Mother Jones

President Donald Trump on Thursday followed through on a threat to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” issuing an executive order to “Make the Great Lakes Even Greater” amid a collapsed trade deal with Canada, further escalating tensions between the two former allies.

The lake in question has been known as Lake Ontario since the 1600s. Trump, contends that it should be renamed because America spends more money on it than Canada does.

“The United States is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario,” Thursday’s executive order reads. “The United States Coast Guard supplies 9 of the 11 ice breaking vessels on the Great Lakes, securing commercial shipping lanes free of charge.  The United States has invested nearly $4 billion in protecting the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystem in the last decade, while Canada has invested far less in similar initiatives over the same period.”

My colleague Alex Nguyen covered Canada’s response to the escalating trade war—a large support package for Canadian workers and firms—on Tuesday:

While the plan aims more at support for businesses than direct funds for individual Canadians, it is a meaningful step that far exceeds any the Trump administration has taken or tried to take, with the White House largely ignoring the foreseeable harm of its tariffs on American workers and consumers… Nearly every state has experienced blue-collar job losses as a result of the tariff agenda, even as the policies deliver few apparent results in improving US manufacturing or lowering the trade deficit.

The “Lake America” decision is a return to a Trumpian theme: governance as branding exercise. That includes renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the Defense Department as “Department of War,” the Kennedy Center as “Trump-Kennedy Center,” and (unofficially) ICE as NICE.

Trump cannot force Canada or any other country to follow his preferred naming conventions. It remains to be seen whether independent news, weather, and mapping firms will fall into line.

More than a dozen local law enforcement agencies across the country have used opioid settlement money to procure Flock cameras and other AI-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs), an investigation by Mother Jones has found.

Settlement funds began flowing to states and localities in 2022, after major pharmaceutical companies agreed to resolve thousands of lawsuits over the industry’s role in the opioid crisis. Altogether, state and local governments secured more than $50 billion in funds, to be paid out over 18 years, from the various manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies accused of fueling the deadly epidemic.

Public health advocates hoped the settlements would provide lifesaving resources for historically underserved communities ravaged by opioid addiction. But as the money has been disbursed, local officials have come under fire for putting crucial dollars toward policing instead of prioritizing addiction prevention, recovery, treatment, and harm reduction services: KFF Health News found that police spent settlement money on Tasers, firearm silencers, drones, and more; in West Virginia, some rural counties used the funds to pay off their jail bills.

“Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

But little attention has been paid to how police departments have used those opioid funds to build out AI-powered surveillance networks like Flock, whose ALPRs have become increasingly popular with police even as they’ve drawn intense bipartisan pushback in the communities where they’ve been deployed. A review of meeting minutes, local reporting, state opioid expenditure disclosures, and invoices obtained via public records requests reveals that at least twelve sheriffs’ offices and police departments have since 2024 spent their opioid funds on Flock cameras. Another seven law enforcement agencies used the money to purchase similar ALPR technology from competitors Motorola, Axon, and Verkada.

In sum, Mother Jones found that 19 agencies in ten different states spent more than $920,000 in opioid funds on Flock and other ALPRs, a likely undercount given the inconsistency with which opioid settlement expenditures are tracked and disclosed across states and local jurisdictions.

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In city council and county commission meetings, police sought to convince local officials that the cameras were a good use of the opioid money because they would help catch drug traffickers and reduce drug-related crimes. But Robyn Oster, director of policy at the nonprofit Partnership to End Addiction, said that this type of spending doesn’t honor the spirit of the settlements.

“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” said Oster. “While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis…Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

At a June 2025 meeting in Sunnyside, Washington—an agricultural hub where roughly one in five people live in poverty—council members were thrilled by the prospect of spending their opioid settlement money on a Flock camera. Around $200,000 had been sitting, untouched, in the city’s coffers since 2022, even as the area faced a dire need for expanded treatment services: Yakima County lacks a medical detox center and has one of the highest overdose death rates in Washington state.

“We’ve had several people … in that strip mall next to the hotel … that have complained about drug use and things like that behind their business, and they’ve asked us to place a trailer there,” the Sunnyside police chief told city councilmembers. He requested the approval of $24,000 in opioid settlement funds to go to a one-year lease for a mobile Flock security trailer, which would integrate with the city’s existing Flock surveillance system.

“I was trying to find creative ways to pay for one because $24,000 wasn’t in our budget this year,” he added, “but we’ve got this opioid settlement money, and if we’re tying it to the drug use problem we’re having at these hotels, I think we can justify the expenditure there.”

The city council unanimously voted to approve the police chief’s request. “Can we afford two of them?” one councilmember asked with enthusiasm.

Thousands of miles away, in Ohio County, West Virginia, county commissioners also voted unanimously in favor of spending opioid money on Flock cameras. In September 2025, the commission approved the sheriff’s office’s request for six Flock ALPRs, totaling $57,900 for the first three years. According to meeting minutes, Chief Deputy Kent Lewis “said a representative from the company is able to come and give a presentation,” and “added that Walmart and Lowe’s use FLOCK, so we may be able to tie into their system as well.” When one commissioner asked whether the cameras were an appropriate use of the funds, the deputy sheriff responded that they would “[help] track drugs coming into our area.”

Three months later, Sheriff H. Nelson Croft Jr. gave an update on Flock to the commissioners. According to meeting minutes, the system logged 28,000 license plate readings on Black Friday alone. Ohio County has a population of around 40,000.

The surveillance industry has taken notice, explicitly encouraging cops to spend opioid money on the technology. A December blog post from the multinational security firm Leonardo called opioid settlement funds “a major new opportunity” for law enforcement to invest in license plate readers.

“Eligible spending categories vary by state,” the blog post noted, but approved uses often include “LPR technology due to its role in detecting vehicles tied to drug trafficking, overdose events, and fugitive recovery.” In June, 404 Media reported that Leonardo planned to add sensors to its ALPRs that “would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices” in passing cars, enabling the cameras to track not just cars but “the location of particular people.”

“The funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

Mother Jones identified four additional locations where local officials explored using opioid money to pay for Flock cameras but ultimately funded them through other parts of city or county budgets. In Green, Ohio, for instance, the city council approved the purchase of 14 Flock cameras in 2024, and the mayor stated at the time that the city could use $20,000 of opioid money to offset the cost. But Shelley Goodrich, Green’s director of finance, told me the city ultimately paid for the first two years of the contract using a different funding source. “We were planning to use Drug Task Force funds beginning in 2026; however, we have not made any payments in 2026,” she wrote. This month, the Green City Council voted against renewing its contract with Flock, citing concerns about privacy and oversight.

In Etowah County, Alabama, commissioners authorized two disbursements from the opioid settlement fund to pay for ten Flock cameras in August 2024 and March 2025, totaling $42,267. But minutes from October 2025 show that the sheriff department’s budget was increased by $42,267, “to reimburse the Opioid Settlement fund for the FY 2024 and FY 2025 annual contract for the Flock safety cameras.” The Etowah County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions about why it reimbursed the funds or whether it plans to use opioid money for future renewals of the Flock contract.

Opioid spending on police surveillance technology isn’t limited to ALPRs. Mother Jones also identified six locations that have used opioid settlement money to fund contracts with Peregrine Technologies, an AI-powered software platform that integrates law enforcement surveillance data from a variety of sources.

In October, the city of Campbell, California, approved a three-year, $71,500 annual contract with Peregrine using opioid settlement funds. A publicly accessible copy of the contract states that “the initial Customer Data sources and systems” integrated into Peregrine would include both Flock and Axon ALPRs, as well as Axon body cameras, police records, and the Axon Fusus intelligence platform. Two months later, the city council in Chicopee, Massachusetts, approved a five-year, $837,500 contract with Peregrine, to be paid using opioid funds.

Chicopee was among the western Massachusetts cities hit hardest by the opioid crisis, and in 2024, it still had the second-highest overdose rate in Hampden County. In meeting minutes, the Chicopee mayor noted there was “quite a bit of money in the opioid agreement account” and said that the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office supported increasing the Peregrine contract from three years to five years.

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Peregrine itself has been proud to announce “new partnerships” with police departments in Cranston and South Kingstown, Rhode Island. “Both agencies leveraged opioid settlement funds to invest in their communities by strengthening interagency collaboration, operational awareness, and investigative workflows through Peregrine,” stated a July LinkedIn post from the company.

Revelations that local governments spent residents’ opioid money on Flock cameras has stoked furor in both Pensacola, Florida, and Monongalia County, West Virginia. In Pensacola, the mayor approved a two-year, $108,000 contract for 18 Flock cameras using opioid funds. After seven months of public backlash, the Pensacola City Council announced in June that it would no longer allow opioid money to be spent on Flock cameras when the contract next came up for renewal.

In Morgantown, West Virginia, constituents have shown up at the Monongalia County Courthouse every Wednesday morning to speak out against local officials’ support for Flock. In November, the Monongalia County Commission approved the sheriff’s request to use up to $180,000 of settlement funds to install 20 Flock cameras across the county. To some people in the area, this use of the opioid money felt like salt in an all-too-fresh wound.

“As somebody who has had family members directly affected by the opioid crisis, I find the use of these funds absolutely disgusting,” said Harrison York, a 25-year-old electrical engineering student at West Virginia University in Morgantown. “The thing that got my family members clean were methadone services, and that’s what this opioid settlement money should be used for.” He pointed to research showing that criminalization does little to help people struggling with drug addiction, and contended that further policing “would punish the poor and the working class, who are victims” of the opioid epidemic.

Adam Menear, a 45-year-old father born and raised in Morgantown, started a petition in March calling on the Monongalia County Commission to halt the installation of Flock cameras that has received more than 1,500 signatures to date.

“There is not a single human being inside the state of West Virginia who was born and raised here who has not been adversely affected by the opioid crisis,” Menear told me. “The new crisis is the fact that the funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

A heated scene unfolded at the Cuyahoga County family court in Cleveland on Wednesday, as the key players in a bitter dispute that has grabbed national headlines assembled in one room.

The case is one that Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis has been covering for weeks: a custody fight over the two-year-old daughter of Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) and his ex-wife, Emily Moreno—whose father is Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Miller is currently defending himself against Emily’s allegations that he held a gun to her head, shoved her against a wall, and threw scalding water at her—all of which he vehemently denies. Despite these allegations, and at least six Republican senators (including his former father-in-law) urging him to drop out, Miller is running for reelection and has vowed to stay in the race. The deadline to replace him on the ballot passed earlier this month.

Abby got a rare chance to question Miller directly, just weeks after uncovering more than 2,000 pages of court and police records detailing the abuse allegations. Miller had initially declined to speak to the press after the hearing, referring all inquiries to his attorney. But while his lawyer was speaking, Miller interrupted to deliver what sounded like a veiled threat against Sen. Moreno.

“There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about,” the scandal-plagued congressman told reporter Abby Vesoulis on Wednesday.Video by Sam Van Pykeren

“I was a part of that family for a very long time,” he said. “There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about, and I respectfully have… because that’s not my business to share. But it’s politically motivated.”

His lawyer went further, claiming Sen. Moreno “hates Max and wants to destroy Max” and only “came out of the woodwork” to attack Miller once reporters began asking why he had stayed silent about his daughter’s allegations.

In the frenzied, finger-pointing days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, institutions across the country rushed to appease online mobs and vitriolic politicians who demanded takedowns of anyone critical of the right-wing influencer. 

In the year since, courts and arbitrators have forced a growing number of institutions to answer to something much more enduring than right-wing pressure: the law.

The latest is the Washington Post, which was ordered this week to reinstate Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist it fired last year for her social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.

The decision from an independent arbitrator is a major win for Attiah, who, alongside the union that represents Post employees, spent the past year fighting her termination through a union grievance process. 

“I started squealing,” Attiah said in an interview, recalling her union representative calling with the news of her win. “My first thought was like, when is the party?”

Post management fired Attiah on September 11, one day after she posted a series of comments on Bluesky about the public’s response to the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination in Utah earlier that day.

“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she wrote in one post. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” another read.

The Post argued Attiah’s comments had “harmed the paper’s reputation and integrity” and “created safety risks” for its staff. It also accused her of violating its social media policy by disparaging white men — a claim the arbitrator said was “unsupported” and “unpersuasive.” 

“The Post, this world-renowned newspaper that’s known for standing up to presidents, authoritarians, and speaking truth to power, was saying, ‘well, we got scared,’” Attiah said. 

Firing Attiah, an 11-year veteran of the paper, was an “absolutely disproportional” penalty, arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa wrote in her decision, which the Washington-Baltimore News Guild shared with Mother Jones.

Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, and in particular since Donald Trump’s return to office, the Post’s opinion section has lurched rightward. In February 2025, Bezos announced that the section would shift its focus to “personal liberties and free markets.” Two months before Attiah was fired, opinion editor Adam O’Neill told Attiah during a meeting that he didn’t think her body of work was consistent with that vision. 

“Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection.”

Her firing ignited concerns about a chilling effect on the press and outrage toward the Post’s leadership. “She was paid, and she was trained, and she was hired to express opinions,” said Amos Laor, general counsel at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, who represented Attiah in the arbitration process. “Obviously, not everyone will agree with a columnist on every issue, but her role is to create lively debate on issues of public concern.”

The Post respects the arbitration process, a spokesperson for the newspaper wrote in an email, but declined to comment further. Attiah says she’s open to returning to her role on the Opinion desk but hasn’t heard from the paper.

“The Post has created quite an awkward situation for themselves,” she said. 

Her case adds to a growing number of firings in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that have proven legally unsound.

“The Charlie Kirk situation caused … institutions to completely have this meltdown of cowardice, fear, temporary insanity,” Attiah said. “Now, they’re facing the year-long Charlie Kirk hangover from their moment of drunkenness — the hangover of having to pay people, of having to reinstate people, of having the negative publicity.”

In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, “we saw a coordinated effort to chill any speech critical of his legacy,” Viktoya Vilk, senior director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, wrote in a statement to Mother Jones. More than 600 people were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined by their employers for their social media posts about Kirk after his death last fall, according to Reuters. 

In the year since, dozens have challenged their firings. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has tracked 28 lawsuits filed in federal court by public employees who were terminated over their Kirk-related posts. Fifteen cases are active, and 13 have been settled, six of those for at least six figures, according to FIRE. 

• Darren Michael, a theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, was reinstated and awarded a $500,000 settlement from the university in January. Austin Peay State’s president also apologized to Michael, who was terminated after he reshared a 2023 article that quoted Kirk saying, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
• An administrative hearing judge ruled Mariah Roller, a Florida public middle school teacher, should be reinstated and receive back pay in August. Roller was suspended after posting criticism of Kirk’s support of the Second Amendment and writing “Bye Charlie,” with a waving emoji and fire emojis.
• Maria Ruhtenberg, a public defender in Iowa, returned to work in November 2025 after appealing her termination and received $125,000 in damages. Ruhtenberg had posted on her private Facebook account “you reap what you sow” and “live by the sword, die by the sword” after Kirk’s death.

Several other employees at public institutions received payouts from their employer, though they didn’t return to work. The University of Tennessee agreed to pay an assistant professor $1.9 million earlier this summer. It had fired the professor, Tamar Shirinian, after she commented on a friend’s Facebook that the “world is better off without [Kirk] in it.” An administrator at Ball State University in Indiana received a $225,000 payout in May. In total, colleges have paid nearly $3 million to employees they fired for their comments about Kirk.

As a private employee, Attiah’s case relied not on the First Amendment but on her contract as a member of the Post’s union, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, whose collective bargaining agreement requires “good and sufficient cause for termination.”

“We don’t have robust speech protections for non-public employees. Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection,” said Matthew W. Finkin, a research professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Only six percent of private-sector workers are unionized, Finkin added.

Still, Attiah sees a common thread between her case and the increasing number of settlements at public institutions.

“Collective hysteria and fear infected so many of the institutions that were supposed to be better than this,” Attiah said of the wave of firings. “[They were] supposed to rise above impulse, supposed to rise above making massive decisions based off of fear and emotion.”

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

As power slowly returns to homes and businesses in Gary and across Northwest Indiana, Black faith leaders and elected officials alike are turning their focus to restoration, accountability, and solutions for future weather events. 

Fewer than 2,500 Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) customers in Gary remained without power as of Tuesday morning, but that is more than 70 percent of the nearly 3,500 customers still without service countywide.

“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis.”

Gary’s prolonged restoration has sparked calls for accountability from residents, faith leaders, and elected officials, including Gov. Mike Braun, who has ordered state utility regulators to investigate NIPSCO’s storm response and spending. The utility also faces a class-action lawsuit over allegations that its vegetation management practices contributed to the widespread outages.

Pastor Eric Boone of Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church in Gary was among the faith leaders who saw firsthand the hardships residents faced during the blackout. “You name it, we saw it,” Boone told Capital B Gary.  

“Some people are 70 and 80 years old, in hot conditions with no air conditioning, and it’s 85 degrees in the house,” Boone said. “People who were already living check to check are now trying to put gas in cars and generators while needing baby formula and diapers. We’ve seen it all.”

Some families even lost their homes, Boone said, prompting him to open the church to temporarily house multiple families.

The length and severity of the outage have drawn attention from religious leaders outside Gary, who have sent resources to the city while also organizing around questions of accountability. The National Baptist Convention on Sunday called for reforms at NIPSCO. Nearly 40 Gary churches have joined in the effort.

In a statement, the Rev. Boise Kimber, pastor of First Calvary Baptist churches in New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, and the convention’s president, said the organization stood in “unyielding solidarity” with Gary residents who had been left without basic necessities.

“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis born of corporate greed and environmental injustice,” Kimber said.

In an interview with Capital B Gary, Kimber said residents should be compensated for what they lost during the outage without being forced to navigate complicated processes.

“We believe all residents should be made whole quickly,” he said. “Too many times…promises are made,” he said, but “barriers have been put in their way. People should not be forced through this unnecessary hurdle.” 

The convention isn’t alone in seeking answers after what became Gary’s worst power outage on record.

After criticizing NIPSCO’s response, Braun called on the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to investigate the company, including how it has spent money collected through rate increases approved by the commission.

“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?…We have a list of demands” for the utility.

“NIPSCO is a monopoly utility that Hoosiers pay every month with the expectation that it will use its considerable resources to maintain its system, prepare for severe weather and restore service as quickly as possible when disaster strikes,” Braun said in a news release. “NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain.”

The pressure from the governor’s mansion comes on the heels of a class-action lawsuit filed in Porter County Superior court on behalf of a woman in nearby Portage and “all similarly situated.” The lawsuit alleges NIPSCO’s vegetation management practices caused or worsened the disruption of electrical service and widespread power outage.  

NIPSCO has denied the allegations.

The company’s response time in Gary has also come under fire from residents and leaders across the state.

At the start, about 370,000 customers countywide were without power, with 36,000 of those being Gary customers. On August 19, more than a week after the storm, Gary still had 22,000 customers off the grid. 

Residents were forced to fend for themselves. 

Dale Pugh, a resident of the city’s 3rd District, said he was grateful to have his power restored, but said the time without electricity was difficult to get through. 

“The house was burning up. We had let up all the windows and open all the doors just to stay cool,” he said. “It was unacceptable.”

Latrice Farmer, a native of the Marshalltown neighborhood, said she was out of town when the storm hit. She said she returned to devastation wider than she’d ever seen.  “I was on the road, and my mom immediately tried to get my aunt out of Marshalltown,” she said. “There’s only two ways in that neighborhood and both of them had a tree down. Residents had to carve themselves out.”

Farmer has been assisting the elderly in her community who have been largely shut in by helping provide meals. Some of her neighbors went a full two weeks without power. 

Gary Mayor Eddie Melton has also criticized the length of the restoration process, drawing on his own experience working for the utility.  “I worked at NIPSCO for 15 years,” he said. “It does not take that long to turn the lights on.”

With power restored to most residents, Melton said his focus with NIPSCO now is on the immediate aftermath and helping residents. 

“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?” Melton said. “We have a list of demands that we present to them. There should be no disconnections for the next 60 to 90 days. There should be no disconnect notices going after folks. What are you going to do to prepare us for the next storm?” 

As Boone continues to serve community members, he said this situation could be a turning point for relations between NIPSCO and the community. 

“It shouldn’t be NIPSCO versus us,” he said. “I believe we are better together, and this storm has fixed it for us to have a relationship that’s beyond them just reading meters and us paying bills.”

A nationwide social media addiction trial against Meta came to an abrupt end on Wednesday, with the company announcing a sweeping settlement with 52 attorneys general. As part of the proposed settlement, the company promised to pay around $18 billion to participating states over a ten-year period and enact a set of changes to make their apps, like Facebook and Instagram, supposedly safer for teenagers, including by enacting a default two-hour limit for teenage users and setting up “night” and “school” modes to block the apps or reduce notifications during certain times. In their press release, the company also pointedly urged rival companies like YouTube and TikTok to do the same. 

“While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day,” the announcement read. “All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.” (Though it was somewhat buried in the announcement, Meta also stipulated that it would only commit to enforcing its time limits and “night” modes for five years, but said it would extend that commitment to ten years “if industry peers sign on to the agreement.”)  

All of this, of course, builds on a series of recent losses for Meta: the company also lost two phases of a similar trial in New Mexico, with the jury finding that the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and intentionally built its products to addict minors. The state also claimed that “Meta’s design features enabled pedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms,” a claim the jury also agreed with. 

These judgments won’t much affect Meta’s bottom line; the company made $200.97 billion in revenue last year. And they also will have virtually no effect on Meta’s emerging focus: becoming, primarily, an AI company. Meta told investors in January that its biggest expense was “employee compensation, driven by investments in technical talent. This includes 2026 hires to support our priority areas, particularly AI.”

And co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg released an addled 6,500 word essay-shaped object on August 10 titled “The Future is For Everyone,” outlining what he called his “positive AI” future. The essay amounted to an argument that AI is good and thus that Meta should be able to keep building data centers wherever it wants, with Zuckerberg claiming that the centers will be “water efficient” and create jobs. (A Meta contractor flushed bacteria-contaminated wastewater into public water systems while building a data center in Wyoming, a controversy Zuckerberg didn’t address.)  

Meta has also aggressively promoted its AI agents for businesses, touting them in a press release as a way for businesses to “show up for every customer as if they had an infinite team behind them.” (Grandiose claims like these have gotten more complicated as Meta, like several other tech companies, have had to disclose that besides working as helpful little robot employees, their AI agents also supposedly hacked into another company’s internal systems during testing.)  

The company’s other big AI-related product rollout is Meta Glasses; the company describes the glasses’ AI capabilities as “a helpful voice in your ear,” which is probably meant to be less chilling than it sounds. But the glasses, too, have been met with intense controversy over privacy and nonconsensual filming using the glasses. They are unpopular in a rich variety of settings: UK cinemas are considering banning them entirely, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has banned employees from wearing them at work. HateAid, a German digital advocacy group, has lodged a criminal complaint seeking to stop them from being sold in that country at all. 

Ironically, another bold Meta AI initiative was internal—and that, too, has been a disaster. Reuters’ Katie Paul reported on Wednesday that Zuckerberg had explored a plan to replace up to 60 percent of Meta staff with AI. Meta’s human staff responded with anger and alarm in internal chatrooms, Paul reported: “One person trolled Zuckerberg, sarcastically likening his internal announcement of an AI initiative for small businesses to Prometheus, the figure from Greek mythology, giving fire to humanity.” Meta staff also had to spend a remarkable amount of time cleaning up messes made by AI, Paul reported: “Major technical and security incidents, such as service disruptions and possible data leaks, spiked 40 percent from the previous year, with the time staffers had to spend “firefighting” them up 70 percent, according to the internal posts.”

Like virtually every other tech company, then, Meta executives have turned from social media as their core product, to a gauzy, pie-eyed future of AI as the future of work, business and everything else.  Laws, legislation and jury settlements are often backwards-looking when it comes to tech companies. This particular settlement attempts to mitigate the harm of their current products, while companies like Meta are already focused, for better or much more likely worse, on what’s next. 

Last night, I watched Straight Talk, the 1992 Dolly vehicle in which the singer plays, yes, a straight-talker from Arkansas who, through a series of highly predictable accidents, becomes Chicago’s biggest radio talk-show host, dishing out salty Dollyisms to the city’s brokenhearted.

Giddy with her sudden fame and riches, her character wants to buy champagne for an entire restaurant. “Money’s meant to be spent, right?” she coos to a love interest (James Woods! Of all people.) “What good’s it going to do anybody in the bottom of my panty drawer!”

For the country superstar, who died yesterday at 80, the wisecrack could have been a creed for her own life, one defined by extraordinary generosity and a fierce loyalty to the underdog.

Vaccine hero

As Covid tore through America, Dolly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which worked with the drug company Moderna to develop its cutting-edge vaccine. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she quipped in a tweet accompanying a video of her getting the jab, in which she urged others to follow suit and called those still resisting the shot “chicken squat.” She even sang a reworked version of her megahit “Jolene”: 

“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, ’cause once you’re dead then that’s a bit too late.”  

According to the New York Times, Dr. Mark Denison, who led the research, credited Parton’s donation with funding its critical early stages.

Paying her union dues

For nearly 60 years, Dolly Parton kept up her membership in the Nashville Association of Musicians (AFM Local 257)—a notable commitment in Tennessee, a right-to-work state with one of the nation’s lowest union participation rates.

In a statement posted to social media, the union hailed Parton “as a steadfast champion for working musicians” who filed union contracts “for gigs, sessions, and tours.” It added that “her extensive charitable work was never about public perception—she gave simply because she truly cared, always doing everything the right way to make sure that people were taken care of.”

The American Federation of Musicians, the major labor union representing professional musicians in North America, is paying tribute to Dolly Parton, who was a member of its Nashville Local 257 for 58 years.

AFM says that for decades, Dolly consistently filed union contracts for… pic.twitter.com/DhjhkU65nZ

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 25, 2026 Her greatest achievement: Books, books, books

Much has already been written about Parton’s celebrated Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in East Tennessee in 1995 that would eventually send hundreds of millions of free books to enrolled children every month. It was inspired by her father, who Parton said could not read or write.

I learned about a lesser-known side of the charity when Dolly visited my home country, Australia, where Imagination Library runs a local partnership: Its strong focus on Indigenous authors and illustrators.

“We’re currently supporting 50,000 children and their families,” Dr. Lyndsey McKee, CEO of United Way, the local operator, told Australia’s ABC News Radio after Parton’s death. Ten percent of the books sent are First Nations titles, and 70 percent are Australian. Children on the program are nine times more likely to be interested in books, McKee said, citing the “absolute joy of reading books.” Adult literacy is improving too, she said, a ripple effect of helping families put reading at the heart of home life.

And Parton didn’t base the library in Sydney or Melbourne. She launched it in 2019 in the regional town of Tamworth—Australia’s country music mecca, our very own Nashville.

“Children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”

Lisa Rennie of the Tamworth Imagination Library celebrated Dolly’s impact on young Indigenous readers, a group for whom literacy remains a major challenge, in an interview with Australian broadcaster SBS. One Indigenous boy “pointed to the book and he said he never knew children of his color skin could fly a plane,” Rennie said. “So children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”

“That’s a wonderful gift that Dolly has given to us here in Tamworth,” Cheryl Brown, Tamworth Country Music Festival coordinator, told SBS. “And we will certainly endeavor to carry that on forever.”

The program also runs in the UK, Canada, and Ireland.

A strident LGBTQ ally

Dolly used to joke that if she was a man, she’d be a drag queen. In fact, she once entered a lookalike drag competition as herself—and lost. She was an indefatigable defender of her gay fans, guarding against hate and championing the underdog with her trademark compassion.

“They’ve made me the poster child, I think, only because I’m so outspoken as far as being accepting of people in general,” Parton told Larry King, who asked her in 2016 if her support attracted criticism from conservative groups. “I do not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are.”

“I got too much to do on my own to do God’s work too,” she added. “We are who we are. If you’re gay you’re gay, if you’re straight you’re straight.”

I’ll let Dolly speak for herself:

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

A $500 million Biden-era grant to decarbonize steelmaking has been refashioned by the Trump administration to upgrade a coal-fueled blast furnace in southern Ohio.

On Friday, Cleveland-Cliffs confirmed that the US Department of Energy had changed the scope of the previously awarded funding for Cliffs’ Middletown steel mill—the longtime economic engine of Vice President JD Vance’s hometown. Vance and Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited the plant on Friday to tout the federal investment.

“The DOE’s support for this project is a testament to the importance of preserving the blast furnace route to produce automotive-exposed grade steels in the US,” Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves said in a statement. The Middletown plant makes steel used in the exposed parts of cars, trucks, and SUVs.

Today’s announcement makes official what Cliffs has been signaling would happen in recent months. The change of plans has drawn pushback from green-steel advocates and some Middletown residents, who say they are dismayed that funding meant to slash industrial emissions could potentially amp up local air pollution instead.

“Cleveland-Cliffs and JD Vance need to get rid of coal and go back to the original project that would clean up the air we breathe and improve our health,” Donna Ballinger, who lives in the shadows of the Middletown steel mill, said Friday in a news release shared by the Sierra Club.

Cliffs initially planned to use its half-billion-dollar award to replace its aging blast furnace with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology and electric furnaces. In March 2024, the Biden administration’s DOE chose Middletown as the place to unveil its broader, $6.3 billion program for decarbonizing key US manufacturing sectors, which was primarily funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Globally, iron and steel production generates roughly 9 percent of human-caused CO2 emissions every year, and the vast majority of that pollution comes from using coal in blast furnaces. Replacing the centuries-old technology is considered key to limiting the worst impacts of climate change, and global efforts to clean up steelmaking are advancing, though in fits and starts.

Cliffs’ original project would’ve replaced coal with natural gas—and eventually hydrogen—eliminating roughly 1 million tons of planet-warming emissions. But after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the Ohio-based steelmaker recommitted itself to using ​“beautiful coal” at the Middletown steel mill.

Under its current plan, Cliffs says it will refurbish and optimize the 73-year-old blast furnace so that it can run for potentially another two decades. The manufacturer will also install a cogeneration plant that uses waste gases from the blast furnace to generate steam and electricity for the steel mill’s operations. Cliffs said it will invest $500 million of its own money to match DOE’s grant.

Cliffs first outlined the new direction in a February air-permit application submitted to Ohio’s environmental regulator. It wasn’t clear then whether this work would be funded by the DOE, given the nature of the grant program.

However, in July, Goncalves said during an earnings call that the company aimed to redirect the $500 million grant to align with the Trump administration’s priorities. Friday’s announcement cements those plans, with the DOE having ​“established a framework for Cliffs to finalize negotiations and implementation plans” for the Middletown project, Cliffs said.

In a news release, the DOE said the company ​“determined that the business case for the original project scope no longer made sense given customers’ unwillingness to pay a ​‘green premium’ for steel. Working with the DOE, Cleveland-Cliffs identified a viable alternative that will upgrade and improve the efficiency of its existing coal-fired blast furnace” while also capturing waste gas.

A former DOE official noted that Congress legally mandated that the grant funding be used to, in the words of the Inflation Reduction Act, enable ​“advanced industrial technology”—defined as something ​“designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emission reduction progress to net-zero at an eligible facility.”

The Middletown project’s revised scope will move the steel mill away from achieving net-zero emissions, not toward it, the former official said.

As Cliffs sees it, the steelmaker is ​“going above and beyond a standard blast furnace reline, to include the most advanced technology available,” Goncalves said in Friday’s statement, referring to the cogeneration plant and other planned energy-efficiency improvements.

“Cleveland-Cliffs is making a decisive investment in the future of American steelmaking and manufacturing,” he said.

If you want to get acquainted with Brandon Herrera, the gun influencer currently favored to win a tight congressional race in South Texas, his YouTube channel offers many opportunities. You could feast your eyes on his most-watched video, with 13 million views, wherein he uses a rifle and head and torso ballistics models to recreate the assassination of JFK. Or there’s the one where he calls a World War II-era machine gun the “original ghetto blaster” and goose-steps to the tune of Nazi military songs. In an episode of his podcast, he brags about owning a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and, departing from his interest in Nazis, he has also appeared with the neo-Confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans and calls the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.”

In an article about Herrera’s excesses and his successes, the New York Times declined to print some of his most profane viral statements “because this is a family newspaper.” I suspect Mother Jones readers may prefer the unabridged edition, so here goes: In a 2023 video, Herrera referred to children as “cum trophies.” Of mothers’ views on current events, he said, “Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.” When Austin-American-Statesman reporter Faith Bugenhagen asked the Herrera campaign about those remarks, the team replied with a photo of a cream pie (the baked good, to be clear).

Herrera, whose campaign slogan, naturally, is “Let’s Go Brandon,” is what’s known in online parlance as an edgelord—an influencer whose entire brand consists of off-color jokes and offensive remarks designed to titillate, outrage, and garner attention. This gambit is not new; the shock jocks of talk radio’s glory days (think early Howard Stern) figured this formula out decades ago—though at 30, he wouldn’t remember all that.

But these days, shit posting alone is not enough to win votes; witness the recent crashing and burning of James Fishback, the Florida groyper who lost the Republican gubernatorial primary with only 10 percent of the vote. Or the case of Casey Putsch, the Ohio challenger to Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor whose campaign included antisemitic dogwhistles. In that primary, Putsch got just 17.5 percent of the vote. 

What sets Herrera apart from these mere provocateurs is his massive online fanbase: 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube, where he is known as the AK Guy, after the abbreviation for Avtomat Kalashnikova, the Russian phrase for automatic rifle. His 12-year-old channel is a mix of gun history, memes, and genuine feats of engineering. In 2024, wearing a “More Liberty Less Government” t-shirt, he successfully built and fired the prototype of an AK-50, a long-range rifle that has long been the holy grail of automatic weapon enthusiasts.

Herrera in his AK-50 video.YouTube

Herrera’s success proves that a candidate can harness an online following into a formidable campaign—one whose true supporters are not voters in his district but rather a geographically dispersed, chronically online group of (mostly-male) fans. This model is adjacent to the “network state,” a concept coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and a former colleague of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen. In Srinivasan’s vision, digital networks can amass physical land, forming new sovereign nations. Herrera’s campaign proves they can do something potentially even more powerful: They can accumulate an impressive amount of political capital—thus transforming a scattered online audience into a powerful base and financing juggernaut.

Indeed, Herrera’s campaign is funded almost entirely by people outside his district. In recent months, he has solicited campaign donations on his YouTube channel, sometimes offering donors entry into a raffle for a Cold War-era collector’s item, an AC-556 machine gun. What he does with his donations is unclear; they are funneled through an unregistered opaque entity. Jacob Ware, an extremism researcher with Georgetown University and the author of the 2025 book God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, has observed this phenomenon firsthand. “In the past people would have idiosyncratic or individual ideas but wouldn’t be able to build political movements on that because they were just so disparate,” he said. But now, thanks in large part to social media, this scattered group of people can come together around a shared interest to back “a local candidate and pour their resources and hopes and dreams into him, thinking this is a foothold in the national political picture.”

What makes the success of this impassioned Second Amendment advocate even more improbable is that his district includes the sites of two high-profile mass shootings: Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022, and El Paso, where a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019. A poll earlier this year conducted by the gun control advocacy group Giffords surveyed 600 likely Texas Republican voters in the Senate runoff and found overwhelming support for firearm safety policies like background checks and red-flag laws.

Despite those headwinds, as of mid-August, Herrera was leading his opponent, Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, by six points. He has also garnered powerful endorsements from like-minded celebrities, including right-wing podcasters Tim Pool and Benny Johnson as well as a motley crew of organizations: the Freedom Caucus Fund, MAHA Action, and the National Women’s Prayer and Voting Army, to name a few.

Conspicuously absent is the National Rifle Association, which Herrera has criticized for being a fusty boomer relic that is overly accommodating to gun safety groups. After initially supporting Tony Gonzales, Herrera’s opponent in the primary, House Speaker Mike Johnson did an about-face this summer and began campaigning for Herrera. As someone who has tirelessly promoted traditional family values, Johnson is an awkward spokesman for a candidate whose statements about children and mothers are profane enough to exclude them from the pages of the New York Times. No such awkwardness faces President Donald Trump, who endorsed Herrera in a March post on Truth Social: “Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas, and Republicans in the US House,” he wrote. “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

Raised in a military family in the Fort Bragg-adjacent community of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Herrera’s interest in firearms began in middle school and obviously never waned. He dabbled in building guns as a teen. After a short undergrad stint as a pre-law student at a nearby Christian college, he dropped out to focus full time on manufacturing firearms through his business, The AK Guy Inc., and building his YouTube channel. In 2020, he moved to Texas, where he plugged into a thriving community of firearms enthusiasts and launched his gunsmithing company. The following year, he built and fired the AK-50, a move that immediately increased his prestige in the firearms world.

“If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution. We will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”

The Uvalde school shooting happened two years after Herrera moved to Texas, and in response, lawmakers in the state introduced new legislation to tighten firearm regulation. Tony Gonzales, the Republican who represented Texas’ 23rd district, was the only Republican to vote in favor of the new law—so Herrera took it upon himself to unseat him. “If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution,” he warned Gonzales at a 2024 gun rights rally in Colorado, “we will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”

Herrera did not, in fact, take Gonzales’ fucking job in the 2024 election cycle—he lost, but barely. Gonzales won by 1 percent, a margin of about 400 votes. Two years later in this election cycle, Herrera ran another extremely tight race, drawing 41 percent of the vote to Gonzales’ 43 percent, thus triggering a runoff. But two days after the primary, Gonzales suspended his campaign (and later resigned) after being accused of having had a sexual relationship with an employee who later committed suicide. In his victory speech, Herrera thanked “all those #TX23 constituents that support our campaign.”

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz raises Brandon Herrera’s hand after both speak at a rally for Herrera in March 2024. Herrera was campaigning with Matt Gaetz before his runoff against US Rep. Tony Gonzales.Jessica Phelps/San Antonio Express-News; Getty

In reality, the support of all those #TX23 constituents appears to be dwarfed by the support of internet randos. Just shy of 96 percent of individual contributions to his campaign came from donors outside his district—and 84 percent were from a different state. The Federal Election Commission’s database revealed donors from nearly every state, from many walks of life. Top individual donors included former Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz and billionaire and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, each of whom has given the maximum individual donation of$12,000. Other donors of more than $1,000 included Silicon Valley managers, a Campbell’s soup factory worker, a technician at a Toyota plant, an associate producer at National Public Radio, and many retirees.

Herrera’s fundraising isn’t the only unconventional part of his campaign finance activities. His federal disclosures list a single mysterious entity as the recipient of more than 99 percent of the campaign’s spending—more than $2.7 million. That entity, a business called Texas Strategy Group, doesn’t appear to be listed in any registry as a commercial vendor. In May, the election spending watchdog Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint about Herrera’s campaign with the FEC, alleging that Texas Strategy Group is “a mere shell entity established to serve as a payment clearinghouse for the committees to conceal who they are actually paying.”

Herrera’s campaign didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones about the Texas Strategy Group or anything else. The FEC, meanwhile, is unlikely to act on the allegations any time soon—because the agency currently has only two commissioners, and four are required to enforce campaign spending rules. This lack of oversight has created a free-for-all, creating a gray area for rules around campaign transparency, said Campaign Legal Center’s director for federal campaign finance reform, Saurav Ghosh. His organization has documented several other such cases recently—but the proportion of spending that Herrera’s campaign sends to Texas Strategy Group, he said, puts it “really at the far end of the spectrum.”

It’s unclear whether Herrera’s far-flung donors are concerned about where their money is going. David Meyers, a researcher with the campaign watchdog group Open Secrets, told me the nationalization of local races has become increasingly common, but even in that context, Herrera’s reliance on donors outside of his own district is “an outlier.” His YouTube following was likely playing a key role in driving those out-of-district contributions, Meyers said, and noted, “Having that kind of presence on an issue that people care about is going to help drive those donations.”

Real estate developer and investor Josh Abbotoy has thought a lot about the qualities that allow online communities to amass real-world power. Abbotoy is the founder of the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America in which, as it has outlined in the “philosophy” section of its website, “our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”

Tapping into communities that share those values has worked to Abbotoy’s advantage—he has sold land to friend groups “that wanted to go in together to buy a property somewhere, but they could never quite reach critical mass,” he said. “But then when you build like a neighborhood like that, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll just all buy in there.’” The people who have coalesced around Abbotoy’s Highland Rim Project are not the same as Herrera’s gun-fanatic followers, but both are striking examples of the increasing political and economic relevance of shared-interest digital communities: in Abbotoy’s case, an IRL community, and in Herrera’s, a formidable, galvanized political force.

Of course, there are other reasons for Herrera’s success. Jason Blazakis, a researcher who oversees Middlebury College’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, sees House Speaker Mike Johnson’s endorsement as a shrewd political move aimed at uniting an increasingly fractured national base. Johnson’s endorsement of Herrera, he added, could even be interpreted as an “olive branch” between the pro-Israel camp, which Johnson supports, and Herrera-aligned America-first anti-interventionists. “It makes sense to see someone like Johnson try to prop up someone like Herrera to show that there is a broad tent within the Republican Party,” despite Herrera’s profane persona being out of step with Johnson’s wholesome image, he said.

When news outlets have confronted Herrera with his most controversial statements, Herrera has dismissed them; he was obviously being ironic, he says, and if you didn’t understand that, you are clearly a humorless scold. As he told the New York Times, “I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment.”

But some of his followers appear to be taking him literally. Take Robin Westman, the gunman who killed two children and injured 17 people at a Catholic church in Minneapolis before taking his own life last year. In a video he made shortly before his deadly rampage, Westman spoke favorably of Herrera. “He and I had a conversation, a brief conversation,” Westman said. “We agreed on a lot of things. So, y’all should vote for Brandon Herrera for president.”

Herrera later said in a tweet he didn’t remember meeting Westman, and that he was “sickened and angry about this clearly hate-motivated attack on innocent children, and disgusted that my name came out of this demon’s mouth.”

But his followers, more than a thousand of whom rushed to defend him in the comments on that tweet, didn’t appear to be concerned. “You were clearly only singled out by the shooter as a ridiculous attempt to smear your name,” tweeted an X account named Roman Helmet Guy.  “They will always come for the most effective voices in any natural freedom movement,” added a user named Patri0t. “This is planned.” A third saw it as a political sign. “If this isn’t a sign that Brandon Herrera is the right guy for the job,” the user wrote, “I don’t know what is.”

Over the course of nearly a month, Lindsay Clancy has stood trial for the January 2023 killings of her three young children, a catastrophic tragedy that has riveted the country. The scenes unfolding in Judge William Sullivan’s courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, have been excruciating.

“I can’t do this,” Clancy sobbed at one point, as testimony about the fatal injuries she inflicted on her children was delivered. Patrick, Clancy’s former husband, who has publicly forgiven her, took the stand amid viral conspiracy theories suggesting that he was the one who really killed their children. Then there were the family members, including Clancy’s mother and sister, who testified to Clancy’s declining mental health in the months before she killed her children, forcing them to relive the pain of a loved one struggling to get the help she begged for. Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, hundreds of people, mostly women, have turned up to support Clancy. Many argue they could have easily been in her place because of the systemic failures around maternal health. Indeed, postpartum psychosis affects roughly one to two out of every 1,000 women after giving birth.

One must wonder if prosecutors ever regret the decision to go to trial.

“It’s a witch hunt for fame,” forensic psychologist Leslie Dobson told a criminal justice podcast in early August, arguing that prosecutors should have offered a plea agreement and civil commitment rather than push a murder trial. “If the prosecutors think they’re winning by winning, they’re horrible people.” The rage resonates across social media, where threads pondering the same themes are rampant, and the prosecution’s strategies, including invoking “mortal sin” in questioning Patrick Clancy’s mother, have been roundly condemned. “This prosecution is a malicious circus with no benefit,” one observer wrote on Facebook.

Lindsay Clancy holds her head as she listens to a description of her children’s injuries during her murder trial August 18, 2026, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.John Tlumacki/Boston Globe/AP

To be sure, Clancy has her detractors. There are those, including prominent right-wing commentators, who call her a “monster” who methodically killed her children and should be punished. Others, like Katie Miller, go further: “Lindsay Clancy deserves to die for murdering her three children.”

Such exhortations for severe punishment tend to elide two certainties: No one, neither Clancy nor her defense team, disputes that she killed her children. And regardless of a verdict, Clancy will never be free. Even if she wins, she will be committed, likely for life, to a psychiatric hospital. Which forces an uncomfortable question: Should this ever have gone to trial?

I spoke with Marisol Orihuela, a clinical professor at Yale Law School and director of the Mental Health Justice Clinic, about the avenues the prosecution could have pursued—and the inherent challenges of evaluating mental health within the American criminal justice system.

Let’s start by defining what it means to evaluate competency to stand trial. What is the difference between competency and the insanity defense?

That’s a great question, because the two can often get confused. Anyone criminally charged in the United States has a due process right to be competent during certain critical moments in criminal proceedings. That includes pleading guilty or standing trial. When someone does not have a rational understanding of the proceedings or cannot rationally assist in their defense, then they do not have the competency to stand trial, and the prosecution cannot proceed. That is different from what we call the insanity defense, or a defense where someone is not criminally responsible for the actions that occurred based on a mental health condition. That has more to do with someone’s ability to appreciate right from wrong at the time of the offense.

“There is another justification in criminal law: retribution…I think that’s what might be one of the motivators for this prosecution.”

My understanding of what the commonwealth is arguing is that Lindsay Clancy wanted to and tried to specifically kill the children and had the intent to kill the children and knew what she was doing. Competency is not an issue here. It’s really about criminal responsibility, which also matters for what happens after the trial. In jurisdictions around the country, when someone is acquitted based on a mental health condition, what follows is commitment based on that status.

In the Clancy trial, what incentivizes prosecutors to deliver such a harsh sentence?

If we give every benefit of the doubt to the commonwealth in this case, we would have to think that they really believe that she is criminally responsible, that she understood right from wrong. And the way that we give meaning to that is to provide a very lengthy sentence. We call these justifications for sentencing and how to respond to crimes through sentencing. Another justification is what we call deterrence: an effort to prevent this person from doing it again or to send a message to the rest of the community so nobody else does it. Prosecutors might think that they need to deliver a hefty sentence to send that message.

But here in this case, Clancy is not going to be free, no matter what happens. And I think there’s a really good debate about what role deterrence has here. But there is another justification in criminal law: retribution. That you did something really wrong, so we’re going to give meaning to that wrongness by imposing a lengthy sentence—and I think that might be one of the motivators for this prosecution. I haven’t watched the whole trial, but the parts I have watched and some of the questions, specifically how they’re phrased by the prosecution, suggest a level of blame-worthiness on Lindsay Clancy, especially for having concerns about taking medication.

Another feature of the Clancy trial I found illustrative of the way our society treats mental health as an individual responsibility is some of the resources that were provided to Lindsay when she sought help. For example, when asked what resources were offered to her upon discharge from one of the treatment facilities, one of the psychiatrists pointed to a guide to going on Psychology Today, which, as many can relate to, isn’t exactly adequate. People who turn to it still have a really tough time finding care. Thinking that Psychology Today is an appropriate resource for someone who might be in crisis is a real thing that we should talk about. Yet it’s being presented as, “How could Lindsay not have done more?”

Similarly, another psychiatrist testified that Lindsay was able to access care on the online portal and that she could have easily contacted her provider for additional crisis resources. But this expectation that someone in crisis is going to have the wherewithal to go on an online portal to find out the right information, as opposed to trying to make information immediately available to them in any particular moment, or having follow-ups of people who are calling her, is another illustration of how we see how we have a system that’s really based on individual responsibility and an assumption that treatment is easy and that it always works.

I’ve seen the argument floating around that this case never should have gone to trial. Can you speak to that?

I don’t know a ton about what happened in plea negotiations; I only know what’s been reported in the news. But my understanding is that the defense would have agreed to a plea of the commission of the acts but that Clancy was not criminally responsible based on her mental health condition at the time of the offense. In other words, an agreement to commitment under that statutory scheme. But the prosecution was not interested in that. The thing to know is that the prosecution, in this case, the government, can decide whether they think it is valuable to its jurisdiction to proceed with a criminal trial. So they made that decision. Why? I don’t know the factors that went into that decision. But I think that people are raising really good questions about the decision to go to trial. Because trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.

“Trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.”

There are other victims in this case. The husband. He lost three children. His family is a victim. The grandparents who testified. They lost three grandchildren. I even wonder what it’s like to be one of the medical professionals that attempted to treat Lindsay. Assuming the best intentions for each medical professional, they wanted Lindsay to be well, and Lindsay was not well, and that has to be a difficult thing for a doctor. Now these individuals are being put through a lengthy trial. So again, I think there are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what. So what is a trial really doing in this case? And is it worth the costs of what they’re imposing on everybody going through it?

How does the legal system hurt people with mental health vulnerabilities? Why are prosecutors so incentivized to deliver harsh sentences, and how does this come up in cases involving mental health?

I could not do that question justice. But the mental health system and the criminal system have long been in conversation. Because the criminal system does not exist separate of the mental health system. Both because jails and prisons are massive providers of mental health care to the population doesn’t necessarily mean that they provide great mental healthcare, and because there are so many individuals in the criminal system who have mental health conditions. This is one of the main places where people get some kind of mental healthcare.

“There are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what.”

They’re also really related because of exactly the kind of things that are getting reported about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is that even if her defense team is successful in having her not be held criminally responsible for the killing of her children, that does not mean that Lindsay Clancy goes and lives a life that you and I may be living. Like, she will not be going to get ice cream tomorrow or to the grocery store or hold a job. She will be committed to a facility that we call a hospital, but in many ways bears resemblance to a jail or prison, in that she is not free to leave, that she will be forced to undergo the treatment that is being offered to her, and will likely be detained for very long periods of time, if not for the rest of her life. Which brings up the question that some people are talking about, which is: What is the value of a criminal prosecution when incapacitation could be met through other avenues?

Psychosis is already so misunderstood among the general public, how it operates, that it can wax and wane, etc. How does the legal system fail to address conditions like psychosis?

The legal system has expectations for what should flow when something is attempted. But mental health conditions can be very complex, and the legal system is not designed for the nuance needed to handle them. In my work representing people with significant mental disabilities, both in the criminal system and in the civil commitment system, different mental health conditions can have overlapping criteria. For example, sometimes doctors will have different views about what the actual mental health condition that a particular individual meets criteria for. The criminal system wants to have criminal responsibility flow from a set of actions and wants to know intent. And intent is a very difficult concept to understand and to prove, particularly when we’re talking about a moment in time that has passed.

It’s all so depressing.

It’s very sad. But I think that’s one of the things that appears to be resonating for many people who are tuning in to this trial: that this is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing that has happened to three young kids and that every aspect of this is incredibly sad. And people are wondering about how we provide mental healthcare to try and avoid things like this happening. It is all incredibly sad.

What are some ways society can center mental health to help prevent these kinds of tragedies?

Everybody wants to know what kind of world we could build to avoid the awful tragedy that occurred. We won’t ever know exactly what could have prevented it. But this case is not just raising questions around the mental healthcare system, but also more broadly, including postpartum care in general. One of the things to think about in the mental healthcare system is that we underfund community-based supportive mental healthcare systems, both at the beginning and after any period of commitment. Testimony from the Clancy trial really illustrates that postpartum and mental healthcare were not thought of holistically. So you could imagine people who go to the home and provide both medication management therapy and postpartum care. That’s helping take care of the kids, helping get Lindsay to sleep, which seemed to be a significant issue for her in the months preceding the killings. These are the kinds of things that a society that prioritizes care as a normative matter does, where we approach getting people support and care as something that we really value, and do it as a matter of economics. That this is where we choose to spend the dollars that we have.

Over the course of nearly a month, Lindsay Clancy has stood trial for the January 2023 killings of her three young children, a catastrophic tragedy that has riveted the country. The scenes unfolding in Judge William Sullivan’s courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, have been excruciating.

“I can’t do this,” Clancy sobbed at one point, as testimony about the fatal injuries she inflicted on her children was delivered. Patrick, Clancy’s former husband, who has publicly forgiven her, took the stand amid viral conspiracy theories suggesting that he was the one who really killed their children. Then there were the family members, including Clancy’s mother and sister, who testified to Clancy’s declining mental health in the months before she killed her children, forcing them to relive the pain of a loved one struggling to get the help she begged for. Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, hundreds of people, mostly women, have turned up to support Clancy. Many argue they could have easily been in her place because of the systemic failures around maternal health. Indeed, postpartum psychosis affects roughly one to two out of every 1,000 women after giving birth.

One must wonder if prosecutors ever regret the decision to go to trial.

“It’s a witch hunt for fame,” forensic psychologist Leslie Dobson told a criminal justice podcast in early August, arguing that prosecutors should have offered a plea agreement and civil commitment rather than push a murder trial. “If the prosecutors think they’re winning by winning, they’re horrible people.” The rage resonates across social media, where threads pondering the same themes are rampant, and the prosecution’s strategies, including invoking “mortal sin” in questioning Patrick Clancy’s mother, have been roundly condemned. “This prosecution is a malicious circus with no benefit,” one observer wrote on Facebook.

Lindsay Clancy holds her head as she listens to a description of her children’s injuries during her murder trial August 18, 2026, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.John Tlumacki/Boston Globe/AP

To be sure, Clancy has her detractors. There are those, including prominent right-wing commentators, who call her a “monster” who methodically killed her children and should be punished. Others, like Katie Miller, go further: “Lindsay Clancy deserves to die for murdering her three children.”

Such exhortations for severe punishment tend to elide two certainties: No one, neither Clancy nor her defense team, disputes that she killed her children. And regardless of a verdict, Clancy will never be free. Even if she wins, she will be committed, likely for life, to a psychiatric hospital. Which forces an uncomfortable question: Should this ever have gone to trial?

I spoke with Marisol Orihuela, a clinical professor at Yale Law School and director of the Mental Health Justice Clinic, about the avenues the prosecution could have pursued—and the inherent challenges of evaluating mental health within the American criminal justice system.

Let’s start by defining what it means to evaluate competency to stand trial. What is the difference between competency and the insanity defense?

That’s a great question, because the two can often get confused. Anyone criminally charged in the United States has a due process right to be competent during certain critical moments in criminal proceedings. That includes pleading guilty or standing trial. When someone does not have a rational understanding of the proceedings or cannot rationally assist in their defense, then they do not have the competency to stand trial, and the prosecution cannot proceed. That is different from what we call the insanity defense, or a defense where someone is not criminally responsible for the actions that occurred based on a mental health condition. That has more to do with someone’s ability to appreciate right from wrong at the time of the offense.

“There is another justification in criminal law: retribution…I think that’s what might be one of the motivators for this prosecution.”

My understanding of what the commonwealth is arguing is that Lindsay Clancy wanted to and tried to specifically kill the children and had the intent to kill the children and knew what she was doing. Competency is not an issue here. It’s really about criminal responsibility, which also matters for what happens after the trial. In jurisdictions around the country, when someone is acquitted based on a mental health condition, what follows is commitment based on that status.

In the Clancy trial, what incentivizes prosecutors to deliver such a harsh sentence?

If we give every benefit of the doubt to the commonwealth in this case, we would have to think that they really believe that she is criminally responsible, that she understood right from wrong. And the way that we give meaning to that is to provide a very lengthy sentence. We call these justifications for sentencing and how to respond to crimes through sentencing. Another justification is what we call deterrence: an effort to prevent this person from doing it again or to send a message to the rest of the community so nobody else does it. Prosecutors might think that they need to deliver a hefty sentence to send that message.

But here in this case, Clancy is not going to be free, no matter what happens. And I think there’s a really good debate about what role deterrence has here. But there is another justification in criminal law: retribution. That you did something really wrong, so we’re going to give meaning to that wrongness by imposing a lengthy sentence—and I think that might be one of the motivators for this prosecution. I haven’t watched the whole trial, but the parts I have watched and some of the questions, specifically how they’re phrased by the prosecution, suggest a level of blame-worthiness on Lindsay Clancy, especially for having concerns about taking medication.

Another feature of the Clancy trial I found illustrative of the way our society treats mental health as an individual responsibility is some of the resources that were provided to Lindsay when she sought help. For example, when asked what resources were offered to her upon discharge from one of the treatment facilities, one of the psychiatrists pointed to a guide to going on Psychology Today, which, as many can relate to, isn’t exactly adequate. People who turn to it still have a really tough time finding care. Thinking that Psychology Today is an appropriate resource for someone who might be in crisis is a real thing that we should talk about. Yet it’s being presented as, “How could Lindsay not have done more?”

Similarly, another psychiatrist testified that Lindsay was able to access care on the online portal and that she could have easily contacted her provider for additional crisis resources. But this expectation that someone in crisis is going to have the wherewithal to go on an online portal to find out the right information, as opposed to trying to make information immediately available to them in any particular moment, or having follow-ups of people who are calling her, is another illustration of how we see how we have a system that’s really based on individual responsibility and an assumption that treatment is easy and that it always works.

I’ve seen the argument floating around that this case never should have gone to trial. Can you speak to that?

I don’t know a ton about what happened in plea negotiations; I only know what’s been reported in the news. But my understanding is that the defense would have agreed to a plea of the commission of the acts but that Clancy was not criminally responsible based on her mental health condition at the time of the offense. In other words, an agreement to commitment under that statutory scheme. But the prosecution was not interested in that. The thing to know is that the prosecution, in this case, the government, can decide whether they think it is valuable to its jurisdiction to proceed with a criminal trial. So they made that decision. Why? I don’t know the factors that went into that decision. But I think that people are raising really good questions about the decision to go to trial. Because trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.

“Trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.”

There are other victims in this case. The husband. He lost three children. His family is a victim. The grandparents who testified. They lost three grandchildren. I even wonder what it’s like to be one of the medical professionals that attempted to treat Lindsay. Assuming the best intentions for each medical professional, they wanted Lindsay to be well, and Lindsay was not well, and that has to be a difficult thing for a doctor. Now these individuals are being put through a lengthy trial. So again, I think there are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what. So what is a trial really doing in this case? And is it worth the costs of what they’re imposing on everybody going through it?

How does the legal system hurt people with mental health vulnerabilities? Why are prosecutors so incentivized to deliver harsh sentences, and how does this come up in cases involving mental health?

I could not do that question justice. But the mental health system and the criminal system have long been in conversation. Because the criminal system does not exist separate of the mental health system. Both because jails and prisons are massive providers of mental health care to the population doesn’t necessarily mean that they provide great mental healthcare, and because there are so many individuals in the criminal system who have mental health conditions. This is one of the main places where people get some kind of mental healthcare.

“There are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what.”

They’re also really related because of exactly the kind of things that are getting reported about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is that even if her defense team is successful in having her not be held criminally responsible for the killing of her children, that does not mean that Lindsay Clancy goes and lives a life that you and I may be living. Like, she will not be going to get ice cream tomorrow or to the grocery store or hold a job. She will be committed to a facility that we call a hospital, but in many ways bears resemblance to a jail or prison, in that she is not free to leave, that she will be forced to undergo the treatment that is being offered to her, and will likely be detained for very long periods of time, if not for the rest of her life. Which brings up the question that some people are talking about, which is: What is the value of a criminal prosecution when incapacitation could be met through other avenues?

Psychosis is already so misunderstood among the general public, how it operates, that it can wax and wane, etc. How does the legal system fail to address conditions like psychosis?

The legal system has expectations for what should flow when something is attempted. But mental health conditions can be very complex, and the legal system is not designed for the nuance needed to handle them. In my work representing people with significant mental disabilities, both in the criminal system and in the civil commitment system, different mental health conditions can have overlapping criteria. For example, sometimes doctors will have different views about what the actual mental health condition that a particular individual meets criteria for. The criminal system wants to have criminal responsibility flow from a set of actions and wants to know intent. And intent is a very difficult concept to understand and to prove, particularly when we’re talking about a moment in time that has passed.

It’s all so depressing.

It’s very sad. But I think that’s one of the things that appears to be resonating for many people who are tuning in to this trial: that this is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing that has happened to three young kids and that every aspect of this is incredibly sad. And people are wondering about how we provide mental healthcare to try and avoid things like this happening. It is all incredibly sad.

What are some ways society can center mental health to help prevent these kinds of tragedies?

Everybody wants to know what kind of world we could build to avoid the awful tragedy that occurred. We won’t ever know exactly what could have prevented it. But this case is not just raising questions around the mental healthcare system, but also more broadly, including postpartum care in general. One of the things to think about in the mental healthcare system is that we underfund community-based supportive mental healthcare systems, both at the beginning and after any period of commitment. Testimony from the Clancy trial really illustrates that postpartum and mental healthcare were not thought of holistically. So you could imagine people who go to the home and provide both medication management therapy and postpartum care. That’s helping take care of the kids, helping get Lindsay to sleep, which seemed to be a significant issue for her in the months preceding the killings. These are the kinds of things that a society that prioritizes care as a normative matter does, where we approach getting people support and care as something that we really value, and do it as a matter of economics. That this is where we choose to spend the dollars that we have.

The Supreme Court may be deferential to President Donald Trump and the legal arguments put forward by his Justice Department. But when it comes to their own physical safety, the justices seem to view the administration with appropriate skepticism.

The court is now ditching the longtime protection of the executive branch’s US Marshals Service, and instead creating a robust, in-house security force to guard themselves at all times. Though famously without its own army, the Supreme Court is building up its own police.

While the new security seems necessary, the change is also the product of the world the Roberts Court has built: one where the executive branch cannot be trusted, a violence-prone political movement has returned to power, dangerous people have readier access to firearms, and the justices decide the biggest political questions of the day.

Historically, the marshals, housed in the Department of Justice, provided security to the justices, lower court judges, and federal courthouses, as well as to selected witnesses and lawyers. In addition, the Supreme Court relied on a small police service, called the Supreme Court of the United States Police Department, to patrol its building. In recent years, its officers have begun to take up work once done by the marshals; this spring, the justices’ residential security details changed hands.

Now, the justices are expanding the Supreme Court police into a sweeping force that can replace their longtime protectors. The justices are seeking to rapidly grow the department, which numbered some 200 officers last year, to more than double its size. The justices’ 2027 budgetary ask to Congress includes funds to build their own police command center, assess threats, and provide round-the-clock security to the court’s nine members. To compete with other federal agency forces, including the Capitol Police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Supreme Court Police offers starting salaries between $86,530 and $147,928 with up to $60,000 in bonuses with a three-year contract, depending on experience. The tagline in its recruitment videos: “The highest court. A higher calling.”

The justices empowered Trump—and placed their own security in his hands.

It’s essential for our political system that the justices live and work free from fear and violence. “The security request is important and necessary,” says Gabe Roth, who runs Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group that advocates for reforms to make the Supreme Court more transparent and accountable to the public. “They don’t want to be beholden to the whims of another branch, which is more political.”

It is not mere happenstance that the justices no longer trust the executive branch to protect them. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has embraced the unitary executive theory, cooked up by Republican lawyers in the 1980s, which gives presidents direct authority over everything carried out inside the executive branch. The Republican appointed justices explicitly gave the president power over the Department of Justice in their 2024 immunity decision. While never technically independent, since Watergate, the DOJ had worked to keep its prosecutorial functions walled off from the White House. But Roberts’ decision in Trump v. United States clarified that the attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer for the president, redirecting the office’s ultimate loyalty from the rule of law to the occupier of the Oval Office. The result is that the Justice Department under President Donald Trump is increasingly unmoored from Congressional oversight and acting as the personal legal attack dog of the president. 

This is important because the US Marshals are part of the DOJ. By removing any taboo around presidential meddling in the department’s affairs, the justices more directly placed their own security in Trump’s hands. The head of the Marshals’ Service reports to Attorney General Todd Blanche, who not only serves at the pleasure of the president but has described his department as being in a “war” against judges. Trump, who has called Supreme Court justices “disloyal to the Constitution” and said some “sicken” him, is ultimately in charge of their personal security. It’s not hard to imagine Trump ordering the marshals to lighten security to apply pressure over a particular decision, or to withdraw it as a punishment for a ruling. Clearly, the justices are uneasy with this arrangement, too.

The concern is “probably 10 or 20 percent of the reason that this transition is happening,” Roth says. “They just want to have that control.” 

While the marshals struggled to meet demand under a stagnant budget since the Biden administration, the squeeze has tightened under the chaos of Trump’s corrupt and personalist second term. As threats to judges ramp up—in part because of rhetoric from Trump, his deputies, and allies—the judiciary’s security needs have increased. But at the same time, the marshals have been pulled onto Trump pet projects, immigration enforcement, and crime, depleting resources for protecting judges and the courts. The marshals were also assigned to provide a security detail to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr, an unusual arrangement that took staff away from the service’s core duties. Meanwhile, some of the justices were unnerved that officers showing up to protect their homes were sometimes only a few weeks out of training, according to Politico. In response to questions, the Marshals Service confirmed it provides security to Kennedy; its 2027 budget request includes an additional $34 million for judicial security and $228 million for immigration enforcement and local crime operations.

The Trump administration has also overseen more direct political weaponization of the marshals. In March 2025, DOGE and an official from the State Department used the marshals to gain access to an international development agency they were attempting to dismantle, wielding the marshals against another federal agency. “There’s some question of whether it falls under the marshals’ duties,” one expert told Mother Jones last year. “You have an extragovernmental agency assigning marshals to do something that’s questionable in the first place.” Indeed, the marshals assisted DOGE, a rogue operation greenlit by the president alone. (While the Supreme Court justices never weighed in on this particular Musk-induced skirmish, they generally abetted DOGE’s efforts, granting it access to Americans sensitive Social Security data while denying the public access to information about DOGE.)

In what may have been a signal of the marshals’ unreliability, this spring the Justice Department informed the Supreme Court that they would stop providing security at the justices’ homes before the Supreme Court police were expected to take over the job, sending the justices scrambling. “We were suddenly confronted with the loss of US Marshal protection,” Justice Elena Kagan explained in testimony to a Senate panel last month as the court asked for an additional $18.9 million to cover its growing security costs. “We thought we were going to have US Marshal protection at our residences for another six months, and all of a sudden learned from the Justice Department that that was going to be impossible.” Left in the lurch, the court’s police department took over their residential security with the help of outside contractors. The US Marshals did not answer a question about why they pulled security ahead of schedule.

The court has made it harder to keep guns from dangerous people.

The level of protection around the justices has increased dramatically in recent years. “I joined the court in 2010, and it was an entirely different world then,” Kagan told the senators. “I just walked out on the street, I had no security with me at any time. I drove back and forth to work by myself… Honestly, none of us particularly thought about it.” But after Justice Antonin Scalia died on vacation in remote Texas, hours from the closest marshals, the court began to reconsider its protocols. Not long after, two congressmen who served on the House oversight committee and were assessing the government’s personal protection practices paid a visit to the chief justice. “They said, ‘We think you’re out of your mind,’” Kagan summarized. “They said the director of the Office of Personnel Management has more security” than the justices of the Supreme Court. Slowly, the high court began to raise its guard. This accelerated in the wake of the May 2022 Dobbs leak indicating the court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, when protests erupted at justices’ homes and a would-be assassin showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house. Now, the justices have round-the-clock security and arrive at work in armored SUVs.

As part of that ramp up, some justices turned to the court’s police department. According to public records obtained by Fix the Court, Roberts, Kagan, and Justice Clarence Thomas have been using the court’s police when they travel for several years. “Life has changed a great deal for all of us,” Kagan said.

The Supreme Court has played a part in the country’s uptick in political violence. The justices helped Trump return to office after he incited a deadly insurrection, and his MAGA movement is behind many of the threats the justices now face. But more broadly, the court has made it easier for people to access guns. The court’s landmark 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller gave every individual the right to a firearm. In 2022, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc v. Bruen added another hurdle to state firearm regulation: even though guns themselves have changed drastically, a six-justice majority held that gun restrictions must be similar to a law that existed in the nation’s past. The court went on to greenlight bump stocks, and this year, blocked state attempts to limit guns on private properties like stores and restaurants. In the coming term, it will decide the constitutionality of assault weapon bans.

The United States was racked with gun violence before the Roberts Court began loosening gun restrictions, but its decisions have made it harder to keep firearms away from dangerous people. Notably, the court upheld a Biden-era regulation of untraceable ghost guns, several months after Luigi Mangioni used one to assassinate the CEO of United Healthcare—perhaps a moment of clarity for some of the conservative justices, realizing that the nation’s elite are not immune from the violence spurred by letting anyone be armed. 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, testifying to senators alongside Kagan, relayed how one of her kids noticed she had a bulletproof vest. “I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one,” Barrett said. It’s not something anyone’s job should entail, yet it’s one that the justices’ own decisions made more likely for many people—including themselves.

Barrett, a Trump appointee who in a few important cases has ruled against the president, including by invalidating his claim to broad tariff powers and his birthright citizenship executive order, has seen violence directed at her and her family alongside right-wing vitriol tinged with sexism. She described a swatting hoax directed at her home, and the eerie pizza deliveries sent in the name of a federal judge’s murdered son, which have been received by many federal judges since Trump returned to office. “I think the message on the deliveries being sent is clear,” Barrett said.

The court is drawing more attention because it keeps putting itself in the position to decide contentious issues, from college admissions policies to whether Trump can stand trial for instigating an insurrection. Again and again, the justices are taking cases that make them the ultimate deciders of not just the law but the pressing social and political debates dividing the country. Indeed, the justices’ security was increased after a leak showed the court poised to end the right to abortion.

The justices have never been so important, nor further from the people whose lives they impact. In the 19th century, the justices rode regional circuits, spending months presiding over trials. It put them up close with not just local judges but juries and ordinary people. In 1935, as the justices were striking down New Deal legislation, their courtroom moved from the basement of the US Capitol to the august marble facade across the street; an appropriate perch for a branch of government busy upending the work of the other two. Today, there’s usually a security detail or a bullet-proof windshield between the justices and the people.

More than ever, the justices shape the country we live in—and as their new security is evidence, it isolates the justices from the privilege of living in it.

Ben McKenzie might seem like an unlikely choice to launch an investigation into the complicated world of cryptocurrency. But the television actor known for shows like The O.C. and Gotham did exactly that. 

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His documentary film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, is a deep dive into the people and companies at the heart of crypto. The film focuses on McKenzie’s journey to discover why people continue to invest in digital currency even while knowing the risks of this highly under-regulated market. 

“I think crypto is not only not the future of money, it’s the past of money,” he tells host Al Letson. “And it’s something we’ve tried before and it’s failed.”

On this week’s More To The Story, McKenzie shares his concerns for what he calls the cult-like behavior of those investing in digital currency, talks about his interview with disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried just months before his arrest, and discusses the poignant conversations he had with everyday people who trusted the power of digital currency and lost everything—yet are still crypto believers.

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

On Tuesday, Canadian officials announced funding to back businesses, workers, and industries, as they implement dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs on the US in response to the Trump administration’s newly imposed 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports. 

Senior members of Canada’s government announced a support package worth $7.5 billion Canadian dollars, or about $5.4 billion US, including $3 million in non-repayable loans for every small business and a further $2 million in interest-free loans—even for businesses only indirectly affected by tariffs.

Small and medium-sized businesses directly affected will be able to apply for a further $5 million through Canada’s business development bank, and the Canadian government has set aside $2 billion for medium-sized and large firms, more than half a billion dollars for retraining workers whose industries are affected by tariffs, and a one-year extension on temporary employment insurance benefits Canada already issued in response to the start of Trump’s trade war with Canada last year.

The package, and Canada’s reciprocal tariff plan, come after US-Canada trade negotiations collapsed late last week. According to the New York Times, discussions on automobiles, steel, and aluminum—among Canada’s key industries—were the first major setback: Canada’s proposal to lower tariffs on automobiles went beyond what the Trump administration deemed acceptable. American companies lobbied the Department of Commerce and other White House officials to “preserve their protections.”

While the plan aims more at support for businesses than direct funds for individual Canadians, it is a meaningful step that far exceeds any the Trump administration has taken or tried to take, with the White House largely ignoring the foreseeable harm of its tariffs on American workers and consumers. 

According to data released by the Center for American Progress, in the 10 months following the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs last April—which introduced a baseline 10-percent tariff on all imported goods—the US lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs and 124,000 transportation and warehousing jobs, two industries that Trump’s tariffs severely affected. In fact, nearly every state has experienced blue-collar job losses as a result of the tariff agenda, even as the policies deliver few apparent results in improving US manufacturing or lowering the trade deficit.

On March 9, President Donald Trump said the war in Iran was “very complete, pretty much.” That was Day 10 of the conflict. Now it’s nearly Day 180. 

After Trump and Israel launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran on February 28, the president predicted a quick military victory and said “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” Within weeks, the hardline stance gave way to negotiations aimed at a deal that would deliver the core US demands of Iranian denuclearization and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Six months later, there’s still no deal and no end date to a conflict that has cost the US $37.5 billion, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July testimony to Congress. And this week, the administration pivoted again, unveiling “Operation Economic Outcast,” a sweeping sanctions campaign to isolate Iran from the global financial system, a tacit admission that six months of bombing didn’t get the job done. 

In between, there has been a long trail of promises that a deal with Iran was close, mixed with threats that the US would “finish them off” if it wasn’t. Watch the timeline in Trump’s own words.

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily handed President Trump a key victory in his crusade to restrict mail-in voting. The unsigned opinion by the court’s conservative majority, issued over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, said it was too soon for states to challenge Trump’s executive order from March 2026 severely restricting mail-in voting because they had not shown how they would be harmed by it.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges. The Court has held for a while now that even valid election-related legal claims can come too late. Today’s revelation is that such claims can also come too early—never mind that an election is looming and related harms
are presently occurring. Never mind, too, that the Government (which controls the timing of proposed and final rules) can easily game the system.”

While not a ruling on the merits of the executive order, the Court’s decision still overrules a series of federal court rulings blocking that order, which represents an unprecedented attempt by the Trump administration to seize control of election administration from the states, based on Trump’s demands for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over” the voting system.

It instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of voters it deems citizens in each state, essentially overriding state voter rolls, and directs the Postal Service to only deliver mail-in ballots to voters on those lists, leading to the possibility that a significant number of voters will not receive mail-in ballots if the lists are inaccurate. (Trump, despite his frequent tirades against the practice, voted by mail in Florida’s primary last month, the second time this year he has done so in Florida.)

“The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme,” wrote the 23 states, led by California, that are challenging the executive order. “Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting—especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas—would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised. Many more voters would be confused—either because they wouldn’t receive their mail ballots or would fear that USPS would fail to deliver their voted ballots to state officials for tabulation.”

The Postal Service subsequently issued a new rule on August 21 specifying that it will only deliver mail-in ballots if states hand over their voter rolls to DHS—a form of extortion that has generated furious pushback from election officials. (The Department of Justice has sued 30 states to get access to their voter rolls and is 0-23 in federal court so far.) The executive order also specifies that election officials could be criminally prosecuted if they don’t comply with the administration’s demands.

“The EO directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections,” a majority of judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month. “Regardless of the details of how federal officials implement the EO, at its core, the EO contemplates that states will have to coordinate with DHS and USPS to ensure that various lists, whether maintained by the agencies or the states, reflect current mail-voter information (which can change daily up until Election Day), or else risk disenfranchisement for certain voters and penalties for states and their officials.”

As the Supreme Court considered the case for weeks, a federal district court issued a nationwide injunction on August 11 against the executive order, halting the Postal Service from taking any steps to implement it. That injunction remains in effect despite the Supreme Court’s order on Monday.

Voting rights groups argued in court over the weekend that the Postal Service’s decision in late August to finalize the rule specifying that mail-in ballots can only be delivered in states that hand over their voter rolls to the administration violated that injunction.

“By issuing this final rule, the Trump administration has flouted the court’s injunction,” those voting rights groups, including the ACLU and League of Women Voters, said in a statement. “The final rule threatens further chaos for voters, civic organizations, and election officials by seeking to impose last-minute changes to mail voting rules. Enforcement of the court’s preliminary injunction is necessary to hold this administration accountable for its unlawful action and make clear that voters can confidently cast their mail ballot free from federal interference this November.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling may only be a temporary win for Trump. “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the Court wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

States can renew their legal challenges to the executive order once DHS and USPS finalize their plans to implement it—and it may be too late to implement the order regardless, with the midterms roughly 70 days away. However, the Court’s decision allowing the executive order to proceed “contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” Justice Jackson wrote.

“To be sure, the Court has not foreclosed States from challenging this blatantly unconstitutional Order,” Jackson continued. “But it declines to explain when, exactly, is the right time to bring a meritorious election-rule claim challenging unconstitutional interference with electoral processes. The majority
just signals that these claimants had to wait—even though the election cycle had started and despite facing pocketbook costs, threats of prosecution, and an affront to their sovereignty—before receiving the relief to which they are likely
entitled.”

Trump’s two executive orders restricting ballot access, in 2025 and 2026, were both blocked for violating the Constitution’s clear mandate that states, with oversight from Congress, have the authority to run their elections. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections, ” District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in June. Talwani may soon issue a new injunction blocking the Postal Service’s new rule.

The Supreme Court’s decision nonetheless comes at a time when Trump is escalating his attempts to interfere in the midterm elections. Though his primetime speech on “election integrity” last month was widely regarded as a dud, the president’s false accusation that China interfered in the 2020 election has led to renewed fears that he could use fake claims of foreign interference as a basis to declare a national emergency so that he can attempt to seize control of the voting system.

And the Supreme Court has already green-lit a key part of Trump’s effort to tilt the midterms in the GOP’s favor by destroying the Voting Rights Act and approving the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering that has allowed Republicans to draw 10 more GOP-friendly seats in the race for the House of Representatives. That has made it much harder for Democrats to retake the chamber despite Trump’s record-low approval ratings.

On Monday, Justice Jackson perfectly summed up how the Court’s GOP-appointed majority has enabled Trump’s efforts to interfere in the midterms. “Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” she wrote.

On Monday afternoon, President Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US would impose all-encompassing sanctions on countries and institutions that conduct business with Iran, in an apparent attempt to end the war after most viable military options have failed.

Scott Bessent described the plan, dubbed Operation Economic Outcast, as an “economic D-Day”, in reference to the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, with the Iranian regime replacing Nazi Germany. Bessent vowed to “sever every economic lifeline” that sustains Iran—including digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping—by enforcing a “zero-leakage approach” that will shut down “every facilitator and every network” that Iran has used to smuggle oil past existing sanctions.

But Bessent did not disclose how that process would work, or on what timeline.

When we don’t know what to do, we sanction Iran.

In fact, the Treasury secretary offered almost nothing in the way of details—perhaps because, over roughly 47 years of US sanctions on Iran, there is little that the United States hasn’t tried and even less indication that Iran has become more compliant. When we don’t know what to do, we sanction Iran.

The Trump administration has already nominally imposed secondary sanctions on many countries that trade with Iran for oil, but has not significantly enforced them on Iran’s major trading partners like China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Qatar. Some of those countries are key US allies; others are major trading partners; that leaves Russia, which is already under extensive American sanctions and has unmatched experience in evading them with regard to its global oil trade.

Trump, Bessent said, is holding an ongoing series of calls with world leaders—under threat of sanctions—about what he wants from them. After his announcement, reporters asked Bessent which leaders, and when secondary sanctions would be enforced over noncompliance. Bessent declined to say.

Last week, the United Arab Emirates, Iran’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and a US ally, said it would at least temporarily end all trade with Iran. Bessent reiterated on Monday that the move was due to US pressure—supposedly evidence that sanctions would work this time.

As Trump has claimed repeatedly during his second term, and as Bessent repeated on Monday, Iran has been “at war against America” and “much of the world” for 47 years, which is also when the US first imposed sanctions on the country. Over that time span, American economic sanctions on Iran, which have increased by roughly nine times over the past 20 years, have not led to a more democratic—or even simply US-friendly—Iranian government. Instead, it has largely strengthened Iranian regime leaders’ hold on the country at the price of civilian lives.

Meanwhile, according to 2025 data from the World Bank, about 35 percent of Iran’s 92 million residents live on less than $8.30 per day—the poverty line for its economic peers.

Deadly heatwaves in May smashed records in the UK, France, Spain, and parts of North Africa. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh saw April temperatures soar to 45-50 degrees Celsius. A late spring heat dome in the US marked the hottest March on record, and in a 1,000-year July storm, parts of Texas were left reeling after flash flooding killed multiple people. That same month, wildfires in Canada turned skies orange and exposed over 106 million North Americans to hazardous air quality. In the US alone, the catastrophic events of 2026 have killed approximately 17,377 people and cost over $3.2 trillion.

In terms of the sheer scope of heat and extreme weather, 2026 has been a year of climate disasters.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry—by far the greatest contributor to global climate change, accounting for approximately 68 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions—is holding firm. In response to a growing tide of litigation seeking to hold it at least partly responsible for the climate crisis, oil and gas groups and their networks have accelerated their defenses, fighting with their all-too-familiar playbook of discrediting the science linking emissions to extreme weather events such as heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, heavy storms and hurricanes. With the help of the Trump administration and industry partners, oil and gas groups have lodged disinformation campaigns targeting specific studies and even individual climate scientists. 

“How can you show approximate causation in injury?” asked Michael Buschbacher, a partner at Boyden Gray PLLC  during an October 2025 Federalist Society panel on climate litigation. He has supported industry opposition to renewable energy mandates, state-level climate liability lawsuits, and SEC climate risk disclosure mandates. “Bad weather is of course not new. So how do you show that emissions from company X cause injury Y from a hurricane or whatever?” He then wondered about the consequences of the suits should they be successful. “Will they reduce global carbon emissions, or will it just be a payday for contingency fee lawyers and opportunity for virtue signaling from progressive politicians?”

“There is no level of emissions that does not contribute to changing climate impacts. Every ton matters.” 

A new peer-reviewed study published earlier this month in Earth’s Future suggests that it is possible to demonstrate that “emissions from company X cause injury Y.” It also could potentially provide evidence so industry could be forced to answer for climate impacts. The new methodological framework has, for the first time, drawn a straight line from single corporate emitters like Exxon or Chevron, or even whole countries like the United States, to specific heatwaves and areas of extreme rainfall. By running over 150 simulations across 8 different climate models, the study’s author, Christopher Callahan—an Earth systems scientist and assistant professor at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs—built a statistical model to figure out the relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the odds of extreme heat or rain. He then used real emissions data to calculate the extent to which specific fossil fuel emitters increased the risk of extreme weather.

The study’s results are clear: “There is no level of emissions that does not contribute to changing climate impacts,” Callahan told me. “Every ton matters.” 

The implications of this for an industry struggling to contend with the potential consequences of its actions could be dire. “Climate attribution research seeks to connect greenhouse-gas emissions to specific climate impacts, and increasingly, to particular industries or companies,” wrote Kyle Kohli in Energy In Depth, a blog associated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America. “That makes it especially valuable to climate plaintiffs attempting to overcome one of their biggest legal obstacles: proving causation.”

These new findings are part of a growing field of climate science known as source attribution, which examines “whether we can link an individual extreme climate event to any individual emitter who contributed to that event,” Callahan said. By looking at global extreme heat and at specific events like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave and Pakistan’s extreme rainfall in 2022, for instance, Callahan used climate models to determine what might have taken place without the carbon dioxide released by certain fossil fuel companies and countries. His conclusions were stark: fossil fuel firms increased the likelihood of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave by 31 percent and extreme rainfall in Pakistan in 2022 by 7 percent.

In the past, source attribution studies linked several climate models that were, in Callahan’s words, “computationally difficult,” sometimes taking months to run and requiring vast amounts of computing capacity. “The approach here is attempting to be particularly simple and particularly lightweight,” Callahan explained. Now, by knowing the proportions between climate change and cumulative emissions, he said, researchers can calculate changes to extreme events based on historical emissions. “What this science tells us is that there is a direct relationship between how much an entity emits and…[the] extreme events that alter people’s lives.” 

Source attribution is a subset of the larger, well-established attribution science field, which has helped us understand how much climate change is shaping our world by comparing the climate conditions we face today to a hypothetical Earth devoid of human influence. In 2004, for example, a team of scientists found that human influence doubled the risk of the 2003 heatwave that had swept Europe. But source attribution helps answer more granular questions about what specific actions are having what specific effect. 

For over half a century, industry has known of and misled the public about its role in human-caused planetary warming, deliberately sowing doubt to undermine scientific evidence. Now oil and gas groups are facing a wave of lawsuits. Over 40 cases in the United States filed by states, municipalities, and tribal governments have been brought against Big Oil since 2017. At least five of these lawsuits have entered the discovery phase—marking a turning point that could force oil executives to hand over key documents and testify under oath on what they knew about climate change and when they knew it. Grist reported in July that the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil lobbying group, stated that one of its top priorities for 2026 was to “stop extreme climate liability policy.”

Callahan has no illusions about how his research fits into the current legal and political climate, describing it as “a pretty live question in conversations around climate liability lawsuits.” But how will attribution science play out in a legal context? Some experts argue that it will “‘[rock] the courtroom,” while others say key decisions will most likely hinge on legal issues rather than the science itself. “Our responsibility as scientists,” Callahan said, “is not to never do science that is relevant to the political conversation. We should follow the results of our questions wherever they lead and report them regardless of what they are.” 

In recent years, industry has cast doubt on plaintiffs’ use of attribution science in the courtroom. “They have an attribution theory, but that’s just a crude measure of how much oil and gas companies sold,” said Chevron lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., in a 2024 litigation webinar, “but that doesn’t tell you anything about anything.” A recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report has inflamed that debate. A June investigation by Politico revealed a secret opposition campaign waged by oil industry allies to discredit the report’s findings. The campaign came just months after Republican attorneys general successfully forced the removal of a NAS climate sciences chapter from a reference manual for federal judges, which the Academies officially pulled earlier this month. A NASA scientist who asked to remain anonymous called the academy’s decision to pull the chapter “pathetic. If they cannot stand up for science, then who is going to?” 

But the scientific consensus on the NAS extreme weather report is aligned. “I thought it was a great report,” said Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist. “It didn’t pull any punches.” Others, like Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist and vice president for science at Climate Central, said the report was “a really excellent roundup of the state of the science.” 

Reports like the Academies’ extreme weather event attribution study and Callahan’s research on emitter impacts help illustrate how far the field has come. “We all live in a world that’s been shaped by a fossil fuel-based economy,” Dahl said, “so I think studies like this can shed light on why we are where we are, and why we have the range of choices available to us that we have, and can also give us a sense of how different the world would be.”

Kim Cobb, an expert in observational climate studies at Brown University, says we’re gaining something “extremely valuable” in Callahan’s study. “This would have been a pipe dream 10 years ago; it simply wouldn’t be possible.” For Jim Hurrell, the chair of the Academies’ NAS report and a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, there’s lots of room for advancement in the field, and that’s what excites him most. “This science could be really useful to help communities plan for the future,” he said. 

Separating the future of attribution science from the politicization attached to it has proved to be impossible recently. The Trump administration’s cuts to funding for scientific programs, monitoring systems, and scientific personnel, alongside ongoing industry attacks, will continue to affect the field’s advancement. In the end, Yann Quilcaille, a climate scientist from ETH Zürich noted, “We need to act quickly, and we have the solutions.”

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

The Trump administration’s push to expand oil and gas extraction across the US is set to bring drilling near cherished natural and cultural sites, raising alarm among conservationists and prompting questions from the UN’s heritage body.

UNESCO said it had received information on the administration’s plan to scrap a drilling-free buffer zone around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, a world heritage site and one of the most important cultural areas in the US. A UNESCO spokesperson said it had procedures regarding “potential threats” to a world heritage property and was awaiting a response from the federal government as to its impact.

“The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status,” a UNESCO spokesperson said.

As well as warning about the consequences of drilling within the boundaries of world heritage sites, the spokesperson said the committee had also “emphasized that projects proposed outside world heritage properties should not adversely affect their outstanding universal value—which are the features of the site that justify its inscription, and should be subject to appropriate impact assessments before decisions are taken”.

The US has 27 world heritage sites, places protected by international treaty for their cultural, historical or scientific significance, including parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite and landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty.

Several of them, however, have nearby drilling or mining projects, with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” approach leading to a sweeping opening up of the US’s forests, oceans and protected landscapes to the extraction of the fossil fuels that are dangerously overheating the planet.

“We will be a rich nation again and it is the liquid gold under our feet that will help us do it,” the president has said. “We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth—and we are going to use it.”

One US world heritage site, the Everglades, is listed as being “in danger” due to the impact of development and pollution. Others could join this imperiled list if nearby industrialization is deemed harmful. “UNESCO follows developments that may have implications for world heritage properties and their outstanding universal value,” said the spokesperson, who added that nearby industrial projects should be “carefully assessed” before proceeding.

Some Republicans have lobbied the US president to remove a ban on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, a world heritage site, while the administration has leased thousands of acres for oil and gas drilling near the fragile underground cave systems in another listed site, the Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico.

It is at Chaco, however, where the threat of oil and gas drilling looms largest. The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has proposed eradicating a 10-mile buffer zone shielding the protected area from industrial activity including fossil fuel drilling and uranium mining, a move that a broad coalition of opponents, including tribal leaders, archeologists and green groups, warns could cause major environmental harm to the area.

The plan to begin drilling into the 336,400-acre zone next to Chaco attracted 100,000 mostly hostile submissions in an unusually short 14-day public comment period that closed in July.

Deb Haaland, the former interior secretary who oversaw the creation of the buffer zone in 2023, said its removal would cause “irreversible damage.” She added of Trump and Steve Pearce, director of the BLM: “Their attempt to profit off this sacred place shows a clear lack of consideration and disrespect for the lives that New Mexicans live.”

The 53-sq-mile historic park in northwestern New Mexico contains a trove of key cultural sites, including the ruins of pueblos, settlements of the Indigenous Pueblo peoples. The site is also internationally recognized by astronomers as being a dark skies area, ideal for viewing the stars.

“This park offers an incredible transportive experience where you essentially go back in time 1,000 years to experience what the ancient Pueblo people saw,” said Maude Dinan, New Mexico program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association. “The buffer zone is incredibly important and removing it would completely change this experience.”

Allowing oil and gas development near Chaco would introduce a toxic haze of air pollution that would cut visitor numbers, opponents contend, as well as spoil views, risk water pollution from fracking activities, and result in bright lights and gas flaring that would ruin the pristine dark skies once treasured by the Pueblo people, who were keen astronomers, as well as today’s stargazers.

Daniel Tso, a community leader in the region’s Navajo community where he served as a Navajo Nation council delegate, said there were allotments of land outside the buffer zone where the oil and gas industry had shown “total disregard for the community and total disrespect for the landholders.” He fears the same situation closer to Chaco should the buffer zone be eradicated.

“I have allotments inside the buffer zone where the land is untouched, the aquifers are pristine,” he said. “If the oil and gas companies go in there the sacredness of that land is gone. Outside this zone, some of these oil and gas wells are within 100 feet of Navajo people’s homes, causing tremendous health impacts.”

Dinan said she was pessimistic the outcry over the BLM’s plan would be heeded, pointing to recent administration decisions to shrink the protected areas of two prized national monuments in Utah and to ditch a rule that safeguarded swathes of untouched forests.

“It makes me wonder where the line in the sand is; it feels that no matter how valuable or sacred a place is, the administration is willing to trade it all in,” she said.

“Almost all of the federal land around places like Chaco and Carlsbad is already leased for oil and gas drilling, so the idea there’s an urgent new demand for this is an illusion. There doesn’t seem like a good coexistence going on at the moment.”

The Department of Interior, which oversees the BLM, and the National Parks Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Democrats and critics of the Trump administration have criticized House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries as reports came out Sunday that he met with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to discuss potential collaboration on issues such as housing, immigration, and affordability. 

As Casey Michel wrote for Mother Jones earlier this summer, Kushner has used his ties to the White House to make business deals with autocrats—including the Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar—and work on foreign affairs as a “special peace envoy” in conflicts in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine. That’s despite claiming that he would not play a role in Trump’s second administration.  

The New York Times first reported that the meeting took place in recent weeks. Rep. Jeffries (D-N.Y.) did not acknowledge the meeting in a statement to the Times, but suggested that Democrats would have to work with Republicans to get any policies through the White House. With the midterms coming up in November, there is a significant possibility that Democrats take control of the House, and Jeffries would be first in line to become Speaker. 

But Democrats thinking of compromise now—especially when congressional Republicans, the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration have largely done the opposite—makes little sense.

Below are a few reactions:

The only meeting Hakeem Jeffries should be having with Jared Kushner is to tell him he’ll be subpoenaed by the House for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House. This is just pathetic stuff from the House Dem leader. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T14:59:21.599Z

NEW: Hakeem Jeffries met with Kushner recently to discuss how democrats could work with the administration when we take the house back. We shouldn’t work with fascists, and I’d appreciate a leader who felt the same. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Allison Gill (@muellershewrote.com) 2026-08-23T16:06:49.551Z

The only good reason I can imagine for a Jeffries meeting with Kushner is to personally deliver a subpoena for his testimony https://t.co/1NnYtpm3Kv

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) August 23, 2026

Jared Kushner has no actual government job he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way @RepJeffries should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas. https://t.co/5dBHVHW0CT

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) August 23, 2026

WTF. Did you not get the memo, Jeffries? We want fighters, not conciliators. There is no working with fascists. Fascists are to be fought. Jeffries and Kushner Meet Privately as Midterm Attacks Fly www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T11:59:38.017Z