Mother Jones

For a little while, crypto mogul Justin Sun represented everything the digital currency industry could want from Donald Trump. But Blockchain Camelot is over, and the dueling lawsuits are here.

Sun, a Chinese-born crypto-billionaire known for his antics—he is the guy who paid $6.2 million for a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel—was already facing a slew of civil fraud allegations leveled by the Biden-era SEC when he entered the Trumps’ orbit. Shortly after the 2024 election, Sun made a huge investment in digital tokens issue by World Liberty Financial, the newly launched crypto firm run by the Trump family and their allies.

Sun tweeted loudly about his, and the crypto industry’s, love for Donald Trump, and when the new administration came to power, his regulatory and legal troubles eased. The SEC agreed to put its lawsuit against him on hold; he recently settled the case for the relatively low sum of $10 million. Sun and Trump, it seemed, embodied a new political and economic order.

But it didn’t last.

Today, we are filing a lawsuit against Justin Sun for defamation. Sun has launched a coordinated media smear campaign against World Liberty Financial and refused to stop even when confronted with the truth.

Here's the story.

— WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) May 4, 2026

Two weeks ago—after a months-long dispute—Sun filed a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial, accusing the company of “engaging in an illegal scheme to seize property” by preventing him from selling his tokens. On Monday, World Liberty Financial hit back, filing a defamation lawsuit that accuses Sun of trying to ruin the company with lies. Sun, who usually doesn’t hold back his opinions on anything, quickly responded, insisting that the suit was “nothing more than a meritless PR stunt.”

The alleged defamation lawsuit that World Liberty announced on X today is nothing more than a meritless PR stunt. I stand by my actions and look forward to defeating the case in court.

— H.E. Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) May 4, 2026

The details of what exactly each side is alleging are also quite representative of the crypto industry—complicated, arcane, and full of protestations of transparency and insistence that the other side is not what it seems. But here’s the gist:

• Sun owns 4 billion World Liberty tokens, including 1 billion that the company awarded to him in exchange for serving on a World Liberty advisory board. The tokens were awarded very early in the company’s existence, and company rules barred him from selling them quickly. The tokens are supposed to grant holders the right to vote on major decisions about World Liberty’s future.
• Sun said in his lawsuit that he should have become eligible sell some of his tokens last September. But without warning, according to Sun, World Liberty froze his accounts, blocked the sale of his tokens, and wouldn’t tell him why. In addition, Sun claims, World Liberty’s management never allowed Sun, or any other token holders, any substantial amount of say in company decision-making and instead have focused on enriching themselves.
• In its own lawsuit, filed Monday, World Liberty Financial said it knows Sun’s secrets. The company claims he engaged in transactions with World Liberty tokens when he shouldn’t have; improperly purchased tokens for other people; and secretly engaged in short-selling.

In short, World Liberty says Sun has been a bad investor who secretly seeks to undermine the company. And Sun says World Liberty has been a bad company that secretly seeks to undermine its investors.

One thing that is clear is that the price of World Liberty—or WLFI, for short—tokens has been plummeting for months. WLFI first hit the market last August, at $0.45. That turned out to be its peak price. Since then, it’s fallen more than 80 percent (though it did rise on Monday). It’s now worth about 7 cents per token.

The people involved are what makes this otherwise extremely complicated, crypto-bro fight more than just a blockchain nerd squabble. Sun may own 4 billion WLFI tokens, but Donald Trump and his family own about 22.5 billion. The Trumps have a controlling interest in the company. But one of other partners is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, aka the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ monarch, who controls a trillion-dollar investment fund and runs the small Arab country’s intelligence apparatus. He paid $500 million for his stake. And a World Liberty Financial affiliate has signed deals with Pakistan’s government, under the watchful eye of that country’s army chief.

So this odd little crypto company and its sliding token price are suddenly in the middle of everything.

This is a story about how we—you and us here at Mother Jones—beat Jeff Bezos. Let me explain.

Remember the moment, a couple of months back, when Stephen Colbert was at a loss for words: “I don’t even know what to do with this crap,” he said on his show, before crumpling up a memo from his network bosses and depositing it in a dog poop bag. “I’m just so surprised that this giant global corporation would not stand up to these bullies!”

In the “crap” statement, CBS explained why it had essentially forbidden Colbert from airing his interview with Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas: The network said it had received “legal guidance” that the interview might violate the Federal Communications Commission’s equal time rule—a rule that late-night talk shows have been exempt from for almost 20 years. Surely it was ­coincidental timing that CBS chose to obey in advance just as its parent company, Paramount, sought the Trump administration’s blessing for its proposed merger with Warner Brothers Discovery. Just like last year, when then–­Paramount owner Shari Redstone reportedly let it be known that 60 Minutes shouldn’t offend President Donald Trump until she consummated the network’s sale, which also needed approval. Or when the current owners of Paramount—David Ellison and his billionaire father, Larry—appointed Bari Weiss, who made her name attacking major media as too far left, CBS’s editor-in-chief.

It’s not just CBS that has been plagued by coincidences in the Trump era. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Soon after sitting onstage at Trump’s second inauguration, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages would henceforth publish only pieces supporting “personal liberties and free markets.” A year later, the Post laid off 40 percent of its staff.

None of this was coincidental. It was a result of the longest-running problem plaguing American journalism: that we’ve entrusted this vital public service (mostly) to for-profit companies whose allegiances shift with the political winds and the bottom line. CBS began squeezing its news division to grab ratings and profits in the mid-1980s (add Broadcast News to your Netflix queue) and suppressed its landmark interview with tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand in 1995 (watch The Insider next). The New York Times missed the boat on the AIDS epidemic and, along with other big newsrooms, fell for the racist “superpredator” narrative in the ’90s. In the runup to the war in Iraq, the Post buried its own—excellent—reporting on the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction while the Times let reporter Judith Miller amplify the WMD lies.

Newspaper jobs have declined by 80 percent—faster than coal mining jobs.

Throughout, America’s media companies delivered a lot of fantastic reporting. But they also had to deliver quarterly returns for multinational parent companies (GE, Westinghouse, Verizon, Comcast) and hedge funds (Alden Global Capital) to whom news was a sideshow at best, an inconvenience at worst. This is why, for decades now, we’ve heard that giant sucking sound of newsrooms being emptied out across the country. Newspaper employment stood at 425,000 in 2000. By 2026, it was down to 79,000—a drop of more than 80 percent. Coal mining jobs, by comparison, have declined 50 percent.

Which brings us to Mother Jones. This magazine was founded 50 years ago as an independent nonprofit precisely because, even in 1976, it was clear that journalism was never going to be the driving passion of a plutocrat.

Fifty nail-biting, scratching and clawing, experimenting and innovating years later, we are still here and bigger—if not in budget, then in impact—than many for-profit newsrooms. Our newsroom is still a lot smaller than the Post’s, but our audience on YouTube—where many, especially younger people, get their news—is growing faster; about 50 percent more people watch each of our videos, on average, than the Post’s. Their print circulation is down almost 90 percent from 20 years ago; ours is up more than 10 percent. (And along the way, we’ve published some killer exposés on Amazon.)

Would MoJo have made good use of the cash—at least $700 million—that Bezos sank into the Post? Hell, it would have covered our entire budget for more than 25 years. Am I crazy proud of our team for doing better than a billionaire despite all the headwinds? Hell yes.

And who else am I crazy proud of and grateful for? You. You are the only reason we are still here after 50 years, the reason we have been able to grow as corporate media crumbled around us. You are why we can stand strong as others bend the knee. And together, we even beat Bezos and all his billions. So thank you, and bravo.

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily reinstated a Food and Drug Administration rule allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and dispensed through the mail. 

The order, by Justice Samuel Alito Jr., paused a ruling by the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that sought to block nationwide access to mifepristone by cutting off online providers. The Fifth Circuit ruling, issued Friday, caused providers, advocates, and patients to scramble all weekend to put in place contingency plans to keep abortion medication available. Almost two-thirds of abortions in the US now occur with pills, and nearly 30 percent take place via telemedicine.

Louisiana filed suit against the FDA last fall, claiming that a 2023 rule change by the Biden administration allowing mifepristone to be prescribed by telemedicine was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and politically motivated. The drug, part of a two-pill regimen that also includes the medication misoprostol, was approved by the FDA in 2000.

Louisiana had asked lower courts to issue a nationwide injunction on the telemedicine rule and reinstate a requirement that abortion pills be prescribed and dispensed in person. The trial court judge declined to do so, but the Fifth Circuit, packed with anti-abortion ideologues, complied. The telemedicine rule “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone,” the Fifth Circuit said in a 3-0 ruling. “Both injuries are irreparable.”

In Monday’s order, Alito granted temporary relief to mifepristone’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, and a generic manufacturer, GenBioPro, which had filed emergency appeals of the Fifth Circuit ruling over the weekend. Alito’s order pauses the case until at least May 11.

Alito, of course, is the ultraconservative author of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended the national right to abortion. Monday’s order comes almost exactly four years after the Dobbs opinion was leaked, throwing abortion access into a state of turmoil from which it has never recovered.

As I have written, the Louisiana lawsuit “reflects widespread anger within the anti-abortion movement over the continued availability of abortion pills in the post-Roe era, even in states with near-total bans.” Louisiana, for example, prohibits abortions in almost all cases, classifies the abortion medications mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled substances,” and equates abortion providers with “drug dealers.” Yet every month, nearly 1,000 patients there are getting abortion pills from telemedicine providers.

The case is similar in key ways to 2024’s FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, also from the Fifth Circuit, in which a coalition of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors sought to overturn the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as well as the more recent rules’ changes. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the doctors lacked standing to bring the lawsuit because they could not show that the FDA regulations caused them any direct harm. But the ruling left open the possibility that states might have standing to sue the FDA on their own. Last fall, Louisiana brought its own case in federal court, as did Texas and Florida in a separate lawsuit. A third suit, involving three states, is pending in Missouri.

As I noted last week, the Louisiana case puts abortion on the SCOTUS docket at a critical political moment.

[T]he Fifth Circuit ruling suddenly makes abortion a huge issue in the midterm elections—something Donald Trump has been hoping to avoid, says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Telemedicine “has been why people in abortion-ban states have been able to get access to abortion,” she says. “It’s been the centerpiece of absolutely everything.” Voters who have been showing signs of complacency over the abortion issue, thanks in large part to telemedicine, won’t be complacent any longer, she says. “It’s going to be a major political pressure point.”

Last Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) released a report showing just how intensely the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has failed students. The report found that there were zero resolution agreements in 2025 “involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment, or discriminatory school discipline.”

Overall, just one percent of complaints submitted to the Ed Department’s OCR received a resolution agreement. Sanders noted that OCR has been “decimated”—nearly half of OCR employees received a reduction-in-force notice in March 2025. The report highlighted the fact that 2025 saw the fewest resolution agreements in 12 years.

“When a child with a disability is denied the education they are entitled to, when a student faces racial or sexual harassment — they turn to the Office for Civil Rights for help,” Sanders said in a press release. “Yet the Trump administration has decimated this office. As a result, tens of thousands of students facing discrimination have been left with no recourse. That is beyond unacceptable.”

Department of Education—which President Donald Trump keeps trying to dismantle–is led by Secretary Linda McMahon, who claimed she believes that “discrimination is a bad thing.” But, no one would know that based on how the office is run.

Individuals and their families can still sue schools for discrimination in court, but this can be an expensive processs, unlike how OCR investigations are supposed to work. Essentially, if anyone feels that they are discriminated against in schools, they can file a complaint and OCR is supposed to seriously consider an investigation.

A Government Accountability Office report from January 2026 also found that 90 percent of cases received between March and September 2025 were dismissed outright. The report recommends encouraging staffing in the Education Department’s OCR.

While it is harmful that there have been few resolution agreements across types of discriminatory categories, the lack of resolutions when it comes to disability issues is telling. This is because, as ProPublica noted in February 2025, OCR staff were specifically instructed to continue with disability focused cases and to ignore ones pertaining to gender and race. However, ignoring race in disability discrimination cases will lead to OCR dropping the ball, for instance, in situations where a Black disabled male student may be disproportionately secluded in comparison to a white disabled male student.

Still, rates for disability-focused cases remain low. In 2025, zero resolution agreements were reached for cases involving seclusion and restraint, with 172 pending cases on this topic. For disability harassment, there was one resolution agreement and 595 pending cases. For cases involving access to appropriate education, there 1,887 pending cases and just 40 agreements.

“This report shows federal civil rights enforcement in education, an essential tool provided by Congress to help fight disability discrimination, is being denied to students with disabilities,” said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, in a press release. “OCR is where families turn when a student is denied accommodations or accessibility, pushed out of learning time, or harassed or disciplined unfairly because of disability. 

This 18-second clip of Bernie Sanders went viral over the weekend. It’s not because, at 84-years-old, he demonstrates near-perfect form. Or because he drains four consecutive shots. Or even because he ends the whole thing with a characteristically grumpy “that’s it!” before stopping. It’s because on that Minnesota basketball court, in town to stump for Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan (D-Minn.) for the U.S. Senate on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, Sanders reminded America generally, and the Democratic party specifically, that inspiring a new generation of elected officials is all fine and well, but he coulda been our guy, but we blew it. And we know it.

It’s not the first time basketball has played a nostalgic role in reminding America of times past. Former President Barack Obama was campaigning for Joe Biden during the 2020 election when he oh-so-casually drained a three-pointer. Spring in his step, all swagger, he lowered his mask and said, “That’s what I do!”

When distinguished guests and A-listers gather tonight for this year’s Met Gala, two new faces will greet them on the receiving line: Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos, both of whom will be at Monday’s event as honorary chairs, in addition to their roles as lead sponsors.

The appointment, which prompted a small outcry and calls for a boycott, is something of an apotheosis for the Bezoses, who have spent recent years effectively inviting themselves into some of the most exclusive corners in high fashion. There they were in January, sitting next to Anna Wintour herself, at the Paris couture shows. During the same visit, Sánchez Bezos was seen palling around with Zendaya’s stylist, the highly influential “image architect,” Law Roach. (The following day, Sánchez Bezos was spotted tripping in sky-high heels on her way to dinner with her husband.) And in June 2025, Sánchez Bezos became one of the exceedingly few brides to have their nuptials celebrated with a Vogue cover.

The enthusiasm with which the Bezoses have stormed the gates of the fashion world is the latest attempt among today’s oligarchs to seize cultural cachet. These titans of industry, apparently no longer satisfied with enormous wealth and power, now seem hellbent on sealing their reputation as fashion insiders.

But is any of this landing with the public? Will serving as honorary chair at the top of fashion’s biggest staircase cement the Bezoses’ status in high fashion? I talked to Anne Higonnet, an art historian at Columbia University, for more.

Lauren Sánchez attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Mark Guiducci at Los Angeles County Museum of Art on March 15, 2026Daniele Venturelli/WireImage/Getty

Lauren Sánchez’s eagerness to join fashion royalty is well established at this point. Now, as honorary chairs for the Met Gala this year, a sort of “storming the gates” image is invoked.

I’m going to use that image to say that what we have been witnessing in our culture is that the gates have been moved to a new place, and the most visible peak of the phenomenon is the Met Costume Institute. We are witnessing a sea change in cultural values, with fashion rising in the hierarchy of the arts with lightning speed, and the power of the super-rich to control culture. And this is the moment where the change really becomes visible. You’re absolutely correct that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez have realized that this is the gate.

“We are witnessing a sea change in cultural values and the power of the super-rich to control culture.”

Can you point to any historical precedents for this? The rich and powerful attempting to gain further influence through fashion?

Yes and no. In the larger scheme of clothing history, every society has expressed its hierarchy through clothing. Societies used to be run by a very tiny group at the top, or even just one or two people. Basically, a king, who sometimes has a queen, would get to wear something different from what anyone else was allowed to wear. The birth of modernity overturned many of those rules, including what art forms were considered to have more prestige. Of course, there were other prestigious art forms, but before modern times, clothing was much more powerful as a marker of hierarchy than we tend to remember.

What’s happening now is that the hierarchies of the art world are tumbling around, and fashion is really rising in the cultural scheme. As it does that, the super-rich, who are smart, are increasingly involved in fashion. One very, very visible, important way to do that is to be the chair of the Met Gala. So, surprise, surprise: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are the chairs of the Met Gala.

Relatedly, Big Tech is set to have a major presence at this year’s event. These are people who have enormous wealth and seemingly everything. Why are they so eager to conquer fashion?

Because fashion has become so much more visible and important, largely thanks to social media, where you see much more [content] about fashion than painting, sculpture, or architecture, which used to be the three dominant arts. This power is quantifiable, too. Just look at the number of followers fashion influencers have versus how many followers high art museums have. Consider that the floor plan of the Met has always been a map of cultural power. And now, with this gala, the Met recently decided to allocate its prime real estate on the ground floor to the Costume Institute because it is so commercially important. It will be the first thing people see when they enter, instead of the gift shop.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez are the lead sponsors and honorary co-chairs of the 2026 Met Gala, taking place on May 4th.Angela Weiss/ AFP/Getty

At the same time, the announcement of the Bezoses’ honorary chair appointments was tucked into the end of a two-page memo. Is there an implication here that organizers, namely Anna Wintour, understand that this is a controversial appointment?

Anna Wintour rides controversy like the wind. She’s one of the great culture power brokers of our time, and perhaps the single most visible power broker today. She’s way too smart not to realize that something is changing. The way I would put it is that she understands the magnitude of the move she’s made with [the Bezos appointment]. It’s as big a change as people think it is, whether you approve of it or you don’t approve of it. She’s doing it, and she’s being bold. She’s riding the wind of cultural change.

Evidence number one is the Sánchez Bezos appointment to the gala. Evidence number two is the new location of the Costume Institute inside the Met. Evidence number three is the theme of the show and of the gala, “fashion is art.” Because while it is not historically specific or even thematically specific, it’s a power manifesto. It’s not begging for fashion to be recognized as art. It’s just announcing, painting, sculpture, and architecture—move over.

“The greatest style in the world is confident, understated style, which we call elegant or chic. Sánchez Bezos is not either. She’ll never be elegant, ever.”

Let’s talk about Sánchez’s fashion more broadly. How would you describe her style?  What is the story that Sánchez is trying to tell us through her clothing?

Her clothes are self-objectifying showcases of Bezos’ wealth. There’s this brilliant economic historian, Thorstein Veblen, who wrote these essays about what he called “conspicuous consumption.” Even though it’s from the 1890s, my students just love this concept and totally understand why it’s as relevant now as it ever was. He said clothing can manifest conspicuous consumption to show everyone that you have money to waste. Veblen also made a brilliant gender point by noting that we live in a world that is controlled by men, and the ultimate way in which [men] show their wealth is how their wives or mistresses dress. It was the ultimate show of power, because they got to do all the conspicuous consumption with none of the bother of having to wear the clothes that were not comfortable or practical in any way.

Some have argued that despite the expensive clothes, Sánchez often comes away looking cheap or tacky. Why?

That’s because her clothes have to be screamingly expensive. Style has to do with individuality and an affirmation of one’s aesthetic place in the world; it’s very much an affirmation of self. And the greatest style in the world is the most confident, understated style, which we call elegant or chic. Sánchez Bezos is not either. She’ll never be elegant, ever.

The mayor, who, at least to my mind, is on the opposite end of this, is not coming. What is he signaling here?

Well, first of all, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got in big trouble for going in 2021. So he hasn’t forgotten that. I mean, if you’re a socialist, and you go to an event where the seats cost $75,000, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

But also, look at his wife, who is actually quite elegant because she conveys that she is a person in her own right and that her worth in the world does not depend on money.

Finally, things are bad out there. Economic inequality, war, constant dystopia. Parties like this can feel a bit strange. Historically, though, is there something to say about fashion’s role in class struggle?

Clothing’s role in expressing social hierarchy is the rule, not the exception, of history. Now, in our modern post-French Revolution, universal rights of man, way of thinking, we don’t think that clothing should necessarily express social hierarchy. But at the same time, as with all forms of art, some people do it better than others. I’ve seen homeless people with more style than some supermodels. Style is why I’ll never stop loving clothing as an art form. Clothing and style are also one of the most democratic of all the arts. We all do it. We all can do it.

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

Every spring, Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe observes its corn dance season on lands the tribe holds as sacred within the fragile Everglades. But this year’s festivities are different because of the migrant detention site that now looms among the tribal lands, Alligator Alcatraz.

One hindrance is that the light emanating for miles from the facility interferes with an important aspect of the Miccosukee’s religion, the orientation of the stars, said Curtis Osceola, the tribe’s chief operating officer. If not for the light pollution, the stars would gleam bright here in the night sky above the vast sawgrass prairies and cypress marshes of the remote river of grass.

“It’s hard to explain, and not everyone will understand our relationship with the land,” he said. “It’s as if someone went to a holy place, whether it was like church land, and said, ‘We’re going to raze this church land and put up a prison and put up a detention center.’ People would be up in arms. This is our place of worship. This is a sacred place. This doesn’t seem fair.”

“This is our place of worship. This is a sacred place. This doesn’t seem fair.”

The tribe, along with environmental groups, says they will continue their litigation over Alligator Alcatraz, where thousands of undocumented migrants have been detained since the facility opened last summer as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals last week invalidated a preliminary injunction issued by District Judge Kathleen Williams, who had ordered in August a winding down of the facility. The case now will go back to Williams, who will decide the next steps.

The ruling means the detention site may keep operating while the environmental groups and the tribe’s litigation proceed. In this case, the Miccosukee and their fellow plaintiffs accused the federal and state governments of unlawfully rushing the facility to completion without a required environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The government agencies have contended that the site is a state and not a federal one, and that the federal review is not necessary. The agencies also said the facility’s impact on the environment is minimal. The Everglades, which span central and south Florida, are responsible for the drinking water of millions of people in the state. A $27 billion restoration effort is among the most ambitious of its kind in human history.

The appeals court, in siding with the government agencies, said the plaintiffs failed to prove the federal government controlled the site. Judges William Pryor and Andrew Brasher also said Williams’ preliminary injunction violated, in part, a statutory prohibition on enjoining immigration enforcement. The judges reasoned that for the site’s Florida operators to follow federal immigration standards does not transform the facility into a federal one. They compared the situation with that of an office building owner who adheres to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Compliance with the federal law does not make the building federal, they said.

But Judge Nancy Abudu dissented. She characterized the federal and state roles in Alligator Alcatraz as one where the federal government enlisted the state not as an equal partner but as a “deputy of the federal government operating at its request.” She said her colleagues’ analogy involving the office building owner and the Americans with Disabilities Act was weak.

“Here, the detention facility’s only goal is to house thousands of people under DHS and ICE’s control, in a secluded area, away from the public, without any accountability,” Abudu wrote. “If not for its partnership with DHS and ICE, Florida’s housing of these individuals (and in some cases families) would be more akin to kidnapping and, at its most extreme, perhaps human trafficking. The state cannot detain a non-citizen without the proper authority to do so.”

The court’s ruling was disappointing, but the environmental groups and tribe remain optimistic they eventually will prevail, said Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

“We were prepared for any potential outcome, but that doesn’t make it sting any less because we know that there is irreparable harm ongoing in the Everglades, from water pollution to impacts to the Florida panther and bonneted bat,” she said. “We were hopeful we would put an end to that harm in the early stages in the case. Now we’re reinvigorated to get back in there and win.”

Friends of the Everglades, the third plaintiff in the case, said public records obtained through a separate lawsuit filed by the advocacy group show the Federal Emergency Management Agency promised hundreds of millions of dollars to Florida to build and operate the facility. Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity filed the lawsuit last June in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida, with the Miccosukee Tribe joining later on. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Miami-Dade County, which owns the property, are named as defendants in the case. The government agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the appeals court ruling.

During the First and Second Seminole Wars, in the first half of the 19th century, the Miccosukee were pushed deep within the watery wilderness of the Everglades and found sanctuary on the tree islands scattered here. For them, the land is sacred because it saved their tribe from annihilation. Osceola said the detention site’s close proximity to tribal lands and the Big Cypress National Preserve is a concern. Within a three-mile radius of Alligator Alcatraz are 10 Miccosukee villages, including one a mere 1,000 feet from the facility. A school is 10 miles away.

“We survived in the Big Cypress. It cared for us. The Everglades likewise cared for us and helped us survive. The plants and animals of those lands sustained our existence, and we were able to make it through that wartime period,” he said. “We have a very strong religious connection with the land. And so activities like this are going to disrupt that relationship, that sort of strong relationship we have with the sacred land.”

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

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has made it harder for small and activist investors to raise concerns through the government filing system known as EDGAR. Now they’re pushing back with their own alternative platform, which they call the Proxy Open Exchange—or POE. 

Literary puns aside, the initiative is aimed at bringing greater transparency to an increasingly restricted space. In January, the SEC said it would no longer allow investors with less than $5 million in shares to use EDGAR to send communiqués called exempt solicitations to fellow shareholders. Such documents are often used to lay out an investor’s stance on a given issue, including climate action, board accountability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“We believe a free market requires communication,” said Andrew Behar, CEO of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, which spearheaded the new site. “If they’re going to take away EDGAR, we’re going to give them POE.”

The response has been swift. In less than a week, POE has 63 filings, with dozens more expected. EDGAR shows just 39 exempt solicitations so far in 2026. 

The SEC declined to comment about POE, but has previously told Grist that limiting access to the system is an attempt to rein in the scope of government, ease burdensome regulation, and curtail the “large volume” of requests that often require prompt attention. “Over the years, companies have expressed concerns that this misuse has caused confusion among their investor base,” an SEC spokesperson said at the time. “Shareholders can continue to conduct exempt solicitations through other commonly used means, such as press releases, emails, websites, and social media, and electronic shareholder forums.”

Critics of the move see it as an attempt to silence irksome investors.

The workaround is not the only attempt at an alternative to the official platform. The nonprofit Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, for instance, recently started putting exempt solicitations and proxy memos it receives about issues relevant to its members on its website. Still, POE is the most robust effort yet to fill the gap the government created.

It is designed to mimic EDGAR, Behar said. It even relies on the same set of codes—known as central index keys—to identify individuals and companies making posts. Although As You Sow reviews submissions for basic errors, it doesn’t filter content, making POE, like EDGAR, open to all viewpoints.

“POE is a new and adventurous approach to try to set up a large public website that people of all persuasions can post their solicitations on,” said Tim Smith, senior policy advisor for the Interfaith Center, who applauded the idea. “It could be an investor that’s filing a resolution on climate. It could be a conservative investor who decides to push a resolution that’s challenging diversity, equity, or inclusion.” 

Any filings are subject to the same anti-fraud legal provisions required by EDGAR, says Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania. “The postings have to be accurate, so that doesn’t change,” she said. What is new is that POE’s interface is much more user-friendly, she said, calling the government’s site “kind of old and glitchy.” 

Not everyone, however, is embracing the system. According to Behar, one of the world’s largest proxy advisors—which helps its clients research shareholder proposals—won’t consider any information that’s not on the official platform. The company, ISS, declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions. Still, Fisch said the pool of potential users of the new system is vast. 

“The great thing about these being public websites is that they’re available to mutual funds, to smaller institutions, to universities, and so forth,” she said. She’ll be curious to see data on who uses the site in the coming weeks and months. So far, though, “it’s way too early to tell.”

Fisch will also be watching how corporations respond. Some, like Exxon Mobil, which has often opposed shareholder advocacy, could see it as a threat (the company did not respond to an interview request) and start their own platforms. Or, perhaps, the existence of unregulated alternatives will encourage companies to ask the SEC to push people back to EDGAR, where everything will be in the same place. 

Whatever the rationale, it would be relatively easy for the government to reverse course. “Any new administration or new SEC could change this in a moment,” said Smith. That, in many ways, would be an ideal outcome for Behar, who hopes that POE will be temporary.

“We do not want this to be a necessary platform into perpetuity,” he said. “This is hopefully short-lived. When the administration changes and the SEC returns to its core mission, we expect EDGAR to be restored because transparent information sharing is essential for the free market.”

More often, though, Fisch finds that platforms like POE are one-way streets. Even if EDGAR is loosened back up, she expects people to continue finding the alternatives useful. “Once investors figure out how cheap and easy and convenient it is to use the internet and social media to communicate, I don’t think they’re going to stop,” she said. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

As peace talks with Iran continue to stall, the Trump administration announced on Friday an additional $8.6 billion in fast-tracked weapons sales to Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the deal under an “emergency provision” allowing arms to be sold without the congressional approval nominally required for warmaking. This is the third time since the US started bombing Iran two months ago that Rubio has invoked emergency authorization to sell weapons to Israel and its allies. 

During those two months, the US and Israel have reportedly drained their munitions stockpiles bombing Iran and Lebanon. At least 3,375 people have been killed in Iran, according to the country’s health ministry; at least 2,509 people have been killed in Lebanon, per the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Last week, a White House official for the first time offered an estimate of the conflict’s costs to the United States, ballparking the campaign at around $25 billion. 

Generally, arms sales are supposed to go through a congressional review process under the Arms Export Control Act. But it’s not uncommon for the government to bypass that process entirely. (The Biden administration also approved arms sales under emergency powers.) 

This most recent set of weapons sales includes $4 billion for American-made Patriot missile interceptors, to be sent to Qatar; “Advanced Precision Kill Weapons Systems” for Israel, Qatar, and Kuwait; and an “Integrated Battle Command System” for Kuwait. The contractors receiving that money will include Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman. 

Those contractors might be the only people happy about the ongoing war on Iran: 61 percent of Americans in one recent poll said they believed the war was a mistake. Another recent survey said that the main priority among Americans, regarding the war, was to end it as soon as possible—whether out of concern for human lives or for gas prices, which have skyrocketed in recent weeks.  

Donald Trump’s plans to remake parts of Washington, DC, are much bigger—and more expensive—than originally planned. A top Trump fundraiser is now asking for donations to a nonprofit that will support a proposed massive sculpture garden, as well as the remodeling of a central DC golf course. 

Last year, dump trucks carrying demolition waste and dirt started depositing their payloads in a giant pile near the 4th hole at DC’s municipal East Potomac Golf Course. It was the first sign that Trump planned to re-create the course to his own tastes. (Later, reporters learned that the debris was the remains of the White House’s old East Wing.) 

Today, the Washington Post reported that Trump fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke is soliciting donations to remake the course into a championship-caliber facility for major events and to create Trump’s long-desired “Garden of American Heroes,” a sculpture park on nearby federal land. The federal government plans to formally take over the golf course Sunday, according to the Post. 

The concept images for the golf course seem to eliminate most non-golf activities that presently exist in East Potomac, disappearing the park’s bike paths and open spaces where people picnic in the summers.

The garden, meanwhile, is a Trump concept that’s been in the works since his first term. It would involve approximately 250 “realistic” statues of prominent Americans, including Elvis Presley, Kobe Bryant, Alfred Hitchcock, and Dr. Seuss, among many others, according to the New York Times. The statues alone could cost more than $50 million, though Congress has only approved $40 million for for the project. 

It’s the latest in a chain of attempts to remake DC in Trump’s image: the renaming of the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” the draping of banners bearing his portrait over various federal government buildings, and resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in “American flag blue.” He also hopes to add a giant triumphal arch to the Lincoln Memorial area, which would overshadow the memorial itself. 

The president, it’s clear, loves a monument: Yesterday, he posted a picture online of his own face photoshopped onto Mount Rushmore. 

It’s become a familiar refrain: something awful happens in the world, and a member of the commentariat asks, “Where are the student protests? Or did those only happen when Biden was president?”

Deprived of student targets, they are forced to post ad infinitum about Hasan Piker. Who wouldn’t be bitter?

The consistent thread is that kids these days, because they’re protesting or because they’re not, are the problem. “One might expect left-leaning college students to have practically started a revolution” over Trump’s bombing of Iran, a writer for the Atlantic recently mused. After all, critics from Jonathan Haidt (“Instagram intifada”) to Jesse Watters (“Hamas influencers”) framed the students as the least impressive of Iran’s proxies.

But the question itself is a fair one. Where are the protests? The real answer isn’t that students decided to shut up. It’s that universities, and a hostile federal government, have expended massive resources trying to ensure they do. 

Between spring and fall of 2024—before Donald Trump’s reelection, let alone his return to office—the total number of campus protests dropped a staggering 64 percent.

Then came Trump’s second term. Universities were terrorized and cuts dished out—but administrators who had been pulling their hair out in 2024 could now say their hands were tied. Soon after Trump’s election, dozens of schools fell over themselves to institute even more speech-suppressing policies, banning things like megaphones and musical instruments from outdoor areas of campus except with permits or during specified hours.

Even faculty members are still dealing with the legal and disciplinary fallout of joining protests.

University presidents dragged before Congress to prove their compliance with Trump’s half-dozen executive orders on education testified endlessly about why they’d allowed such chaos in their fiefdoms. In response to allegations of antisemitism—and threats to revoke federal funding—some schools, like the University of California, Berkeley, even turned over students’ personal information to the federal government. 

Others simply turned the other cheek as the federal government bore down on their students. Some students who spoke in support of the Palestinian cause, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, were kidnapped by ICE. Others, like Momodou Taal, were pressured into leaving the country to avoid the same fate. Even faculty members are still dealing with the legal and disciplinary fallout of participating in the encampments.

Schools like the City University of New York and New York University still aren’t allowing student commencement speakers out of fear that those speakers might criticize Israel. At Swarthmore College, students are busy preparing for criminal trials over their participation in encampments two years ago, when they should be preparing for finals. Immigrant students, now as in 2024, face the highest stakes: say too much about Israel or Palestine or genocide online, and your green card might be revoked. 

The high-risk climate has not silenced student activism entirely, in particular around Gaza. On April 24, several dozen students rushed the quad at Occidental College bearing Palestinian-flag banners, and set up the same cheap green Amazon tents that got Columbia protesters accused of being a Soros and/or Hamas-funded op back in 2024. One student in the encampment called me on Saturday, late from a session of his weekly Torah study group, and said the Occidental group was “definitely the first encampment that’s lasted more than 24 hours since 2024.”

The students at Occidental, who also mounted an encampment in 2024, wanted their school to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies profiting from occupation and genocide in Gaza. Occidental, like most colleges and universities, did not divest two years ago. 

The most liberal of liberal arts schools can now plead Trump administration pressure to call in riot cops.

But, like many schools, it did change its rules around demonstrations. “We’ve seen wave after wave of reactionary protest policies,” the Occidental student, who did not wish to be named due to fear of administrative retribution, told me—as at the dozens of other schools that expanded the circumstances in which student protest would be met with the threat of expulsion or arrest.  In Occidental’s case, student protests have been restricted to specific times and spaces, and more bafflingly, “semi-permanent structures” have been banned. (“What does that even mean?” the student I spoke to wondered.) 

Columbia’s 2024 encampment lasted two weeks. Occidental’s 2o24 protest lasted eight days and was voluntarily disbanded after the school’s board of trustees agreed to consider a divestment proposal, which it did not take up. The 2026 Occidental encampment, called the Rafah to Jenin Liberated Zone, was dismantled after only 3 days. No one was arrested and no one was hurt—but even the most liberal of liberal arts colleges can now plead Trump administration pressure if they threaten, or choose, to call in the riot cops. April’s Occidental board meeting, which the students aimed to protest, was moved to Zoom. 

“Students involved in the encampment cited a recently submitted divestment proposal as their key issue. That proposal is currently under review by the College’s Board of Trustees through the College’s established process, which is designed to gather input from across our community,” an Occidental representative told me.

And students, despite the higher-risk climate, are still politically engaged. The protests this week indicate that, as do slower modes of organizing, like the historic wave of graduate student unionism we are in. (Harvard’s graduate student union just went on strike, for one.) Some young people have simply moved their organizing off-campus and into broader coalitions. Palestinian flags can be found at anti-ICE and No Kings protests. We may not be in an era of encampments—but the kids haven’t given up and gone back to scrolling.

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

Looking out to sea from the grey sandy beaches of Santa Marta, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, it is never hard to spot evidence of the country’s thriving fossil fuel export trade. Oil tankers ride at anchor on the horizon, and sometimes, locals say, lumps of coal wash up on the shore, blown off the collier ships that carry cargoes from the nearby mines.

It was here, on Wednesday evening, that the Colombian government took a bold step to shift its economy—and that of the rest of the world—away from dependence on coal, gas and oil and into a new era of clean energy. With the first-ever conference on “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” the host joined nearly 60 countries determined to loosen the grip of petrostates on the world’s future.

“This is the beginning of a new global climate democracy,” Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister and chair of the talks, said in closing remarks that celebrated a “new method” of bringing together high-ambition governments, parliamentarians and civil society groups to accelerate the decarbonisation of their economies.

“This is the beginning of a new global climate democracy.”

At this moment in history, the conference may also mark a new global divide between “electro-democracies” and petro-dictatorships.

The initiative has come at a pivotal moment in the climate fight. Oil and gas prices have soared since the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, the second such crisis within five years, after the price rises that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Households around the world are spiralling into debt, farmers cannot afford fertiliser, and governments are remembering that a dependency on volatile fossil fuels is holding them hostage to geopolitical forces they cannot control.

The global economy faces a triple whammy: rising energy costs, rising food costs that follow, and the spectre of rampant inflation that will raise interest rates and add to the cost of servicing debt. Both rich and poor nations are feeling the impact, but the poor, with their higher levels of debt and lower reserves, are suffering more.

Repeated oil shocks blighted the 1970s, and the current crisis is not only greater than those but more impactful than all previous crises combined, according to Fatih Birol, the world’s leading energy economist and chief of the International Energy Agency, the gold standard in energy research. “This is bigger than all the biggest crises combined, and therefore huge,” he said in an exclusive Guardian interview. “I still cannot understand that the world was so blindsided, that the global economy can be held hostage to a 50km strait.”

What is different today from previous oil shocks is the ready availability of a viable alternative: cheap, reliable and plentiful renewable energy from the wind and sun, with modern battery technology to smooth over any intermittency; while electric vehicles and heat pumps can shunt transport and heating off fossil fuels and onto far more efficient electricity.

For those reasons, Birol predicted the current shock would mark a permanent change for the global energy industry, leading consumer countries to lose trust in fossil fuels. “Their perception of risk and reliability will change,” he said. “Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future. And this will cut into the main markets for oil.”

These changes would be lasting, he added. “The vase is broken, the damage is done—it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy market for years to come.”

It is an irony not lost on Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, that it is the oil industry’s dominance of global economies that has finally woken governments to the dangers. “The fossil fuel cost crisis now has its foot on the throat of the global economy,” he said. “Those who have fought to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels are inadvertently supercharging the global renewables boom.”

“Those who have fought to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels are inadvertently supercharging the global renewables boom.”

Renewables overtook coal in global electricity generation last year for the first time, according to the thinktank Ember, generating 33.8 percent of power compared with coal’s 33 percent. Interest from consumers in solar panels and batteries, from Pakistan to the UK, has leapt further since the Iran war.

“The economic logic of renewables [is] impossible to ignore,” Stiell said. Military advisers have weighed in, too, pointing out that renewables offer a better route than fossil fuels to national security. Stiell noted: “Governments are pushing renewables plans into overdrive: to restore national security, economic stability, competitiveness, policy autonomy and basic sovereignty.”

But no one should write off the petrostates just yet. The world’s biggest gas producer, the United States, is increasingly flexing its military muscle to assert the Trump administration’s goal of “energy dominance”. Russia, the second biggest gas supplier, is waging war against its democratic neighbor, Ukraine. Fossil fuel interests are pouring huge sums into the political campaigns of far-right candidates in the Americas and Europe.

The Santa Marta vision of a “new global climate democracy” sets people power against this. Polls constantly show an overwhelming majority of people want their governments to take stronger action against the climate crisis, but at many international meetings, their voices are drowned out by corporate lobbyists or shut down by petrostate vetoes.

At Santa Marta, by contrast, science led the way on the opening day, followed by a “people’s summit” and gatherings of parliamentarians. All of these groups sent representatives to the high-level sessions in the final two days, where there were no vetoes, no fractious negotiations over minutiae, only intensive and constructive dialogue on how to move forward. Many participants called the gathering historic, but few were under any illusions that it was anything more than a strong start.

Claudio Angelo, of the Observatorio do Clima, a think tank in Brazil, said: “I don’t think the Santa Marta process represents any immediate threat to the fossil fuel industry. This is more about countries organising to draw up a plan. Even within the ‘doers’, the fossil industry landscape is diverse: national oil companies in Latin America, private oil majors in Europe and parts of Africa. These folks will fight for lenient transition calendars until they’re either outcompeted by Chinese electricity or forced by governments to diversify.”

Though shifting to renewables will work out cheaper for all countries in the long-term, there is an upfront cost to the switch. Fossil fuel producer nations will also need finance to invest in new industries to replace lost oil, gas and coal export revenue.

The Santa Marta conference was not intended for new finance pledges – rich countries offered a settlement of $300 billion a year by 2035 at the Cop29 conference in 2029, and that will not be improved on now that the US has withdrawn its dollars.

But there could be other routes to finding cash. Diverting some of the $1.5tn currently spent each year on subsidising fossil fuels around the world would help, and raising money from the companies that have profited from the climate crisis, through windfall taxes and other mechanisms, is always an option. David Hillman, the director of the Make Polluters Pay coalition, said: “Fossil fuel giants are figuratively making a killing from this war. Their excessive unearned profits need to fund the transition to renewables to hasten the end of our fossil fuel dependence.”

Almost all of the 59 nations participating in Santa Marta are democracies, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Colombia will hold a presidential election at the end of May in which the ruling party’s candidate, Iván Cepeda, faces a fierce challenge from the far-right populist Abelardo de la Espriella, who wants to increase fracking and oil production. If the latter wins, the global energy transition movement would lose one of its most important nations.

Colombia is not the only country facing difficulties. The Netherlands, co-host of Santa Marta, announced new drilling in the North Sea just before the conference. The UK is considering new North Sea fields too, and other countries present, from Brazil to Tanzania, also have fossil fuel expansion plans. Those decisions will have to be reversed for this to become the hoped-for “conference of doers”.

Before the next conference, to take place early next year on the Pacific island of Tuvalu, which is co-hosting with Ireland, countries are supposed to start the process of drawing up national roadmaps for the phaseout of fossil fuels. The organisers want these plans to feed into the broader UN climate negotiating process and to spur others to join the transition movement.

Roadmaps offer a way for countries to attract investors, and also provide guidance for their industries to help ensure the transition to a low-carbon world is fair to workers and the most vulnerable people. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said: “We need three transitions: out of fossil fuels, into renewable energy for all, and into a world that cares for nature. All must be grounded in justice.”

Santa Marta, a historically coal-fuelled town at the heart of a coal- and oil-fuelled country, may eventually be regarded as ground zero for the demise of fossil fuels. Fernanda Carvalho, the head of policy for climate and energy at WWF International, said: “It is here that the seeds of a new, implementation-focused initiative have been planted. In times of an exhaustion of multilateral processes and a gap in delivering the system change we need, what is emerging offers a different approach. This could be a real bottom-up process that centres the voices of communities most affected by fossil fuel extraction and consumption.”

But despite the “contagious” hope felt by many involved in the Santa Marta talks, there remains a long road ahead.

Last fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world’s attention. 

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At first, it was easy to dismiss the Global Sumud Flotilla—until it wasn’t. Before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy. 

“We were at gunpoint; like, you could see the laser on our chest,” says flotilla participant Louna Sbou.  

They were then sent to a high-security prison in the middle of the Negev desert.

“You have no control, you have no information, and you have no rights,” says Carsie Blanton, another participant. “They could do whatever they want to you.”

This week on Reveal, as a new flotilla recently set sail for Gaza, we’re bringing back our story about the Global Sumud Flotilla from last fall for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference. 

This is an update of an episode that first aired in December 2025.

A federal appeals court packed with conservatives has handed abortion opponents a major victory against the US Food and Drug Administration, reinstating an in-person dispensing requirement for the abortion medication mifepristone and shutting down telemedicine providers—at least temporarily—from prescribing the abortion pill across the US.

In a 3-0 order issued Friday afternoon, the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals granted Louisiana’s request for an injunction against FDA rule changes from 2023 that have allowed blue-state telehealth providers to send mifepristone to thousands of patients every month in states where abortion is banned. The decision, which was expected to be quickly appealed, could severely disrupt the availability of mifepristone nationwide.

The ruling, however, does not affect misoprostol, the second medication used with mifepristone to terminate pregnancies—and a powerful abortion drug on its own. Nor does it stop in-person prescription of abortion pills. Nonetheless, the injunction will have the greatest impact on women in the dozen or so states—many in the South—where lawmakers and attorneys general have sought to end access completely.

The 2023 telemedicine rule “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone,” Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the court. “Both injuries are irreparable.”

“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,'” Duncan wrote. He was appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Donald Trump in 2017.

“Telehealth has been the last bridge to care for many seeking abortion, which is precisely why Louisiana officials want it banned,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “This isn’t about science—it’s about making abortion as difficult, expensive, and unreachable as possible. Telehealth has transformed healthcare. Selectively stripping that away from abortion patients is a political blockade.”

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed her lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to drop the in-person dispensing rule was “arbitrary” and “capricious,” and that abortion pills are too risky to prescribe remotely, even though scores of studies around the globe have shown otherwise. She also claimed the rule change was “avowedly political”—explicitly intended to get around the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade—and interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as it sees fit.

In April, US District Judge David Joseph—also a Trump appointee—put the lawsuit on hold pending the FDA’s own study of mifepristone’s safety, which has been underway since last fall. Even though the Trump administration has made clear its own concerns about the telemedicine rule, it has argued that rolling back the Biden rules while its review is ongoing amounts to “judicial intervention” in the agency’s long-established drug review process. It added that an injunction “may prove as unnecessary as it is disruptive, if FDA ultimately decides that the in-person dispensing requirement must be restored.” 

But abortion opponents have seen that study as a delaying tactic by a White House worried about the impact that cutting off access to abortion pills might have on the GOP’s already grim prospects in the midterm elections. Murrill quickly appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which encompasses Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi—one of the most conservative federal jurisdictions in the country.

It is the same appeals court that ruled in a similar but separate lawsuit three years ago that the FDA exceeded its authority when it relaxed an assortment of restrictions on mifepristone during the Obama and Biden administrations, including the telemedicine rule. The Supreme Court eventually rejected that case, because the anti-abortion doctors who brought it didn’t have standing to sue. But the SCOTUS ruling did not address the far bigger and thornier issue of whether the FDA’s rule changes were legal.

In Friday’s ruling, the Fifth Circuit panel harkened back to its earlier decision.

“Our court has previously concluded that [the] FDA’s actions here were likely unlawful,” Duncan wrote in Friday’s ruling. The same reasoning, he said, “squarely applies” to the 2023 telemedicine rule change.

The ruling “will hit Latine and immigrant communities hardest,” predicted Lupe Rodríguez, Executive Director of the  National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. “Medication abortion by mail is one of the few ways people can overcome systemic barriers to care…Taking it away is deliberate and dangerous and puts politics over the health and well-being of our communities.”

“There’s no world in which this genie goes back in the bottle.”

Even as they decried the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, abortion rights advocates insisted that they have been making contingency plans for just such a scenario—including ramping up efforts to switch to a different abortion-pill regimen that doesn’t include mifepristone.

“We will do everything in our power to continue providing care to people in all 50 states,” said Dr. Angel Foster, co-founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, a telemedicine provider that serves more than 3,000 patients a month. “We remain committed to ensuring that people can get the care they need, when they need it.”

Legal scholars also doubted that the flow of abortion pills could be completely cut off. “Abortion is too important,” says Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and shield law expert who specializes in medication abortion. “People are going to find ways around the law because [the ability to access care is] so critical to someone’s identity and autonomy and self-determination. There’s no world in which this genie goes back in the bottle.”

Developed by French researchers in the 1980s, mifepristone is one of two drugs that make up the standard abortion-pill protocol in the US. It works by blocking the production of progesterone, the main hormone needed to support a developing pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, then causes the uterus to contract, expelling the embryo. Misoprostol—available over the counter in many countries to treat stomach ulcers—has also been shown in numerous global studies to be a safe and effective abortifacient on its own.  

The anti-abortion movement fought hard to keep mifepristone out of the US, claiming it was—and remains—too dangerous. When the FDA finally gave its approval to the drug in 2000, it imposed a series of restrictions, including limiting mifepristone’s use to early in the first trimester. The rules became even more stringent in 2011 when mifepristone was consigned to a new program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs.

But the Obama-era FDA, buoyed by still more studies confirming the drug’s safety, began easing those restrictions in 2016, including allowing mifepristone to be used up to 10 weeks’ gestation and slashing the recommended dosage by two-thirds. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the FDA suspended the in-person office-visit requirement, and in 2023, it made the telehealth change permanent. The new FDA rules also made mifepristone more readily available in pharmacies.

In the four years since Dobbs, the revised rules have made it possible for large numbers of red-state patients —some 15,000 per month, according to the most recent data from the #WeCount project—to continue obtaining abortion pills despite draconian bans. Medication now accounts for almost two-thirds of abortions in the US, facilitated by shield laws—statutes that protect abortion providers in blue states who care for patients living in places where abortion is illegal. More than a quarter of all US abortions now occur via telemedicine. In 2025, approximately 142,000 people crossed state lines to access abortion care, or about 13 percent of all abortion patients in the US, according to the latest data from the Guttmacher Institute.

The growing availability of mifepristone has enraged the anti-abortion movement, which was counting on Trump 2.0 to take quick action to stop the flow of pills. But so far, administration officials have resisted pressure to rescind the FDA’s approval of mifepristone or revive the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era obscenity law, unenforced for decades, that prohibits the mailing of abortion drugs, supplies, and equipment. 

So red-state attorneys general and other anti-abortion activists have escalated their own attacks in court. Murrill has been a leader in those efforts, trying to extradite abortion providers in New York and California to face criminal charges, without success, and threatening to sue those states over their shield laws. Louisiana has some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, yet telemedicine providers are mailing close to 1,000 packages of abortion pills to patients in the state every month.

In targeting the FDA, Murrill accused the Biden administration of making the 2023 rule change for political reasons, as part of a  broader effort to thwart the Dobbs decision and “ensure that mifepristone is as widely accessible as possible.” She said the telemedicine rule exceeded Biden’s authority, violated the Comstock Act, and is causing Louisiana “irreparable harm” as long as it remains in effect, in part by forcing the state to bear the costs of Medicaid patients who suffer complications as a result of the pills’ use.

The Fifth Circuit panel cited those Medicaid costs as one of the reasons Louisiana had standing to sue. “Louisiana identifies $92,000 it paid in Medicaid costs from two women who needed emergency care in 2025 from complications caused by out-of-state mifepristone,” Duncan wrote. “Such costs will almost certainly continue because nearly 1,000 women monthly—many of whom are on Medicaid—have mifepristone-induced abortions in Louisiana.”

The court rejected arguments by the drug’s manufacturers that an injunction now would be premature. “We conclude Louisiana has strongly shown a likelihood of winning its … challenge to the 2023 REMS,” Duncan wrote.

In seeking a nationwide injunction, Murrill also claimed telemedicine makes it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want. Joining her as a co-plaintiff in the case is a Louisiana day care employee named Rosalie Markezich, who alleged that her ex-boyfriend used her email address to order drugs from a California doctor, then forced her to take the medication against her will. Markezich is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal powerhouse that has played a pivotal role in most of the significant anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policy and court battles of recent years. 

ADF also represented the anti-abortion doctors who challenged the FDA’s initial approval and regulation of mifepristone in the blockbuster case that went to the Supreme Court in 2024. While justices ruled 9-0 in that case that the doctors did not have standing to sue the FDA, it left open the possibility that other plaintiffs might. Louisiana and Markezich argue that they do have standing. The FDA and companies that manufacture mifepristone contend otherwise.

In his April 7 ruling putting Murrill’s lawsuit on hold, Joseph ordered the FDA to conduct its safety review of mifepristone with “deliberate speed.” At a hearing earlier, he was skeptical of Murrill’s arguments that issuing an injunction on telehealth would stop the flow of abortion pills.  “The war on drugs has been going on for 50 years,” Joseph pointed out, “and yet there was more cocaine produced last year than any other.” 

Donley, the law professor, agrees that abortion opponents are fooling themselves if they think any US court will be able to cut off access to abortion pills. “You shut off access to mifepristone, people will switch to misoprostol-only abortions,” she says. “Even if you were to shut down shield providers in this country, people would just switch to international providers and start shipping from other countries.”

Likely to President Trump’s dismay, the Fifth Circuit ruling suddenly makes abortion a huge issue in the midterm elections, says Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis. Telemedicine “has been why people in abortion-ban states have been able to get access to abortion,” she said. “It’s been the centerpiece of absolutely everything.” She added that voters who have been showing signs of complacency over the abortion issue, thanks in large part to telemedicine, won’t be any longer.

This is a developing story.

After last month’s No Kings protest, Indivisible, the group that describes itself as a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian people-powered movement, joined May Day Strong’s actions to take a page out of Minnesota’s one-day strike playbook from this past January.

On its surface, Indivisible’s participation appears to be a slight pivot, engaging in more disruptive labor-directed actions. But for Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, May Day Strong is part of their movement—one that can’t succeed without growing its broad coalition. “Society cannot function without workers, and our political system won’t function unless more non-billionaires and non-mega corporations get involved in how politics works,” Levin told me when we spoke by phone on Thursday.

Politics feel brutal for most workers these days. It’s equally hard to measure the impact of protest groups like Indivisible. That’s especially true in a week where the Supreme Court dismantled voting rights and the Trump administration doubled down on its war in Iran despite rising costs and thousands of people killed. But Levin was, at times, evasive about looking too far in the future. For him, it’s impossible to measure the success of a pro-democracy movement on whether authoritarians are doing damage. It’s more useful to measure impact by how much a movement grows and tries new tactics.

This strategic alignment with May Day is an example. Levin was focused on building a coalition now—including opening the door for people who are not advocates or organizers. He also seemed clear-eyed about his group’s role: “Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country. We are a piece of it.”

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Where do you think Indivisible’s work stands within the larger US ecosystem of organizing? 

I don’t think there’s a pathway to getting a real democracy that reflects the world of people that doesn’t depend on coalition. There’s not going to be any one organization or any one individual movement that succeeds in significantly changing our political system and bends it to the will of the people—you need to build across coalition. 

For us, that’s core to just about everything Indivisible does. That shows up in the Hands Off coalition that came out a year ago. The Good Trouble Lives On [protests] on the John Lewis Day of Remembrance, and the No Kings coalition itself, which is made up of hundreds members. 

May Day is not by Indivisible and it’s not led by the No Kings coalition. It’s being led by the May Day strong coalition with an emphasis on union participation. You’re not going to build a pro-democracy movement that’s successful without having heavy involvement from union leaders. You can’t succeed in what we’re trying to do without welcoming new members to your coalition and without showing up for them when they’re leading a day of action like tomorrow.

How are you measuring the impact of your work with No Kings, considering we’re in a week where the Supreme Court has fully gutted voting rights?

How you judge the success of a pro-democracy movement is with a couple of criteria: One, are you bigger than you were before? Two is, are you more aligned than you were before? Three is, is the authoritarian regime less popular than it was before? And four is, are your tactics proliferating? Are you trying new things? Are you developing new muscles?

We had three million people at the 1300 Hands Off protests last April. Then for the first No Kings, we had five million people at 2100 protests at the second No Kings. We had 7 million people at 2700, protests at the third No Kings. We had 3300 protests and more than 8 million people, which is to say three of the largest protests in all of American history are in ascending order.

The growth is pretty evident, and I don’t think it’s just us saying that. Some of the experts like Erica Chenoweth who are looking quantitatively at the scale of protests over the course of 2025 and into 2026. It dwarfs what we saw in 2017. The scale of mass mobilization and organizing is historic.

What are the challenges of growing No Kings?

The challenges in growing No Kings are the president repeatedly systematically using the powers of the presidency to go after his opponents. There are challenges of convincing people to care about politics. A lot of people believe that politics is bullshit, that both sides are corrupt, and that the whole system is broken and it’s not worth their time to get involved. That cynicism and nihilism and fatalism about the state of the country and our politics is the primary enemy that we have and the one that we have to slay. Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country.

We are a piece of it. And if we’re doing our work to build a truly representative and powerful movement, we’ve got to be helping and showing up for other organizations, other movements, went into their time to lead, and I would be May Day tomorrow as an example that, like I said, it’s not an Indivisible action. This is being led by May Day Strong.

What do you think of larger disruption actions formed by coalitions over longer periods of time like the general strikes in India, Panama, and Italy? Do you think that is possible in the US?

In 2025, the regime was targeting the organization of America, which is straight out of [the playbook of] Hungary. One of the lessons of Orbán’s downfall is that the best way to remove an authoritarian is electorally, so it depends on building a mass movement.

When it comes to disruption, you don’t have to look abroad. You can look at the Twin Cities. The Day of Truth and Freedom was a mass disruption event and intended to bring society to a halt. And I think it was very successful. The federal government had to retreat because of the PR disaster as a direct result of the incredible organizing on the ground. If Trump tries to sabotage the midterm elections, you’re going to need something that looks like the Twin Cities but at the scale of something that looks like No Kings. 

Going off what you brought up about disruption actions in the US, what do you think about tactics that try to get around restrictive US labor laws such as the proposed UAW strike in 2028?

I’m one battle at a time right now. There are a lot of questions about what happens in the Democratic primary, how we position ourselves in that race, and what happens if Trump runs again. These are all interesting questions that I look forward to digging into after we crush the regime in the midterms and elect some Democrats who are interested in using the powers of the Senate and the House to prevent the regime from doing more damage and bringing accountability to people who violated the Constitution. That is the single best thing we can do to set up democracy for a successful 2028.

Matt Multari has been driving for Amazon—and organizing with the Teamsters—for about a year and a half. His days are mostly spent delivering packages. But he thinks of his role as a worker-organizer as something much more historically significant than just maximizing delivery efficiency. 

“After the Assyrians lost their state, they survived in their homeland of Iraq for thousands of years. After facing a genocide that forced them to flee that homeland, they went to Russia, and then to Iran, and then some of them went to New York. Now I’m here,” he said. “And I’d like to tell Amazon: fuck you!”

Early on the morning of May 1, Multari took the megaphone in front of a hundred or so sign-toting Amazon warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and software engineers, who had traveled in from Queens and Staten Island to march on an Amazon office building for International Workers’ Day. 

“Each of us here has a story of generational struggle,” Multari, 25, said. But to him, working for Amazon means the obliteration of identity. “Amazon is trying to erase that.” Every day, as he puts on his blue vest and delivers packages from Amazon’s DBK-1 warehouse in Queens, the company surveills him: “You have an app that tells you the exact stop order you’re supposed to go in. You’re under a time quota, basically.” 

If you take too long, or take too many stops, Multari said, the app tells you to go faster. “You get a scorecard every week that says how you’re performing.” Five months ago, Multari and his DBK-1 coworkers unionized with the Teamsters, joining thousands of unionized Amazon workers nationwide. They’ve been able to extract some concessions from the e-commerce giant, though Amazon has refused to bargain with their unionized workers. Nonetheless, during this year’s record-breaking winter storms, they were paid for days they weren’t able to work; and when they needed new hand-trucks, Amazon paid up. 

Amazon holds millions of dollars in ICE contracts.Sophie Hurwitz

Nonetheless, Multari and his coworkers are aware that they’ll have to do much more to win real job security in an age of automation. “Amazon, at its core, is a tech company,” Multari said. “Our main asset to them is our data from our routes, so that it can train its algorithm, so it can make us more and more replaceable.” 

Amazon’s Web Services cloud-computing platform is more profitable than all the company’s retail operations combined. And AWS sells cloud-computing services to clients throughout the American government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement: According to Forbes reporting, ICE spent at least $25 million on AWS during the second Trump administration. Amazon Web Services also holds contracts with Palantir, the surveillance-tech company behind much of ICE’s deportation operation. (And Amazon has served as an inspiration for ICE, too: acting ICE director Todd Lyons has said he wants deportations in the US to run “like Amazon Prime for human beings.”) 

That’s part of why, at Monday’s rally, non-union tech workers stood alongside unionized warehouse workers. 

Zelda Montes, a former software engineer at Google who was fired in 2024 for holding a sit-in with their coworkers, said they’ve spent much of the past two years trying to help organize tech workers at places like Amazon. With the group No Tech for Apartheid, Montes works to build power within tech companies against the contracts that Amazon and Google hold with the Israeli government. “For a lot of tech workers, the work that they’re doing is helping to create these systems of surveillance that affect warehouse workers, that affect delivery workers, that create more difficult working conditions for them,” Montes said. “So it’s really important for us to be able to unite with them on the labor front.” 

Thousands of Amazon workers are unionized with the Teamsters. The company has spent years refusing to bargain with them.Sophie Hurwitz

At some Amazon warehouses, more than half of workers are immigrants. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has shown no interest in walking back the company’s contracts with agencies targeting those immigrants. “Amazon’s abuse of workers bankrolls their ability to do this,” said Sultana Hossain, an organizer with Amazon Labor Union. So, workers in New York told Mother Jones, they’re going to keep fighting. 

“We will demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect,” Multari said. 

On Friday, Nebraska became the first state to enact Medicaid work requirements, mandatory for states with Medicaid expansion due to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Notably, the state did it seven months before the deadline.

Now, around 70,000 adults below the age of 65 in Nebraska who have Medicaid through its expansion could risk having their health insurance ripped away from them.

Medicaid work requirements do not increase employment. Instead, the administrative burden of work requirements only serves to kick people off this governmental health insurance. Additionally, a majority of people on Medicaid, who are not on Supplemental Security Income, work full or part-time jobs. This underlines how rhetoric around work requirements is just false.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also highlighted that there is not enough time to implement what could be considered less cruel systems for Medicaid work requirements. The center called for work requirements to be pulled, “but short of that, states need more time to ensure their policies, systems, and staffing plans are in place to minimize the number of eligible people whose health care is taken away.” This also highlights the cruelty of Nebraska’s implementation of work requirements before the January 1, 2027 deadline.

Especially because an interim rule from the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not even due until June 1. I previously raised concerns about what an interim rule could look like from Kennedy:

A person with debilitating chronic pain, or a serious autoimmune illness, may appear “able-bodied” by the standards RFK Jr. appears poised to implement—even as they face hurdles in qualifying for Social Security disability due to not being considered disabled enough. HHS declined to answer a series of questions for this article, instead offering a general statement that the agency “remains committed to protecting and strengthening Medicaid for those who rely on it…while eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.”

There are some exemptions to Medicaid work requirements, including for people with chronic illnesses and pregnant people. According to Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services’ website, the state will be considering work requirement exemptions during checks every six months. There is a list of conditions for people on Medicaid that qualify for people with exemptions, but understandably, not every serious health issue is on there. Notably absent is Long Covid, a post-infectious disease caused by a Covid infection that can very much impact someone’s ability to work.

“I don’t see how any state could protect people with disabilities from these kinds of cuts,” Georgetown University professor Edwin Park told me last year before Republicans voted to enact Medicaid work requirements and nearly $1 trillion worth of Medicaid cuts.

Now, it’s a waiting game to see how draconian Medicaid work requirements roll out throughout the country.

Fresh on the heels of a lackluster Mar-a-Lago “luncheon” party for his struggling $TRUMP meme coin, President Donald Trump appears ready to launch his next crypto-coin-for-exclusive-access project: Trump Coin Club.

In the wake of the Mar-a-Lago bash, the official $TRUMP coin website was updated with a new offer. The details are sparse but apparently meant to be enticing. “MEMBERS ONLY · LIMITED ACCESS,” the site promises. “The Trump Coin Club — invitation-only luxury suites at the biggest sporting events in the world, private dinners, and the most elite and extraordinary experiences.”

There is no information as to what specific “biggest sporting events” that might include. I sent an email to the $TRUMP coin website and the Trump Organization, but no one replied.

The website has a sign-up prompt and what appears to be a mockup of a “leaderboard”—apparently similar to the ranking system used to doll out slots to the top 297 $TRUMP coin holders who were invited to last weekend’s Mar-a-Lago luncheon. Independent crypto researcher Molly White first reported the new Trumpian offer Wednesday evening. While it seems anyone can join can join the Trump Coin Club for free, White writes that the leaderboard “appears designed to rank members by both the amount of the token they hold and the duration they’ve held it.” And the prospect of invitations to “elite” events could be intended to incentivize crypto enthusiasts to hold onto their $TRUMP coins for the long term.

$TRUMP is a meme coin, which means it doesn’t have any inherent use or value—it simply exists as a digital endorsement of Trump, as a concept. If it becomes popular, it can also become useful for financial speculation. But other than a huge spike in price in the hours immediately before and after Trump officially announced the coin’s creation, the price’s trajectory has been almost exclusively downward.

Depending on the crypto exchange you use, the price of the coin was once as high as $74, giving it a $15 billion market cap. But since February, each coin has been worth less than $4. After last weekend’s event at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump attended, the price slipped even further. As of this writing, it is currently hovering below $2.40.

But even with the plunging price, $TRUMP is a great deal for its namesake. The president created the coin out of nothing, so any price is a win for him.

Affordability is the new buzzword. It’s yapped by politicians and pundits across the spectrum. It’s as popular as a new TikTok dance. And it’s genuinely an important and mobilizing concept.

But the truth is, it doesn’t really capture what’s ailing us.

What makes this moment unique is insecurity. Struggling with bills isn’t new to most Americans; what is different today, across lines of social class lines, is the degree of unpredictability that comes with ordinary ways of making a living: ICE grabbing people at workplaces and schools, at bodegas and hospitals, and taking them to American concentration camps; hundreds of thousands of formerly secure, essential federal workers being laid off, part of a Trump administration program of destroying any institution or program that led people to associate government with stability and security, like Medicaid-backed home care and FEMA. And then there’s the threat of AI ending our jobs as we know them.

In this era, instead of walking on solid ground, terra firma, we dwell on shaking, shifting terra infirma. While affordability is a handy reframe of pervasive income inequality—talking about prices and the cost of living, rather than structural forces that stymie mobility, makes people feel less blamed and less-than—it doesn’t cover the gamut of social instability that the last few years have wrought. Call them “economic-plus” factors.

Of course, much of this insecurity has been manufactured by merchants of doubt, the henchmen of an “insecurity-industrial complex.”

That complex is the brainchild, in part, of what former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has dubbed “muzzle velocity,” a rapid political communications strategy that presents a constant stream of wild news events and outrages, shocks designed to both overwhelm the media and put the populace on edge.

It entails the steady downpour of confounding right-wing populist dreck. Bannon described it to Frontline as “three things a day—they’ll bite on one.” When it lands on media platforms, viewers’ fears are then exploited in predatory fashion, for monetary or political gain.

The new insecurity also follows on more than a decade of gleeful “disruption” by Silicon Valley, whose titans have gutted or taken over so many familiar institutions in the last decade that experiences like shopping feel fundamentally less secure, with constant developments like the idea of dynamic pricing in stores, so that budgeting for coffee or eggs feels like playing a slot machine.

On a wider level, it also extends to predictive gambling mega-sites, which monetize the increasingly unpredictable news generated by the White House, benefiting inside traders in government and enabling corporate forces to cash in at scale on our feelings of instability.

Prediction market Kalshi’s co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour are now billionaires, according to Forbes; New York University anthropologist Natasha Schull characterizes their platform as “making everything into a set of binary choices” and bettable outcomes, both offering a kind of false reassurance.

The insecurity-industrial complex also includes the nationalist politicians who incite volcanic policy shifts and mass layoffs.

Take Tara Fannon, for years a research director at a consulting agency serving the federal government, responsible for communication outreach across agencies and direct work with veterans. In 2025, her government contracting job was DOGEd into oblivion. Fannon now makes a fraction of her former salary, and her unemployment has run out. At 50, she’s looking for a full-time job and “struggling”—Fannon says “the job market is the worst in my life: an absolute hellscape.” Her health care premiums are colossal.

“For me, ‘insecurity’ is a good word to describe all the ways I feel precarious right now,” Fannon says from her apartment in Brooklyn. “I can’t afford great medical care, and that’s going to affect my health, which causes me to worry and feel more anxious. I can’t afford to go to the gym or eat the kind of food that makes me feel healthy, and that affects me in other ways.”

She didn’t want to take all that turbulence lying down. Fannon started an oral history site interviewing government workers who had been laid off equally unceremoniously. Most, like her, she says, are still unemployed, “patching things together.”

And the war against our security entails crushing reliable government, including funds allotted to the caregivers of our most vulnerable citizens. United Domestic Workers deputy director Johanna Hester is on the front line of that battle. GOP-led cuts to Medicaid, she tells me, have been brutal for her members, who struggle with reduced paid hours as well as the fear of ICE raids at their workplaces. Many make less than $20 an hour and need food assistance from the union; some have been driven to live in their cars, struggling to afford gas.

Terra infirma is also a place where people fear speaking freely. The bravest are those who continue to, like Amisha Patel, a Chicago activist and mother of two who passed away this week at age 50, a month and a half after we spoke. Opposing the second Trump administration while struggling with metastatic cancer, Patel epitomized to me degree of courage that some Americans are showing today, standing up even while they teeter on the personal and political edge.

Before she passed, Patel underwent treatments, hoping to find something that would give her extra time. But by March, she was told she had just a few months to live. Still, when we spoke, she was trying to “show up,” as she put it, for her wife and neighbors in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood amid an escalation of ICE raids.

What kept her together in the last months of her life, in a time of massive turmoil, was the opportunity “to fight fascism.” “It’s easy to be frozen and not to act,” Patel said. I knew what she meant: public defiance was harder in a time of street kidnappings, campus crackdowns, and organized attacks on free speech (of, say, anyone who called Charlie Kirk…well, a Charlie Kirk). “But my disease has shown me that we are not going to have certainty,” she continued—only “possibilities.”

Fannon, Hester, Patel, and so many of us are standing in a frightscape and yearning for security from the political developments that snap at us like carnivorous plants.

I am not the only one who sees our main vibe as uncertainty, anxiety, and nervousness, our mood rings always turning to a muted gray or black. The Urban Institute’s “True Cost of Economic Security” metric, which factors in costs like health insurance, childcare, and retirement, defines 52 percent of US families as financially insecure, many more than define themselves (or are defined by other standards) as poor.

In the age of gig work, volatile income is another source of systemic insecurity around our labor. It makes planning for the future or even giving consistent time to family and other obligations, far more difficult. (No wonder Gen Z, has come up with corecore, a TikTok aesthetic that specializes in confusing, overwhelming juxtapositions.)

So does indebtedness: consumer debt is among the reasons that Americans’ available income has dropped by more than a quarter in recent years, according to political scientist Jacob Hacker’s Economic Security Index. Businesses look to the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, a financial instrument that tracks the effects of economic instability in the US and twenty other countries, going back to 1900.

Political uncertainty is approaching an all-time high here, says EPUI director Scott Baker, a professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin. Baker believes that insecurity about the future has made “firms and households less comfortable” spending and more likely to reduce consumption, while business have become less productive as a result, leery to make investments or increase hiring.

As Baker puts it, “sudden shifts in policy across a wide range of fields [have] made it hard for businesses and financial markets to know what is coming next.” According to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll, 47 percent of American adults  are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a job they would want. That figure was 37 percent in late 2023. 

Of course, the insecurity-industrial complex wasn’t born yesterday: exploiters have been making us nervous for generations. In her 1989 book Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the anxieties of an American middle class barely holding on to its social position by one high-thread-count pillow-set. In the 2009 collection The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It, nineteen ethnographers parsed how our leaders produce social insecurity, from the war on terror to the war on welfare.

But now that insecurity is everywhere, all the time. As economist Pranab Bardhan argues in his 2022 book A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries, insecurity, rather than poverty or inequality, is our new constant, bringing with it the forces that have caused an erosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike. As societal uncertainty, both real and manufactured, has risen in countries like the US, India, and Turkey, populists have taken over and tilted the political tables toward despotism, exploiting citizens’ economic and cultural instabilities to get their votes.

What would really restore our sense of certainty? On a governmental level, bolstering the hardy social programs we have, like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. Paid leave, which I depended on over the last year to care for two family members.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the National Academy for Social Insurance, tells me that this is the “moment to return to the moral and even spiritual foundation of the New Deal—the idea that we are in this together—and to carry that further into the next chapter of public policy. The question isn’t whether uncertainty will exist, it’s whether we will meet it with solidarity or fragmentation.”

When I attended a conference Vallas recently organized in Washington on the future of American social programs, attendees struck similar notes, harkening back to that great moment of the birth of Social Security, the New Deal; of Frances Perkins and FDR. But we can also push new policies that have a grandeur of spirit;  some of the threats to our security are too deeply contemporary to do otherwise.

Will we strategize and develop policies akin to universal basic income, updated to account for the six-fingered monster that is AI? An experimental “AI dividend” piloted by the nonprofit AI Commons Project and What We Will proposes to compensate 50 workers who have lost paid jobs or opportunities due to AI to the tune of $1,000 a month for a year, no strings attached. If it works, it will be a new model for basic income set to help the hundreds of thousands who may ultimately lose work due to AI.

And then there’s the personal piece of this: standing up to the insecurity complex, starting to naturalize the term “insecurity” when we talk about citizens’ state of mind, their needs and what informs their political will. I believe that part of surviving uncertainty is framing it, living with it—and acting despite it. Therapists I have spoken to speak of treating patients’ sense of “overwhelming and overweening threat,” in the words of psychologist Harriet Fraad, including fear of the encroachments of AI, while increasingly “unable to afford heat or gas for their car” as a consequence of Trump’s war in Iran.

Fraad tries to make her clients recognize the real culprit: “that their fears aren’t just because of their mother or something” but rather the nature of America today. She tries to ensure that they aren’t blaming themselves for their nerves, personalizing the effects of the insecurity-industrial complex into a singular failure on their part. To these patients, Fraad recommends “not being alone” and embracing “activism, love and solidarity.” 

Similarly, it can’t hurt for us to recognize when we are participating in habits that reflect and exacerbate terra infirma—we can reject predictive betting markets and their janky fake sense of relief, for example, or use tools that strip our feeds of AI slop wherever they find it, demanding a more human internet.

I am trying to acknowledge the political and economic uncertainty and nihilism around me, to live with it and name it. Otherwise, there is always the danger of repression, which leads, according to psychologists, to our splitting into metaphorical parts. The version of myself that tries on tinted sunscreen, makes sure to Docusign contracts, and  watches regional UK TV procedurals late into the night co-exists with the version of myself that is hyper-vigilant to the extreme events that keep unfolding.

In my quest to gain a greater sense of equilibrium, I also look for mirrors of our current precarity. Perhaps weirdly, I find reassurance in poetry reflecting extreme events, like poems composed shadows of the gulag, or one of Jorie Graham’s latest. As she writes, “I/will let go/of the world/as it was/once. It was probably/ never that way.”

This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. Subscribe to follow EHRP.

In April, the MAHA Mom Coalition, an organization that claims it advocates for “parental rights, holistic health, clean food & water, and medical freedom,” put out an unusual call. They wanted to talk to the farmers who’d been finding mysterious boxes of ticks in their fields—farmers and boxes that, by every available indication, don’t seem to exist. 

“Can anybody reading this right now validate this?” the MAHA Mom Coalition wrote on their Instagram page. “We’d love to connect with and speak to these farmers!!” 

The reason for such a request, as one conspiracist on Twitter explained in a post with over a million views, is with a potential new “Lyme disease vaccine coming out next year,” they “fear our government is going to release plague like levels of ticks upon us in order to incentivize the masses into getting another vaccine.”

The roots of the tick rumors originate, according to the fact-checking website Snopes, with an Iowa woman named Sarah Outlaw. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she wrote alongside a March 30 Instagram video post that’s been watched over 10 million times. “Reports of boxes of ticks being found. Reports of ticks being seen in ways that feel out of the ordinary. At the same time, we are seeing a very real increase in tick populations across our region…in my practice, I am seeing the impact. More Lyme. More chronic symptoms. More alpha gal,” an allergic reaction to red meat triggered by tick bites.

The suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing ticks to give us all Lyme disease keeps spreading.

Outlaw hasn’t provided documentary evidence to support these claims. She wrote on Threads that she heard them at a private seminar in late March from someone familiar with a “rural Missouri community.” But when Snopes reached out to hundreds of public health and other governmental officials in Missouri, they couldn’t find a single person who could corroborate seeing even one box of ticks. Snopes also wrote that in correspondence with Outlaw she “declined to provide us contact information for any involved parties, citing their privacy.” Outlaw didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. 

All evidence—or lack thereof—aside, Outlaw’s not-so-veiled suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing boxes of ticks to try to give us all Lyme disease has kept spreading. It wasn’t long before people on social media began to connect Outlaw’s claims to a newly developed Lyme disease vaccine from the drug companies Pfizer and Valneva. While the vaccine technically failed a late-stage clinical trial—which its makers attributed to a decrease in Lyme cases during the study period, resulting in less data than expected—the companies still hope to gain regulatory approval and release it in 2027. In a March press release, the companies boasted of the vaccine’s “strong efficacy,” reporting it reduced Lyme cases by 70 percent.

One major vector for the rumors was David Avocado Wolfe, a prominent wellness and conspiracy influencer, who quickly reshared Outlaw’s video on Telegram in a flurry of posts with suggestions on fighting ticks. He also re-shared a different video implying unknown powers are at work, featuring a woman who stares deadpan into camera as text under her reads, “Pfizer’s dropping a new Lyme vaccine next year… And magically, this spring and summer are going to be the worst tick season ever. You’ve seen this playbook.” Throughout April, posts on X making claims about boxes of ticks or casting suspicion on the forthcoming vaccine continued to go viral, with phrasing like “SHOCKING TIMING EXPOSED” and “feds bioengineering ticks to poison us with Lyme disease.” 

A previous Lyme disease vaccine, LYMErix, was pulled off the market in 2002, doomed partly by suspicions from Lyme patient groups that it caused adverse effects, and partly by a weak CDC recommendation that didn’t fully protect it from liability. After a raft of lawsuits were filed against its maker, GlaxoSmithKline, it discontinued the drug. No human Lyme vaccine has existed since.

Ever since, Lyme cases have continued to grow, spurred in part by climate change and other environmental factors that have brought people into closer contact with ticks, which can carry the bacteria which causes the disease. Tick-borne alpha-gal is also on the rise, with its first reported death in November 2025, when a New Jersey pilot who was apparently unaware that he’d been bitten by a tick and had developed the allergy died after eating a cookout hamburger. 

Because Lyme is a frightening and debilitating illness, conspiracy theories about it reliably catch attention. In 2024, Tucker Carlson produced a program claiming that “government bioweapons labs” that were “injecting ticks with exotic illnesses” in the 1960s led to widespread Lyme disease today, a show that has been viewed nearly 8 million times on X alone. In response, Politifact pointed to evidence that not only has the Lyme disease bacterium existed for some 60,000 years, it would make a poor weapon considering its slow spread and low fatality rate.  

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said as recently as January 2024 that he believes that Lyme disease likely came from a “military bioweapon.” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary made a similar claim on a podcast in November; both men have said the disease came from federal research facilities on Plum Island, New York. That idea was advanced in a 2019 book by science writer Kris Newby; the Washington Post debunked some of the book’s claims, including by disputing that a key Newby source was in fact a bioweapons researcher, as he is described. An epidemiologist who reviewed the book faulted it for “hysteria and fear-mongering,” while doing “little to help those afflicted by the disease it preys upon.”  

The legacy of these bioweapons claims lives on. After at least two previous attempts, this year Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the co-chair of the Congressional Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Caucus, succeeded in including a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act directing the Government Accountability Office to, as his office put it, “investigate whether the U.S. military weaponized ticks with Lyme disease.” 

With suspicion pressing on Lyme from all sides—from the president’s cabinet and the halls of Congress, to natural health influencers and back again—it’s possible that Pfizer and Valneva’s vaccine will be doomed to death by distrust before it even hits the market.  

Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practice from 1998 to 2003, when the LYMErix vaccine was considered. 

We “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”

While LYMErix was, Offitt says, “about 75% effective…it was damned by a soft recommendation from the ACIP” which held only that it “should be considered” for people who live in tick-endemic areas or spend lots of time outdoors. Offit had favored a broader recommendation, one which would have seen the shot covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. While patient reports of autoimmune issues were never conclusively proven, after only three years, LYMErix was pulled from the market.  

“It was subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous litigation” Offit says, as its manufacturer “tried to defend the vaccine until it was too expensive” to continue, he adds. 

In the intervening years, Offit adds, both “vigorous patient advocacy” and a “whole paramedical community” has grown up around Lyme disease and so-called chronic Lyme disease, in which people believe they have a long-term active infection. While persistent effects from Lyme disease, called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, exist, chronic Lyme is not recognized as a medical diagnosis.

Offit thinks more research is needed to demonstrate the new Lyme vaccine’s promise, but is worried about the environment in which it could be released. 

The suspicion bubbling up around the unreleased vaccine, Offit says, precisely calls to mind what has happened to vaccines targeting the coronavirus. “MRNA Covid vaccines have suffered from these conspiracies” about both the virus’ origins and alleged safety issues, he says. “It was very easy to get that bad information out there. So we suffer.”

Outlaw, who works as a herbalist, holistic doctor, and nutritionist, closed her viral video spreading her claims about tick boxes with a call to reach out to her for help: “Comment TICKS and I will send you what we do in our practice to support and protect naturally.”

To those who responded, Outlaw provided a “tick exposure and prevention guide” via DM, centered around a supplement brand called Cellcore, according to a video from by Mallory de Mille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast who often covers wellness scams, misinformation, and purported health trends on social media.

Outlaw describes herself as a “Board-Certified Doctor of Holistic Health,” and boasts of other credentials, including a master’s degree in applied clinical nutrition from the New York Chiropractic College and a certification in health coaching from the Biblical Health Institute. But she is not a physician. What she calls her “doctor’s degree” on LinkedIn came from Quantum University, a holistic medicine school whose two-year doctorate program is not accredited by the U.S. Department of Education. Quantum’s website has a disclaimer stating that its degrees “are NOT equivalent or comparable to” neither a MD or “a Doctor in Naturopathy Degree (ND),” nor do they “entitle graduates to any state, provincial, or federal licensure.”

“Lyme disease takes a huge toll on people in this country and their wellbeing,” infectious disease researcher Laurel Bristow says, with health influencers hawking baseless products adding to the problem. “There’s no evidence that anything they’re selling will reduce your risk of acquiring Lyme disease from a tick bite.”

Like Offit, Bristow—who hosts of Health Wanted, a podcast produced by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health—wants to see more research before passing judgment on the new vaccine. But she is also worried about the “pernicious” conspiracy theories it has already engendered: “We don’t want to cast aspersions on a vaccine before we really know what’s happening.” 

Even if the new Lyme vaccine is eventually approved by the FDA, Bristow points out another issue: there is no working “mechanism to review who should be recommended for it.” That step, which helps determine whether a vaccine is covered by insurance and by the federal injury compensation program, is conducted by ACIP. But the panel is caught in an ongoing legal battle as RFK Jr. tries to unilaterally overhaul it and stock it with anti-vaccine fellow travelers. 

Bristow hopes that time and more information about the new vaccine could raise public trust before it might hit the market. “It won’t be available to work for this tick season,” she says. “So hopefully in the intervening time we can have a little more data and feel a little more confident, and by the next tick season we’ll have a good option.” 

Dr. Paul Offit is less optimistic about what might happen in the intervening months, because, as he puts it, we “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”

“I’m not sure what gets us through this,” he adds, with a note of exhaustion. “We’re at a time now—and RFK Jr. is a ringleader of this as a major conspiracy theorist—where people create their own truths, including scientific truths.”