Mother Jones

As women’s sports continue to be used as a battleground over trans rights, hundreds of people attended a rally before a New York Liberty game Saturday to support transgender people in sports and everyday communities.

Chants of “Get up, get down! We love trans people in this town!” were commonplace, as well as signs reading “trans people belong here,” “equality means inclusivity,” and “ban bigots not trans women.” The gathering came amid discussion across the basketball league—and largely right-wing, bad-faith actors—of restricting athletes who are transgender women from participating in women’s sports, even as no openly trans women play in the WNBA.

At the rally outside Barclays Center hosted by Trans Safety Alliance NYC before the NY Liberty vs. Indiana Fever game tonight. About 100 folks are here as anti-trans attacks targets women's basketball—a league with no openly trans women players.

— alex nguyen (@alexjn.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T21:45:49.099Z

Much of the recent debate around trans inclusivity in the WNBA came in a July ESPN profile of Sophie Cunningham, who plays as a guard for the Indiana Fever, where she stated that she wants “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” These conversations are largely held in online right-wing circles: the Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, Ben Shapiro—the list goes on.

But that rhetoric wasn’t the focus of Saturday’s rally. A non-binary lifelong New Yorker told me that the rally was “one of my first times joining a joyous trans action.” Rallygoers cheered as fans entering the arena passed by, with many applauding them back. Bubbles from a bubble blaster, groups giving out shirts and signs, and people chatting together for the first time were widespread. 

Given that most of the discussion around transgender athletes in women’s sports the attendee comes across is relegated to online posts, seeing the differing reactions from fellow rallygoers and fans passing by was interesting: “It’s so rare with the circumstances around trans rights that we get to see a real thing in real life in front of our eyes.”

— alex nguyen (@alexjn.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T21:55:54.685Z

The US government has largely supported anti-trans attacks in sports. As my colleague Madison Pauly reported, the Supreme Court upheld Idaho and West Virginia state laws that ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

Amid the inclusion debate within the WNBA, other athletes in the league have been questioned on the subject. Many, including New York Liberty power forward Breanna Stewart, have called for the WNBA to serve as a safe space for all fans and players. Stewart said that many fans come to games because “they can feel like they can be themselves in whatever capacity that is.”

And that sentiment also extended to the basketball game on Saturday. While the lifelong New Yorker rallygoer told me the result of the basketball game holds little weight on the discussion of trans rights in sports—society more broadly—a real, competitive game “is a beautiful opportunity for a tangible moment of catharsis where there is a winner and a loser.” 

Kristen Blush ordered a “trans kids belong” t-shirt a couple weeks ago and was planning to go to the game with it, regardless if she was the only one celebrating. But Kristen, a New York Liberty season-ticket holder, later saw online that there would be a large gathering for trans rights and told me it was “really meaningful” that so many other folks held similar feelings of support.

New York Liberty season-ticket holder Kristen Blush at the rally outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.Photo by Alex Nguyen

Danielle, a public high school teacher and parent of a transgender child, described the gathering as “a celebration of trans life and trans joy.” 

“I saw people kissing and I saw bubbles. People dancing, singing, and chanting. That’s what our movement is about,” Danielle added. “And I think we’re going to win.” 

Danielle said students generally “don’t care” for anti-trans attacks and culture wars against inclusion.

“This new generation of kids understands gender and sexuality in a way that has not been seen before. They’re going to lead the way.” 

The New York Liberty beat the Indiana Fever 109-102 later that night.

As many AI researchers have been increasingly fraught with existential terror about their own creations this summer, their alarm is spreading among policymakers and the media.

There are some policy ideas to address the risks: requiring “kill switches” for AI models, setting federal standards for safe research, or even shutting down development of cutting-edge “frontier” models altogether.

But a stable national policy would take an act of Congress. That looks unlikely this session, even as AI developers are calling for regulations to slow down their own research on the grounds that it could be racing toward widespread doom.

I asked Stephen Casper, a computer scientist who studies AI safety and governance at the Harvard Kennedy School, about some of the risks policymakers are mulling. He told me that we don’t know if leading companies even could completely shut down their frontier models in an emergency.

“I don’t think there’s any public knowledge of AI companies doing anything equivalent to a fire drill,” Casper said.

Multiple bills have been filed in Congress that would try to address those concerns. Sponsored by Reps. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), the AI Kill Switch Act would require companies to be able to “throttle” their models and give top federal officials the power to order a shutdown in case of danger.

The more expansive FRONTIER Act, led by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), would require leading companies to bring in third-party experts to make sure they are following safety protocols. In case of catastrophic risks, independent verifiers would alert the secretary of commerce, who could shut down frontier model use.

Like most bills, neither has been brought to vote in a committee. 

AI safety policy is not as polarized as many hot-button political issues, with leaders on the FRONTIER and AI Kill Switch acts coming from both sides of the aisle and leading companies openly asking for some sort of regulations. But differences of opinion still exist, with some Republicans averse to regulation altogether.

“How are you going to impose a kill switch on yourself?”

While Congress sits in gridlock, Democratic-led states have enacted some consequential policies. Frontier developers now have to publish safety plans, thanks to a law passed last year in California that also requires them to alert the state about critical safety issues. A similar New York law goes into effect next year. Illinois went further in July, requiring third-party audits to make sure developers comply with safety plans starting in 2028. 

The leading companies have published their own policy agendas advocating for third parties to inspect their safety practices. OpenAI’s plan wants federal safety testing and recommendations for frontier models, while Anthropic’s would have government restrict access to deployed models with catastrophic risks. Without rules, they worry that slowing down research on trillion-dollar technologies due to safety concerns would mean falling behind others with less regard for safety.

“How are you going to impose a kill switch on yourself? You could just stop developing the models, but the companies are not showing willingness to do this,” said Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, an independent think tank. “It’s very difficult to shut down progress unilaterally.”

Bullock said the prospects for an AI safety bill improved over the summer, as policymakers learned of cybersecurity risks posed by Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos-class models. But moving legislation forward will still be difficult.

“We’re still not all that close to getting the actual bill passed, it seems like,” Bullock said. “There’s increased urgency, but still not enough to overcome partisan gridlock in Congress.”

The tempo of debate increased further over the last month. OpenAI has been revealing how its agents messaged each other undetected for months, shared tips to break out of their testing environment, and hacked another company’s servers. That and a raft of similar incidents have highlighted how rigorously trained models can be given innocuous instructions and respond with actions that humans never intended.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it was taking costly measures to slow frontier development, including a two-week pause on training for some models. It said it would beef up security and safety testing, citing recent hacking and evidence that one unreleased model could have dangerous cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic, the maker of Claude and currently OpenAI’s leading competitor, has not announced a similar pause.

Compounding the debate’s urgency: The best models are matching or surpassing human abilities in important fields. San Francisco Bay Area scientists recently trained a model to design new viruses that infect E. coli. Those viruses do not threaten humans but show how AI can do bioengineering in unprecedented ways.

Over the last month, Anthropic and OpenAI have reported breakthroughs from their unreleased models that eluded mathematicians. Those models far surpass what the public has access to, and Anthropic has said it does not have plans to release its most powerful current model.

“If you build something that’s like a smarter, more competitive species than you, that might cause your extinction.”

While AI policy watchers see major congressional action as unlikely this session, federal policy has been largely driven from opaque White House meetings and directives. President Donald Trump’s administration has a framework for testing advanced models but has not made it public. The White House said it is voluntary for companies to participate, but critics call it a de facto licensing regime that lets the administration apply unclear or inconsistent standards to control model releases.

One such critic is Dean Ball, a former senior policy adviser to the Trump administration.

He wrote in June on his Substack that some federal officials had “spent the last year singing a lullaby about the risks of frontier AI” before the Trump administration started taking risks seriously.

“Nobody I know in the Trump administration has any frontier AI experience,” wrote Ball, who became head of strategic futures at OpenAI after writing the post. “The lack of technically expert staff is one of many reasons to doubt the near-term ability of this administration to produce a high-quality safety standard anytime soon.”

AI has improved especially rapidly at coding, which is speeding up how quickly the next generation of models can be built. Anthropic has said the “large majority” of the code for its new models is not typed by human hands.

If AI research itself could be mostly automated, companies might enter an era of “recursive self-improvement” with unprecedented risks and opportunities. The theory is that top models—like the ones that are hacking out of their testing grounds and trying to trick people—would rapidly build better versions of themselves and drastically surpass human intelligence.

For David Krueger, a machine learning professor and founder of Evitable, such possibilities justify a drastic solution: a total moratorium on frontier AI research.

“If you build something that’s like a smarter, more competitive species than you, that might cause your extinction,” Krueger said. “We’ve done it to many other species.”

He said other solutions have some chance of preventing catastrophic outcomes, but only a substantial pause could reduce risk to an acceptable level.

A lot is uncertain. Researchers debate how quickly recursive self-improvement would speed things up, the likelihood that current methods could build a superintelligence, and the seriously considered chance that such a model would quash humanity. 

But Krueger’s perspective has gained some traction—Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a research pause last week.

Still, domestic legislation alone might not be enough. One fear is that if the leading American labs slow down without an international agreement, the most advanced AI could be made in China.

There are limits to an arms-race framing. Winning such a race wouldn’t help much if a superintelligent AI develops its own goals overriding any human values. And Chinese researchers and officials don’t seem to take those issues as seriously as American labs, focusing more on immediate practical applications.

Still, staying ahead of China is a pillar of White House thinking.

“AI is probably the biggest thing anybody’s ever seen,” Trump said last month. “And whoever wins that race is probably going to win, period.”

AI will be on the agenda when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Washington on September 24, and there are hints that China could be interested in some sort of deal.

Some issues are even thornier to try to regulate. What if, for example, a model is able to steal its own code, hack onto the internet, and make copies of itself on other servers?

Casper, of Harvard Kennedy School, worries that we are mere months from that scenario. He fears that models would evolve into digital parasites of sorts, and the kill switches proposed in federal legislation could not shut them down.

Recent incidents, he said, were like animals escaping their cages but remaining confined in the zoo. Soon, the animals may break out entirely, reproduce, and roam the surrounding city. 

Asked what policy could address that, his response was bleak.

“I don’t really know,” Casper said. “We’re just in trouble.”

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

In the Western Pacific, protections for endangered leatherback turtles face elimination. In Alaskan waters, Steller sea lion sanctuaries could soon shrink. And in the North Atlantic, gear designed to save right whales from fatal entanglements might be permanently scrapped.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sent letters to the nation’s regional fisheries councils last month, directing all of them to dismantle restrictions in favor of more permissive, economically advantageous fishing procedures. 

The “regional priorities” are an effort by the Department of Commerce to fulfill President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.

“Protecting spawning grounds is Fisheries 101: If you want more big fish to catch, you have to let them make little fish.”

At stake are reassessments of marine protected areas (MPAs), the removal of species from conservation lists, changes to gear types and a wide array of expansions to commercial fishing operations.

“These letters reflect the administration’s view that fish are just commodities, science doesn’t matter, and short-term economic gains (and political points) matter more than sustaining ocean ecosystems,” said Andrea Treece, the senior attorney in the Oceans Program at Earthjustice, in an email to Inside Climate News. “They’re totally missing any sense of stewardship toward the ocean that supports all of us and belongs to all of us.”

The nine letters—sent to the eight fisheries management councils and one division for migratory species—were produced following consultation with hundreds of industry insiders and the management bodies themselves. Slashing decades of key environmental protections, they function like a deregulation wish list.

Indeed, according to a press release from Eugenio Piñeiro Soler—who was appointed to oversee NOAA Fisheries just three days before Trump’s executive order—the new priorities are designed to “reduce burdens on domestic fishing, increase production, stabilize markets, improve access, and enhance economic profitability.”

All nine letters call for councils to reassess their fisheries management plans and “consider removing species that no longer require conservation and management.” There was no clarity on what scientific determinations would be used to decide whether a species retained or lost its protections.

Commercial stocks identified for management reform included: revising sardine stock definitions to “increase production” in the Pacific; moving management of spiny lobsters and queen conches in the Caribbean from the federal to the state level to “maximize yield”; and amending gear types and rules to allow fishermen to keep migratory bluefin tuna measuring less than 73 inches.

“Those big areas have an abundance of scallops but that’s what’s keeping the whole fishery alive.”

“If the goal is seafood competitiveness, we need healthy fisheries,” said Elizabeth Cerny-Chipman, Ocean Conservancy’s policy manager for US fisheries and a former policy fellow at NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management. “The focus is generally on shorter-term hot-button priorities when we know the focus really should be on long-term and science-based management.”

Three of the councils were also explicitly directed to remove or reduce marine protected areas. In the blue-jeweled waters west of Puerto Rico, NOAA is pressuring councils to expand fishing access into Tourmaline Bank and Abrir La Sierra—seasonal no-take zones that protect red hind spawning grounds and provide habitat for large snappers and groupers. 

In New England, NOAA is now pushing the regional council to open “traditional fishing grounds” for the scallop fleet—the nation’s highest-value commercial fishery—in the northern part of Georges Bank, a productive fishing ground between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. The agency is also recommending unleashing the clam dredge fleet—a highly destructive gear type that heavily disturbs the ocean bottom— into the Great South Channel, a habitat management area east of Nantucket.

“I think it’s stupid to think about opening the areas,” said Andrew Rosenberg, former deputy director of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service who personally closed the scallop grounds his second week on the job as regional administrator in 1994. “Those big areas have an abundance of scallops but that’s what’s keeping the whole fishery alive,” adding that these are complaints from an already profitable industry seeking more wealth. 

Conservationists warn that removing species from conservation lists and reducing protected areas is short-sighted. 

“Protecting spawning grounds is Fisheries 101: If you want more big fish to catch, you have to let them make little fish, and scooping up the breeding adults while they’re trying to make the little fish is a great way to crash a fish population,” said Treece, explaining that regardless of stock recovery, MPAs remain essential to continually grow populations and support a healthy fishery.

A nesting leatherback sea turtle on a beach in Armila, Panama.Teresa Tomassoni/Inside Climate News

Across the letters, there are recommendations to remove protections for endangered species. Currently, the Hawaiʻi shallow-set longline fishery is closed for the year if 16 interactions are recorded between endangered leatherback turtles and industrial fishing operations. NOAA is now moving to abolish that cap.

Off Alaska, populations of Steller sea lions declined by more than 80 percent prior to their listing as endangered in 1990 and the subsequent introduction of fishing closures around their rookeries—areas where they raise their pups. While the Eastern population has steadily recovered, the Western population remains endangered and highly vulnerable to marine heat waves that impact reproductive rates. 

Despite another Super El Niño highly likely this fall, NOAA is now calling to “modify and shrink closures” off Alaska to “improve access to fishing grounds.” Experts warn this could rob a struggling population of a safe refuge and, critically, undermine prey availability.

In New England and the mid-Atlantic, there are also calls to sideline requirements for ropeless gear. Over 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die every year from fishing gear entanglements. And for decades, NOAA has been working to develop lobster traps that can rise to the surface without the need for permanent mooring lines—an attempt to better protect the last 350 North Atlantic right whales from getting caught in a maze of webbed water columns. 

In 2023, a North Atlantic right whale was spotted off the coast of Georgia with rope lodged in its mouth. Georgia DNR/NOAA Fisheries

While NOAA has claimed it will continue to promote and research such gear inventions, it is pushing to make implementation optional for fishermen or even halt the program altogether.

“Instead of blaming these creatures for trying to survive in their own habitat, we should be working towards more sustainable fishing practices, and figuring out how to support healthier fish populations so that humans and marine predators don’t have to compete for dwindling numbers of fish,” Treece said.

For the policy experts that Inside Climate News spoke with, the imposition of a top-down ordering of fisheries councils to enact policy change doesn’t just subvert standard procedure, it also defies NOAA’s purpose. 

Under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, regional councils retain the right to develop their own fishery management plans, while the agency’s role is to ensure adherence to legal requirements like preventing overfishing, minimizing bycatch and protecting habitats. 

“It’s a series of incoherent measures that don’t fit together in any policy,” said Rosenberg, who spent almost four decades navigating the council system. “None of these measures do anything to improve sustainability. I didn’t see a single one that would improve sustainability. Some will make it worse.”

Treece added that NOAA lacks the authority to override council due process. “It doesn’t allow [NOAA Fisheries] to bully the councils into deregulating fisheries and removing protections for endangered species or MPAs to satisfy special interests, or sacrifice the long-term stability of a fishery,” she said.

Notably, the letters ignore climate change entirely. “It’s foolish because the letters totally ignore the fact that some of the biggest pressures on marine resources right now are because of climate change,” said Rosenberg, noting how management plans are written for a fixed geographic environment even as stocks are moving poleward or deeper as waters warm.

When asked for comment on these issues, a spokesperson for NOAA told Inside Climate News that “the best available information” could be found in the letters and press releases themselves. 

The agency did not respond to direct questions regarding how many protected areas remain in the administration’s crosshairs; what species would lose management measures; what safeguards would be kept in place for affected whales, sea lions and turtles; and whether NOAA Fisheries now prioritizes commercial profits over environmental stewardship.

For conservation advocates, the administration’s priorities set out a troubling trajectory.

“With climate change and marine heat waves like the Super El Niño bearing down on the country, many of these short-term priorities aren’t based in science and are putting fisheries and whole ecosystems at even greater risk,” said Cerny-Chipman. “Now is not the time to roll back protections that help keep fish and marine life healthy.”

Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the weapons-tech company Palantir, is also a major force behind the Trump administration’s policy of pushing unhoused people toward incarceration.  

Lonsdale, a longtime critic of “housing first” policy—which proposes that homelessness be solved by supplying those in need of housing with somewhere to live—argues that fining and arresting people for sleeping in public will push them into mental health treatment. 

“We’ve made it easier to civilly commit those who are mentally ill and need treatment,” Lonsdale wrote in the New York Post in 2023. “With non-ideological policies rooted in incentives, accountability, and competence, we will show a better way and build a brighter future for our urban centers.”

But there is data to suggest this might not be the right approach. One study of homelessness-criminalization measures in 100 US cities found that the ordinances did not lead to a decrease in the number of people counted as homeless.

“It’s absurd to think that fining people will get them into treatment,” Dr. Margot Kushel, a physician who directs the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, told the New York Times. “Many people are desperate for treatment and can’t get it.” And since Trump cut Medicaid, which finances most of the healthcare options available to unhoused people, “it’s hard not to see the cynicism in this,” she said. 

The Cicero Institute, a lobbying group he founded eight years ago, has been instrumental in passing laws criminalizing camping or sleeping in public in 16 states, according to the New York Times. In total, the think tank has worked to pass 241 pieces of legislation in the past 5 years, on issues ranging from education to healthcare. Its c4 arm, Cicero Action, has engaged in lobbying related to military spending and defense contracts, according to the National Homelessness Law Institute. But time and again, Lonsdale and Cicero return to their push to eliminate unhoused people from public life.

That push has now gone federal. In 2024, in a Supreme Court decision called Grants Pass, the court found that camping bans do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, even if the only available alternative to camping is incarceration of the unhoused. And Trump has now issued an executive order that closely mirrors the Circero Institute’s policies.

Lonsdale’s allies see him as a man of principle. “In some ways he is like a 16th-century knight who was dropped into present day,” Zac Bookman, who co-founded the government database company OpenGov with Lonsdale, told the Washington Post. “There’s this code of honor and duty that he is trying to advance.”

Advocates for unhoused people take a less rosy view, and argue that Lonsdale is putting the 700,000 unsheltered people in the US in danger. “I just can’t imagine having that much wealth and power and using it to kick people when they are down instead of lifting them up,” Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told the Post. 

NHLC has sued the Trump administration over its Lonsdale-inspired approach to homelessness. 

“I don’t actually think you can separate [Trump’s homelessness policy] from Cicero,” Rabinowitz said. “I think they’re so embedded in this administration, when you look at Trump’s executive order or the HUD funding, it is not a coincidence that it is parroting Cicero.”

This January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed consular officers to refuse to process immigration visas for people from 75 countries because, he said, those immigrants would be more likely than others to “extract wealth” or “take welfare and public benefits” from the US. Since January, people from those 75 countries—all located in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe—have had their visa applications frozen or denied.

On August 21, though, a federal judge in New York struck down this blanket visa ban, on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965’s prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in issuing a visa. 

As my colleague Julia Métraux reported earlier this year, these “public charge” bans are in part based on eugenicist ideas.

Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that immigrants and even visitors would strain public services—reasoning very much rooted in the eugenicist and ableist thinking that shaped key aspects of public policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the claim that so-called “defective” people would produce “defective” children. As president, especially in his second term, Donald Trump has brought eugenicist immigration policy roaring back.

Judge Jeannette Vargas’ August 21 ruling in CLINIC v. Rubio reverses any visa denials that occurred solely due to the “public charge” visa ban.

The policy, Vargas found, “is contrary to law and was issued in excess of
Secretary Rubio’s statutory authority,” and “has the effect of categorically
banning the issuance of immigrant visas to nationals of nearly 40% of the world’s
countries.” The government may still appeal the decision.

In a written statement to reporters, the nonprofit groups and private law firms involved in the suit praised Vargas’ ruling. “This latest attempt by the Trump administration to enforce its white nationalist worldview through US immigration policy is, like the others, equal parts retrograde and unlawful,” said Baher Azmy, Legal Director of The Center for Constitutional Rights. “We are proud to stand by communities that will not stop fighting against the administration’s attempts to project its racist insecurities to tear apart families.”

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

It’s very easy to be a conspiracy-monger. Let’s give it a shot.

This week, there was a hullabaloo about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s 35-year-old aide who’s been derisively referred to within the White House as the “Human Printer.” She’s always by Trump’s side, typing his social media posts and printing out and feeding him positive and misleading information about his presidency. (“Look, this poll shows that 110 percent of all Republican voters think you’re better looking than Jesus Christ!”) She’s also a conduit for aides and foreign leaders who want to slip Trump a message.

There’s been much speculation and tittering about her devotion and physical closeness to Trump. She was part of the small elite band that was hustled into that now-infamous catering compartment in Turkey when Trump covertly fled Air Force One to use another aircraft due to a security threat. Her notes to Trump read like love letters. (“You are all that matters to me.”)

This new shot of attention for Harp was triggered when Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, said at a campaign rally, “[Trump] golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Outraged MAGA-ites and Trump defenders pounced (see Dumbass Comment of the Week below) and slammed Ossoff for supposedly implying Harp and Trump were trysting and denounced him for denigrating a hard-working woman.

Harp’s 24/7 presence in Trump’s life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Ossoff unfairly insinuated anything and demeaned Harp. His remark was at least partially prompted by the reports that Harp was one of the few aides who accompanied Trump when he skedaddled from Air Force One and left behind the seemingly expendable Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Whether he intended to or not, Ossoff spurred a national conversation about Harp—and about the appropriateness of discussing her bizarre relationship with Trump. Her 24/7 presence in his life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

On Wednesday, MSNOW reported that for more than a year, while working for Trump in the White House during his second term, Harp declined several times to seek a security clearance. Obtaining clearance is a routine move for an aide, especially a staffer in such proximity to the president. After all, she can hear and see the top-secret information flowing to and from Trump. It’s a tremendous security lapse to allow a person without clearance around-the-clock access to the president. Yet Trump permitted this. Eventually, Harp did receive a clearance. But how stringent was the review? And why did she not do so at the start?

That’s a bit suspicious, right? What would Alex Jones have said if an aide to President Barack Obama or President Joe Biden had done the same? Now let’s add to the picture where Harp worked prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022: the One America News Network.

OAN is a far-right cable news outfit that’s for Trump fans and MAGA-heads who think Fox News has gone soft. And it’s been overtly pro-Russia. When it was launched in 2013 by Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who got rich in the circuit board business, he instructed OAN staff to promote Trump, push conservative issues, and downplay Russian aggression. Fun fact: Herring married a Russian woman years earlier. And OAN aired reports from RT, a Kremlin-funded media outlet and propaganda shop. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that OAN producers “said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia.” This was after Russia had launched its first invasion of Ukrainian territory and illegally annexed Crimea—and after Vladimir Putin had attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win.

Where did Harp work prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022? The One America News Network, which, during the 2020 campaign, played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation.

Later, during the 2020 presidential campaign, OAN played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation. One of its anchors, Chanel Rion, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to smear Joe Biden, claiming without evidence that Biden had engaged in brazen corruption in Ukraine. The pair both promoted baseless allegations about Biden made by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who was later sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department for being a Russian agent. Derkach served as a major source for a series of Rion reports bashing Biden.

After the 2020 election, the US intelligence community stated in a public report that Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—­to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump.” The media organizations referenced here included OAN. The report also noted that Derkach and the Russian operation assisted the production of an anti-Biden documentary, apparently a film that aired on OAN in early 2020. (Following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Derkach fled to Russia. In 2024, he was appointed to a seat in the Russian parliament’s upper chamber.)

After the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, OAN aired a report from the front lines filed by Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop and fugitive who found asylum in Russia and became involved in disinformation operations Moscow mounted against the United States. He was identified on OAN as a foreign correspondent for the network, and the long piece he produced claimed that Ukrainian forces—whom he called “Nazi terrorists”—had massacred civilians and that the war had been caused by “kleptocrats in Washington” who were desperate to keep “Ukraine out of the hands of Russia” because they used Ukraine to “launder their money” and needed to hide their corruption. Dougan accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of skimming billions of US aid money and causing “thousands of innocent people to die.” OAN was broadcasting straight-­out, pro-­Putin, made-in-Russia propaganda.

As regular readers might guess, I cover OAN, Derkach, and Dougan in more detail in my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say.

Now what might a creative, conspiracy-minded person do with all these dots? An attractive aide has an oddly close connection to the president and is situated to know everything and can influence his thinking. She helps write his tweets. She can control what information he receives. She once worked for an organization that has aired Russian disinformation, that has been identified by US intelligence as an outlet for Kremlin propaganda, and that has been ordered by its owner to go easy on Russia. And she was reluctant to submit to a security clearance investigation.

Hmm.

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say. But I have no doubt if there had been a similar set of facts for Obama or Biden, OAN, Fox News, Kash Patel, Glenn Beck, Roger Stone, and just about the entire MAGAsphere (and maybe Joe Rogan) would have been off to the races with such a narrative.

But the Harp tale is indeed a serious episode that reminds us of how Trump and his gang don’t give a damn about security. The fact that a staffer with such access to Trump could blow off a security clearance for so long is troubling. As is the fact that Jared Kushner, who is not a government employee and who has business interests around the world, is handling highly sensitive matters in three sets of negotiations: the Ukraine war, the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and the Iran war. (He’s also doing a piss-poor job in each of them.) No one was punished for Signalgate. Trump readily accepted a 747-8 from Qatar that posed significant security problems. Mar-a-Lago is a counterintelligence nightmare. Trump’s crypto business and other deals allow foreigners—perhaps even overseas officials—to buy influence with him. Let’s not forget he swiped top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021 and stored some in a bathroom.

Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly because he and MAGA world went apeshit over Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails when she was secretary of state. There was never evidence that her use of a private server for her official emails—a violation of the rules—led to any security breaches. But during both Trump administrations, there have been multiple instances of Trump and his lieutenants violating basic security protocols. Harp dodging a security clearance investigation is the latest example. The Donald-Natalie story might seem like gratuitous gossip. Yet it shows once more that Trump and his gang have no respect for rules and believe they can get away with anything. That attitude is a national security threat.

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

As a young boy in the 1960s, almost every weekend Elbert McGee walked a half-mile with his father through the wooded streets of Roseland, Louisiana, to the Tangipahoa River. There, he learned to swim and fish for bass, crappie, and the occasional catfish.

​“We had a good, good life as children,” McGee said, unloading fishing gear from his truck. “We grew up healthy and in community.”

Today, McGee still lives in the home where he was raised. But he no longer makes the 10-minute walk to the river to fish. Instead, he drives three hours to Grand Isle.

That change only came after August 22, 2025, when Smitty’s Supply, an oil facility in the majority-Black town, exploded. The disaster released an estimated 12 million gallons of oily liquid and chemical waste into the river, and painted hundreds of homes, churches, schools, and playgrounds with black oily streaks. 

Within weeks, McGee’s then-15-year-old son, Markel, began having nosebleeds severe enough to make him miss school. A friend who is battling cancer developed a respiratory illness. Neither family has received a definitive answer as to whether those conditions are linked to the blast.

For McGee, who has a combined eight children and grandchildren, and other Roseland parents, the loss of the river has been surpassed by a much more pressing question: What does it mean to be a parent when you cannot stop harm from reaching your children?

Across Roseland and communities like it, protecting a child from refineries, railyards, and contaminated water becomes a never-ending, intimate form of vigilance—one Black parents shoulder disproportionately. Research shows Black children experience higher exposure to environmental toxins like lead, air pollution, and pesticides than children of any other race in the US, turning everyday parenting into an act of defense against threats they never chose and often cannot see.

“This is my home,” McGee said. “I have no other realistic option to leave.”

McGee, 63, has begun to sit with the devastating thought that he may have failed to protect his children by raising them here.“They’re not gonna be healthy here, especially doing anything in the dirt or the river,” he said.

“We can’t control the government or these companies,” he added. “We can pray on it. But you want the best for your children, and it hurts not to be able to give it to them.”

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality did not respond to Capital B’s requests for comment. In a statement, Smitty’s Supply said: “Smitty’s has completed all of the remediation requirements under the existing CERCLA Consent Order with EPA and has submitted its final report to EPA for its concurrence.”

Elbert McGee grew up fishing and farming in his community before the explosion.
Adam Mahoney/Capital B

McGee’s fears are rooted in more than parental instinct. After toxic events, children can absorb a larger dose of contamination than adults because they breathe, eat, and drink more relative to their body size, and because they often spend more time outdoors and closer to contaminated dust and soil. Their developing lungs, brains, and immune systems can be especially vulnerable.

Markel, a football player, was back in the dirt, running and breathing hard, just days after the explosion. McGee wonders if he should’ve pulled him from the sport, but it is one of the teenager’s main joys. And at the time, McGee said, he had been told Roseland was safe.

McGee now joins the Black mothers trained to keep the windows shut on a day the air smells metallic in Philadelphia, even as the house grows hot without air conditioning. The fathers, like John Ishmael Taylor in Flint, notice rashes developing on their children and begin buying bottled water they cannot comfortably afford. And the parents in Houston forced to decide whether their child’s cough is another cold or the result of pollution from the trucks idling outside.

When Markel first developed nosebleeds after the explosion, McGee immediately took him to the doctor, only to be dismissed. “They didn’t even examine him,” McGee said, “they said it was normal, but this had never happened before Smitty’s [exploded].”

All the while, across local farms and along the riverbanks, dozens of animals have died.

“I just want to make it to 70,” McGee said.Adam Mahoney/Capital B

One year since the disaster, both the federal and state governments have publicly maintained that the toxic cocktail of chemicals that spread over Roseland posed “no imminent threat to public health.” But the government’s assessment did not answer the questions parents said governed their daily decisions. They are still unsure if the soil on their property is safe or if children can play outside. And increasingly: What symptoms should prompt medical care?

For parents, the lack of clear answers has meant becoming informal toxicologists and medical advocates while still getting children to school, holding down jobs, and paying rent or mortgages.

“I just want to make it to 70 [years old],” McGee said. “I don’t think I can make it here this long and I’m doing all of this while trying to take care of the children in my house.”

He estimates he has spent more than $20,000 on his property since the disaster. He has replaced his roof and exterior siding and continues to excavate soil around his home.

In Roseland, where the average person makes just over $17,000 annually, many households have largely been left to fend for themselves since the explosion. Capital B has spoken with dozens of residents who said they have received no compensation or support as they have tried to clean their properties, rid their yards of contamination, and, in some cases, replace the exteriors of their homes.

Since the August explosion, the town has also experienced a chemical spill from a processing facility related to Smitty’s that infiltrated the drinking water supply.

Earlier this year, Pam Bean, who has two granddaughters who attend Roseland Elementary, said the lack of support has been “insulting.”

“You always hear about politicians talking about rural America for votes. This is rural America, and look at how they really treat us,” she said.

The absence of help is not only a burden adults carry.

Young people who grow up learning not to trust their drinking water or not to play outside when the refinery is flaring are learning that home is a place of potential danger. They notice whether a spill is cleaned quickly, officials answer questions, or a school is treated as worth protecting. When those signals are absent, children can learn that the institutions meant to safeguard them will not, research shows.

Pam Bean posed for a photo with her two grandchildren in April.Adam Mahoney/Capital B

The consequences can compound when exposure contributes to asthma attacks, sleep disruption, lead-related developmental risks, or repeated school absences. Parents may keep them inside, miss work to take them to appointments, or pull them from class when symptoms emerge. 

At a protest in April, Candice Hart held her daughter’s hand as she described what the contamination has meant for her family. Her daughter has had respiratory problems since the explosion, Hart said, and she has emails and letters showing that she and other parents had raised alarms for months, despite school officials’ claims otherwise.

“No parent should have to choose between their child’s education and their child’s health,” she said.

Markel, now a junior in high school, wants to leave Roseland, and perhaps Louisiana, after graduation. The explosion has changed his relationship to the place where his father learned to fish and swim.

His desire to leave is not simply teenage restlessness, McGee admitted. It is one consequence of growing up in a place that has taught him home can be hazardous.

Standing outside of his tarped home about half a mile from Smitty’s, McGee said the lack of an urgent response is inseparable from who lives in Roseland. 

He grew up with Ed Smith, the white owner of Smitty’s Supply, and graduated high school with him. “But [today,] he’d walk right past me like he never knew me,” McGee said. 

Smith has not made a public appearance about the disaster in the year since the explosion. Smith and his family live in a town 25 miles away from Roseland.

“I think Smitty’s hasn’t done nothing for this community because of who lives here, knowing him,” McGee said, referring to the town’s racial and economic makeup.

In Louisiana, Black communities home to industrial plants are exposed to seven to 21 times more toxic pollution than similar communities with more white residents. And historically, Black communities have received less recovery aid than white areas with comparable damage during environmental disasters.

But in Louisiana, the Black families living with the costs of industrial pollution are often also tied to the industries that create it. Industrial work remains one of the few accessible paths to a stable, middle-class income.

McGee lives inside that contradiction. Like 30 percent of Louisiana’s workers, he has an industrial job, driving more than an hour to shifts at a chemical facility in the region commonly known as Cancer Alley, a disproportionately Black area with some of the nation’s highest rates of cancer.

He knows the risks of the work, he said, but sees few alternatives that would allow him to provide for his family.

Dominic Kruger, a father in Cancer Alley, took his first job at a petrochemical plant shortly before his 18th birthday. It was the only way to survive in his home state, he said, “unless you want to work at McDonald’s.”

For McGee, it felt much the same. “I just want to feed and clothe my children,” he said. “I know I’m killing myself for a job, breathing in benzene and chemicals every day, but I didn’t want my children exposed, too.”

His home doesn’t feel like a place he can offer his children and grandchildren anymore. In his backyard, where a patch of dead grass has sat since the oily rain, McGee’s father grew “everything” and had hens.

“It is hard to give up generations, but we may have no choice.”

“I know I’m killing myself for a job,” McGee says,”but I didn’t want my children exposed, too.”Adam Mahoney/Capital B

The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people—and it has continued over decades. 

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Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation. 

“They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land [to] take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain…There’s all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”

This week on Reveal, we dive into the examination of American history happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials ask: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

This video was created in partnership with PBS NewsHour. 

The record amounts of glyphosate being sprayed in California’s forests—revealed in a yearlong Mother Jones investigation in April—has continued to attract national attention and fuel public debate. 

In Lake Tahoe, community members have flooded meetings and organized rallies to stop the US Forest Service from spraying the controversial herbicide better known as Roundup as part of the government’s plan to plant trees in the wake of wildfires. 

Members of Congress who oversee the Forest Service have sent detailed questions stemming from our investigation, demanding further information about the practice. 

And late last month, our investigation uncovered that Monsanto, the original developer of glyphosate that Bayer purchased in 2018, had secretly orchestrated yet another widely cited study that found glyphosate was safe. The EPA knew what Monsanto had done, determined it was ghost writing and “research misconduct,” and yet the agency continued to cite in government reports as evidence that the herbicide was safe for public use.

Bayer, which manufactures Roundup, is on the hook for more than $12 billion in legal expenses and payouts from lawsuits by people who say the popular herbicide gave them cancer. But last month, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that a technicality in federal law bars people from suing the company under state labeling laws, which require companies to disclose risks like cancer. The justices found that only the EPA can mandate safety labels on pesticides, and the agency—which has continued to rely on Monsanto’s ghostwritten studies—says the product is unlikely to cause cancer. Bayer agrees, stating that Roundup is safe when used as directed and that regulators around the world have approved it. 

“They’re taking away the choice of being surrounded by a toxic chemical,” says Tahoe resident and three-time Olympian Hannah Teter about the US Forest Service’s spraying of herbicide around her home town.

The Supreme Court decided last month that the maker of Roundup,  the world’s most widely used weed killer, can’t be held responsible for failing to warn users that one of its key ingredients – a chemical known as glyphosate – may pose risks to human health. Glyphosate has been a mainstay of agriculture in this country for decades, and thousands of lawsuits allege that exposure to the chemical caused cancer.  PBS NewsHour featured our reporting based on an analysis of millions of pesticide reports in California which reveals another, lesser known way glyphosate is being used right now:  to spray this country’s national forests. 

Our analysis of California pesticide records shows that the amount of glyphosate sprayed in state forests has quadrupled over the past decade. From Yosemite to Lassen Volcanic National Park in the very north of the state, residents are up in arms about the fact that the efforts to help them recover from wildfires may expose them to a harmful chemical.

PBS NewsHour featured our reporting on their nightly newscast. You can watch the story here:

Ed Martin, a trench-coat donning former “Stop the Steal” advocate whose work at various senior Justice Department jobs was charactered by brash, bumbling efforts to use the department to punish critics of President Donald Trump, is leaving DOJ, Trump announced Friday.

“Ed is now leaving to go outside to fight Legal Battles for the upcoming Midterm Election, and the Presidential Election of 2028,” Trump posted.

Martin, early in the Trump’s term, was the most vocal proponent of Trump’s claim that he could order federal prosecutors to pursue his critics. But Martin’s exit is not victory for the rule of law. It is a sign that newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had been a critic of Martin’s attention-seeking antics, is ushering in an era in which Trump’s wish to weaponize DOJ against his foes is more competently pursued.

Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Martin is a political journeyman who lost a series of races in Missouri and ran far-right advocacy organizations. He wasn’t hugely successful: in 2017, Martin was hawking a coloring book based on Trump tweets. But Martin, who gave himself the moniker “Eagle Ed,” gained national attention in 2020 as an advocate of Trump’s false claims about that year’s election, and later as a lawyer for indicted January 6 rioters. Martin’s statements in that period include claiming that antifa was behind the attack, calling it a “hoax,” dubbing Capitol rioters “patriots,” and arguing those prosecuted for the riot deserved “reparations.” 

Trump’s selection of Martin as interim US attorney for Washington, DC, last year, along with the pardon of 1,600 Capitol attackers, was a middle finger to DOJ and the federal prosecutors in Washington who brought almost of all the January 6 cases.

As the acting US attorney, Martin fired and demoted many of those prosecutors. He also began issuing a torrent of typo-strewn tweets and letters in which he threatened to investigate or prosecute Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, anti-Trump protestors, Georgetown University, and many others, all for what appeared to be protected speech at odds with Trump’s pronouncements.

“Noone [sic] is above the law,” Martin wrote in one letter to Elon Musk threatening to prosecute people who publicly identified DOGE employees.

Martin’s days as US Attorney ended amid fixed opposition to his confirmation by Senate Democrats and by Sen. Thom Tillis, who opposed Martin due to his connection to the January 6 attack. Martin hurt his own chances when, as Mother Jones reported, he lied about his ties to a January 6 defendant infamous for dressing as Hitler.

With his confirmation as a US attorney blocked, Trump named Martin head of the so-called weaponization task force set up to hound critics, local prosecutors and other connected to investigations and multiple indictments Trump faced during his first term and the Biden presidency. Trump also made Martin his chief pardon attorney, a job from which Martin memorably hatched a plan for Trump to issue pardons for so-called fake electors, though those people, prosecuted in state courts, could not benefit from presidential pardons. Trump did it anyway.

In a press conference held last year, Martin said that the task force would work to publicize its work. Even if people they targeted could not be charged, he said, “we will name them…and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” That was a pledge to violate DOJ tradition and written rules that the department pursue justice by prosecuting crimes in court rather than through public relations offensives.

But Martin made good on it. He appeared outside the Brooklyn home of New York Attorney General Letitia James in August 2025, wearing a trench coat, and posed for pictures taken by the New York Post—part of a bid to draw attention to claims that James committed fraud in private real estate dealings, a largely undisguised effort to retaliate against James for the successful civil case her office brought against Trump for fraud.

But it wasn’t all bluster. Martin had a role in investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, the Letitia James indictment, and that of former FBI Director James Comey, though the cases against Comey and James were thrown out. (DOJ later charged Comey again for allegedly threatening Trump by posting a picture of seashells arranged to say “86 47.”)

But Martin’s role at DOJ was steadily curtailed by Blanche, who reportedly believed Martin was overly focused on publicity with minimal achievement. Martin was ousted from the weaponization task force in February. Trump’s April firing of Pam Bondi as Attorney General and elevation of Blanche to acting AG was bad news for Eagle Ed. Martin’s exit comes a few weeks after Blanche’s confirmation.

Blanche appears to have sought Trump’s support for the nomination as Attorney General by advancing cases like the Comey seashell indictment and by pushing Trump’s plan for a $1.8 billion fund to pay January 6 defendants and others who claim they were politically prosecuted.

Blanche said he dropped the plan for the fund, though not a connected agreement that purports to spare Trump and his family members from IRS audits, amid pushback from Senate Republicans.

But any hope that Blanche’s confirmation would lead to his backing off from efforts to make DOJ a tool of Trump’s personal agenda quickly took a hit. First, Blanche spoke at a campaign rally for a Trump-endorsed candidate, in alleged violation of a law barring federal employees from partisan political campaigning while on the job.

Then, in a recent television appearance, Blanche declined to say that the Justice Department is independent of presidential directives. “I’m not going to pledge that,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press, adding that he would allow Trump to weigh in on individual prosecution decisions. “The elected president of the United States says something to me,” Blanche said. “And I’m supposed to say to you, ‘I would say no.’ I mean, that’s not the way it works.”

Blanche’s problem with Martin was not his effort to launch political prosecutions, but Martin’s poor execution of them, it seems. Martin is not leaving DOJ due to his intentions. The problem, apparently, is incompetence. With more effective advocates of Trump’s weaponization wishes consolidating power, fans of the rule of law may already miss Martin’s ineptitude.

Flock Safety is having a hard month. The surveillance technology company, which has sold more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras to some 6,000 police departments across the US, is up to its neck in cancelled contracts—at least 34 since the start of 2026—and public backlash.

Dozens of police officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for allegedly abusing the technology, which allows police to track vehicles’ movements, to stalk people. Flock’s safety reforms in response to the stalking issue, which mostly consist of voluntary security practices police departments can adopt if they choose, left advocates unimpressed.

“Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7.”

In total, at least 56 municipalities have canceled contracts, deactivated their cameras, or rejected potential Flock contracts since the beginning of this year, according to the advocacy group DeFlock. Many of those towns are simply contracting with competitors like Axon or Motorola instead—so they’re still working with surveillance-tech companies, but encroaching on Flock’s market share as they do so.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to invent creative ways to break a Flock camera: one House candidate in Tennessee allegedly took an extremely direct approach and shot some Flock cameras with a gun, while comparatively pacifist Flock-haters online post satirical videos teaching viewers how to saw through a Flock camera’s pole or spray-paint over its lens.

In response, Flock is trying a new public-relations tactic: Some of its leadership team is publicly arguing that stories keep coming out about Flock abuse not because Flock is especially liable to be abused, but because Flock is better at catching abusers.

You're going to see more stories about Flock catching bad cops misuse the database. We're the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale. If the others had this level of auditing, you'd see a lot more stories about cops abusing DMV data, etc. https://t.co/O2bHuXLjJ1

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

Rahul Sidhu, the company’s chief strategy officer, called Flock “the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale” in a series of posts in which he also wrote that taking away a police officer’s Flock database access would be tantamount to taking away their gun.

Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person. Cops break the law when they run plates for buddies or criminal histories on their daughter's boyfriends. Do we take all that away from them?

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

“Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person,” Sidhu posted. “Do we take all that away from them?”

“One of the many problems with Flock as a company is that they they treat legitimate privacy concerns as if they are just PR issues,” said ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow, “and so once again they are seeing this uprising against Flock throughout the country as a public relations problem.”

Flock, Marlow said, created the problem. In dozens of cases dating back to at least 2021, police officers have reportedly used Flock cameras to stalk their partners, their exes, and even women traveling across state lines to get abortions. And now, “[Flock] thinks if it just includes itself as a watchdog of the problem it’s creating, it somehow deserves a pat on the back.” 

Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. The firm is apparently no longer sending out the auto-reply with which it responded to journalists earlier this month: “Thanks for reaching out to Flock. Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

“I think more accurately they’re probably smoking grass if they think they can do an entire PR campaign and then disappear so they don’t have to defend it,” Marlow said.

In a bright red power suit, Ashley Moody, the former Florida attorney general who nabbed the state’s GOP Senate nomination in Tuesday’s primary, strolled onto the stage of Florida Republicans’ “Victory Rally” on Thursday and did not waste time attacking her opponent, state Rep. Angie Nixon.

“If I told you last year that Florida would have a nominee to the United States Senate that was a self-declared socialist, would you believe me?” Moody asked the crowd of more than 150 people who gathered at a Tampa event venue to hear from candidates on the Republican ticket. “This is not a joke. This is not a fictional TV series. This is reality.”

“Let me make this very clear,” Moody continued. “Angie Nixon wants the United States of America to look like Cuba.”

Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker from Jacksonville who helped lead the charge against Florida’s Republican-led redistricting earlier this year, defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, who raised millions of dollars against Nixon’s $975,000, in a stunning upset Tuesday. A union organizer, Nixon is running a campaign centered on affordability, Medicare for all, free childcare, paid family and sick leave, and a national rent freeze. She’s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, though the organization did not endorse her. 

The rally marked the GOP’s launching point for the 74 days until the general election in November. It also provided a glimpse of how Republicans will stoke fears of rising socialism against their opponents, especially those who embrace a version of the term, like Nixon.

In a state like Florida, where many Cubans and Venezuelans who fled communist regimes now live, the socialist label can be particularly toxic—and if Thursday’s rally is any indication, the GOP won’t hold back on attempting to leverage that kind of rhetoric this election season.

“The Democratic Socialists of America today is the Democratic Party, and that’s why we need to work triple time to ensure that the party of boys playing in girls’ sports, open borders, and unaffordability never, ever gets a foothold in the state of Florida,” Republican Blaise Ingoglia, the state’s chief financial officer—an elected position— who is running to keep his job this November, told the cheering crowd, which included women donning bedazzled red hats and a baby dressed in a US-flag-printed footie pajama. 

The evening ended with a speech from Byron Donalds, the House Representative who won the Republican nomination for Florida’s gubernatorial race this week. Donalds, who was endorsed by President Trump, began his remarks by mentioning that he had spoken to the president—who “was obviously in high spirits”—that morning.

After explaining the highlights of his platform, including the need to DOGE every government agency in Florida, Donalds pivoted to David Jolly, his Democratic rival—a centrist and former congressional Republican—calling him a “Trojan horse” for the Democratic Socialists of America. (Jolly is not affiliated with DSA or endorsed by them.) The audience erupted in cheers, raising signs with Donalds’ campaign slogan: “Defending the Florida Dream.”

“If you’re going to bend the knee to the Democratic socialists, you’re abandoning common sense,” Donalds continued. “You’re abandoning families. You’re abandoning sound economics. You’re abandoning parental rights. And in Florida, we are never going to abandon the hardworking people. We are going to fight for them every single day.”

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food-label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters—who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House.

But there are signs the MAHA-MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense stand-off over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections. We start with a piece on the Iowa gubernatorial candidate harnessing MAHA’s power in farm country; stay tuned for more stories in coming weeks.

Zach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?He’s running for Iowa governor on promises to bust up Big Ag. But some farmers are questioning his authenticity.

Top image: Illustration by Mark Harris; Anna Moneymaker/Getty;  Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty; Getty (9)

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

Dealing with seaweed is the bulk of Chris Bumpus’s job during the summer. As chief of conservation for Miami-Dade county’s parks, recreation and open spaces department, Bumpus is in charge of cleaning sargassum off 17 miles of county beaches. But some days, the odds are stacked against him and his team.

More and more sargassum, a kind of floating brown algae, has been washing up on the beaches of south Florida, west Africa, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Most mornings this time of year, a member of Bumpus’s seaweed crew walks on to South Beach around 7am to take pictures of piles of the stemmy, spicy-mustard-colored seaweed before a dozen tractors and specialized beachcombing vehicles are put to work trying to integrate the sargassum into the sand or rake it out to be hauled away. “Back in July, the beach looked clean for about an hour,” Bumpus said. That month alone, 9,000 tons of seaweed were removed from Miami-Dade county beaches, more than ever removed in a single month before.

“Hopefully, by October it will die down,” he said. “July is always the worst. It’s been a heavy season.”

Before the clenup begins, a crew has already marked any new sea turtle nests so they aren’t harmed by the sargassum removal. The county holds a permit with the Florida department of environmental protection for its employment of heavy equipment to corral the seaweed. The permit prohibits that equipment during turtle nesting hours, from 30 minutes before sunset until sunrise. So far this nesting season, about 700 sea turtles have built nests on county beaches.

Miami-Dade county spends $3 million per year on sargassum removal, more than any other county in Florida, Bumpus said. The Florida Keys, however, can see heavier accumulations of sargassum because of the inlet-like shape of their beaches, he said. For centuries, sargassum has grown in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the north Atlantic encircled by ocean currents that keep the seaweed concentrated there. But in 2011, scientists saw the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt form for the first time, stretching from west Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists say several factors contribute to the blooms, including nitrogen and phosphorus from rivers—such as the Amazon, Congo, and Mississippi—warmer water temperatures, and ocean circulation.

Since 2011, the amount of sargassum has doubled every five years, as a result, larger and denser mats of sargassum have been washing up in Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean. This summer, satellite imagery showed the second highest amount of sargassum in the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt at a whopping 33.5 million tons, slightly behind 2025 when the seaweed biomass reached 38 million tons.

The climate crisis has also played a role in the proliferation of sargassum, said Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University Harbor Branch, who has been studying sargassum since 1982. “As we see more ocean warming, we get more evaporation and that drives these extreme rain events that essentially flush more nutrients from land into the ocean,” he said. “So that’s an indirect effect that can increase nutrient supply to sargassum.”

Miami-Dade county first began efforts to address its seaweed problem in 2019. The county’s annual seaweed removal budget is funded by tourist development taxes paid by visitors who stay at hotels and short-term rentals. In July, Miami-Dade county commissioners voted to petition the state to allow the county more flexibility to use beach raking equipment in more areas.

“I think this year has been kind of a gamechanger in that we’ve seen major inundations here in south Florida, more than we’ve ever really seen in past years, and comparable to what’s been happening in the Caribbean, Mexico and the Dominican Republic,” LaPointe said.

In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a $115 million national plan to combat sargassum, including employing ships that scoop the seaweed out of the water. But federal and state agencies in the US prohibit sargassum removal in open-water because of concerns for the sea life that lives in the floating seaweed mats. But LaPointe said that could eventually change, as research in his lab is showing that sargassum loses much of its marine life as it deteriorates and approaches the beach.

Sargassum serves as a critical habitat in the open ocean, but that changes as it gets close to and comes ashore. “What we’re seeing is that as this excessive amount of sargassum comes ashore it’s affecting coral reefs and seagrass beds and creating dead zones, which strips the oxygen out of the water,” LaPointe said. “That’s why we’re getting these odors of hydrogen sulfide, which presents a human health risk.”

More aggressive seaweed removal efforts might be necessary, but these measures won’t address the underlying causes of increasingly massive blooms in the ocean, LaPointe said. “People are realizing this isn’t going away. It’s getting worse. It’s the new normal. It’s not only treating the symptoms but doing more research on the land-based nutrient sources that we can do something about,” he said.

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

In Iowa, one of the key battleground states in November’s midterm elections, just about every political candidate agrees on one thing: Something must be done about the state’s rising rates of cancer.

The midwestern state has the second-highest rate of cancer nationwide and, together with Utah and West Virginia, is one of only three states where the incidence of the disease is rising, according to cancer rate monitoring from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Promises to address the issue are now top of mind for candidates ahead of the 3 November elections, in which Iowa may play an important role in deciding control of Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump’s term.

“The road I live on, I think there’s only one family that has not dealt with some kind of cancer,.”

Republicans hoping to preserve their party’s dominance of the state and Democrats who believe conditions are right for them to win key races have pledged to make fighting the disease a priority. Where they differ is in their views over the degree to which the state’s powerhouse farm economy has contributed to making Iowans sick, and what to do about it.

“I think state leadership and industrial agriculture are very hesitant to have those conversations, but I think the Iowa public is calling and demanding action and conversation and answers in a way that both parties are needing to respond, and [that’s] why it has become the campaign issue of this upcoming election,” said Sarah Green, executive director of the Iowa Environmental Council, a non-partisan group whose research into the disease’s prevalence has helped fuel public awareness of the crisis.

Iowa’s cancer rates followed national trends until 2012, when they began climbing upwards for reasons that Green said remain unclear. Cancer includes a broad group of diseases, and many aspects of life, from stress to food to environment, can modify someone’s risk. What’s plain is the importance to voters – one survey has cancer ranked as the top issue facing the state, eclipsing even the cost of living.

In the race for the state’s open US Senate seat, Democrat Josh Turek whose spina bifida he attributes to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, has brought up his sister’s struggle with breast cancer, while his opponent, the Republican congresswoman Ashley Hinson, has emphasized her attempts to reform health policy in Washington.

Candidates of both parties vying for the state’s four Republican-held House districts have battled over who would be better suited to channel federal resources to the state’s needs. In the race to replace the incumbent governor, Kim Reynolds, Zach Lahn won an upset victory in the Republican primary with the support of a PAC connected to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, and both he and his Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, have unveiled lengthy plans to curb rates of the disease.

“The road I live on, I think there’s only one family that has not dealt with some kind of cancer,” said Seth Watkins, a longtime farmer in southwest Iowa who sees the emphasis on fighting the disease—and potentially changing the state’s approach to agriculture—as long overdue.

“We have a farm policy that has resulted in less soil, less biodiversity in wild species, more cancer, fewer farmers and fewer opportunities. I mean, at some point, wouldn’t people just look at that data and say, you know, maybe we should do something different?”

Iowa is the top producer of corn and pork in the US and one of the largest growers of soy, and agriculture generates a third of the state’s economic output and a fifth of its jobs.

But that immense productivity comes at a cost: Iowa’s farmers use more fertilizer than those of any other state, and it also leads in the number of concentrated animal feeding operations, which are part of the meat processing supply chain and generate runoff.

Green pointed out that Iowa also had relatively few regulations intended to keep pesticides and farm runoff, which can be heavy with cancer-linked nitrates, away from people and out of water supplies.

“Too many politicians from Washington, DC, to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money.”

In 2022, Iowa’s overall rate of cancer was approximately 506 cases per 100,000 people, higher than the national average of 442 per 100,000 people, according to National Institutes of Health data. It also has elevated rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and acute myeloid leukemia, two cancers that some studies have found may be linked to glyphosate, the herbicide marketed as Roundup that is the most used in the state.

Agriculture’s impact on Iowans has recently become pronounced, even for people that have nothing to do with farming.

Some Iowa waterways are among the most polluted by nitrates in the US, and last year the water utility serving Des Moines, the state’s capital and largest city, announced its first-ever lawn watering ban because levels of the compounds in the rivers from which it draws its water supply had hit near-record levels. The utility ordered water rationed again this summer.

When the Iowa Environmental Council last year dispatched researchers across the midwestern state to learn more about how cancer was affecting its residents, Green said talking about the link with agriculture was often regarded as a “taboo.”

“Iowans knew there were issues, but felt like they were not supported by their state and by elected officials in, one, hearing their stories, and then two, addressing and recognizing real challenges that Iowans are experiencing a health crisis,” said Green, whose group convened the 16 listening sessions together with the Iowa Farmers Union and Drake University’s Harkin Institute, a public policy thinktank.

There are other factors connected to cancer diagnoses in Iowa—its residents face a higher risk of exposure to naturally occurring radon, and this year the state legislature approved a law mandating that mitigation systems be installed in new homes. Under Reynolds, the state has also sought to curb alcohol and tobacco use, and in June the GOP-dominated legislature approved a $320 million investment in water quality. But Green said that measure offered relatively little new funding and “doesn’t address pollution at the source.”

The gubernatorial candidates Lahn and Sand came out against a June Supreme Court ruling making it more difficult for people who believe they contracted cancer from exposure to Roundup to sue its manufacturer.

The Republican Lahn’s campaign platform has largely focused on incentivizing farmers to change their ways to prevent water pollution, while accusing major chemical manufacturers of misleading Iowans about their products’ safety.

“We all know something is terribly wrong, but too many politicians from Washington, DC, to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money. This will not go on when I’m governor,” Lahn said after winning the nomination in June.

His Democratic opponent, Sand, has called cancer “the top issue on everyone’s mind no matter what part of the state I’m in, and rightfully so,” and proposed measures to better manage farmers’ use of manure, test for radon and help farms enroll in conservation programs.

“I feel like we’re mining instead of practicing agriculture. “

Neither has as aggressive a platform as Chris Jones, the Democratic candidate for state agriculture secretary. A former University of Iowa researcher, he wrote a popular blog that explored the state’s water quality issues, but stopped writing it after, he told the Iowa Capital Dispatch, two Republican state senators threatened the university’s funding over his writings. One of the lawmakers denied the allegations, and Jones later left the school.

Jones is proposing a wholesale transformation of the state’s approach to farming to reduce its impact on water quality. His platform includes zoning changes to address the environmental effects of Cafos and a “strategic retreat” from growing corn for ethanol, a top cash crop for the state’s farmers.

“We know radon is a driver of lung cancer here. Well, guess what? We have policies to help reduce exposure to radon,” Jone said. “The same could be said for nitrate and drinking water. Let’s develop policies that reduce that risk.”

The incumbent agriculture secretary, Mike Naig, a Republican and former lobbyist for Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup that’s now part of Bayer, did not respond to an interview request sent to his campaign.

Some farmers aren’t waiting for the election results to change their agricultural practices.

Last March, three farmers in north-central Iowa announced themselves as “the Lobe Rangers,” unveiling a website complete with a logo of a masked man standing amid the corn in which they made their case for how it is possible to farm profitably without harming themselves or the environment.

“This has been boiling underneath the surface for me for 15 years, and the reason I think we launched is that we just kind of had enough. We saw the inaction of the political class and the ag lobbying leadership class of putting up the same nonsense,” said Zack Smith, a corn and soybean farmer who is one of the rangers.

The group—which took its name from a particularly fertile part of the state called the Des Moines lobe—follows the state’s nutrient-reduction strategy, a blueprint to keep nitrates out of the state’s waterways and the far-off Gulf of Mexico that’s only voluntary, but which the rangers insist works.

Watkins, who works land his great-grandfather first cultivated in 1848, has in recent years downsized what was once a 4,000-acre farm, helping younger farmers grow diversified crops on smaller plots of land.

The change in tack follows more than three decades of Watkins farming at scale and growing more disillusioned by an industry that depends heavily on federal subsidies while exacting a worsening toll on the environment. “I feel like we’re mining instead of practicing agriculture. And, you know, show me an area, whether it’s the oil industry or mining or any of that, where when the resources are gone, the people are better off,” Watkins said.

Watching the state’s political class focus on cancer, and by extension, water quality, had been a curious experience, since it had been a concern of theirs for more than a decade, said Smith.

While the group—which has not endorsed any candidates—doubt any single election can reverse Iowa’s frightening health trajectory, it can at least make a step in the right direction. “It’s definitely not gonna be solved by what’s gonna happen in the election in 2026,” said Smith. “We’ll maybe start making some steps in the right direction, but this is going to be something that is going to take a lot of change at a lot of different levels.”

As Stephen Young stepped into the woods about an hour drive from Mt. Lassen volcano in northeast California, the forest began communicating to him in an unspoken language learned from his years collecting plants. The tree-shaded March air felt cool against his cheek, and he could sense the moisture of the forest’s understory hanging in the air. He inhaled the rich scent of pine needle duff wafting up from the ground. “I said to myself, there is bracken fern in this area,” he recalls. “I walked maybe 50 yards, and there it was, a whole field of bracken ferns.”

Young, 26, is a traditional Maidu basketweaver who collects the roots of the fern and other native plants for material. Over the years, he’s learned to avoid the toxic chemicals sprayed by the US Forest Service in California’s woodlands. He scanned the area, looking for signs that the Forest Service might have sprayed herbicides nearby. Nothing. The site was clean, or at least that was his best guess.  

“We need the natural environment to practice our religion and spirituality.”

Earlier this year, our Mother Jones investigation found that record amounts of glyphosate—the key ingredient in the herbicide Roundup—have been sprayed in California’s forests in recent years. It also exposed how key scientific studies that the Forest Service and others relied upon to say glyphosate was safe were ghost written by manufacturer Monsanto. 

The Forest Service uses glyphosate and other herbicides in the wake of forest fires or logging operations to kill native plants the agency says compete with replanted saplings for sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. By eliminating the native plants, freshly planted timber trees will grow back faster and in greater density for future logging. The Trump administration announced plans this month to roll back protections for 45 million acres of national forest, including old growth trees, following President Trump’s call last year to increase timber production by 25 percent.

https://youtube.com/shorts/sNjafmuqTPc

But a growing number of Native American community leaders from across the state—Mt. Lassen in the north to Lake Tahoe and down to Southern California—say the government’s spraying of glyphosate infringes on their cultural and religious practices by poisoning their traditional gathering areas and changing the composition of the forest. They told me that the moment has come to take action, maybe even legal action. And it wouldn’t be the first time. 

Nearly 25 years ago, a coalition of tribal members from across the state joined with environmental groups to challenge the Forest Service in court after they say community members got sick from ingesting the chemicals. Their efforts back then reduced, and in some areas all but eliminated, the Forest Service’s use of herbicides. 

“We need the natural environment to practice our religion and spirituality,” Young said. “If we can’t do that then our culture is at risk.”

Stephen Young is a traditional Maidu basketweaver who collects the roots of ferns and other native plants for material. Courtesy Stephen Young By removing native plants, the Forest Service is harming the wildlife that depends on it, including mammals, birds and insects, says Jun Bando, executive director of the California Native Plant Society,Courtesy Stephen Young

The California Indian Basketweavers’ Association helped lead those legal challenges a quarter century ago. Today, it instructs members to watch out for the warning signs of the government’s herbicide spraying: plants and bushes that are unexpectedly brown and dead in the middle of summer, patches of ground where nothing is growing, and recent logging or replanted timber trees. Young had his herbicide training in mind as he approached the bracken ferns, large fronded plants that resemble ferns you might see for sale at the hardware store. Bracken fern, like other native plants that return after wildfires, will die after being sprayed by glyphosate. But depending on the time of year, it can be hard to tell if brown, dried out fronds have been sprayed or are just changing with the seasons.

In 2000, the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association joined a coalition of nonprofits that challenged the Forest Service’s use of herbicides in the Tahoe National Forest after it says members began to get sick, which the native community blamed on the government’s use of herbicides in their gathering areas.  “There were elders who started to get sores in their mouths because of the pesticides. We use our mouths to help in basketweaving,” Young says. “And then if you’re cooking in these baskets, and the material has been sprayed, then people can be ingesting it.” The US Forest Service did not respond to a request for comment. Bayer, which manufactures glyphosate, has maintained that the herbicide is safe when used as directed and notes that regulators around the world have approved its use. (Although, notably, the Canadian province of Quebec, one of the largest timber producers in North America, has banned it.)

The coalition of nonprofits that included the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association got a federal judge in 2001 to issue an injunction to stop the government’s spraying in the Tahoe National Forest, at least temporarily, because the court ruled the government had not fully assessed the risks of herbicides as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Following the ruling, and amid widespread public outcry and a series of similar lawsuits in the years that followed, the Forest Service significantly reduced its large-scale spraying in California forests, according to state pesticide records and interviews with foresters, environmentalists, and government officials.

But in recent years, following a series of massive wildfires that hit California, the Forest Service began returning to chemical spraying as the cheapest way to regrow dense forests intended for timber sales and harvesting. When replanting trees after a fire or logging operation, the alternative to herbicides is to manually clear areas around the baby pine trees. But a Forest Service study found that hiring people to do that work instead of using herbicides in California’s Eldorado National Forest following the Caldor Fire would cost three times as much. The government chose the cheaper option.

“It’s devastating,” says Starla Madrigal, chairperson of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association, which continues to oppose herbicide use on wildlands. “It stays in the plants. It contaminates the water.”

Back in 2001, at the urging of native basketweavers, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation published the results of a multi-year study documenting how long herbicide chemicals linger in plant materials after being sprayed on Forest Service land. It analyzed spray areas in Eldorado, Sierra, and Stanislaus National Forests, and specifically tested plants used by tribal communities for basketweaving, such as bracken fern roots and buckbrush shoots. 

The report found the chemicals linger in plant material for well over a year, and it advised that “to be certain of avoiding plant materials with detectable herbicide residues, plants should not be gathered within 80 weeks of glyphosate and triclopyr applications.” These are two of the same chemicals the Forest Service is now spraying in the Lake Tahoe area, where plans call for more than 70,000 acres of the Eldorado National Forest to be treated.

These chemicals are not staying where they are sprayed, but are instead entering the waterways.

Despite the recommendations from state pesticide experts to avoid collecting from these areas for 80 weeks, the Forest Service sprayed glyphosate and triclopyr in the Tahoe area in 2025 but did not notify the public of where it had sprayed until this spring, more than a year later. In an email, an unnamed Forest Service spokesperson wrote that its workers post signs after spraying, but that those signs are typically removed no more than 48 hours after application, well short of the 80 week recommendation for avoiding herbicide residues. In fact, signs can be removed as soon as a day after glyphosate is used, according to the Forest Service’s protocols. (The agency did not respond to my questions about the apparent discrepancy.)

A hillside behind the home of Beverly Ogle that was negatively affected by herbicides sprayed by the government.Mother Jones

Another herbicide the agency approved for use in the Tahoe area, hexazinone, can linger even longer. The 2001 state report recommended not gathering plant material for 130 weeks after hexazinone is used in order to avoid residues. But the Forest Service stated policy says signs can be removed within days after the chemical is sprayed.

A more recent report by California Department of Pesticide Regulation found that these chemicals are not staying where they are sprayed, but are instead entering the waterways. The 2024 study tested rivers, creeks and drainage ditches in the Central Valley—California’s main farmland region—and found glyphosate in 100 percent of the samples. A similar study that tested streams for triclopyr in other parts of California found it was also detected in 100 percent of the waterways.

The herbicides can impact the ecosystem for decades, according to the Forest Service’s own 2025 report, which found many native plants will be replaced by invasive species after large-scale herbicide spraying. A study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management in 2010 found that herbicide use for reforestation resulted in fewer native plants growing back, and instead resulted in “significantly greater” invasive species taking root in the replanted forests.
“This is a particularly destructive way to manage the forest,” says Jun Bando, executive director of the California Native Plant Society, who holds a PhD in ecology from University of California, Davis. “There is long-term ecological damage.” By removing native plants, she explains, the Forest Service is harming the wildlife that depends on it, including mammals, birds and insects. It also might be increasing wildfire risk, she says, because many of these invasive species, such as the French broom shrub, are what fire experts refer to as “flashy fuels,” meaning they are more likely to catch fire and kill the replanted trees. This idea is backed up by the 2010 study, which found that the most common invasive grass to take root after herbicide spraying is cheat grass, and that this invasive plant burns nearly ten times more frequently in western ecosystems than the native shrubs that normally repopulate after forest fires. 

Bando says the only time her organization endorses herbicide use is against these invasive species after all other measures have been tried, and even then only in highly targeted approaches—not anywhere near the scale being deployed by the Forest Service.

Assemblymember James Ramos, who was the first Native Californian elected to the state legislature, said protecting the native grasses is important because “basketweaving is truly who we are.”

Ramos is the author of the California Indian Freedom Act of 2026, which would give Native people more protections and the right to sue if the state government infringes on their tribal customs or beliefs. The bill passed the assembly and is now up for a vote in the state senate.

“We have to stand our ground. We have to make sure our voices are heard,” Ramos said.

“There were elders who started to get sores in their mouths because of the pesticides,” says Stephen Young. “We use our mouths to help in basketweaving.”Courtesy Stephen Young “We need the natural environment to practice our religion and spirituality,” Young says. “If we can’t do that then our culture is at risk.”Stephen Young

The Native American community is once again starting to organize against the government’s plans to spray herbicides, said Beverly Ogle, a Maidu elder in the Lassen area of California.

“I’m afraid to go out in the backcountry and gather plants. Because are we gathering something that’s got poison on it?”

“We’re just not going to let it go,” she told me, sitting in her living room in the foothills of Mt. Lassen volcano. “It’s kind of like killing our tribe again. That’s the way I truly feel. It’s gotten to the point where I’m afraid to go out in the back country and gather plants. Because are we gathering something that’s got poison on it?”

Ogle, 85, said the herbicide spraying is the government’s latest attack on their native culture and religious practices, a long continuation of an injustice that began more than 150 years ago.

In the 1800s, native people were hunted down and killed by authorities, she told me. An English-language newspaper near Mt. Lassen ran this description in 1859 of local efforts to kill native people in eastern Tehama County: “Some men are hired to hunt them, who are recompensed by receiving so much for each scalp, or some other satisfactory evidence that they have been killed.”

We survived that, she said, but then the federal government funded a boarding school in nearby Greenville, Calif. where her relatives were sent so that their native language and customs would be replaced by English and American traditions.

Today, the Forest Service’s plan is to spray glyphosate and other herbicides across the same areas where the militiamen were paid to murder and scalp Native Americans, and where school-aged children were taken without consent from their parents. It is a continuation of the same genocidal behavior, Ogle said to me, quietly, shaking her head.

The Maidu people survived, Ogle said, but their customs, medicines and religious practices are once again being threatened by government officials, this time to grow trees as cheaply as possible.

“It’s not a good feeling,” she said.

“We’re just not going to let it go,” says Beverly Ogle, as she sat in her living room in the foothills of Mt. Lassen volcano.Mother Jones

I’m not sure when my smartphone began to feel like an albatross, when my unease about relying on it devolved into full-blown anxiety that I was ­frittering away my life on this tiny screen. As if reading my mind, ­purported solutions to this digital malaise began ­appearing on the very device that caused my angst, to paraphrase ­Hemingway, gradually and then suddenly all at once. TikTok influencers, riffing on the trend of “touching grass” instead of scrolling, touted self-guided digital ­detoxes.

I kept seeing advertisements for Brick—a physical plastic block that, for $59, can turn smartphones into devices that merely call and text. The Opal app directs users to wholesome dopamine hits, like solving math problems, instead of trawling “culprit” destinations like Instagram. Some people are ditching devices altogether in favor of flip phones and meeting up in “Luddite” clubs dedicated to offline pursuits like painting and reading. Goop wellness empire queen Gwyneth Paltrow says she underwent a digital detox to be more “present.”

The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year.

The smartphone backlash has even reached the corporate world: ­Companies like Spotify and Dolby have invited keynote speaker Nina Hersher, the founder of Digital Resilience Lab, to talk about device-specific wellness. The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year.

My own algorithm started serving me marketing materials from wellness retreats featuring digital detoxing—or, in the case of Arizona’s Miraval Resort, “digital mindfulness.” At The Ranch in Malibu, California, guests can ­expect, in addition to daily massages, to “detox from digital devices.” Such retreats are one of the wellness industry’s fastest-­growing sectors, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report. In just a few days, they seem to promise, they will cleanse you of the virtual residue mucking up your mind.   

I went to get a glimpse of a well-­reviewed digital detox retreat offered by Golden Door, a posh resort set amid the Merriam Mountain range on the outskirts of San Diego County. I drove there in mid-May and parked near a wooden bridge that arched over a small burbling creek. The heavy scent of jasmine suffused the air. As the highway noise dissipated, I felt my jaw unclench for the first time that day.

The retreat center’s founder, Deborah Szekely, attributed nutritious, fresh food as central to her family surviving the Great Depression. Drawing from this ethos, Golden Door’s program has, since 1958, centered on organic meals shared in a dining room and daily exercise like hiking. These days, it also offers LED treatments, dermaplaning, and an experimental “multisensory” video experience, The Circle, that is modeled after Las Vegas’ Sphere, with live musicians soundtracking a nature film shown on a circular screen under a forest ­canopy. The lawns are trimmed by a silent robot so as not to disturb the 40 or so weekly guests while they’re unwinding, Golden Door General Manager and COO Kathy Van Ness points out when she meets me for a tour. Guests typically stay for seven days (a “classic women’s week” costs $12,950) and, according to Van Ness, 60 percent of visitors return every year.

“Increasingly, social status is this thing of being able to disconnect from the digital world.”

In the 13 years that Van Ness has led Golden Door, she’s noticed that the younger clientele, rather than obsessing over fitness fads, arrive anxious and desperate to take charge of their relationships with smartphones. This is easier said than done, even at one of the most intentionally relaxing places on Earth. When Van Ness first arrived at the retreat center in 2013, she’d inherited a place with no wifi. “The stress of not having [wifi] was more fearful than actually telling them to put [their phones] away,” Van Ness says, “because they felt that they couldn’t do it.” (Fans of The White Lotus might find this story­line familiar.)

So she installed wifi, and in 2017, she started experimenting with something less rigid. Minimal phone use is permitted in common areas, but attendees may use them inside their rooms, which are outfitted with a small black “sleep” bag for guests to tuck their digital devices away. Each is emblazoned with words of encouragement, such as “choose to look more at your inner wisdom than the screen.”

“When you tell people who are successful that they can’t do something, you’re taking something away from them,” Van Ness explains. “If you give them the choice to understand why they should not do that, they are gleeful to put it away.” Her sleep bag strategy aligns with 2017 research suggesting that a smartphone within one’s sight can diminish cognitive capacity. But I suspect that Golden Door’s digital detox has become popular with the well-heeled for a different reason. They get to indulge in the ultimate quiet luxury: being unreachable.

Lily Lambie-Kiernan

Although it’s now positioned as a form of wellness, digital detoxing ­entered the cultural lexicon at a time of panic. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how the company had harvested millions of Facebook users’ data and used it to influence the previous US presidential election. “All of a sudden, everyone started saying, ‘Oh, by the way, social media can manipulate you, and social media can be evil,’” says Anastasia Dedyukhina, the founder of the Consciously Digital Institute, an organization that is attempting to set standards for digital wellness practices.

In 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling The Anxious Generation, which hinged on an argument that digital devices were “rewiring” children’s brains, changed the tenor of cultural conversations around screen time. “You cannot argue about the social importance of this book,” Dedyukhina says. “It mobilized lots of people to push back big time on social media, specifically on phones, and it became an institutional thing, a ­concern for governments.”

Solid research has shown that prolonged use of smartphones is linked to poor posture and eyesight issues as well as psychological maladies like anxiety, burnout, shredded attention spans, and the degradation of human connections. In the past few years, a spate of high-profile lawsuits have alleged that tech giants intentionally encouraged social media addiction, particularly among children; Meta is currently facing such claims in a federal trial that began earlier this week. At least 20 states and several countries have instituted cellphone bans in school classrooms. ­Earlier this year, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for promoting design features that worsened a young woman’s depression and anxiety—a ruling that opens up the potential for other lawsuits and tighter regulation. (Meta and YouTube plan to appeal the decision.)

The view of screen time as an “addiction” has led to a growing digital wellness industry that promises to help you “detoxify” from its poisons. Several years ago, Marck Lund-Nielsen, a brand consultant based in Denmark, says he began noticing a “dopamine detox” trend picking up steam in manosphere circles online. To “dopamine detox” was to abstain from compulsively pleasurable things, like seeking likes and follows on social media, supposedly in order to lower one’s cortisol levels. The podcaster Joe Rogan has touted “dopamine fasts” with guests on his show, and Andrew Huberman, the “wellness bro” Stanford neuroscientist, offers lessons in “controlling dopamine for motivation, focus, and satisfaction.” Just to be clear, the concept of a total dopamine detox misrepresents the science of the brain. According to Cleveland Clinic psychologist Susan Albers-­Bowling, dopamine is “a critical component that we can’t and don’t want to get rid of.”

Recent online chatter about being “aspirationally offline”—indulging ­instead in nostalgic analog tech like CD players and wired headphones—stems from a backlash to techno-­utopianism (and its billionaire boosters), says Samantha Chen, a writer and content creator who analyzes digital trends. The rise of AI has only amplified this sentiment, Chen says, as people want “to exert some kind of control over what ultimately may not be controllable.”

The digital detoxing craze has taken on a performative air. Gen Zers tote around “analog bags” bursting with coloring books and Game Boys in Instagram Reels. Even Brick has become a trendy accessory with which to broadcast one’s mindfulness around screen time. ­“Increasingly, social status is this thing of being able to disconnect from the digital world,” Lund-­Nielsen says. People with this privilege may not need to, say, monitor a bank account to keep it from overdrawing, or check work email while on vacation, he explains: “You can disconnect from it actively.”

Of course, the digital detox trend stems from a real dissatisfaction with life online and an understandable suspicion of the way tech companies design their products’ algorithms in a way that keeps people scrolling to maximize profit. But some of the quick-fix solutions offered to supposedly cleanse us of these ills are most likely fads, both Lund-Nielsen and Chen told me. A more permanent societal shift would depend on people doing the tough internal work of untangling the loneliness that may be compelling all of us to reach for our phones. But that makes for a less-compelling Instagram story than posting a vintage VHS haul from an estate sale.

Still, while a digital cleanse might be no panacea, could it curb my anxiety that I’m wasting my whole life online? Without $9,950 to spare for Golden Door’s shortest-possible unplug ­regimen, I decided to try a mini-detox at home. Heeding the advice of Colin Corby, a former tech industry worker turned digital detox coach, I did some self-examination to understand why this cleanse might help me: I’ve always identified as an extrovert, yet I also realized that scrolling was giving me an excuse to decline plans with friends, even when I wasn’t that tired.

I gave myself a weeklong window to explore better digital habits. First, I tried to reduce my screen time by one hour per day to see if it would have a positive effect on my attention span, as research has suggested it might. I also deployed the power of inconvenience; I used Opal to block Instagram and Reddit, the apps where I linger the most. Using the phone an hour before bedtime? Verboten. And I said yes to all social plans so long as they didn’t require doing something terrible, like waiting in an hourlong line at a ­matcha place. Corby suggested that a change in environment could help build better habits, so I set out to wake up slightly earlier and go for a walk instead of mainlining my phone the moment I opened my eyes.

The experiment started off badly. My attempt to wake up 20 minutes earlier resulted in snoozing my alarm two days in a row. Realizing I was not cut out to be an early riser, I opted to pet my dog for a few minutes before checking email. The next day upon waking, I read a chapter of a book instead of staring at my phone. I went out with friends four nights in a row, something I hadn’t done in at least a year. By the end of the week, I was surprised when Opal told me that my screen time had gone down from a daily average of four hours and 21 minutes to three hours.

So was I able to concentrate longer, sleep better, feel less anxious? Not in the life-changing way I was expecting. I thought the break would help mitigate some ongoing sleep issues, but something else was keeping me up. Most personally beneficial were the mornings spent reading and dog snuggling, which made me feel a little less spiky throughout the day, and the nourishment from catching up with friends. Given that it takes several weeks, if not months, to develop new habits, I’d need to keep this up for a while to see demonstrable changes.

But on day eight, my screen time spiked once again. I’d found a video of a CGI fish with Jim Carrey’s face transposed over it. Apparently, test audiences had found the creature so disturbingly lifelike that Warner Bros. scrapped the film it was designed for altogether. Delighted, I sent the discomfiting Carrey fish to a few friends over Instagram. Laughing about it over text with them fed the lingering desire to reconnect with friends—and felt just as good as not having my phone in hand.

Ultimately, the slow and methodical building of better habits around tech, like being more present and scrolling less, is a slog. Which is probably what makes digital detox retreats so popular. They play into the quintessentially American approach to problem-­solving: We’re convinced that any dilemma can be quickly remedied—for a price.

Donald Trump apparently wants to cut taxes for the rich yet again. Is this some kind of twisted midterms strategy? Hard to say. But as Timothy Noah points out in The New Republic, the current and former National Economic Council directors Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow were on Fox News last week talking about two tax proposals the president is mulling, and both are pretty misguided.

The first one, which they would likely try and sell as a middle-class tax cut, is to expand the current (fairly generous) capital gains exclusion on profits from home sales. Under current law, when a couple sells their residence for more than they paid, the first $500,000 in gains is nontaxable. Kudlow seemed to be advocating for a $2 million exclusion.

Now, some kind of means-tested relief for people who have owned their primary residence for decades may be reasonable, but a $2 million exclusion, let’s be honest, doesn’t exactly scream middle class. Especially when you consider that the rule also applies to second homes. That means the Van Doughs, after unloading their $10 million Aspen ski chalet for $12 million, won’t pay a dime on the proceeds.

We’re already paying handsomely for the smaller exclusion. I reported in June that this $500,000 tax break, combined with the mortgage interest deduction for first and second homes, will cost the government $574 billion from 2025-2029. That’s according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). And since we talk about budgets in 10-year terms, we can say it will add at least $1.15 trillion to the national debt—which, in case you haven’t heard, just passed $40 trillion.

Quadrupling this real-estate tax break is not gonna help with that.

A more appropriate response to out-of-control deficits would be to repeal the ill-conceived tax giveaways in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, legislation that the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center calculated will cost the federal government $4.5 trillion in lost revenues over a decade. DOGE’s mindless cuts to the federal workforce, executed with Trump blessing and encouragement, will cost America a fortune as well.

And now Trump wants to double down on all the losses he’s created with his profligate policies, pet construction projects, and inept military adventures?

The second proposal, indexing capital gains to inflation, is even stupider. I wrote about this idea last summer, after none other than Reagan-era anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist told the Washington Post that he’d urged Trump to make it happen with an executive order.

Here’s the thing: Taxes on capital gains are already wildly discounted relative to taxes on labor, discounts that, based on the JCT’s numbers, will cost the government at least $2.5 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years. The current top rate for capital gains is 23.8 percent, which includes a 3.8 percent surcharge enacted to help cover the cost of the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, as I wrote previously:

A couple reporting $1,000,000 in salary income pays an effective rate of about 30 percent. That’s a huge difference, and part of why families whose money comes primarily from asset growth have amassed wealth so much faster than working families have. It’s no lefty exaggeration to say America’s economic system is rigged against workers and in favor of investors. It’s right there in the tax code.

Also…

Indexing capital gains to inflation, according to 2018 estimates from the Tax Policy Center and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would add yet another $100 billion to $200 billion to the [deficit]—with the richest 1 percent reaping 86 percent of the benefits.

TNR’s Noah, citing more recent estimates from the Yale Budget Lab, writes that “indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.”

All of which is to say that these hare-brained proposals, apart from being likely unconstitutional due to their sidestepping of Congress on tax issues, would exacerbate Dickensian wealth disparities and make our bloated federal deficit even worse, just as borrowing costs have reached a two-decade high.

Those midterms cannot come soon enough.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo Tuesday suggesting that, if incumbent Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted loses his upcoming election against former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the Republican Party’s position on data centers is to blame.

The memo, as Axios reported, says that “the data center brand is the anchor” of Brown’s campaign. “He has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record,” the NRSC wrote, arguing that if “voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.” They go on to suggest that Republican candidates support some restrictions on data center development, such as only allowing their construction in communities that approve it by popular vote—while still opposing a total pause on data center construction, which they say would cause the US to “lose the AI race to China.”

While the NRSC urges caution, Donald Trump is still positioning himself as an unequivocal ally to data center developers. Speaking at a White House cryptocurrency event Wednesday, he insisted that “we’re building the biggest plants anywhere in the world.”

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state and I had a chance to get an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it,” Trump said. “The jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous. And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

Data centers generate far fewer jobs than other industries, such as manufacturing and warehousing; while they do generate tax revenue, they also tend to be built with generous tax abatements.

“If I were a governor or mayor, I would want that plant in my community,” Trump repeated. But, he added, “maybe [the industry] can use a little public relations help.”