Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Wednesday night, President Donald Trump inserted himself into a Utah GOP primary by endorsing incumbent Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) for Congress. “Celeste has a strong Record of Success, and resounding support from her Community,” he wrote on Truth Social. “SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”

Maloy’s opponent, however, former state legislator Phil Lyman, has his own MAGA cred. In 2020, Trump pardoned him for an old conviction for illegally riding an ATV on public lands. And in this mostly rural district full of Sagebrush Rebellion supporters, the pardon might be more of a selling point.

“He absolutely could win,” says Bryan Schott, founder of the online news site Utah Political Watch who has been closely tracking the under-the-radar race. “He is a true iconoclast. His supporters are very passionate.”

Back in May 2014, Lyman, then a San Juan County commissioner, organized a protest against the Bureau of Land Management for banning motorized vehicles in Utah’s Recapture Canyon. The canyon had been closed since 2007 to protect prehistoric archeological sites, but just weeks before the protest, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy had led an armed standoff with the BLM after it attempted to impound his cows that were illegally grazing on federal land. The standoff set off a wave of anti-government activism across the West, including in Utah.

During their protest, Lyman and others, including Bundy’s son Ryan, illegally rode ATVs through the fragile canyon, a brazen move that got Lyman prosecuted for riding off-road vehicles on closed roads. A federal jury convicted him of two misdemeanors. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years of probation, and ordered to pay nearly $96,000 in restitution.

The prosecution turned an unrepentant Lyman into something of a local folk hero for facing off with the federal government, which owns 64 percent of the land in Utah. Utah Republicans of all stripes, including then-Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, tripped over each other to show their support for him. Gov. Gary Herbert even tried to use $100,000 in state tax money to pay for Lyman’s appeal.

When that failed, Republican politicians pledged thousands of dollars of their own money to pay Lyman’s legal fees. “We are proud to support one of our own,” Cox said, after adding $1,000 to a pile of cash collected by lawmakers at a meeting in the state capitol. “Commissioner Lyman is one of the finest individuals I know.”

“We are proud to support one of our own.”

Lyman lost his appeal, but in 2020, after urging from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Trump pardoned him, suggesting he’d been a victim of selective prosecution. “Mr. Lyman is known to be a man of integrity and character,” White House officials wrote.

In 2018, his notoriety propelled him into the state legislature, where he was a member of the Yellowcake Caucus, a group of conservative legislators from rural counties known for uranium mining. During the extreme drought in 2022, when many state Republicans were taking steps to keep Great Salt Lake from drying up, Lyman organized a meeting at the state Capitol to expose what the caucus considered the real culprit behind the lake’s plight. “Trees are the enemy,” said one of the witnesses, suggesting that trees sucked up too much water. Lyman had been lobbying legislators to devote money to tree-thinning projects rather than forcing alfalfa farmers to conserve.

Then, in 2024, Lyman launched an upstart campaign to run against incumbent Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who only a few years earlier had been chipping in for Lyman’s legal defense. During the campaign, he took aim at Cox’s signature initiatives: Disagree Better, a program he’d created as head of the National Governors Association to urge people to dial back exactly the sort of polarizing rhetoric Lyman specializes in. It won Cox plaudits nationally, but in Utah, Lyman found “Disagree Better” a rich source of campaign punchlines. At an event I attended in 2024:

Lyman told the crowd that basically, Cox’s initiative is predicated on a lie. The notion that “you either agree with me, or you disagree with me on my terms. And that’s what’s happening right now in this in this state and this election with Governor Cox.” In fact, the whole effort was “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions. It’s manipulation to silence them.” He insisted that the whole enterprise might work if people on the other side would tell the truth, “Then maybe,” he said, “we could disagree better.”

Lyman ultimately lost the GOP primary but ran as a write-in candidate in the November general election, which he also lost. Undeterred, he filed challenges and lawsuits against various state officials, trying to prove that Cox had stolen the election. He had some familiarity with this strategy, having been active in the “election integrity” movement kicked off by Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Lyman even appeared at events with My Pillow guy Mike Lindell that promoted fraudulent election conspiracy theories.

Politically, there’s not a whole lot of distance between Lyman’s views and those of his much better-funded opponent, Celeste Maloy, particularly when it comes to federal control of public lands—a hot-button issue in the district. In fact, while Lyman protested in Recapture Canyon with the Bundys in 2014, Maloy is actually related to them. She’s Cliven Bundy’s niece by marriage and cousin of the far-right militant Ammon Bundy, Cliven’s son who staged an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.

Maloy’s ties to Utah don’t run particularly deep. She grew up in a small town in Nevada but did attend college and law school in Utah. She was first elected in a special election in 2023 to fill the remaining term of retiring Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), for whom she’d worked as an attorney. Stewart backed her campaign, but even then, Maloy barely made it through the three-way primary.

A challenger unsuccessfully sued to get her off the primary ballot, arguing that she was ineligible to run because her voter registration in Utah was inactive before she filed as a candidate, and she hadn’t voted in the state in 2020 or 2022. As a Hill staffer, she’d been living in Virginia, but Maloy had claimed her sister’s address in Cedar City as her permanent residence. She ultimately prevailed and remained on the ballot. But even cousin Ammon endorsed someone else in the race.

When Maloy ran for her first full term in 2024, Trump backed her, as did most of the Utah congressional delegation—except Sen. Mike Lee, who supported one of her opponents. Even with the support of the state’s Republican establishment, she won the GOP primary by just 176 votes—less than one percent and hardly a sign of a deep well of support. This year, she’s had an 8-1 fundraising advantage over Lyman. Yet Maloy barely bested him at the GOP nominating convention in April.

Utah candidates have two paths for getting on a primary ballot. They can collect petition signatures or win enough delegate votes at a state nominating convention. Lyman has been wildly popular with convention delegates, who tend to be more MAGA than other Republicans. When he ran for governor in 2024, convention delegates overwhelmingly voted for him over Cox, whom they booed.

Lyman ultimately lost that primary—but by less than 9 points, which was far closer than anyone expected him to get. (Democrats are such a nonfactor in Utah that the winner of the GOP primary generally wins in November, a problem that prompts many Democrats to register as Republicans so they can influence the process—even a little.) This year, Maloy beat Lyman at the convention, but by a razor-thin margin: 50.9 to 49.09 percent. Both of them advanced to the June 23rd primary.

The 3rd district congressional race may be surprisingly close because the district is new, redrawn this year in response to a court order ending partisan gerrymandering. Maloy had previously represented the 2nd district but switched to run in the new 3rd after redistricting. The 3rd district includes a lot more counties that Lyman won handily in his statewide race against Cox. According to Schott’s math, 60 percent of registered Republicans in the district have never seen Maloy on a ballot, even though this will be her fifth election in three years. If Lyman wins the congressional primary, says Schott, “it’s because people know him.”

There’s little polling in the race. Prediction markets suggest Maloy will crush Lyman. Yet the ultimate results will rest on turnout, and Lyman is “a partisan warrior. She’s a technocrat,” Schott says. “Partisan warriors inspire people to vote.”

Maloy hasn’t made much effort to counter Lyman’s base by reaching out to more moderate voters—and there are some. In this rural, red Utah district, tourism has become a growth industry since President Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument 30 years ago over objections from many local officials, who to this day would prefer to see it turned into a coal mine.

Blake Spalding is one of the two founding executive chefs of the award-winning Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Boulder, Utah, and co-owner of Boulder Mountain Lodge next door. Located inside the monument, the operation is one of the largest private employers in Garfield County, which is in Maloy’s district. Spalding says Maloy has never been there. She’s voting for Lyman.

“It’s not like I love Phil Lyman,” she explained. “And he has definitely never eaten in my restaurant.” As a longtime public lands advocate, Spalding is well aware that both Lyman and Maloy are hostile to federal protections for Grand Staircase. But she believes “it’s better not to vote for Trump- endorsed candidates, and Trump endorsed Celeste.”

That said, she’ll be voting for a Democrat in November. “I’m gonna vote for whoever is going to do the best job for the hummingbirds.”

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

Peak Energy announced last week that it has entered a new partnership with General Motors to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for energy storage systems.

The deal marks a pivotal moment for Peak, a startup founded three years ago, and an opportunity for GM to branch out into a battery technology that is largely limited to China.

I spoke last week with Cameron Dales, Peak’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, and I started by asking him how he would explain a sodium-ion battery to a 10-year-old.

“It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt. It’s an abundant element.”

A good place to start, he said, is to understand that the market-leading technology—lithium-ion batteries—gained a foothold in the 1990s because of high energy density. So it has a long track record of success.

“They pack a lot of power into a small package, which is why they’re so great for mobile applications, because you’re carrying this battery around with you in your phone, you’re carrying it around with you in your car, which is a large mobile device,” he said.

But there are downsides. Lithium-ion batteries use rare and expensive materials such as lithium and cobalt, and they are highly flammable.

Sodium-ion is a sister technology, he said. The main difference is that it uses sodium to carry the charge inside the battery, rather than lithium. “It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt,” Dales said. “It’s an abundant element.”

Also, fire risk is much lower.

The main downside is that a sodium-ion battery has lower energy density than a lithium-ion one, so an energy storage project requires a larger battery or batteries to achieve the same capacity.

But what about the cost?

Right now, sodium-ion batteries cost more than lithium-ion because the latter has economies of scale from being the dominant technology and companies have spent decades honing the manufacturing process. But companies such as Peak are confident that sodium-ion batteries will be less expensive, and eventually much less expensive, as the product moves from the fringes of the market to the mainstream.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment.”

The world’s leading battery-maker, CATL of China, has invested in developing sodium-ion batteries for cars and energy storage, citing cost and safety advantages.

In the United States, Peak is one of about a dozen companies working on the technology. One of its peers, Natron Energy, abruptly closed last year when its funding dried up. It had about 100 employees and operations in California and Michigan.

Peak, which is based in Burlingame, California, in the Bay Area, has about 125 employees. It also has a cell engineering center in Broomfield, Colorado, near Denver. The company demonstrated its technology by completing a 3.1-megawatt-hour sodium-ion battery in the Denver area last year.

Peak was founded in 2023 by Landon Mossberg, the CEO, who came from the battery maker Northvolt and had prior experience at Tesla, and Dales, who previously was at the battery maker Enovix. 

Under the partnership with GM, the automaker will develop sodium-ion batteries in its Michigan battery lab, and Peak will be able to use them in its energy storage systems.

The agreement helps GM build an energy business that includes electric vehicles, charging and stationary energy storage. Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president for battery and sustainability, said in a news release that his company believes “sodium-ion will be a defining chemistry for grid-scale energy storage systems.”

GM is one of several automakers branching out into energy storage systems. One reason for this is that the companies built battery manufacturing capacity that exceeds current EV demand, so they are looking to new markets.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world.”

Based on manufacturing capacity, sodium-ion battery market share is essentially zero in North America, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It will still be less than 1 percent in 2030, according to the research firm’s forecast.

In China, sodium-ion’s market share is 1 percent and on track to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment,” said Anya Sidhu, a battery analyst for Benchmark, in an email.

Sidhu said sodium-ion batteries are emerging as a complementary technology to lithium-ion rather than a replacement.

“The partnership between GM and Peak Energy signals growing commercial confidence, particularly for stationary energy storage, where cost and supply chain resilience matter more than energy density,” she said.

Dales said the market is large and diverse enough that several, if not many, battery technologies will be major contributors. For example, analysts and battery scientists have long made the case that solid-state batteries—with a solid instead of a liquid or gel as a key component—are the future because of high energy densities.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world,” he said. “There’s no reason why a single solution should be the thing that works best for every single application.”

This morning, Vice President JD Vance touched down in Switzerland for the first round of talks with Iran. The stated goal: extending last week’s interim mediated ceasefire and the Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Donald Trump into a more permanent peace in the 110-day US-Israeli war on Iran. But as those talks continued, Trump lost no time in taking to social media and Fox News to threaten Iran.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social Sunday morning. “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP

( TS: Jun 21 2026, 9:30 AM ET )​​​‍​​‌‍​​‌‍​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​​‌‍… pic.twitter.com/4FYtEyoF8s

— Commentary Donald J. Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) June 21, 2026

Lebanon’s civil defense reported that Israeli strikes had killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. In response, Iran once again closed the Strait of Hormuz shipping pathway, which before the war carried a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon.

Meanwhile, in the Bürgenstock resort near Lake Lucerne where the talks are being held, Vance said that “great progress” was being made, without being explicit about the steps that had been taken. He noted that the gathering would “allow us to sit together as teams for the first time in history,” with the goal of turning “over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand.” 

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a lead negotiator, said Iran’s military is prepared to react to Trump’s verbal aggression. “They better be careful with their statements; our armed forces are ready to respond in a different way,” he wrote on X. Iranian officials reportedly walked out of Sunday’s talks, protesting Trump’s threats.

A Washington Post report today reveals the devastating human toll of the war. “Months after the war began with a wave of US and Israeli airstrikes on February 28, the scale of civilian casualties and destruction in Iran remains difficult to measure,” Post reporters Dylan Moriarty and N. Kirkpatrick wrote. 

In a single airstrike, 100 buildings were damaged in one civilian neighborhood in Tehran. Almost a third of the city has been hit by US and Israeli missiles. One report on civilian harm puts the death toll from late February to mid-April at 1,701 civilians, including 307 children. Across both Iran and Lebanon, over 7,000 people have been killed since mid-February, according to official casualty figures. 

In a Sunday morning phone interview with Fox News, Trump expressed some willingness to continue the carnage. “You close it, and you won’t have a country,” he warned. Fox News reporter Trey Yingst said the president told him that he told Iranian officials. “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country,” if they did not open the essential transportation lanes for oil in the Strait of Hormuz.

"You close it and you won't have a country." President Trump said he told Iranian officials about the Strait of Hormuz. "You won't even make it back to your fu*king country."

"We may take over the Strait, if we have to," Trump said. "If they don't make a deal, we'll collect… pic.twitter.com/cErvdjCJmK

— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) June 21, 2026

Trump has repeatedly referred to himself as the “Guardian Angel” of this particular body of water. “We may take over the Strait, if we have to,” Trump told Yingst.

Hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are pushing in that same direction. Graham reportedly spent over four hours with the President on Friday, outlining a plan to “take the Strait of Hormuz over by force” even as the clock starts on a 60-day negotiating period. On Face the Nation Sunday, Graham told host Margaret Brennan, “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.” He added, “Let’s try a diplomatic solution. I think it’s going to fail. What happens next?” 

In many countries around the world, it’s Father’s Day, a time to celebrate the contributions of dads. But aside from the inevitable barbeques and dad jokes, what does fatherhood actually look like in June 2026? 

A new report, “State Of The World’s Fathers 2026” from the nonprofit research group Equimundo takes a snapshot of the life of fathers worldwide, and its findings do not suggest that the social role of the father as secondary parent has changed as much as many dads themselves would like. Researchers have found that globally, fathers want to be involved in parenting their children—but economic insecurity and cultural backlash often find them sliding back to the more uninvolved and traditional role of breadwinner.

Its findings paint a picture of parenthood all over the world defined by precarity and sacrifice—regardless of the parent’s gender. But the 5,000 fathers interviewed—in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, and Croatia—seem stuck between a rock and a hard place: retrograde cultural values (and a healthy dose of manosphere YouTube influencers) teach men that their greatest value in society and in a family unit lies in being a provider. But economically supporting a family is now more difficult than ever. 

“We see that more fathers, and even more mothers, are reverting to traditional norms about fathers as providers and mothers as carers. This is driven both by financial pressures and systems that do not support equal parenting, and by the anti-equality backlash that is spreading around the world.” 

“We see that more fathers, and even more mothers, are reverting to traditional norms about fathers as providers and mothers as carers,” the Equimundo researchers wrote. “This is driven both by financial pressures and systems that do not support equal parenting, and by the anti-equality backlash that is spreading around the world.” 

In general, the modern dads surveyed said they are more involved in the care work of raising a child than their own fathers were—but they are still far less involved in parenting than mothers. One reason, researchers found, is a lack of infrastructure to explicitly support fathers. Very few countries mandate paid paternal leave, for instance, while many more legally require paid maternal leave. Thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, employers must provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the parents of newborns—but the average American father only takes 10 days off, since the US is one of the few countries where there is no requirement for employers to pay for parental leave. Mothers working full-time earn approximately 63 to 74 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, which incentivizes fathers to deprioritize spending time on the grueling tasks of raising a family. As Equimundo researchers note, “Because, in general, men still earn more than women, if leave is not adequately paid, families can often not afford for the man to take leave.” 

That’s not to say that there aren’t some solutions: universal pre-K, universal parental leave, and even the greater provision of parenting resources explicitly geared toward fathers, like parenting classes and support groups. Fewer than half of the fathers Equimundo surveyed even knew such resources exist. And this lack of support can lead to hidden consequences beyond the economic realm —as New York Magazine recently reported, up to one in ten new fathers experiences depression after the birth of their child, but such challenges are rarely taken seriously. 

At a January 2026 March for Life speech, Vice President JD Vance told Americans “you will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself to the creation and sustenance of human life.” Elon Musk, the noted father of at least fourteen, has also urged Americans to “have more children.” But this ascendant pronatalist movement often fails to account for the actual economic constraints parents face. The United States, in particular, boasts some of the highest parental distress levels, the priciest childcare, and the weakest paid leave laws of any peer nation.

In that context, all parents are forced to make daily sacrifices: in the Equimundo survey, nearly a quarter of all fathers worldwide reported overall poor well-being. Over a quarter had refinanced their homes to pay for childcare expenses, and three-quarters took on overtime work to do so. Nearly half took on second or third jobs to make ends meet. Nonetheless, the fathers surveyed consistently said they wanted to spend more time with their families. 

In the US, even under a purportedly family-focused administration, raising a child—becoming a parent—is now harder than ever. A Surgeon General’s report in 2024 classed parental stress, in a country with only a bare-bones safety net, as a public health crisis. Other researchers have joined them in that claim—and have gone even farther. 

“We find ourselves running out of adjectives to convey this level of stress,” the Equimundo researchers wrote. “We’ve called it a crisis, which it is. We’ve called out the indifference of policy makers, workplaces and others, which is still the case. Now we’re tempted to call it the willful neglect and destruction of our humanity.” 

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

The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to US weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall, likely leading to major disruptions in agricultural production and food security. 

El Niño is part of a cyclical, naturally occurring weather pattern that redistributes warm air, surface water temperatures, and moisture across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During El Niño, trade winds that typically blow east-to-west from the Americas to southeast Asia slow down or sometimes reverse. Normally, these winds push warm water along the equator—but during El Niño conditions, that warm water shifts back east. Although El Niño does not follow a specific timeline, it typically occurs every two to seven years. 

Certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture.

Beginning in the summer, El Niño typically peaks around December or the following January. (The pattern was named El Niño—Spanish for little boy—by fishermen in South America who noticed warmer waters around Christmas time, and associated it with the birth of Jesus Christ.) That means the most significant impacts of the cyclical weather phenomenon may not be felt until months from now.

NOAA’s most recent calculations show a high likelihood of a “very strong” El Niño, meaning average surface temperatures in the Pacific jump by more than 2 degrees C. (Some experts are calling this year’s a “super” El Niño, although some agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, reject this language.)  

Because it impacts a “diverse set of geographies,” said Weston Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, “there is no one set of impacts.” El Niño can contribute to severe droughts in one part of the world and heavy rainfall in others—both of which can disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world. 

But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact with the effects of global warming—and what that means for food security—is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling. “That question is still really important open science,” said Jennifer Burney, a professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability whose work focuses on climate and food security. 

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies, contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine. 

The fatalities associated with these famines, upward of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

The last El Niño occurred in 2023 and 2024. It was one of the five strongest El Niños ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and is considered to have contributed to the historic temperatures in 2024, making it the hottest year on record. 

The exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown.

That year came with devastating consequences for growers, especially in arid regions where agricultural producers primarily rely on rainfall to irrigate their crops. Droughts driven by El Niño across southern Africa contributed to increased food insecurity and malnutrition in several countries. 

Burney noted that in some vulnerable regions, local governments may have adaptive strategies in place to grow key crops earlier in the growing season or to increase imports during El Niño years, which can help offset food insecurity. But even in those cases, local farmers who depend on growing and selling crops to support themselves and their families may still experience economic setbacks. In other words, certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture, Burney said. 

This year, El Niño conditions are expected to impact a number of growing areas—another setback for agricultural producers who have faced higher input costs stemming from the Iran war. Although the United States and Iran are potentially set to unveil an agreement to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil flows, farmers worldwide have already been impacted by fertilizer shortages and price hikes since the passage closed this spring. 

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes. India, where the majority of the world’s rice comes from, is projected to have a weaker monsoon season, which could reduce yields. Drier, hotter conditions could lead to diminished maize production in southern Africa. The southern US states, from California all the way to the eastern seaboard, will experience a wetter year than normal, which could lead to flooding and upend crop production. 

But the exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown. As El Niño interacts with the additional warming and moisture currently in our atmosphere caused by climate change, “there is likely to be a change in which regions are likely to be affected” by extreme weather, said Singh. Still, she added, we can expect “the severity, extent, and likelihood” of extreme weather events like droughts “to be higher” in today’s warmer climate.

President Donald Trump is blaming “Vandalism” by “Radical Left Lunatics” for some of the struggles of his beloved Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remodeling project.

“Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday night. “Law Enforcement is actively investigating this situation.”

Just six minutes later, he posted an image of what appears to be a green-haired protester wearing a shirt with the words “TEAM ALGAE,” presumably as evidence of said vandalism.

This appears to be the president’s "proof" that vandals are sabotaging the Refelecting Pool.

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2026-06-20T03:00:18.373Z

Although Trump announced the renovation in April—which he initially said would take one week and cost just $2 million—the Reflecting Pool is still not “American flag blue,” as fighting the algae has proved to be a larger task than the administration can handle.

As the Washington Post noted that month, major projects on the National Mall not only typically require congressional authorization, but are subjected to federal reviews. That doesn’t appear to have happened with Trump’s pool makeover.

Indeed, the sequence of events here follows a pattern characteristic of many of the presidents’ projects and policies. While the steps may occur in different orders, they end in the roughly the same place: failure, with regular people paying the price. Let’s take a look at Trump’s destruction playbook:

1. Make the thing in my image and promise perfection

After vowing to clean “Biden filth and incompetence” from the Reflecting Pool last November, he posted on Truth Social in April that although he was warned it could take years to make it “much more beautiful,” it would in fact only “take a fraction of that time, at a fraction of the cost.”

2. Declare success, despite overspending

The Trump administration said it finished the renovation on June 4 and it would fill the pool with water within days. According to a summary of the Department of Interior’s contract with Atlantic Industrial Coatings reviewed by CNN, the price ballooned up to $14.7 million, despite promises it would cost a seventh that figure.

3. Sprinkle some inside dealing

According to a Thursday report by the New York Times, a company with connections to a longtime Trump supporter was handed a no-bid contract worth $1.7 million to install a new water purification system. A larger $14.7 million-contract to put blue waterproofing material on the Reflecting Pool’s floor also had no other bidders.

4. Trouble emerges

CNN reported on Thursday that blue material on the bottom is starting to peel off. Also, the algae is back.

5. Blame the left

Ludicrous claims of sabotage? With Trump’s Friday night post, it looks like we’re at this step right now.

6. Forget it

Trump has publicly downplayed previous failed projects, dating back to his US-Mexico border wall through, most recently, his Kennedy Center takeover.

Last month, after a federal judge ruled his name be removed from the performing arts institution, Trump said he had “no interest” in continuing his remodeling project there. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else,” he posted, “we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them.”

As nature clearly outpaces efforts to clean the pool, keep your eyes peeled for this one.

On Saturday, Iran’s military announced it had closed shipping along the Strait of Hormuz, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon. Iran had just signed on to a preliminary agreement with the US to reopen the strait and allow for safe passage of commercial vessels for 60 days.

Lebanon’s state media and civil defense officials reported that Israeli strikes killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. The Israel Defense Forces stated on Friday that four of its soldiers were killed in Lebanon. It also claimed its airstrikes hit 80 targets connected to the militant group Hezbollah, killing “dozens” of its members. 

This isn’t the best start. 

Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon on Friday after the fighting looked like it would break up talks between the US and Iran in Switzerland. Earlier in the day, Iranian officials declined to meet with US negotiators, citing the fighting in Lebanon. JD Vance, on who Trump and Republicans have pushed responsibility for the negotiations, also postponed a trip to Switzerland.

As I wrote on Wednesday, the first point in the US-Iran deal released this week requires Iran, the US, and all of their allies to immediately end all military operations, with the text explicitly including a close to bombing in Lebanon. But Israel did not agree to the deal, after repeatedly stating it will continue attacking southern Lebanon. Trump has recently criticized Israel for its military campaign in Lebanon, noting that it could dismantle his announced deal.

Before Israel and the United States launched their current war, roughly 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas transited through the strait. Closing the passage has led to massive increases in petroleum prices. 

This week, the Trump administration said it would commit to finalizing an agreement to end the war in 60 days. Getting Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz again isn’t the best start. 

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

Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultrathin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on June 11. 

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning, and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest. 

“This is the moment where we went from knowing that this system exists to really knowing where it is, how dense it is and where it’s been,” said Toby Kiers, executive director and co-founder of SPUN and a co-author of the study.

“You’re getting a win-win. The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. ”

For decades, researchers have known arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form intimate symbiotic relationships with roughly 80 percent of the globe’s plant species and are found nearly everywhere plants are. But the extent of those networks and where they are densest, such as grasslands, and where they are being lost, like in agricultural areas, hasn’t been well understood until now.

“[The study] helps us come to grips with how important these below ground organisms can be to everything that we see above ground,” said James Bever, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas who studies the interactions between plants and microbes like fungi in soils but was not involved in the new study. 

Justin Stewart, an evolutionary ecologist at SPUN and lead author of the study, said previous studies the team had done on biodiversity of fungi were similar to asking someone to describe the forest outside their home.  

“They could say, ‘Well, there are three tree species in it.’ That’s great. That tells me about the biodiversity,” he said. “But you don’t actually know how big the forest is, how far apart the trees are. You don’t have information on its structure.”

Mycorrhizal fungal networks are made up of hyphae, each smaller than a strand of human hair. These living pipes transport the nutrients and carbon between the plants and fungi.

Because they are so long and thin, Stewart said, they can reach deeper into soils than roots, getting nutrients deep underground that plants can’t reach, while simultaneously storing carbon where it can stay put for a long time under the right conditions. 

“You’re getting a win-win,” Stewart said. “The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. That all depends on having dense fungal networks and soils that are active and alive.”

Quantifying these fungal networks started with a review of existing studies on mycorrhizal fungi. Those studies contained 16,000 core samples taken from ecosystems around the world to understand the length of the fungal threads in a volume of soil. Each sample was geolocated, and from there the team was able to use machine learning to create predictive maps of fungal networks globally, and identify where the model is performing well and where uncertainties show more data is needed.

Working with AMOLF, a research institute in Amsterdam, they developed a technique using a robot with a camera that recorded fungal networks growing over time in a lab, to get better estimates of their widths. From there, the team was able to calculate the network’s mass, which amounted to about five times the weight of all humans on Earth.

The study only covers living arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, Stewart said, and doesn’t include dead fungal networks, which also help to store carbon and add to the total biomass and influence of the networks on ecosystems. Research into dead fungal networks is still being explored.

Ninety percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected.

The study also found where these networks are most threatened. Fungal network densities across croplands are about half of what they are in wild ecosystems. Meanwhile, wild grassland ecosystems hold about 40 percent of the world’s arbuscular mycorrhizal biomass. Yet those grasslands are among Earth’s least protected ecosystems, and they are converted into farmland at four times the rate of forests, posing a potential threat to these networks and the benefits they bring to plant life and carbon storage. 

Previous research from SPUN has found 90 percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected, and many ecosystems, like the deserts of the American Southwest, are understudied.

What exactly is driving mycorrhizal fungi losses, and the consequences of that decline, need to be explored next, the researchers said, which is why the SPUN team will be at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—COP31—to present to policymakers about the importance of the networks and the role they could play in protecting ecosystems and sequestering carbon. 

Understanding mycorrhizal fungi more deeply at the ground level is key, said Corentin Bisot, an AMOLF biophysicist and co-author of the study.

“We’re still far from completely understanding how, if you have a grassland next door, and you want to [increase] microbes and fungi there,” Bisot said. “We don’t have the toolbox for you to do it.” 

This study, Stewart said, is just the first map. And like the first maps the Spaniards drew of California—which presented the state as an island, he said, there will be new discoveries about the density of fungi networks around the globe to grow the public’s understanding of them.

The World Cup is here. 

For the first time, the tournament is happening in three countries at once: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s bigger than ever, with more teams, more games, more viewers, and more money on the line.

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This special World Cup episode of Reveal looks beyond the spectacle of the beautiful game to the organization behind it: FIFA. The global soccer body stands to take in billions from the tournament, while fans face soaring ticket prices and host cities pay massive sums for transportation, security, and infrastructure.  

“Sport is this incredible glue that brings people together,” human rights advocate Mustafa Qadri tells Reveal. But he says that also makes it “highly vulnerable to cynical people coming in and exploiting it for their own gain.”  

This week, reporters Alex Shephard, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, and Reveal producer Artis Curiskis follow the money, power, and politics behind the World Cup—and ask who gets to be part of the world’s biggest game.

The global NGO Human Rights Watch released a report Thursday alleging widespread human rights violations by the federal government during “Operation Metro Surge,” the massive ICE deployment in Minnesota this past winter in which ICE arbitrarily detained approximately 4,000 immigrants, the vast majority of whom had no domestic convictions, killing two US citizens and injuring, harassing, and surveilling others.

Researchers interviewed more than 130 people, including immigrants who spent weeks or months hiding, lawyers whose clients were affected, health care workers and educators. 

Now, months after Operation Metro Surge, the report details the scale at which people are still putting their lives back together. 

Calls to local suicide hotlines increased precipitously during Metro Surge, researchers learned.

“There is no amount of press coverage that could ever fully document the scale of the ripple effect of trauma that this has on the city of Minneapolis,” one resident told HRW. “And when these cameras go away, we’re still going to be here grieving and traumatized.” Calls to local suicide hotlines, the researchers learned, increased precipitously; in some cases, previously mentally healthy people became suicidal “because of the threat of being detained.” One medical provider told the researchers that ICE was “writing a recipe book” for PTSD. 

Marcus Schmit, the executive director of the youth mental health organization NAMI Minnesota, called the ongoing mental health effects particularly acute for children living in neighborhoods “where friends are interrogated, assaulted, or taken away.”

“I’m terrified of being here because I don’t want that to happen to my dad again,” said a 7-year-old girl whose father was taken by ICE during a raid on their home in December. Her father, who was later released, said that his daughter sometimes begs him not to leave the house. Her mother, who was pregnant, did not leave the house for months after the raid, even for prenatal appointments.

Since Operation Metro Surge, ICE has continued raiding American cities. This month, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan threatened to raid New York City, saying he would send “more agents than you’ve ever seen before.” Some who protested during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, meanwhile, are still facing legal threats, as in the case of 15 Minneapolis protesters charged with felonies this week. 

“The federal government sent hordes of masked, armed agents to grab people off the street, whisk them away in shackles, and abuse those who sought to bear witness,” said Reagan Williams, crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. “National-level action is needed to ensure accountability, end ongoing abuses, remedy the harm, and prevent another crisis of this scale.”

A recent funding notice from the Department of Health and Human Services  seems to contain a message for the anti-abortion movement: the administration hasn’t entirely forgotten them. The announcement offers applicants nearly $2 million in grant support to promote embryo adoption—and while the program isn’t new, it’s now couched in the fundamentalist language of fetal personhood.

“This revised grant language to call embryos ‘children’ may seem small, but it could have enormous consequences for abortion, IVF treatment, and birth control access for people nationwide,” Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for reproductive rights and health equity at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement.

Embryo adoption was the Christian right’s response to the rise in popularity of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in the early aughts. The fertility treatment involves generating far more embryos than any prospective parent is likely to use, since (as with natural conception) most fertilized eggs don’t survive, often leaving IVF patients with numerous frozen embryos.

Those embryos were sought after for stem cell research, which put some politicians on the right in a bind. While supporting legislation that moved stem cell research forward, President George W. Bush first established the federal embryo adoption grant program in 2002. Ever since, it’s been a bone that conservative officials have dangled in front of anti-abortion groups in hopes of taking the political edge off of their support for IVF. 

The Trump administration’s new funding announcement sweetens the pot for proponents of fetal personhood. The total funds have nearly doubled, and the notice not only uses the words “child” or “children” a total of 37 times, but specifically refers to the unused embryos as “children who already exist and are in need of a family.” It’s far more strident than the program’s previous framing, which is still available on the website of the HHS office that administers the funds.

This opportunity is also only available to those organizations that seek to distribute frozen embryos in the name of fetal personhood. It excludes the few secular groups in this field that refer to the practice as “embryo donation,” a more medical phrasing (you might donate a kidney versus putting your kidney up for adoption).

“There has always been this interest in setting as many precedents as you can for recognizing fetal personhood” among anti-abortion groups, “even in contexts that don’t directly bear on what abortion opponents are most interested in,” says Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis who studies reproductive rights and its opposition. 

But that might be all that the Christian right is getting out of this funding announcement. “Everyone is still looking to read tea leaves about what the Trump administration is going to do after the midterm,” Ziegler says. “I think the question with all of this is whether there’s actually ever any muscle behind it, or if it’s just feel-good talk for social conservatives so the administration can keep their support without actually doing anything.”

While Trump has rolled back key protections for reproductive care, according to many anti-abortion activists, the president hasn’t done nearly enough. Some have threatened to pull their support ahead of the midterms unless they see further action from the federal government on their agenda—which would then alienate a much wider swath of the country.

“The Trump administration sees the same polling everybody else does, which is to suggest that doing a lot of what the Christian right would want would be really unpopular,” Ziegler says. Public approval hasn’t necessarily stopped Trump before, but “I don’t think these are issues about which he’s really personally passionate.”

One sign that this isn’t more than messaging is that the anti-abortion movement isn’t really interested in embryo adoption anymore. Even among proponents, very few people were ultimately interested in giving away or adopting embryos, and when the process was relabeled as an adoption rather than a medical donation, it became even pricier and more arduous, involving home visits and legal fees. That’s unlikely to change. So while the addition of personhood language might be something anti-abortion activists can chew on, that’s about it. 

“It’s like running a playbook that worked in 2002 when the movement has moved much further to the right on this issue,” Ziegler says.

But perhaps the administration realizes it doesn’t need to do more. Where else will its firmest anti-abortion supporters go? 

“The alternative here to what is still objectively a pro-life and pro-family administration—and pro-life and pro-family president—is a party that ran on abortions with no restrictions whatsoever,” a White House official told Politico. “The choice here is very clear, I think, if you’re someone on the pro-life side of things.”

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.

Donald Trump’s war in Iran is one of the stupidest foreign policy ventures in US history.

I know that’s not a new or hot take. When he attacked Iran on February 28, it immediately became clear that he had no idea what he was doing. Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, said he had initiated the attack based on a “feeling”—while negotiations to limit Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs were ongoing.

Trump then had a tough time explaining to the nation what the hell this war was for. To eliminate a nuclear program he had claimed was obliterated by a previous bombing raid? To address an “imminent threat” because Iran was, he falsely claimed, within two weeks of developing a nuclear bomb? To achieve regime change? To wipe out Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles? To protect Iranian anti-government protesters? To diminish Iran’s ability to strike at US allies and bases, if Israel attacked Iran? To end Tehran’s support of terrorism? To “get rid of evil”?

If you don’t know why you’re warring, it’s tough to figure out when to stop. After all, what counts as victory?

Then the war became mostly a matter of addressing unintended—but utterly predictable—consequences. Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, which was an easy-to-foresee possibility, and sparked a global economic crisis. Trump had no plan for that—just as he had no plan to achieve any of the assorted aims he had expressed at different times. Now the mission was to undo what his war had caused.

So dumb. Trump spent gazillions of taxpayer dollars on this endeavor, only to end up fighting for a return to the status quo. He had to put out the fire he started. And thousands of Iranian civilians—including an estimated 168 schoolgirls—have been killed, as well as 13 American servicemembers. It’s a pointless loss of treasure and lives. With the higher gas prices, the war so far has cost Americans $132 billion. This folly has also raised food prices—which has an especially dramatic impact on poorer, food-stressed nations. It further strained US ties with its closest allies.

The signing this week of a memo of understanding between Washington and Tehran to end the war highlighted the imbecility of this action. The terms met none of the revolving goals Trump had tossed out. It kicked down the road any discussion of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic programs. But the deal handed the repressive government of Iran much-desired deliverables, such as an end to sanctions, an unfreezing of assets, and a $300 billion reconstruction fund. Iran could immediately start to sell oil. Ka-ching! It only had to keep the strait open, as it had always done prior to the war. It looked as if Trump was rewarding the mullahs with tremendous riches for doing what they used to do for free. Art of the deal, right? Trump had previously called for a “unilateral surrender” from Iran. This was not that.

Critics of all ideological stripes blasted the deal. Hawks and Republicans saw it as a total sellout, as well as an abandonment of Israel. (The agreement called for an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon—a provision that did not please the Netanyahu crowd.) The New York Post lambasted Trump. Neocons exclaimed on podcasts, “What’s going on?” 

Democrats and liberals noted this was the equivalent of an American surrender to a government still presumably committed to running a repressive regime and supporting terrorism, and it fell far short of the agreement that the Obama administration had forged with Iran in 2015. It was good that the fighting was over—at least for the moment—but nothing had been settled. Only the most cultish of Trump cultists (Jesse Watters, I’m looking at you) could hail the deal as a masterpiece of statesmanship and a win for the United States.

Trump signed the MOU during a trip to Versailles, which in a previous era hosted the signing of a notoriously lousy accord that led to a conflagration we call World War II.

"So … so I said … why not sign your treaty here, at Versailles?"

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) 2026-06-18T00:17:58.484Z

What was especially ludicrous was how Trump and his crew talked about the deal. On March 1, the White House declared that Trump had attacked Iran to “destroy its ballistic missile arsenal.” On Wednesday, he said it was no biggie for Iran to retain ballistic missiles: “If other countries have them, it’s a little unfair for them not to have some.” He added, “Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but [Iran] can’t have them? It doesn’t work that way.”

As for Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium—which is now not suitable for use in a nuclear bomb but could be refined to weapon-grade level—Vice President JD Vance on MSNOW said, “One of the core parts of the agreement is that the [International Atomic Energy Agency] and the United States are going to help Iran destroy the highly enriched stockpile, and that’s something that’s spelled out very clearly in the MOU.”

But the MOU said nothing about this. And Trump sent conflicting signals about what he hoped to do about this half ton of material that ostensibly was one of the key reasons for the war. At one point on Wednesday he said, “We’re going to get it.” At another, he remarked, “I don’t think anybody could get at it.” (This material is apparently beneath a mountain that was bombed last year by US and Israeli warplanes.)

Trump zigged and zagged on another issue. At the start of the war, he said, “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East. We don’t need their oil.” A few weeks in, he reaffirmed this: “It doesn’t really affect us. We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need.” On Wednesday, he asserted that if he didn’t agree to the MOU, we “would run out of reserves at about four weeks…We would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it.”

Once this war was about ballistic missiles and highly enriched uranium and oil was no concern. Now, who cares about the missiles or the uranium? And Trump had to give Iran so much to get the oil flowing. Meanwhile, instead of regime change, it’s likely there’s been regime worsening. As for helping the Iranian people rise up against the tyrannical mullahs? Fuggedaboudit.

No sane person expects consistency from Trump. But during a war, erraticism is particularly dangerous and idiotic. His impulsive attack on Iran has accomplished none of his stated objectives. It’s been a foolish waste.

During a press conference on Wednesday at the G7 meeting in France, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick standing behind him, Trump mused, “In war, terrible things happen. Like you mentioned…the [girls’] school gets hit. Other things get hit. Bad things happen in war. War is a nasty place. I see it. I see it better than maybe anybody has ever seen it.” Yes, even at this point, Trump was claiming he understands this war better than anyone else. But he had no vision of what this war was for, of how to wage it, or of how to win it. This was a vanity project for him. He thought he could unleash violence and chaos—threaten to commit war crimes and destroy an entire civilization—and end up the star triumphantly bathed in military glory and, oddly, deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the end, this disaster does not demand deep analysis. It was a foolhardy move from a narcissistic numbskull who now cares more about a ballroom, an arch, and a reflecting pool than the carnage and damage he wreaked. A stupid war is yielding stupid results—and with Trump its author that’s no surprise.

I first heard the word “intersectionality” during an identity workshop I took in undergrad. Inside our student center, my classmates and I stood under colorful signs naming different aspects of identity—like race, gender, sexuality—as we were asked a series of questions that required us to stand underneath one and talk about how that part of our identity impacted our lives.

Finally, I had a word that could help broach conversations with classmates, colleagues and friends about the parts of my experience as a queer Black person from a low income household that were usually too hard to articulate to those who lived outside of it. From then on, intersectionality became a tool that helped me open up about myself and understand the work I wanted to do as a writer. 

Before distinguished law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, she also was searching for the language to name the intricacies of her experience; “the racial burden of Black girlness and Black womanhood.” For her, this search began at 6 years old in Canton, Ohio when her elementary school teacher refused to pick her to play Thorn Rosa, a fictional fairytale princess, for her class. The emotions of that day clung to her like a “familiar shadow,” emerging again in moments like her first year of Harvard Law School, when she was told she’d have to enter through the back door of a Harvard club because she was a woman. 

In her new memoir, BackTalker, which came out earlier this year, Crenshaw explores the idea of raising, becoming, and being a “backtalker,” which she defines as a person who doesn’t digest or accept “anything close to second-class status at the price of belonging.” The memoir draws from diary entries she’s kept through the years to weave together her personal experiences as a Black woman in America with historical events she’s lived through, from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to President Barack Obama launching My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only.

While on a break from her book tour in Paris, Crenshaw and I spoke about her book, her parents’ lessons on race, the importance of intersectionality in the semiquincentennial, and her hopes for the future of other backtalkers. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You mentioned that you wrote some of the book in Paris, when did you know you wanted to write this memoir and what was the process like? 

When I set off to do the memoir, it was at the height of the moment of racial reckoning in 2020. The tide had turned significantly in that short period of time, as the world started thinking much more critically about anti-Blackness, in particular, about the continuing shadow of our past, how it shapes institutions, how it shapes our actual experiences. So, the tools that I’ve been working with were in more demand at that moment. People were talking critically about race, they were talking about intersectionality, especially in light of the killings of both George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 

And then there was this huge backlash against all of these ideas, and part of the backlash was to frame these ideas as dangerous, as divisive, as counterproductive, and as alien—foreign; this isn’t part of the American tradition. Which was shocking to me, because my understanding of my own life and the way that these life experiences led to the kinds of questions that I and many others were asking is 100% grounded in US soil, grounded in stories that many of us who’ve been racialized would recognize and remember and understand. 

So, the memoir then took on a more targeted objective. There was a time that I thought, “Why am I fiddling while Rome burns? Shouldn’t I be writing a treatise, or shouldn’t I be writing corrections to the many distortions that were intentionally and unintentionally put out there about intersectionality?” And sometimes it was difficult to put down the newspaper and go back to, “Okay, well, when I was five years old…” It just seemed like maybe not the place to be spending time, but I kept at it, and it’s taken a while for it to finally conclude. 

I really didn’t know where the conclusion was, because the problem that I was writing about and into just kept unfolding. But at the end of the day, it’s not a treatise, it’s not a defense of my life’s work, it’s not a brief. It is the stories that shaped my experience as a Black girl and a Black young woman, and out of those stories is the thinking that I take into the academic work that I do.

It was interesting how your book weaved history together. I think sometimes when we have conversations about history, we think about the past and don’t consider the present and how important both are to our future. 

I have to credit my mother for that. She was a griot [a storyteller] and an archeologist at the same time. Showing me the sights and [telling] me the stories about how it was, and what happened to get it to be what it is now. It’s hard to think this stuff is ancient history when you’re looking at the same root beer stand, sometimes owned by the same people, and know what it took to get them to drop their discriminatory policies. So, history, as Faulkner says, it’s never fully behind us, and my mom was basically channeling that to make it clear that everything was still contention. You don’t take your foot off the pedal just because you’ve had some success. You’ve then got to protect that success, and you do that by telling the next generation this is what’s just underneath the surface of this, and this is why you have to keep tending to these victories, because nothing is guaranteed. 

That’s what we learned after reconstruction, having eight years of moving in a particular direction, then being reversed and losing six, seven decades. That is the thing that should tell us how important learning our history and understanding the history is not just the past, it’s the way the past reflects itself in the present. 

As we continue to have conversations about history, especially with the semiquincentennial on the horizon, I wondered how you felt about this current moment we’re in. 

To go to one of the chapters in the book where I talk about visiting George Washington’s plantation and Thomas Jefferson’s plantation and being there and asking all the questions that those enslaved people could have had answers to if their experiences had been valued as important to record. 

“Those who want to erase our history understand the value of it. That’s why they’re directing so many resources and so much coercive power to erase it.” 

You have the pillars of labor who made this republic possible, and they are silenced and erased. So the question it raises for me is, how do we commemorate the part of our history that made America possible without contributing to that very extraction, without signing on to that erasure. 

When we’re asked to step away from that history, to not remember that history, to not do any work to excavate that history, because to do so is to present the American Republic as deeply flawed and damaged, and not something to be celebrated, I see in that demand the same kind of demand that was operative [back then]: “don’t speak, don’t resist, don’t write yourself into the story, stay in the margins.”

So I look at this moment as an opportunity to reclaim the importance of history, all of it. I look at it as a moment for people to connect the dots between the tyranny under which African people and Indigenous people were made to live under, and how the extension of that tyranny undermines the well-being of America. And I look at it as an opportunity to make it apparent that those who want to erase our history understand the value of it. That’s why they’re directing so many resources and so much coercive power to erase it. 

If they understand how important it is, then those of us who are the stakeholders also need to understand how important it is, especially in a moment like this. 

And how do you think holidays like Juneteenth factor into that? 

Juneteenth was a gift that came, frankly, from some of the tragedies in 2020. It was not something that I knew much about, and I don’t think a lot of folks outside of the region in which Juneteenth was commemorated really knew much about it. Which does show again the degree to which aspects of our history, particularly the history of enslavement and the complicated process of freedom, is understood. 

So it is a commemoration that does important work in making it clear that freedom is not a one and done situation. Having won the Civil War wasn’t an immediate moment in which the experience of Black people suddenly turned into what it would have been had there never been enslavement. It becomes obvious that freedom-making is an ongoing process. It’s never fully done in a history like ours. For some people, just the fact that formally we are free doesn’t [mean freedom] arrives at the moment that it’s declared. 

I go into Juneteenth with an appreciation of the fact that it shows us that equality making is like an onion, you peel off different layers of the preexisting condition, and that in and of itself can be an interrupted process. 

In Backtalker, you emphasize the importance of the youth as the next generation of backtalkers. It was interesting to hear about your experience of learning to use your voice and to read about what you remembered about Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; specifically, the speech you gave in Jerusalem Baptist Church during the memorial service organized by young Black activists the day after the news broke. 

I am 100 percent sure that the speaking that I did and the ways that I tried to run with that baton were shaped by my parents at the dinner table, what I heard from elders. Having that influence, and this is important, because I do know that some parents struggle with how much they want to expose their children to the histories into which they were born, and I know they often make choices about not wanting to burden. I appreciate my parents, and my parents’ parents. 

I was born before the major Civil Rights acts were passed, so it was important for them to not whitewash the situation, but also make it clear that we are not expected to accept the contours of our lives as is. We are not expected to give up. What we are expected to do is both move against these artificial constraints and prepare ourselves for the doors that we are trying to blow open. 

I appreciate them for that, because I did have a sense of when it was important to speak up and speak back. I did have a sense that it wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t just my family, but it was a broader sense of “we” that was striving at that moment. So, when I stand up in the church, you know how they say it takes a village? It took a, “we,” it took a whole cultural moment for us to speak into it. 

You once said that “If there is a mother of this country, it’s Black women, because it’s through our bodies that the wealth of the nation was able to launch the United States as the global power it actually became.” How do you keep moving forward carrying that weight and what keeps you steadfast in that? 

I think the thing that keeps me moving is I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of the erasure of Black women’s specific experience and specific history. The chapter about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas really speaks to the consequences of what I call the intersectional failure. The fact that the histories we remember and the visions of resistance that we celebrate don’t often include the specific kinds of conditions that Black women were fighting against. 

I wanted never to see that deeply damaging disconnect in our story happen again because it was so consequential. We got a Supreme Court justice who went on to undermine the very claims of anti-racism that he wrapped his appeal around by calling it a high-tech lynching, so under his watch and through his fifth vote, we lost some central features of the Civil Rights infrastructure that people shed blood to create. That is a tragedy, and so the thing that keeps me moving forward is recognizing how important intersectionality is in understanding the connection between our movements that Black women sit on and represent, if there is an ability to fully incorporate our experiences into our histories and our analysis. 

And I think the thing that keeps me moving is the fact that I wouldn’t have been here if my elders hadn’t said, “The time to rest is when we’re done,” or if they had said, “This is a very difficult climb for us, and we really don’t have a clear guarantee that the work that we do is going to create a better life for our children.” But they were committed to creating a better life for the future generations. They were dedicated to trying and pushing all of the buttons to find a way forward. 

So, as a recipient of that, I feel it would be irresponsible not to play it forward. It would be taking their sacrifices for granted, not to speak in this moment, in which much of what they sacrificed to create for us stands, on the precipice of collapse. So I don’t want to be that generation that let it go. I don’t want to be the ones that didn’t try to put our shoulder to the wheel in every way possible to push back into this effort to make America look like America did before we had the rights, and the ability to fight that we have now. 

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

It was designed to survive the apocalypse, as humanity’s last testament to its failure. But for a while it seemed the “Earth’s Black Box” hadn’t even survived its own planning process.

Now, five years after it was announced to much fanfare, followed by years of ominous silence, the box is back. Its creators say parts assembly is under way and, in December, the full monolith will be installed near Queenstown on the edge of a remote western Tasmanian airfield.

When it was first announced that an indestructible doomsday device would be built in a remote part of Tasmania to bear witness to the climate crisis, the news went viral around the world.

“Earth is getting a black box to record events that lead to downfall of civilization,” CNET declared, a headline that would later be quoted on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “We’re doomed,” he whispered to the camera.

According to the project’s website, the 16-meter long, four-meter high steel structure—to be topped with solar panels encased behind glass—will record “every step” humanity takes towards climate catastrophe.

“Hundreds of datasets, measurements, and interactions relating to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and safely stored for future generations,” it says. “How the story ends is completely up to us. Only one thing is certain, your actions, inactions, and interactions are now being recorded.”

The project’s inspiration is an airplane’s flight recorder, also known as a “black box” (despite usually being orange), which stores data within crash-proof casing to help investigators piece together the causes of accidents. That was also an Australian invention: The prototype was put together at a government research lab in Melbourne in 1954.

The Earth’s Black Box was announced to coincide with the UN’s 2021 Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow. Digital hard drives were turned on to begin recording data from the talks, to be transferred later to the physical box.

Guardian graphic

But then all mysteriously fell quiet. The last—and only—posts on its Instagram page are black tiles which form a 3×3 box from October 2021.

Some wondered if it was all just performance art or a PR stunt, owing to the fact the project was dreamed up by Rouser Lab, an Australian not-for-profit “experimental environmental communications agency,” rather than scientists.

Its artistic director, Jonathan Kneebone, says the project is now being coordinated by the Earth’s Black Box Foundation, a registered charity dedicated to the idea.

“It will be approximately five years to the day that we are finally able to install the work,” he told Guardian Australia.

“In those five years, we have been evolving the design, data storage systems, source materials, web platform—as well as developing funding models to sustain the project into the future.”

Rouser Lab claims its climate interventions have had 4 billion media impressions worldwide, including for another “techno-obelisk,” also yet to be built, that will constantly transmit a Climate SOS into space.

Collaborators on the black box include art and directing collective The Glue Society and production company Revolver, but the University of Tasmania, which was initially affiliated, has dropped out in the intervening years and will request to be removed from Rouser Lab’s website.

The mayor of West Coast council in Tasmania, Shane Pitt, says the project has been a “long time coming.”

“It certainly is something we can see as a tourist attraction,” he said, adding the rugged, remote outcrops of Tasmania’s west coast were picked for their geological, and political, stability—much of the landscape was carved by glaciers. “The west coast is certainly not a place that has got high value for anyone to cause major catastrophes.”

This year, the Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to apocalypse, and narrowed from 100 seconds in 2021.

If the Earth’s Black Box is ever complete, will future beings trawl through its records to determine where it all went so wrong? Or will we land the plane safely, rendering the strange object built into Tasmania’s granite landscape as a reminder of an apocalypse that never came?

Perhaps that’s the thing about a black box: it is the canonical object whose inner workings are a mystery.

Last week, most of the major news outlets ran the perennial story about how the Social Security fund is set to run out of money—now by 2032—and that benefits will have to be cut substantially unless Congress acts.

Okay, so act.

It’s stupid that we are being made to worry about a problem that’s solvable, a manufactured crisis that conservative politicians are already seizing upon to claim we have no choice but to slash entitlements—here’s House Speaker Johnson eyeing them. And Social Security benefits are literally entitlements, as in, we are entitled to them because we’ve been paying for them via payroll taxes our entire working lives.

The dumb rule that lets heirs inherit a parent’s stocks without paying taxes will cost the government $379.3 billion over five years.

Now, it’s true that, for various reasons—an aging population; a Trumpian decline in immigration (workers who aren’t citizens pay into the system but don’t take money out); and the fact that high earners pay a relatively small portion of their incomes in payroll taxes, because the SSI tax only applies to the first $184,500 of a person’s earnings—the Social Security fund’s revenues will soon be insufficient to cover outgoing payments. A February analysis from the Urban Institute forecasts a gap of about $2.8 trillion over the five-year period from 2032 to 2036.

That’s a lot of money, sure. But there are other massive government expenditures we can do without. The nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, based on scores from the Congressional Budget Office and the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), reported that Trump’s One Big Beautiful bill will cost the federal government $4.5 trillion in lost tax revenues over a decade—even as it slashes $1.4 trillion from programs low-income Americans rely on, namely Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), and federal student loans.

President Donald Trump—who just expended American blood and treasure on a war in the Middle East that accomplished nothing except, perhaps, to leave Iran’s horrible regime in a stronger position than before—is demanding a roughly 50 percent increase (to $1.5 trillion) in the US military budget, which had already exceeded the combined military budgets of the next seven countries, including China and Russia.

Raising the tax rate on investment profits to match what workers pay on wages would free up $1.25 trillion.

Our entirely predictable Social Security “crisis,” to put it bluntly, is a political choice made by a pay-to-play government that under President Donald Trump has become baldly transactional. Congress could close the gap tomorrow if lawmakers would get their priorities straight and start acting in the interests of the broader public and not just the richest 10 percent.

You actually can learn a lot about the those priorities from a fun JCT document that lists what every federal tax break costs the US government. The latest version—JCX-45-25—covers the five years from 2025-2029, and it helps show how Congress could find the money to close the Social Security gap.

There are many smaller line items that it would take an accountant to explain, and that add up massively, but I’ll just focus on some bigger-ticket stuff, tax breaks worth more than $100 billion.

To help fill the Social Security gap, for instance, Congress could kill the “step-up in basis” rule. This abomination allows wealthy heirs to inherit assets like stock from their parents at the current market value, thereby erasing the substantial tax bill the estate would have owed on investment profits accumulated over a lifetime. Among America’s rich, those “unrealized” investment gains represent the lion’s share of their income, and the step-up rule lets their families escape taxation altogether. This is costing the government $379.3 billion over five years, according to the JCT.

The $500,000 in tax-free gains the government grants a couple when they sell their primary residence, combined with a combined $750,000 mortgage interest deduction for first and second homes, will run the government more than $574 billion. This one isn’t just for super-rich people, though Congress could at least scrap the second home allowance.

But what about the “deduction for qualified business income”? Sounds boring—and that’s how they get you. Passed by Congress in 2017 as part of the first round of Trump tax cuts for the rich, it’s a giveaway that overwhelmingly benefits the richest 1 percent of the population. Kill it and we’d get back $390 billion to pay for Social Security.

Want to really piss off the oligarchs? Simply increase the tax rate they pay on investment profits investments so it matches the rate workers pay on their wages. That’ll free up $1.25 trillion!

Peter Thiel reportedly hs more than $5 billion in his Roth IRA, a type of account meant for middle-class retirement savers.

We’re up to more than $2 trillion now. So, can you guess which bundle of tax breaks costs the US government more than anything else?

Ironically, that would be subsidies for private retirement savings. We’re talking about tax deferrals on retirement contributions or the exclusion of capital gains from taxation for accounts like 401(k)s and 403(b)s, Keogh plans, and individual retirement accounts (IRAs and Roth IRAs).

All told, these breaks will cost the treasury a whopping $2.3 trillion for 2025-2029—that’s almost as much as the Social Security gap.

Now, some of that money is well spent. Helping working people save for retirement is good—and Social Security more or less does that for everyone. Helping people save and invest more for retirement on the side is also a desirable benefit. But it’s a benefit that gets bigger the more money you have. Affluent families are not only way more likely to have one or more retirement accounts—they also have way more money in them. (Peter Thiel reportedly amassed more than $5 billion in his Roth IRA, a type of tax-advantaged account supposedly created for middle-class workers.)

The Fed’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances, from 2022, shows that less than half (about 43 percent) of families from the least-affluent three-quarters of the population had at least one private retirement account, but more than 87 percent of families in the top quartile had one. The rate for families in the richest 10 percent was 91.3 percent.

Congress has since passed legislation requiring companies to create retirement accounts for all employees (opt-out style), but simply having a retirement account doesn’t mean you can afford to contribute meaningfully to it. That helps explain the huge discrepancies in savings even among families who actually have a retirement account.

Here’s a chart that ran with an earlier story I wrote about our flawed retirement system. The yellow line represents average 2019 retirement savings for households in the top 10 percent. The green line represents the next 15 percent down. The bottom line is everybody else.

Based on the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, 2019Mother Jones

Clearly, the rich get much more out of these subsidies than the poor. According to the Fed’s latest numbers, Americans held $23.8 trillion in tax-advantaged retirement accounts all told. By my calculations, here’s the average household retirement savings by wealth tier:

Bottom 25 percent: $2,548

Second 25 percent: $15,976

Third 25 percent: $66,809

Top 25 percent: $640,771

Top 10 percent: $1,183,877

Top 5 percent: $1,546,050 (minimum)

That richest 5 percent of households held nearly half the nation’s total retirement savings in 2022, $10.15 trillion—and even more now.

Congress could cap retirement savings at, say $2 million per household. After hitting the cap, families could make no more tax-free contributions and any further investment growth in their accounts would be subject to taxation.

Such caps, though more modest, were proposed under President Barack Obama and later under President Joe Biden, but Congress refused to pass them—maybe because too many lawmakers feel beholden to rich investors, and to the Wall Street banks and money managers who profit from hosting wealthy clients’ swollen investment accounts.

This isn’t rocket science. Just tell your constituents that it’s un-American for families with millions of dollars in savings to be taking handouts from the government. Boom! And then use the savings to shore up Social Security—which benefits everyone.

At the very least, let’s not hear any more talk of a crisis. This is a choice.

The federal government intervened Monday in a Clean Air Act lawsuit in which people in Memphis, Tennessee, and Southaven, Mississippi, are suing Elon Musk’s xAI over the health risks posed by the company’s unpermitted gas turbines.

The Department of Justice didn’t intervene on behalf of the people breathing dirty air, though: instead, it submitted an unprecedented motion backing xAI.

The suit, filed by NAACP lawyers, contends that xAI should owe over $100,000 a day in civil penalties for violating the Clean Air Act. DOJ is pushing for the suit to be thrown out—not on the facts of the case, but because, the agency claims, Americans need Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot for our continued safety.

“I can’t live like this. I don’t really know what my options are other than to get out of there.”

xAI’s massive Colossus 2 data center, in the Memphis area, was built primarily to train Grok models—new iterations of the AI that might be best known for calling itself “MechaHitler.” And it has onsite dozens of unpermitted gas turbines to serve its massive energy needs. Colossus 2’s power plant constitutes one of the largest industrial sources of smog-forming nitrogen oxides in the nation, able to emit well over 5,000 tons per year. People living near the site say they’re plagued with poor air quality and constant noise. 

“I can’t live like this. I don’t really know what my options are other than to get out of there,” said Jason Haley, who lives near one of xAI’s Memphis-area sites, to the local Fox News affiliate. He described constant whirring noises from the data center. “But, with that being said, I don’t know who would be willing to purchase that house if they come and look at it and that’s what they’re hearing.” 

“Grok’s continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security,” the filing said, especially “in the event of armed conflict”—adding that the Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s AI chief, added in a declaration that “If xAI is hindered from continuing to improve and upgrade Grok…DoW’s ability to meet its national security mission and keep pace with adversaries will be impaired.” The Pentagon has paid Musk’s company at least $200 million for use of the chatbot. 

But according to Laura Thoms, who worked at the Department of Justice for 19 years before moving to the advocacy group Earthjustice, the DOJ’s action—directly inserting itself into a case on behalf of a corporation—is likely unprecedented. (Earthjustice is part of the suit against xAI, alongside the Southern Environmental Law Center and the NAACP.)

“In my experience, I have never known the government to intervene on behalf of the defendant to argue that enforcement shouldn’t happen at all,” Thoms said.

“They’re saying that when we, the federal government, decide that a company should be able to continue violating for whatever reason, there’s nothing anyone can do about it—not the communities that are impacted by the pollution, not the courts, not even Congress,” Thoms added, calling the move a “power grab…to decide who has to comply with the law and who can be given a free pass,” undercutting one of the main tools communities have against corporate pollution.

Throughout the 20th century, under the legal doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” the federal government has historically exempted military bases from much pollution regulation by citing the primacy of national security. Bases like Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, Florida have leaked volatile organic compounds, jet fuel, and heavy metals into nearby groundwater, rendering them what Abre’ Connor, of the NAACP, calls “sacrifice zones.”

‘National security’ has also been a frequent refrain of the Trump administration’s attempts to ramp up fossil fuel extraction, said Kym Meyer of the Southern Environmental Law Center. “We’ve seen, in this administration, national security used as a way to speed up permitting reviews for pipelines, to fast-track oil drilling, and to essentially eliminate all the environmental checks that are usually in place.” 

And it means that opposition to potential environmentally-destructive projects can be cast as anti-American. That’s increasingly the case with data center developments across the United States, not just those pushed by Musk or xAI. Developer and celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, in Utah, dismissed his critics as Chinese plants; Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves claims Grok is “preventing our adversaries—particularly China—from closing the technology gap.” 

If the White House succeeds, Meyer said, the implications go far beyond just data centers. The administration would have every incentive to intervene in any citizen case against a Trump-aligned polluter and dismiss it.

“This is a blatant attempt to let well-connected corporations like xAI unlawfully pollute without any consequences,” she said. 

On Thursday, the Department of Justice quietly released a memo pertaining to the landmark 1999 disability civil rights case Olmstead v. L.C., which curtailed states’ power to institutionalize people diagnosed with mental illnesses, and related federal civil rights laws. That precedent, the Trump administration memo argues—in conjunction with federal civil rights and disability rights statutes—increases homelessness, a claim that likely signals a push to expand institutionalization in restrictive psychiatric facilities.

The administration’s claims, according to University of Michigan law professor Sam Bagenstos, are not rooted in fact.

“It’s just absurd,” says Bagenstos, general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration, calling the Olmstead decision “one of the most effective tools in combating homelessness” by encouraging states to augment mental health and housing services outside institutions.

More concerning is the fact that the White House instructed the Justice Department to produce the document, which Bagenstos says “suggests we might potentially be seeing an executive order” directing DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services to roll back rules meant to avoid institutionalization.

“This administration is trying to take away one of the most fundamental rights that people with disabilities have fought for,” said George Washington University law professor Alison Barkoff.

In December, for instance, the Department of Justice reached an agreement with South Carolina to expand supportive services for people with psychiatric disabilities to reduce rates of institutionalization.

Bagenstos describes the White House move as “part of the incredibly punitive approach toward homelessness and mental illness that Trump has taken from the beginning of his administration,” including a July executive order that called for unhoused people with mental health conditions to be forced into long-term care settings in contravention of Olmstead and disability civil rights laws.

“Their interpretation is completely inconsistent with virtually all courts,” says Barkoff, a DOJ special counsel on Olmstead enforcement during the Obama administration.

Barkoff and Bagenstos are both concerned that the memo presages a White House effort to ramp up institutionalization—one that could, ironically, also increase homelessness—by chipping at the Olmstead legal framework. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans for Olmstead enforcement, or lack thereof.

Many Republicans across the right are bashing interim deal between the US-Iran as an unnecessary surrender. 

“This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana wrote in a Wednesday post on X. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works.”

“Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal,” he continued. 

Other Republicans, like Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have balked at the amount of resources the US is giving to Iran—including sourcing at least $300 billion to fund reconstruction in Iran. The Trump administration has repeatedly said this week that the money would come from other Gulf countries. 

The Trump administration read the agreement to journalists on Wednesday and both countries are expected to sign it in a formal ceremony on Friday. While extremely vague in how it will be achieved, the “memorandum of understanding” provides financial and political concessions to Iran for the country to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reaffirm that it will not develop nuclear weapons: immediately allowing Iran to sell its oil and terminating all sanctions against Iran, among others. 

But as I wrote on Wednesday, Trump seems to be aware of the dissatisfaction from his own party, stating that the deal isn’t “final,” he may resume bombing if Iran doesn’t “behave,” and that Vice President JD Vance—and definitely not the president—is responsible for the negotiated deal.

While Sen. Cassidy lost last month’s primary election to two Republicans, including Trump’s choice, Julia Letlow, even the president’s allies voiced opposition (although in a less direct way). 

“The president is getting, I think, very poor advice when it comes to this deal,” Sen. Ted Cruz told the Daily Wire on Wednesday. “History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea.”

Likewise, on Wednesday, far right political commentator Ben Shapiro said on Fox News that the agreement looks like a disaster and “does not achieve any of the signal goals that were set by the administration at the beginning,” including ending all nuclear enrichment, ballistic missiles, and support of terrorism.

“In my opinion, the Vice President of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president,” Shapiro concluded. 

On Thursday afternoon, the US military announced that it had officially lifted its blockade on ships entering and exiting Iranian ports. The Trump administration stated that the blockade, which started in April, was designed to stop Iran from profiting off its closure of the Strait of Hormuz and put further pressure on the country to reopen the passageway.

Just after the deal was announced on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the president’s most devoted loyalists, wrote on X that he was “somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming.” The senator didn’t elaborate on what specific worries he had but said on Wednesday that it was worth seeing whether Iran would follow through on its word, as the agreement would significantly help his and Trump’s “ultimate goal” of normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

But JD Vance, who has seemingly become the fall guy if the deal with Iran fails, has, at least publicly, chosen to stand by the negotiations, saying in a White House press conference on Thursday that critics should, “number one, have a little bit of faith in the president.”

JD Vance: "What I would say to any of the critics is number one, have a little bit of faith in the president"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-18T16:11:02.442Z

And Trump, who notably didn’t name anyone specific, wrote on Truth Social on Thursday that any opponents to how his administration has handled Iran are “fools” given that “the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are “tumbling” down.”

For the record, the rising stock market is largely down to the most wealthy investors who avoid the struggles of everyday costs and the average oil price in the US is still 34 percent more expensive than when the US and Israel started bombing Iran again in February.