows any embrace of clean energy by other countries spooked by an oil price that has hovered about $100 a barrel for months but should, at some point in the interminable Iran conflict, drop well below this. The impetus for quitting fossil fuels could wither when it does so.
“Trump’s illegal attack on Iran may hasten clean energy in some countries, but he has gutted green tech in the United States and set us back decades,” said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University who said Newsom was guilty of “tunnel vision” in his framing of Trump. “The notion that he is an accidental environmentalist is wishful thinking.”
The conflict may have rocked the oil and gas industry but it has also enriched it, netting eight of the largest companies more than $90 billion in just the first three months of the war, with even pro-oil Trump complaining that the major fossil fuel firms are “making too much money.”
There is little sign Big Oil fears a looming obsolescence when this bonanza ends. Last month, Exxon forecast that while the world will reduce its emissions, it will still use 105 million barrels of oil a day in 2050, up from 100 million barrels last year. Two-thirds of the global energy mix will stubbornly remain composed of oil, gas, and coal at the midpoint of the century, the oil company estimated.
“All of the oil that is produced will be burned—if they produce more, more will be used,” said Juan Carlos Navarro, environment minister of Panama. “The people who predict that there will be a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases are simply lying or blind.”
The only hope is that the world “can cap consumption and production at levels similar to the ones we have right now,” Navarro added, citing the enormous energy demand of artificial intelligence datacenters, which are largely being run on gas-fired power.
However, climate advocates maintain the Iran conflict will accelerate trends that are already swinging behind clean energy. Investment in renewables globally is now double that of fossil fuels, almost all new power being added to grids comes from clean sources and last year one in four cars sold was electric.
“I don’t think the world is just going to go back to business-as-usual demand of fossil fuels once this crisis ends.”
Unlike previous oil shocks, the world now has a viable alternative to fossil fuels, even if it’s unclear how lasting an impact Trump’s military and trade actions will have in pushing countries towards them. “There is one thing that all these events are making clear,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission said in April. “We are paying a very high price for our over-dependency on fossil fuels.”
Countries from the UK to India to Thailand have sought to speed up the transition to renewables as the price of fossil fuel dependency has spiraled, saving billions. Electric vehicle sales have surged, although not in the US. Trump has urged other countries to reject the “scam” of clean energy but the market is increasingly favoring cheap wind, solar and batteries that have plummeted in cost in recent years, including in the US.
“Demand has massively spiked for solar and for battery storage,” said Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “We’re seeing that all over the world—the Philippines, across Europe, across south-east Asia, Australia and beyond.”
“This Iran crisis, which was, in effect, started by President Trump, has led to a massive surge in demand for our technology…but actually it’s just building on a trend that was already there,” she added.
Political and business leaders can mull the fact that the wind does not funnel through the strait of Hormuz and the sun doesn’t only shine on a foreign autocrat’s lands. The Iran war may not prove a fatal blow to fossil fuels, but it has starkly highlighted their inherent volatility.
The case for renewables has become obvious at a grassroots level in developing countries, too, where rooftops increasingly glitter with cheap Chinese-made solar panels that are helping negate soaring power bills.
“The price of solar has come down so quickly that there are now 100,000 solar panels installed every day in Africa,” Al Gore, the former US vice-president, said last month. “In parts of Pakistan, a common bride’s dowry is now three panels and an inverter, instead of 10 or 12 goats. It’s beginning to kick into gear.”
This momentum won’t stop once the conflict around the Persian Gulf ends, Dunlop insisted. “I don’t think the world is just going to go back to business-as-usual demand of fossil fuels once this crisis ends,” she said. “Once someone decides to step off the fossil fuel rollercoaster, they’re off it.”
So does all this, then, make Trump an environmentalist? “I wouldn’t say that,” Dunlop demurred. “He certainly has his own ideas.”
The Long and Extremely Urgent To-Do List if Democrats Take the House
In the 1972 movie The Candidate, Bill McKay, played by Robert Redford, shockingly wins a Senate seat. Surrounded by ecstatic staff and volunteers, a stunned and panicky McKay pulls aside his manager and asks, “What do we do now?”
That will be the relevant question for Democrats in the House and Senate if the wave election that looks increasingly possible comes true and they win control of both houses of Congress. There will be initial euphoria from everybody hoping to put a halt to the nihilism and march toward corrupt autocracy driven by the destructive narcissist Donald Trump and his minions.
But the euphoria won’t last. The task for a party holding Congress and facing a hostile president with no regard for laws, norms, or the Constitution and its separation of powers—and a Supreme Court that has unleashed him—will be daunting. If Democrats in the majority don’t handle it well, their majority may not last long—and the country’s democracy and well-being will suffer deeply.
Start with three big challenges. First, a lot of those who voted for Democrats are expecting action to improve their economic conditions: Run on affordability, you better improve affordability. Second, and related, with Democrats holding a sizable piece of power in Washington, the failures of policy driven by the reckless Trump and his administration could be blamed on them—and it is a sure thing that hundreds of millions will be spent by Trump allies to try to pin the problems on the Democrats. Americans already think Washington isn’t working; if it looks like Democrats are a part of the problem and not of the solution, that could have brutal consequences in 2028.
Third, it is clear that the Democratic Party base wants toughness and serious pushback against the corruption, misconduct, and mayhem that are the core of Trump’s presidency. Witness the negative reaction to the private meeting between House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, looking for areas of possible common ground after January 3. Rank-and-file Democrats want pushback, not compromise. Of course, compromise will be necessary to meet the first challenge of improving people’s economic circumstances. But if it is not led by Democrats using every tool at their disposal to name names, kick ass, and stop further destruction, there will be hell to pay with the base.
What are those tools? I see six of them. First, of course, is lawmaking: the ability to pass bills and get them enacted into law—or if not, to lay down markers of what you would do if in full power, and what the other side wants to negate or block. That includes putting restraints on ICE to limit and hold it accountable for its predations, reducing or removing Trump’s tariff disasters, restoring defense readiness and making sure we are ready for twenty-first-century warfare, rebuilding our food and drug safety capacity to account for the serial lapses, among other things.
And to accomplish these goals without being stymied by GOP filibusters, consider reforming the Senate’s Rule XXII, not by eliminating the filibuster but by putting the onus on the minority by flipping the numbers—41 required to continue debate, not 60 required to end it.
Second, and related, is the power of the purse: the ability to tax and spend, to replenish programs that have been slashed or eliminated, to cut funds from programs bloated and misused by a president, and to put restrictions on how dollars are redirected from the purpose specified by Congress (see Park Service maintenance used instead for Trump vanity projects, and money earmarked for minority health protections used for RFK Jr.’s security). The power is also there to increase or cut taxes on different categories and groups.
Using reconciliation, which requires only a majority in the Senate, Democrats can pass and send to Trump tough spending measures to right the balance toward decency and the rule of law—but vetoes and confrontation over appropriations bills and continuing resolutions to keep the government funded will likely lead to possible government shutdowns. Democrats cannot afford to blink and concede to Trump on these.
Third is investigations and oversight: to dig into wrongdoing, corruption, lawbreaking, and malfeasance inside and out of government, along with the failure to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Fourth, and related, is the bully pulpit: the ability to use debate on the floor and in committees, and the megaphone provided by the legitimacy of Congress, to report to the public what you are doing and to shed light on failures or gaps in norms, laws, and policy. Fifth is advice and consent in the Senate: the power to examine the qualifications and character of presidential nominees for federal courts and executive positions, and to reject those unworthy of confirmation. Sixth is impeachment: the power in the House to hold miscreants to account and recommend their removal to the Senate.
So what do they do if and when “now” occurs? It can start with accountability. That means hearings that bring in—via subpoena, if necessary—every miscreant who violated the law, implemented disastrous policy, grifted, or lied to Congress. It also requires changing the rules to change the nature of the hearings—no more of the tired, disjointed, and ineffectual five minutes of questions for the majority, five for the minority, with each majority member freelancing without coherence and witnesses able to bob and weave and filibuster for five minutes, followed by a five-minute breather from a friendly questioner. Do 30 minutes at a time, with the initial questions done by expert staff to establish the predicates for the hearing and frame the inquiry, and disciplined and coordinated questions by majority members in each 30-minute interval to follow.
One important reason for the hearings is to use Congress’s power to document the violations of law and norms by virtually every Cabinet member, key White House staffers, and nongovernment employees sent to negotiate with foreign governments. If witnesses refuse repeatedly to appear under subpoena, and they are held in contempt of Congress, no reliance on referring them to Todd Blanche’s Justice Department. In extreme cases, order the Capitol Police to arrest them and create holding cells in the Capitol. That is clearly within the power of Congress.
It also has to include making sure that the statute of limitations does not run out on illegal acts perpetrated by anyone in the federal government or among private contractors or private citizens carrying out illegal acts on behalf of the administration or with cover from it, from perjury to assault to murder to bribery to grift and insider trading. And it means passing reforms to block further misuse of office and to punish corrupt actors. If Republicans filibuster those reforms, or Trump vetoes them, hold them accountable in every venue for the cover-ups. And see above for the best way to restore the original meaning of the filibuster.
It should also include selective impeachment—not of the president, which would be a fool’s errand, but of Cabinet and other officials who have sullied their offices and endangered the security and health of Americans and of our national security. Among those who should be first in line: Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, RFK Jr., Russell Vought, Brooke Rollins, Kash Patel, Brendan Carr, Doug Burgum, Howard Lutnick, and Bill Pulte. Even if none would be convicted by the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required, the process of bringing forward articles of impeachment detailing their corruption, malfeasance, illegalities, and failures, much of it to be documented in the hearings above, with debate on the floor of the House, would serve to underscore the devastation wrought by this horrific administration—and force House Republicans either to endorse the monstrous behavior or reject it. Of course, to make impeachment effective, these need to be staggered so that the enormity of their individual perfidy can sink in before moving on to the next.
Next comes a positive agenda. The policy part can include golden oldies like free community college and subsidized childcare, but it requires a fresh approach to the substantive challenges the country faces. That has to include reducing barriers to implementing policies like infrastructure, and addressing festering problems like housing shortages, childcare, the health crises amplified by radical cuts in Medicaid and the removal of tens of millions from health insurance, the climate crisis, the threats from AI, and ways to reduce the burgeoning inequality. Relying less on bureaucracy and regulations and more on creative ways of empowering individuals and implementing public-private partnerships and relationships is necessary. So is finding ways to protect women and reproductive health, and righting the wrongs against all minorities. Lots of groups are working on fresh approaches to our biggest problems. Whether laws get passed and enacted or not, the agenda has to be available for presidential candidates to embrace in 2028.
The second part of that agenda is reforms both to curb abuses and to reboot a broken political system. In the former category, we need to repeal or curb the Insurrection Act, repeal or restrict the myriad emergency powers granted the president, always under the assumption that the president would act in the national interest, an assumption that no longer holds. We need to reform the Inspectors General Act to make it far harder for the president to negate any independent oversight of wrongdoing in agencies; the Vacancies Act, which lets a president bypass the Senate’s advice and consent power, which Trump has repeatedly abused; and there is an urgent need to restore the agencies and powers that regulate ethical standards throughout the government. That includes strengthening the Hatch Act to keep political figures from using their positions for partisan political purposes.
It also includes hearings, and possibly an attempt at a constitutional amendment, to restrain the presidential pardon power, which Trump has despoiled into a pay-to-play scheme. An amendment that makes clear a president cannot pardon himself and that pardons in return for favors can be rejected by the courts should be a slam dunk.
Congress should also revisit the Budget and Impoundment Control Act to make it even more clear that the illegal use of “pocket rescissions” by Russell Vought and Trump to negate the congressional power of the purse is out of bounds; to require presidents to distribute to all states, not just the ones he likes, federal aid that uses allocation formulas; and to institute criminal penalties, with extended statutes of limitations, for officers of the Postal Service and the IRS if they use their positions for partisan purposes. It should alter the law to make clear that presidents cannot change the White House, other federal buildings, or federal property without approval from an independent body that is not under presidential control.
Congress should also work on reforming itself and fixing the parts of the election and voting system broken by Trump and John Roberts. These measures would include: enlarging the House by 150 from its current 435 members; repealing the 1967 law requiring single-member districts and creating opportunities for multimember districts with ranked-choice voting; reforming the redistricting process to require independent commissions in every state; adding not just Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states but also considering the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa; re-passing a tough and meaningful Voting Rights Act and campaign finance reform to overcome the outrageous Shelby County and Citizens United decisions; and taking away the power of antidemocratic billionaires to swamp the system with money and buy policies that enrich them more. Laying out markers, at least, for adjusting the imbalances in a Constitution built for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not one where soon 70 percent of Americans will live in just 15 states, should be on the to-do list.
Supreme Court reform should be high on the agenda, starting with something that might actually get enacted—a tough and enforceable code of ethics for rogue justices who have repeatedly shown disdain for ethical standards. The code that Chief Justice John Roberts put in effect after sustained criticism is hollow and unenforceable. A code that uses an independent office of judicial ethics, akin to the Office of Congressional Ethics, consisting of former judges and judicial ethics experts, to examine allegations of unethical behavior and recommend appropriate remedies to the Judicial Conference that now oversees lower level federal judges, with the requirement that the Judicial Conference explain in writing if it refuses to adopt those recommendations, should be a part of it.
But there is more. There is overwhelming public support for term limits for justices; Congress should pass a bill calling for 18-year terms, effective upon enactment, with justices then given options of senior status or continued service on a special court of appeals, to fit the constitutional provision of service during good behavior. If it is enacted, for the Roberts court to try to negate it would be a blatant conflict of interest, worth challenging. Consideration of enlarging the Supreme Court to 13, to fit the 13 circuits, with the term limits then extended to 26 years, should be on the agenda. And if the Roberts court continues to bypass the Constitution to promote its radical unitary executive theory, protect Donald Trump, and negate congressional authority, it should at least hold hearings on returning the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to the original specified in the Constitution: to wit, as Section 2, Article 2 states, “In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make. Congress has the power to create a new court of appeals to hold overall appellate authority.
One other idea, admittedly a stretch but not without grounding in history, is moving the Justice Department and attorney general out of the executive branch. The initial consideration of the Judiciary Act of 1793 had the attorney general chosen by the Supreme Court. If combined with court reform, it may be worth considering.
To make some or all of this happen, Democrats in the House and Senate need to do what they have failed to do up to now: create a unified and disciplined message to let Americans know what the problems are and what they are doing about them. Trump has learned from his friend Steve Bannon that if you flood the zone with outrages, they will wash over each other and few if any will stick. The media are ill equipped to handle it, and most voters, occupied with their own lives and challenges, are not paying close attention to every corrupt act or policy outrage. If Democrats, given the timidity of the press corps and its predilection to both-sides issues and let Trump define the narrative, do not develop a discipline that includes changing the old ways of doing business and communicating, their tenure in power will be short and brutal. The way to counter the zone is to have one message pursued relentlessly for at least a week at a time.
That starts with creating a message group; a collection of lawmakers from both houses to meet at least every week to craft a message for the week, from Trump selling national security for money or favors to Republicans blowing up health insurance and access for millions of Americans; to RFK Jr. and his allies undermining responses to epidemics and pandemics and causing deaths from measles and other ailments; to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins shredding food safety; to the American gestapo tactics of Steven Miller, Tom Homan, and ICE; to the deterioration of national parks as Trump drains their money to pay for his perks. The message is not just the outrage but what Democrats say they will do about it, from holding miscreants accountable to proposing solutions to policy failures.
Each week should start with a press conference, followed by coordinated speeches in morning hours, on each floor during regular business, in special orders in the evening, in as many committees with hearings and markups that are relevant to the issue of the week, and with TV, radio, and social media appearances and podcasts, including by their allies outside Congress. If the solution is legislation that passes the House but is stymied by a filibuster in the Senate, there has to be a strong and sustained element to the message that remedies are being blocked by the same Republicans who caused the problem in the first place.
Another innovation should be regular weekly prime-time debates on key issues, primed to the message of the week, on the House and Senate floors, with perhaps two members on each side, to show that Congress is serious about the importance of debate and dialogue, and to highlight in some cases the complexities of resolving complex problems at home and abroad. If Republican lawmakers boycott, replace them with outside experts—say, former member Bob Inglis of South Carolina, a conservative who believes in market solutions for the problem of climate change. And the debates do not always have to pit Democrats against Republicans. The debates can go on YouTube and be used as springboards for media coverage and even use in classrooms and elsewhere.
Of course, a lot of this is easier said than done. If Democrats win majorities in both houses, but they are razor-thin, it may be difficult to do much other than holding hearings, and discipline might be a bridge too far. In any case, it will require a different mindset than we have seen from the leaders in both House and Senate. But the road map to relevance and an ability to turn the ship of state away from its current disastrous course is pretty clear. We know what they should do when the time comes. Let’s hope for the sake of decency and democracy that they have both the opportunity—and the will—to seize the moment.
Why the right is gunning for Ms. Rachel
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. Fox News is at war with wildly popular children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel. Over the past week, the network took aim at the YouTuber with 21.5 million subscribers, warning viewers that her programming, which is geared toward toddlers…
Trumptanic
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Trump thwarted in hunt for rare noncitizen voters as midterms near
By Jonathan Shorman for Stateline Five weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s sprawling effort to identify and remove noncitizen voters hasn’t produced the kind of large purges that could meaningfully affect the midterm elections. Even a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving states access to a supercharged Department of Homeland Security computer program to verify voters’…
Does Jared Kushner Know What a Conflict of Interest Is?
CNN published an investigation earlier this week detailing how an investment fund operated by Jared Kushner, who has acted as a key Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiator and leader on Trump’s Gaza “Board of Peace,” also holds the largest stake in an Israeli financial institution that backs arms manufacturers involved in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza—one of many financial entanglements author Casey Michel highlighted in a Mother Jones cover story in July.
In a rare move, Kushner took to social media Friday to characterize CNN’s reporting as “deeply misleading.”
CNN published a deeply misleading story and headline suggesting that my diplomatic work in the Middle East somehow benefited investments in Israeli defense companies.
But CNN’s own reporting says otherwise. Buried behind a paywall, it acknowledges: “CNN found no indication that… pic.twitter.com/iCowrE9N84
The CNN reporters did acknowledge that they “found no indication that Kushner’s actions as a diplomat” directly affected his investment portfolio. But they laid out how Kushner’s private equity company ended up with a 7.4 percent stake in an Israeli firm linked to nine different weapons contractors.
Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, doubled its stake in the firm, Phoenix Financial, last year—just before Donald Trump returned to office. As Michel wrote for Mother Jones, “Phoenix is a bulwark for Israeli expansion in the Palestinian territories and Syria, enabling more building, construction, and imperialism.”
CNN’s report digs into the details of Phoenix’s investments in Israeli weapons-makers. Most notably, Phoenix has hundreds of millions of dollars in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military equipment provider, known for unmanned aerial vehicles that are deployed extensively for surveillance and bombardment in Gaza. Phoenix also, according to CNN, has holdings in Israeli jet-engine maker Bet Shemesh, drone-camera maker Next Vision, munitions company Reshef Technologies, and Boeing, which supplies Israel’s military with F-15s and bunker-buster bombs.
In his post, Kushner protested, “Phoenix is not a defense company. It is one of Israel’s largest publicly traded financial institutions, highly regulated and managing approximately $220 billion across thousands of investments.”
Nonetheless, Phoenix manages large investments in weapons companies close to the conflict, even as Kushner touts a $2.4 billion dollar “recovery plan” for Gaza geared toward turning the area into a tourist hub. Israel continues to bomb Gaza—despite having agreed to a ceasefire 11 months ago—killing more than 1,300 people since that agreement was signed.
Kushner has responded to past reporting on his conflicts of interest by saying, essentially, that putting himself in a position to make money off his diplomatic work doesn’t count as a conflict of interest unless he actually makes money. But while serving as a diplomat, he has indeed been making money; in September 2025, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire, noting that his fortune had grown by about $100 million from a year earlier.
Israel represents just one of Kushner’s numerous global conflicts of interest. While engaged in attempts to negotiate peace with Iran, he was also soliciting investments from officials of Persian Gulf states with a stake in the outcome. Kushner was also tapped to negotiate an end to Russia’s war with Ukraine, despite his ties to prominent Russian officials. And as the lead story in today’s New York Times revealed, the Trump administration’s talks with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine now involve “a multibillion-dollar oil deal that would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.”
In 2025, CBS’ “60 Minutes” asked Kushner and Witkoff, his fellow “special envoy,” whether their “billions and billions of dollars worth of business” deals with the Gulf States, some of which they’d negotiated while brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Qatar, might constitute conflicts of interest. Kushner seemed to think he was in the clear.
“We’re here to do good,” Kushner responded. “These are impossible tasks.” He stated that he would not be personally involved in deciding who does business in Gaza after the ceasefire deal is signed. “What people call conflicts of interest,” Kushner said, “Steve and I call experience.”
More DOJ rats jump ship, and Trump finally pays what he owes—sort of
Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back. This week, Trump is out $5 million, his personal lawyers are still in trouble, and even his most dedicated believers are bailing out. It’s about time. President Donald Trump finally—FINALLY—formally gave up the fight in the E.
We can police ourselves!
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Welcome to the Flock Elections
Over the past six months, Americans have become increasingly aware of automated license plate readers, used by almost 80 percent of American police departments to trace vehicles and their drivers without the hassle of a warrant. ALPRs perch on power poles and stoplights, quietly encroaching on the most sacred silo of American life—the car. People are pissed.
Like the slew of data centers cropping up across the country, the cameras have inspired fierce bipartisan backlash. As ALPRs proliferate, communities have pressured local lawmakers to rein them in, leading municipalities and counties nationwide to cancel contracts, remove the cameras, or ban them altogether.
Now, a surprising cross-section of candidates—local, national, liberal, conservative—are putting Flock at the heart of their campaigns. With 2026’s midterm elections fast approaching, both Republicans and Democrats in battleground states like Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are wooing voters by promising to place guardrails on unregulated surveillance technologies. Politicians of all stripes suddenly seem to think that they need to get Flock out of here.
“Flock has become a four-letter word.”
ALPR systems like Flock use algorithmically powered cameras to compile searchable databases of the license plate numbers, time, location, make, model, and color of passing cars. Flock CEO Garret Langley claimed in March that his company’s cameras, which make up about 80 percent of the total mapped ALPR cameras in the US, “solved” one million crimes in 2025. (The available evidence doesn’t back up Langley’s numbers.)
Although police can, for example, use Flock cameras to try to track down a missing person or stolen car, reports also abound of cops using ALPRs to stalk their exes, track an abortion-seeker across state lines, and provide information to ICE. The lack of strict standards around their use—and concerns over the erosion of privacy and civil liberties—have become a major concern across party lines as communities debate if, and how, the tech should be used.
A September survey of more than 1,400 adults by the nonprofit National Policing Institute found that public approval of ALPRs depended on the justification: 80 percent approved of their use to find missing children or investigate violent crimes, but about three-fourths disagreed with using the cameras for immigration enforcement or “routine traffic or parking enforcement.” More than half said their support for the systems would increase if their department “adopted safeguards” against abuse.
A Flock Safety license plate reader camera along a roadway in Washington, D.C., September 12, 2026.Matt Kaminsky/ZUMA
With a month to go until a slew of intensely contested elections and public concern over Flock and its competitors only growing, congressional candidates and sitting legislators across the political spectrum are calling to rework the patchwork regulatory system that governs the cameras’ use. And while Flock’s public relations efforts seem to be ramping up, they have brought few politicians to their side on either the right or the left. (A notable exception: Donald Trump, who has said “I like them” with regard to the cameras.)
While ALPRs have been around since the 1990s, 90 percent of people didn’t know whether their local police department used the technology in 2018, according to one poll; the new wave of public awareness and controversy around Flock and similar cameras has left politicians scrambling to catch up.
“Most jurisdictions don’t have clear regulation around the use of ALPRs,” said Clare Garvie, deputy director of technology law and policy at New York University’s Policing Project. That provides an opening to politicians willing to promise regulation, outright bans, or just constraints on who gets to use them.
Today, there are more than 120,000 ALPR cameras across the country. 100 percent of police departments serving more than one million residents use them, according to Bureau of Justice statistics, as do 90 percent of sheriffs’ offices with 500 or more sworn deputies. But that tide could be shifting: in the past year alone, more than 50 municipalities have cut ties with Flock and other ALPR vendors, according to the advocacy group DeFlock.
“There’s been a widespread lack of transparency around where these tools are implemented, how widespread they are, how many actual cameras there are, [and] how long the data is kept,” Garvie added.
“We see widespread opposition to this and frustration on the part of communities that they were never informed; they were never involved in this decision to use the technology in the first place.”
On September 23, a Senate committee led by Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois—both of whom have staked out positions as anti-surveillance crusaders—held a hearing on ALPR reform. They invited representatives from Flock, Axon, Motorola, and Verkada—but none of them showed.
“We’ve got to find a way to protect and enforce the Bill of Rights and the basic personal liberties of every law-abiding citizen in this country, no matter what the technology is,” Hawley said at the time. A week later, the Missouri Republican announced plans to introduce the Stop Flock Act, which would prevent local governments from selling or sharing vehicle data with non-governmental third parties, limit data retention to ten days in most cases, and impose other restrictions on the cameras’ use.
In fact, at least four different bills were introduced in Congress in September alone that would limit ALPR use. By October 2, the text of yet another bill—this time from Democrats Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jeff Merkley—was announced.
And after November’s elections, a new bipartisan batch of legislators could help push federal regulations on ALPRs forward.
Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic Senate nominee, has made “protect[ing] privacy and end[ing] mass surveillance” a core component of her campaign for a hotly contested election. Nixon proposes “federal standards,” requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before accessing ALPR data, imposing a mandatory data deletion period, and mandating community consent at the local level before ALPR contracts are signed or renewed, among other things.
“I know folks are saying, ‘We’ve got to keep crime from happening,’” Nixon said in an interview with Mother Jones. “The way you keep crime from happening is by addressing the root cause of crime, which is oftentimes people not having access to quality, good-paying jobs or access to healthcare, just the most basic needs.”
There’s little research on the effectiveness of ALPR systems at deterring or investigating crimes. For one thing, they often misidentify vehicles—which can lead to devastating consequences, as in the case of Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman wrongfully jailed for 13 days on triple homicide charges after a Flock camera incorrectly flagged her Dodge Durango as the vehicle involved in a fatal hit-and-run.
Even Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose policy positions couldn’t be further from Nixon’s, wants to tamp down on ALPRs: In early September, he banned the cameras on state highways.
Nixon isn’t the only candidate campaigning on Flock. Another progressive Senate candidate fighting for a battleground seat, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, has also raised alarms about ALPRs. In late August, El-Sayed released a video about Flock and his Republican opponent Mike Rogers’ alleged links to the booming surveillance state.
Does it ever feel like you're in a cage being watched?
Well, you are. By Flock cameras, thanks to Mike Rogers. pic.twitter.com/6H2DfN1l5j
While Rogers and El-Sayed have little in common on most issues, they’re now trying to outflank each other on Flock as communities across Michigan voice ire towards the cameras.
“Abdul has heard concerns about Flock cameras from voters in every corner of the state,” campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak said in an email. “In the United States Senate, he will fight to both keep communities safe while protecting our fundamental rights to privacy.”
A spokesperson for Rogers’ campaign, asked about the candidate’s views on Flock by Fox News Digital, said he “vehemently opposes unchecked use of Flock cameras to track law-abiding citizens,” adding that “Security and liberty aren’t enemies. Good government protects both.”
Independent congressional candidates in both Montana and Tennessee even shot Flock cameras (or dummy Flock cameras) with guns to make their case against the technology. Gubernatorial candidates of both major parties in Iowa, Texas, Florida, and Arizona have all made abolishing or limiting ALPR use part of their platforms in recent weeks.
Both candidates for the governor’s office in Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand and Republican Zach Lahn, for example, have said they would sign state-level ALPR regulations. Lahn is more absolutist: the cameras constitute “an unbelievable Fourth Amendment violation,” he said in August. Sand, a former prosecutor, has centered his platform more on local control of ALPRs, without condemning the technology or any specific company.
Even leaders not currently on the campaign trail, like moderate Republican Sen. Dan Laughlin in Pennsylvania, have proposed banning Flock and similar ALPR cameras, signaling that the technology could remain a bipartisan issue in years to come—or that they fear it’s already a wedge issue for their colleagues.
“Public safety is a responsibility we all take seriously,” Laughlin said in a public statement. “But it should not require building a surveillance network capable of tracking the daily movements of millions of innocent individuals.”
“I think Flock is standing in for [ALPR] technology more broadly,” said NYU’s Garvie. “We see widespread opposition to this and frustration on the part of communities that they were never informed, they were never involved in this decision to use the technology in the first place.”
As one Arizona sheriff said at Hawley’s Senate hearing, “Flock has become a four-letter word.”