Mother Jones

Utah Governor Spencer Cox has been making the rounds of national media recently promoting his new book, Off Ramp: How to be a peacemaker in an age of contempt. On Jon Stewart, CNBC, and CNN, Cox drilled down on a theme that brought him into the national spotlight last year after the assassination of conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk in Utah: political depolarization. This was nothing new for Cox, who launched a “disagree better” initiative as the head of the National Governor’s Association in 2023.

While the work has earned him national plaudits and calls to run for president, it hasn’t exactly endeared him to people at home. In Utah, the two-term governor is, in fact, rather polarizing. A new poll released on Tuesday shows that his net approval rating in Utah has fallen 23 points since April.

It’s not hard to see why. He has signed laws supporting extreme Republican gerrymandering and taking fluoride out of the drinking water. This year, he officially declared June as “Fidelity Month,” instead of its more familiar name, Pride Month. He has supported data center construction over the intense objections of Utah residents of all political stripes. And in 2024, the soon-to-be author signed one of the country’s most extreme book banning laws—a decision that’s now coming back to haunt him as he tries to get people to buy his own book.

Since the law’s passage, Utah has now banned 44 books from all of its public school libraries and AP class curricula—everything from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to popular books by Stephen King, Jodi Picoult and Sarah J. Maas. (The full list can be found here.) Some local school districts have banned three times that number, most of them because of LGBTQ-related content or what the book-banners like to call “pornography.” (An example: Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 midlife crisis book Eat Pray Love was challenged in the Davis County school district because, among other things, it “refers to a penis as a banana.” It survived after another reviewer pointed out that the author writes favorably about celibacy.)

I was in Utah when Cox’s book came out and thought I’d try to go see him talk about it while I was there. But the governor wasn’t doing any book events in his own state. I eventually saw him in DC, where he spoke last week at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Since I couldn’t find the governor in Utah, I went to see the legendary Salt Lake City bookstore owner Ken Sanders, proudly displays a sandwich board outside his store announcing, “We Buy Banned Books.” Born in Utah, Sanders has been selling books in the state since 1975, and he’s lived through various waves of state-sponsored censorship. I showed him a copy of Cox’s new book. When he saw the book jacket highlighting Cox’s “dedication to depolarization and a commitment to peacemaking,” he exclaimed, “Oof. That ain’t you, babe.”

“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all, or how would he title his book like that?”

“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all,” Sanders said. “Or how would he title his book like that?”

Sanders isn’t the only Utah resident to notice the contradiction between the subject of Cox’s book and his support for the book banning law. In late April, The King’s English, a venerable independent bookstore in Salt Lake City, announced a promotion of the governor’s book, similar to those it does with other prominent authors. Customers who pre-ordered his book would receive a signed copy as soon as it came out. But the store was forced to cancel the offer in the face of furious outrage from its customers. “The book banner is partnering with a bookstore?” wrote one of hundreds of posters on the Salt Lake City sub-Reddit upset about Cox’s book promotion. “Gross and ill-advised.”

Cal Crosby, co-owner of The King’s English, says that the backlash was worse than when a bomb threat in 2023 forced them to cancel drag queen story time. The bomb threat turned out to have come from somewhere overseas, but the attacks over Cox’s book came from close to home. “It was very personal,” he said, noting that many of the most aggressive critics were among the store’s longtime customers or business connections.

Utah’s book banning law, according to critics, has a sweeping mandate. Here’s how it works: If three school districts, or two districts and five charter schools, ban a book because they decide it meets the state definition of obscenity or “sensitive materials,” the book is automatically removed from every school in the state. A Salt Lake Tribune analysis in May found that almost all of the statewide book bans originated in only two of the state’s 41 school districts.

Of those nine, most of the bans initially originated from just one district: Davis County, a conservative area north of Salt Lake City, where fringe conservatives have taken over the local Republican party. In 2021, after a two-year investigation, the US Department of Justice forced the Davis school district to address widespread racial harassment against Black and Asian-American students. Shortly afterward, a 10-year-old Black girl with autism died by suicide after allegedly suffering from intense bullying in a Davis County school.

Yet Davis County activists are leveraging the book-banning law to dictate what every school in the state is allowed to teach or stock in its library. And once the state bans a book, it can’t be assigned, even for AP classes. And schools must destroy all their copies lest the offending materials make their way into a Little Library or the hands of an unsuspecting youth.

Cox signed the first version of a book banning law in 2022 that allowed individual school districts to ban books. After it passed, a small but motivated army of people aligned with the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty marched into local schools to scan the bookshelves for books they deemed smutty. The law required school districts have committees to review book challenges, and people without children in the district schools were ineligible to challenge reading materials.

But state records showed that those rules have been routinely ignored, according to an investigation by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project. In Washington County in Southern Utah, for instance, most book challenges were made almost entirely by a woman who homeschooled her kids.

In 2024, when the state legislature expanded the law to make it easier to ban books statewide, Utah education advocates and civil liberties groups called on Cox to veto the bill. If enacted, they argued, the law “would encourage individuals to stifle the voices of diverse authors and perspectives, casting a chilling shadow over the sanctity of our First Amendment rights.”

Cox signed it anyway.

“I think calling on people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do,” says Jessica Horton, co-founder of Let Davis Read, an advocacy group fighting book bans in Davis County. “But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’  And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”

“Calling people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do. But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’  And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”

When I reached out to Cox’s publisher for a comment on his support for the book banning law, a spokesperson said in an email that the governor had no role in removing books from schools. The spokesperson disputed the idea that Utah was banning books, saying that local leaders and librarians have always chosen age-appropriate books for their schools. “We’re not going to agree on every policy, including which books should be available to children in public schools,” they said. “And refusing to engage with people we disagree with is a big part of how we got to our current political environment.”

Authors whose work has been banned, the estate of Kurt Vonnegut, as well as several students have sued the state over the law. Represented by the ACLU, they have argued that, among other things, it is depriving young people of constitutionally protected literature and personally harming the authors. On September 15, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to sue and the case is moving forward.

Meanwhile, Cox has been promoting his book, and a state literacy effort, as if none of this ever happened. “Civilization cannot continue if we can’t read,” he said at an event in August. He even retweeted a recent Atlantic story heralding the death of literacy, calling it “sobering.”

The Atlantic’s story this week on America becoming a post-literate society is sobering. The statistics are dark. But they are also reversible. I know because I’ve done it. After deleting social media from my phone, I unlocked my focus and started reading recreationally again. https://t.co/YeF57vVujt

— Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) July 10, 2026

“With one hand, he is saying, ‘I want children to learn to read.’ With the other hand, he is taking away the books that teens actually want to read,” such as Stephen King novels, notes Susan Heiner, an organizer of Let Utah Read, which has been fighting the book bans. “You get kids and teenagers to read by giving them things that they are interested in.”

He tried really, really hard in 2020. With his souring presidency on the line, he’s intensifying his efforts again. You know what we’re talking about: Trump’s election meddling.

“After 2020, I think one of the lessons that some of us learned—but unfortunately not everybody—is that our democracy is fragile,” says Washington, DC, bureau chief David Corn in the very first episode of our new podcast, Stress Test, a white-knuckle guide to the midterm elections. “Trump came pretty close, even with all the guardrails.”

And Trump isn’t the only one meddling—to which David can personally attest. Shortly after the release of his new book, How Russia Won, the very Russian disinformation operators he wrote about started circling deepfake videos of him, claiming he’d written a very different book: one detailing 300 crimes committed by Democratic candidates.

In this episode, David and co-host Garrison Hayes are joined by voting rights correspondent Ari Berman to pull apart the biggest stress test facing the midterms: whether the vote will proceed smoothly, or whether Trump will meddle even more. After all, Trump and his gang are already claiming the election will be “rigged,” pushing false voter-fraud claims, trying to disrupt mail voting, and demanding voter-roll data that could be used to challenge or purge voters. Then there are the redistricting wars that have shaped so much of 2026, and the Supreme Court’s role in diluting Black political power. At last month’s Republican midterm convention, Trump even went so far as to lead the crowd in a performatively jokey pledge to “cheat like hell.” (“It’s kind of hard to believe when someone says it so explicitly,” says a dumbfounded Garrison.)

The episode presents a blend of hope and fear. Many of Trump’s efforts have flopped so far: The Justice Department, Ari notes, is 0-25 in federal court in its bid to force states to hand over their voter rolls. His advice: “Don’t give Trump any more power than he actually has.”

But the Supreme Court has left plenty of room for a more orderly kind of rigging, like gerrymandering. “So you can’t steal,” as David puts it, “but you can tilt.” And Ari argues that what happens before the vote may not be what matters most. “What we saw in 2020 is all hell broke loose after voting ended. And so that’s why I don’t want to sit here and say, like, ‘Everyone’s fine, no need to stress, we’re all good.’ Because we don’t know what’s going to happen in those next phases where people vote, where votes are counted, and where elections are certified.”

New episodes of Stress Test drop every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe at youtube.com/motherjones.

After one of the largest wildfires in state history devastated Rio Blanco County, Colorado in 2025, Deirdre Macnab saw her share of horrors across the community: cows burned to death, pigs died from sunstroke, and pastures were blanketed in thick black smoke. This past summer was no different. “It was hellish,” Macnab told me. “Between the temperature and the drought, 2026 was a dress rehearsal for what we know is coming.”

Over the last few years, Macnab, a regenerative cattle rancher, and her fellow ranchers have experienced the devastating effects of climate change on their livelihood. “Every single rancher can tell stories about how their operations have been impacted and in some cases ended,” she said. On Monday, their stories, along with dozens of others about the mounting climate costs in Colorado, will arrive at the US Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments for the much anticipated case between Boulder, Colorado, and Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil Corporation.

The case revolves around a dispute between the City and County of Boulder, which first sued the energy companies in 2018. They are arguing that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. “The damages will only multiply as climate change worsens,” Boulder stated in its lawsuit. Suncor and Exxon, meanwhile, are asking the justices to kill the case before it makes it to trial—and with it a host of other state-level climate cases. 

Depending on how the eight justices rule—Justice Samuel Alito announced what some considered to be an 11th hour recusal earlier this week—the case could have far-reaching consequences for people like Macnab, who submitted an amicus brief in support of Boulder along with six other ranchers. But its implications extend beyond the state’s borders: dozens of other climate-related lawsuits hang in the balance of how Suncor v. Boulder is decided. Indeed, experts say that its implications extend beyond climate to include other damages-related suits, from asbestos cases, to pharmaceuticals, to opioids.

The state of Colorado is estimated to pay $37 billion in climate damages by 2050, and Boulder is arguing that, “Alone, [the City and County of Boulder] and their taxpayers cannot pay the full costs of all that is needed to attempt to mitigate the harm caused by climate change, nor should they.” Rather, the “costs should be shared” by the energy companies, which have “acted recklessly.” In addition to Macnab and her fellow ranchers, Boulder’s case is supported by some Democratic members of Congress, former Republican and Democratic EPA administrators, and federally recognized Indian tribes. 

Some lawyers hesitate even to call Boulder’s case a “climate” suit. Alejandro Camacho, a law professor at UCLA, said, “Suncor is not about whether climate change is real, and it’s not about who sets national emissions policy. It’s about whether a state court may hear an ordinary damages claim.” Hitching its legal wagon to climate change could hurt Boulder’s chances in front of a conservative-leaning court, Camacho says, “And that’s why I think it’s more useful for people to see it for what it is: a tort case.” In widespread corporate liability, tort law allows a plaintiff who’s been harmed—from pesticides or medications, to the recent case against Meta for social media addiction—to sue a company for compensation. 

Patrick Parenteau, Professor of Law Emeritus at Vermont Law School, described the situation more starkly. “You could call it deception, misrepresentation, but frankly it’s fraud,” Parenteau told me. “What [Boulder is] saying is, the companies lied about what they knew about the dangers of climate change. Fraud is the heart of it.”  

“You could call it deception, misrepresentation, but frankly it’s fraud. What [Boulder is] saying is, the companies lied about what they knew about the dangers of climate change. Fraud is the heart of it.”  

In their petition, Suncor and Exxon have argued that Boulder’s lawsuit is a surreptitious attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and those who claim injury at the state level should instead defer to the federal Clean Air Act. “Claims seeking relief for injuries allegedly caused by interstate pollution constitute an inherently federal area exclusively governed by federal law,” Suncor and Exxon stated in their filing. In other words, Colorado shouldn’t be able to seek state-level damages, in this case compensation from industry, when the harm in question is regulated by the Clean Air Act, which is a preexisting federal system. Three dozen amici briefs submitted on behalf of Suncor also demonstrate a significant show of force on the petitioner’s side, but a recent Consumer Watchdog investigation found that a majority of the briefs were written by groups with financial ties to the energy companies. 

Boulder insists that it is “not asking [the] Court to stop or regulate the production of fossil fuels [or emissions] in Colorado or elsewhere.” They are arguing only that industry should help to “remediate the harm” from the production.  In fact, Camacho believes Suncor’s arguments invoking the Clean Air Act are “ludicrous” given Boulder’s original complaint. “No federal statute provides a damages remedy for climate harms,” he said. “The Clean Air Act does not allow for regulation of greenhouse gases.”

Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor at William & Mary Law School and a proponent of Boulder’s original case moving forward, agrees with Camacho on the preemption argument. “Neither the Clean Air Act nor the Constitution imposes such a rule,” Adler wrote in a brief on behalf of the Colorado county. “We can have arguments and debates about the scope of relief that [Boulder] seeks or obtains,” he told me, “but those are all separate from the preemption question.”

The Trump administration may have inadvertently undermined Suncor’s argument by rescinding the 2009 endangerment finding earlier this year. As Emily Sanders pointed out in Point Source News, the administration is “drastically shrinking the EPA’s authority to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act.” In 2025, the Trump administration submitted an unsolicited brief urging the justices to rule in Suncor’s favor. Department of Justice lawyers are expected to argue alongside Suncor and Exxon’s lawyers on Monday.

If the Supreme Court ultimately decides to issue a broad ruling in favor of Suncor and Exxon by establishing a sweeping preemption rule, the decision could set a precedent for the dozens of other climate lawsuits waiting for their day in court. “A broad ruling ends essentially all of them,” Camacho said during a webinar with Covering Climate Now and Point Source News. A split outcome, in which the court rules that some cases can proceed while others must be halted, is also possible. None of the cases have progressed to trial yet. 

Beyond the ecosystem of climate liability lawsuits, a sweeping decision against Boulder could have even further-reaching consequences. “I worry a broad preemption ruling could have implications for other areas of law, including litigation over things that occur on or through the internet,” said Adler. In a more unlikely but still possible scenario, the court could say nothing about the Clean Air Act and instead rule on another argument from industry: in this case, that Colorado’s law infringes on the federal government’s constitutional authority over foreign affairs. “This has implications for basic asbestos litigation, pharmaceutical injuries, transboundary pollution cases, forced labor cases,” Camacho said. “It swallows up all of state tort law that involves any kind of international company.” 

With a decision expected sometime next year, the legal experts I spoke with pointed out that the justices could choose to punt the case entirely by ruling they don’t have jurisdictional authority to hear it. “No one knows how the court’s going to rule,” said Mike Meno, communications director for Center for Climate Integrity. “But if there is a ruling on the preemption question, in cases across the country, communities and oil companies will be back in court arguing whether and how that ruling applies to these specific cases.” 

On Monday morning, while the justices hear oral arguments, Deirdre Macnab will be outside the halls of the Supreme Court along with a coalition of Colorado ranchers, survivors of the 2021 Marshall fire, and members of Boulder youth groups. On our call, she described what’s at stake. “This story is much bigger than just the cattle ranchers. It’s the everyday families that are trying to afford food, who feel pressured about how much things are costing,” she said. “Government can’t fix everything, but it’s the tool we have to hold the private sector accountable.”

Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said last year that the agency, which oversees federal mortgage regulators Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had launched a “wide crackdown on mortgage fraud.”

That was never a persuasive claim. Pulte announced his campaign after drawing criticism for urging the Justice Department to prosecute officials including Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, New York Attorney Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), over alleged inaccuracies in past mortgage applications. His targets were almost all Democrats—or, in Cook’s case, a Democratic appointee—who President Donald Trump had previously clashed with.

Pulte’s cuts “will eliminate our capacity to effectively conduct criminal investigation of mortgage, bank, and other fraud schemes involving the entities FHFA regulates.”

But Pulte’s supposed crackdown on mortgage fraud looks a lot less plausible now. On Wednesday, he announced deep cuts to the office of the Inspector General at the FHFA. That office is reportedly investigating Pulte’s own alleged misconduct. But it also includes dozens of special agents who work to “detect, investigate, and refer for prosecution mortgage fraud and other crimes” involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, FHFA Acting Principal Deputy Inspector General James Hodge told congressional oversight committee members in a letter Wednesday.

Pulte’s cuts “will eliminate our capacity to effectively conduct criminal investigation of mortgage, bank, and other fraud schemes involving the entities FHFA regulates,” Hodge wrote. He said he would have to lay off about 40 investigators who have helped the office secure more than 1,200 criminal convictions and recover nearly $75 billion since.

In a press release Thursday, Pulte explained slashing the IG’s budget by arguing that it was relatively more expensive than comparable inspector general offices at other federal agencies as a percentage of overall agency spending. 

The announcement did not mention Pulte’s purported crackdown on mortgage fraud, or how firing investigators would affect that effort. The agency’s press office did not respond Thursday to questions on the subject.

Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee demanded on Thursday that Pulte reverse the move, writing to him that the cuts would “make it impossible” for the Inspector General’s office to oversee the agency and the US mortgage market.

Top Democrats said Thursday that Pulte “should resign, and if he does not, Congress must hold him accountable.”

“Your decision is unacceptable and yet another example of this Administration’s willingness to flout the law and evade accountability. It also indicates that FHFA is uninterested in finding and eliminating mortgage fraud—an issue that you have repeatedly claimed to prioritize at FHFA,” the lawmakers wrote.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and other top Democrats said Thursday that Pulte “should resign, and if he does not, Congress must hold him accountable.”

Pulte’s efforts to target Trump foes for alleged mortgage fraud has largely failed. Federal prosecutors, at his urging, did indict James, the New York Attorney General who in 2024 won a civil case requiring Trump’s companies to pay back more than $450 million in wrongly obtained funds and interest. A judge later threw out the case against James after ruling the appointment of the Trump aide who brought the case was illegal.

Pulte reportedly targeted one Republican, Attorney General Todd Blanche. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Pulte looked into Blanche’s mortgages after the former Trump lawyer, at the time the deputy attorney general, criticized Pulte’s efforts targeting Democrats.

Pulte’s efforts to use his office to advance partisan vendettas have never been subtle. The Government Accountability Office has said it is investigating whether Pulte misused his position to access mortgage information on Trump foes.

But as Pulte moves to fire the federal employees who look into actual mortgage fraud, the Trump loyalist’s motivations targeting Democratic officials are clearer than ever.

During a sworn deposition on Monday, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) declined to answer repeated questions from one of his ex-wife’s lawyers about whether he pushed a girl down a staircase during high school.

The deposition, first reported by Mother Jones, was part of his ongoing court battle over custody of the two-year-old daughter he shares with Emily Moreno, daughter of US Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Emily Moreno has accused her ex-husband of assaulting her multiple times. He has also been accused of being violent toward two other women and was investigated by Ohio authorities for potential child abuse, though that claim was deemed “unsubstantiated.”

In July, Mother Jones published an investigation into Miller based on a trove of police and court documents. Among the records were claims that Miller tossed boiling water at Moreno, held a gun to her head while she changed their daughter’s diaper, and shoved her against a wall, resulting in bruises.

In these filings, Moreno’s lawyers also brought up an alleged incident from high school—previously reported by Politico and subsequently by Mother Jones—in which Miller was said to have pushed a woman down the stairs after she rejected his physical advances.

“With eight to 10 friends at Miller’s house, Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in the aftermath,” wrote journalist Michael Kruse in 2021.

Reached by text message this summer, the woman in question told Mother Jones that while the event “happened 20 years ago,” it remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

In interviews and statements, Miller has denied ever behaving violently toward women, including his ex-wife and the woman from high school.

Testifying under penalty of perjury this week, Miller was repeatedly instructed by his lawyers to remain silent on the staircase allegation:

Moreno’s lawyer: Where did you go to high school?

Miller: Shaker Heights.

Moreno’s lawyer: Isn’t it true there was an incident in high school where you pushed someone down the stairs —

Miller’s lawyer: Objection.

Moreno’s lawyer: Yes or no?

Miller’s lawyer: Don’t answer that.

Moreno’s lawyer: You’re instructing him not to answer?

Miller’s lawyer: I am instructing him not to answer that.

Moreno’s lawyer: Can you instruct him to answer the question, please?

Miller: It predates December 18th of ’25. [The] judge made several rulings.

Miller’s lawyer: Max, I got it.

Moreno’s lawyer: Can you instruct him to answer the question, please?

Court reporter: You are so instructed.

Miller’s lawyer: Take it up with the judge.

Moreno’s laywer: If the incident never occurred, why are you afraid of answering the question?

Moreno’s lawyers kept pushing, but Miller took his counsel’s advice. “Max,” his attorney Pamela MacAdams said. “Do not respond.”

During the deposition, Moreno’s lawyers also asked Miller about alleged testosterone use.

Moreno’s lawyer: Are you currently taking testosterone?

Miller: No.

Miller explained that he previously utilized testosterone replacement therapy after obtaining a prescription online. “It is legal,” he said, adding that he has not taken testosterone in two years.

Moreno’s lawyer: Do you understand that the side effects for testosterone replacement therapy include irritability, mood swings, or increased aggression; yes or no?

Miller: No.

Moreno’s lawyer: No one ever informed you about the side effects of taking testosterone replacement therapy?

Miller: They did, but they said where my test levels were is that this would get it back to normal so that it wouldn’t be above [the] normal baseline of testosterone. So essentially, what they were saying is this would help my overall functionality and getting a little bit [of] energy back.

Miller told Moreno’s attorney, a Marine veteran, that taking testosterone is “very normal.”

“And now, Secretary Hegseth has [advised] it for all of the men 30 and over in the military to take it,” Miller added, somewhat misconstruing Pete Hegseth’s instruction for all men in the military over 30 to have their testosterone levels tested. “As you know, Marine.”

David Corn and Garrison Hayes kick off “Stress Test,” our new twice-weekly video podcast on the midterms and the state of American democracy.

It’s only a few weeks away. It feels like an eternity.

The midterm elections have officially entered their looming phase. Worriers of all stripes (doomscrollers, political junkies, fuel tank fillers), we get it. There’s a war, an unpopular president, a MAGA capture of Congress, and a bunch of multibillionaires blithely slop-ifying our jobs. It’s a lot.

That’s where we come in. We know how to tease out what to pay attention to and what to tune out, and we were early to identify the big issues shaping this election. We were on the ground as local groups banded together across party lines to oppose data centers. We profiled the rise of Christian nationalism and its infiltration of the highest ranks of government. And we’ve never taken our eyes off the threat of election interference and the systematic erosion of voting rights across the country.

Enter “Stress Test,” a new video podcast from Mother Jones, hosted by Washington, DC, bureau chief David Corn and video correspondent Garrison Hayes. “We’re facing perhaps one of the biggest stress tests that American democracy has ever been through with these midterm elections,” David explains. “After 2020, I think one of the lessons that some of us learned, but unfortunately not everybody: Our democracy is fragile.”

In twice-weekly pop-up episodes, David and Garrison will talk to our reporters about the midterms and where you should be paying attention. They’ll team up when breaking news changes the course of the election, and they’ll be your companions, channeling your stress (and their own) into a productive discussion about the future of our democracy. As Garrison puts it: “If the fur is going to be flying, there’s no one I’d rather be talking to than David Corn—and, of course, the incredible journalists and reporters in our newsroom.”

Don’t miss an episode: Subscribe now to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/motherjones. The show will also be available in audio form on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

In a move that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has decried as a “clear conflict of interest and corruption,” one of the Trump Family’s most lucrative businesses is on its way to becoming a bank. And it’s set to be regulated by a government entity whose leader was appointed by, you guessed it…Donald Trump.

In August, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—one of three major bank regulators in the United States—declared that Donald Trump’s controversial crypto company, World Liberty Financial, could begin the process of establishing itself as a bank. It’s a complicated regulatory move that not only creates a new level of conflict of interest for the president and his family, but demonstrates just how drastically Trump has reshaped federal government policy in an effort to embrace his fellow crypto entrepreneurs.

The Trumps’ crypto odyssey ostensibly has roots in the family’s grievances surrounding the aftermath of the 2020 election. “I never thought I’d fall into the world of crypto until every bank began cancelling us for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my father was in politics,” Eric Trump told Fox News in 2024. “They came after us viciously. It wasn’t until that time that I realized how important crypto was.”

“We’ve been debanked. We’ve been deplatformed. We’ve had everything thrown at us with the kitchen sink.”

In reality, many big banks had long refused to do business with Donald Trump due to his past bankruptcies. But following the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, some banks did, in fact, close Trump’s accounts with them. Trump and his sons founded World Liberty Financial in 2024, saying that it was needed because banks, and the whole system of banking regulation, had been so bad for their family. World Liberty Financial, they said, would be a “DeFi” company—decentralized finance. Instead of managing money through the stodgy old Wall Street system, it would allow people to do a lot of their financial activities on the blockchain.

“So you know, just very excited, entered the crypto space with this product, really looking to upend a lot of the traditional finance markets that we have viewed as very broken,” Donald Trump Jr. told an interviewer in October 2024, recounting how traditional banks turned away from the family after January 6. “We’ve gone through a lot in America. We’ve been debanked. We’ve been deplatformed. We’ve had everything thrown at us with the kitchen sink. And so we wanted to do something, to take on a system, frankly, that was quite broken.”

The company hasn’t done much of that—there is no way for the public to use World Liberty Financial for many of the activities traditionally performed by banks. But it has created a stablecoin, called USD1, which is a type of crypto asset designed to stay valued at $1. Stablecoins are useful as a way to move money between different crytpo currencies or between partners, without necessarily having to use actual US dollars, which are the common currency for most international transactions.

But, despite not doing much to actually take down the traditional banking world, the founding lore behind World Liberty’s creation makes its potential new status as a “national trust bank” an interesting turn of events. To be clear, the company will be no normal bank—it still won’t offer savings accounts, auto loans, credit cards, or ATMs. But for World Liberty, the development could be a goldmine.

Stablecoin companies make money by accepting US dollars in exchange for their stablecoin—$1 for one stablecoin—and then investing that real US currency in Treasury notes, reaping the interest as their profit. But since its launch, World Liberty has had to partner with an actual bank to hold onto that money for customers—which means it has had to split the profits. If World Liberty receives final approval to become a bank, it will be able to hold the money itself and keep all the profits.

So, why aren’t all crypto companies already established as banks? Because, in the past, it has taken a lot of work to become a bank. Speaking on the floor of the US Senate last week, Warren excoriated the decision by the OCC to grant World Liberty Financial a preliminary charter.

“Even setting aside the clear conflict of interest and corruption, World Liberty’s charter application would have been flatly denied under any previous administration, Republican or Democrat, due to its national security risks, anti-money laundering vulnerabilities, and lack of competent management,” Warren said.

The current Comptroller of the Currency, Jonathan V. Gould, was appointed last July by Trump, and he can be fired by Trump. Four other stable coin issuers have applied for, and received, at least conditional approval from the OCC to become banks—three of them since 2025. One crypto company received a conditional bank charter under the Biden administration, but its final approval was stalled until last December, when Trump’s OCC finally gave it the green light.

Hilary Allen, a banking law professor at American University, said that it’s impossible to say if the World Liberty application got literal special treatment because of its connection to the president, but the OCC’s turn towards allowing stabelcoin companies to become banks is a result of influence from above—influence which clearly has a self-interest.

“Before this OCC, I don’t think we would’ve seen these stablecoin national bank charters,” she says. “This wouldn’t have happened if Trump wasn’t setting things up to accommodate the crypto industry, which he was not just doing out of the goodness of his heart. They supported him, and also he has his own financial interest.”

Indeed, donors linked to the crypto industry gave heavily to back Trump during the 2024 election—and also contributed lavishly to celebrate Trump’s victory.

One of Allen’s concerns is that although neither the World Liberty Financial nor the other crypto banks will be backed by the FDIC—the federal government’s depositor insurer that guarantees you won’t lose your money if a bank fails—just being called a bank will offer the crypto companies an implied stamp of government approval and support. It’s a shot of credibility, but without some of the regulatory hurdles facing traditional banks.

“No regular person is going to say, ‘Hmm, a national trust charter doesn’t carry the same kind of insurance and regulation,'” Allen says.

World Liberty Financial is not yet a bank—it’s only received a preliminary approval, and now must raise a certain amount of money and jump through several more hoops before it can start operating. As part of its application process, World Liberty has already agreed to several changes. For instance, Eric Trump signed a passivity agreement, which prevents the Trump family from taking an active role in the daily management of the bank. Specifically, he agreed, among other things, that the Trumps would not have any management role, would not influence board decisions, and would not involve themselves with regulatory decisions.

According to the terms, the OCC itself will oversee and enforce Eric Trump’s promise that the Trumps wont get involved.

The OCC did not respond to a request for comment. But David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, said there were no conflicts of interest or special treatment given to the company as it applied for bank status.

“There are no conflicts of interest. We have made this very clear,” he said in an email. “There was no special treatment whatsoever and multiple direct competitors received approvals earlier and more rapidly than World Liberty. Approval is a comprehensive process led by OCC career staff.”

The passivity agreement, to one former regulator, who spoke on background as he now advises companies that are regulated by the OCC, is just window dressing. Eric Trump’s precise role at World Liberty Financial isn’t the problematic aspect. Even if he and his family aren’t actively running the bank, they still have a major financial interest in its profitability—and obvious access to the policy levers that impact the industry.

“The problem here is not the fact the Trumps are affiliated with a bank,” the former regulator said. “It’s the fact that Donald Trump can fire the bank regulator if the bank regulator doesn’t do what he says.”

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

Justice Samuel Alito decided Monday to sit out one of the most consequential climate change cases to reach the Supreme Court, but legal experts expected continuing ramifications due to his ownership of individual corporate stocks, including in the fossil fuel industry.

After months of resisting calls for his recusal, Alito reversed himself one week before the Supreme Court is set to open its term by hearing the oil industry’s bid to block Boulder, Colorado’s lawsuit to recover costs related to climate change. The clerk of the court sent a brief letter to the lawyers in the case saying, without explanation, that Alito would no longer participate.

Alito does not own stock in the two companies involved in the Boulder case—ExxonMobil and the Canadian oil giant Suncor—and through a court spokesperson earlier this year conveyed that the court’s legal counsel said his recusal was not required. But Alito does own stock in companies that face lawsuits that will hinge directly on the Supreme Court’s decision. 

State court judges, in fact, have stayed 11 such cases in recent months pending the outcome of Suncor v. Boulder. Those include cases from which Alito has recused himself in the past.

The cases seek to recover damages from oil companies for the costs state and local governments already are incurring and are expected to face in the future due to extreme weather, drought, wildfire and other impacts of climate change. 

The oil industry should bear financial responsibility, they argue, because of evidence that they knew the climate impact of their products for years and misled the public about the risks. The county and city of Boulder sued Exxon and Suncor in 2018, five years after historic flooding destroyed 1,800 homes, tore up more than 100 miles of roadway and caused billions of dollars of damage. 

Three years later, the most destructive fire in Colorado history swept across the region, killing two people, burning 6,000 acres and again burdening communities with costs from an event that scientists say was worsened by climate change. 

“The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling.”

A Supreme Court ruling for the oil companies could provide the kind of blanket immunity from liability over climate change that the industry has sought for years. Exxon and Suncor told the court that energy companies were facing lawsuits seeking “billions of dollars in damages” and urged the Supreme Court to take the case “to prevent dozens of climate change cases from improperly barreling ahead in state court.”

A coalition of 30 environmental, watchdog and advocacy groups, including the League of Conservation Voters, the Revolving Door Project and urged the Senate Judiciary Committee in a May letter to investigate whether Alito was violating the law or the judicial ethics code that the Supreme Court adopted in 2023.

The group Consumer Watchdog earlier this month released research detailing how the two biggest oil companies in Alito’s portfolio, ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, warned investors about the material risks they face due to the litigation. Consumer Watchdog’s review also found that Alito holds stock in companies involved in every climate case identified as currently stayed pending the outcome of Suncor v. Boulder, including lawsuits by California, New Jersey, Delaware and eight California cities and counties.

“Justice Alito’s recusal from Suncor v. Boulder is the right decision, and one he should have made from the start,” said Alexandra Nagy, organizing director with Consumer Watchdog, in a statement. “The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling that shields the fossil-fuel industry from liability.”

The situation brought front and center the kind of ethics controversy at the Supreme Court that Chief Justice John Roberts has sought to quell for at least the past 15 years. In 2011, in a year-end report devoted to ethics issues, Roberts defended the system in which justices decide for themselves—without review of the rest of the Supreme Court—whether to recuse themselves. 

“I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted,” Roberts wrote. 

Alito, the only justice who owns an extensive portfolio of stocks in individual large corporations that regularly litigate in the federal courts, has recused himself more often than any other justice in recent years, according to research by the watchdog group Fix the Court. 

Because Alito participated in the case conference during which the Supreme Court decided to take the Boulder case in February, there remains a lingering question of whether his vote already was decisive in ensuring that Suncor and Exxon would get a Supreme Court hearing. Although the court decides in secrecy which cases it will hear among the thousands of petitions it receives each year, by longstanding practice it requires that at least four of the court’s members must agree before a so-called writ of certiorari is granted. 

Between 2023 and 2025, the Supreme Court denied petitions by oil companies in nine cases to consider essentially the same issue in the Boulder case—whether federal law preempted state and local governments from seeking damages against the oil industry in state court lawsuits. Alito had recused himself from the case conferences for all but one of those cases.

Without naming Alito, ExxonMobil made reference to the recusal problem when it told the Supreme Court back in 2022 that the Boulder case was the “ideal vehicle” for resolving the legal issues the industry had raised.

“We spend too much time talking about what is required of the justices. We should be talking about the right thing to do.”

“It involves a smaller set of defendants…and is thus less likely to present recusal issues,” Exxon said in its brief.

Although the Supreme Court didn’t take the Boulder case back then (Alito had recused himself “inadvertently,” a court spokesperson later told NBC), the oil industry finally will get to make its case to the high court on Monday. 

Advocates for the state and local governments suing the oil industry see the Exxon brief as laying out a roadmap for the justices who were inclined to grant cert on the preemption issue. 

“In a lot of ways, Exxon and Suncor proposed this maneuver to Justice Alito three years ago,” said Mike Meno, spokesman for the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, in an interview before Alito announced he would recuse himself. “People have a very cynical view of this court, and actions like this only reinforce the public’s concerns about the court’s integrity.”

When the Supreme Court unanimously adopted its first-ever code of conduct in 2023, it laid out the circumstances that call for recusal—including holding a financial interest in a party litigating before the court. But legal experts note that it never addressed a more basic question: Should Supreme Court justices hold individual stocks at all?

According to his latest financial disclosure, released in August, Alito holds stocks in more than 25 corporations, seven of them in the fossil fuel industry, as well as a mineral interest worth as much as $250,000 in Oklahoma. His holdings have not changed since the previous year, even though they created controversy last term when he belatedly recused himself from a case over Louisiana wetlands destruction involving ConocoPhillips. (The only other justice who holds individual stocks is Roberts, who has shares in a semiconductor services company and a biotech firm.)

Louis Virelli, a law professor at Stetson University and author of a book on the Supreme Court and recusal, interviewed before Alito made his recusal decision, said that he believed the questions raised go beyond the Suncor case and what is required by the letter of the law. “We spend too much time talking about what is required of the justices,” Virelli said. “We should be talking about the right thing to do, because the justices owe us all an ethical duty and they owe us an institutional duty.

“The real question to me is: Why does any justice hold stock in an individual company that is part of an industry that is going to appear before the court?” Virelli said.

Arthur Hellman, professor emeritus and legal ethics expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said he is “baffled” why Alito continues to own individual corporate stocks. He notes that Alito himself discussed the importance of all nine members of the Supreme Court hearing cases in a 2023 memorandum where he explained why he was resisting calls to recuse himself from a tax case.  “If we recused in such cases, we would regularly have less than a full bench, and the Court’s work would be substantially disrupted and distorted,” Alito wrote at the time.

Said Hellman: “Justice Alito will no longer be open to criticism for participating in the Suncor case, but his recusal does nothing to address the concerns about disruption of the Court’s work that he voiced in his…memorandum.” 

In a laudatory biography of Alito released this year that relied on interviews with people close to the justice, conservative author Mollie Hemingway wrote that the individual stocks were holdings that his wife, Martha-Ann, had inherited from her parents. “They hold not just financial value for her but sentimental value as well, making her disinclined to sell them,” Hemingway wrote.

Hellman said as long as Alito maintains those financial interests, he will raise recusal issues for himself and put the court’s ethics practices under public scrutiny. 

“People will wonder, ‘Isn’t there a downstream effect of whatever the court decides in Suncor on…other fossil fuel companies?’” Hellman said. “It just seems to me no emotional attachment can override all of those concerns.”

In what promises to be the most consequential showdown over reproductive rights since the end of Roe v. Wade, three states with near-total abortion bans asked the US Supreme Court on Wednesday to strike down blue-state laws that have enabled tens of thousands of abortions every year across state lines since 2022.

The action by Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas was a dramatic escalation in the long-running battle over so-called shield laws, which provide legal immunity to doctors, organizations, and advocates in liberal states who deliver abortion care, mostly in the form of pills, to people in states with draconian abortion laws. 

The suit—filed directly with the high court just in time for the start of its new session next week—accuses California, Massachusetts, and New York of violating the US Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, which requires states to respect “the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings” of other states. The suit describes efforts by the defendants to circumvent Republican-passed abortion bans as a violation of states’ sovereignty and “one of the most serious interstate aggressions in our Nation’s history.”

A second lawsuit, filed in federal court in Louisiana on Wednesday, targets more than two dozen individual providers and pharmacists, accusing them of “a sweeping, coordinated scheme” to send abortion pills through the mail in violation of strict bans. The defendants include Dr. Angel Foster and her colleagues at The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP, whose operations I wrote about for Mother Jones and Reveal this past summer. (My reporting is cited frequently throughout the two lawsuits, along with that of other news organizations including the New York Times, Ms. and NPR.)

At the time, Foster told me that The MAP was filling more than 6,000 pill orders a month, 95 percent to states where abortion is subject to harsh restrictions and near-total bans—among the details from my stories the lawsuits cite.  

“Our constitutional system does not tolerate such blatant disregard for a state’s sovereign authority.”

“Our constitutional system does not tolerate such blatant disregard for a state’s sovereign authority,” says the provider lawsuit, which also targets abortion-pill operations in California, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. “That is true regardless of the nature of the products being unlawfully shipped…It does not matter whether the package contains anthrax, mail bombs, or chemical weapons intended to harm individuals within that state, or (as is the case here) abortion drugs.”

As I have written, shield laws are designed to thwart the near-total abortion bans and other restrictions that have proliferated in red states since the 2022 Dobbs decision. 

Broadly speaking, these measures prohibit law enforcement and state agencies from engaging in actions that could help abortion opponents bring criminal or civil cases against abortion doctors, helpers, or patients. In most shield-law states, police can’t serve arrest warrants; court clerks can’t issue subpoenas; IT staff can’t comply with records requests, and governors can’t sign extradition orders. . . .

Perhaps the closest analogy [are] the “personal liberty laws” that Northern states enacted to resist the Fugitive Slave Act before the Civil War.

Nearly two dozen states and Washington, DC, have created some version of shield protections; eight of those states, including California, Massachusetts, and New York, have adopted laws that explicitly protect people who provide or facilitate abortion care via telemedicine. The laws have proven to be “one of the strongest tools that reproductive freedom advocates have to protect abortion access in a post-Roe reality,” Ashley Kurzweil, a senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told me last fall. “It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.”

But the legal theories underpinning shield laws have remained largely untested—and abortion supporters and opponents alike have long predicted that the Supreme Court would be forced to settle the vast constitutional issues they raise.

“It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.”

Shield laws—combined with telemedicine and abortion pills—have led to one of the biggest surprises of the Dobbs era. Instead of rates plummeting as expected, clinician-supported abortions increased 16 percent last year compared with 2022. Telehealth now accounts for 30 percent of abortions in the US; almost two-thirds of abortions in the country occur using pills. 

Despite having some of the toughest abortion laws in the country, Louisiana has not been immune to that trend. By the end of last year, out-of-state providers were sending almost 1,000 abortion packages of pills a month to patients there. Meanwhile, that state’s Attorney General Liz Murrill’s efforts to extradite abortion providers from New York and California have been stymied. One of the people Murrill has sought to prosecute, California-based doctor Rémy Coeytaux, is among those named in the new case.

Last fall, she tried another strategy to stop the flow of pills, suing the FDA over its 2023 rules allowing the abortion medication mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail. When the case went to the Supreme Court briefly this past spring, Justice Samuel Alito singled out shield laws for a blistering attack, calling them a “scheme to undermine” Dobbs.

Blue states “have claimed the right to make abortion policy—their abortion policy—for the entire Nation by overriding democratically enacted laws in pro-life states.”

The complaint by Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas is the first time anti-abortion states have tried to take action directly against shield-law states. Murrill and her colleagues argue that such laws flout the high court’s decision in Dobbs, which struck down the federal right to abortion and returned regulation to the states. The blue states “have claimed the right to make abortion policy—their abortion policy—for the entire Nation by overriding democratically enacted laws in pro-life states,” the lawsuit argues. “This is not the promise of Dobbs—and it is a direct affront to this Court as an institution and an attack on our constitutional structure.”

Murrill reiterated those arguments at a news conference Wednesday, the Louisiana Illuminator reported. “We will not allow activist states, activist providers or distributors profiting from killing babies to threaten Louisiana’s sovereignty, violate Louisiana’s laws and endanger Louisiana women and Louisiana babies,” she said, adding, “It is no different than if they were sending fentanyl in these boxes.” Joining her were Republican attorneys general Steve Marshall of Alabama—who has threatened advocates who provide information about abortion and help women travel for care—and Tim Griffin of Arkansas.

As the New York Times noted, filing a case directly to the Supreme Court isn’t unusual when states are in conflict. 

States can bring disputes between themselves directly to the Supreme Court, which is given “original jurisdiction” by the Constitution and can function in such cases like a trial court. Past disputes that have gone before the court involved challenges over geographic boundaries or water rights. Justices have the discretion to turn down these cases, and often do.

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, denounced the lawsuit and said her office would defend the state’s shield law, the Times reported. “Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas are asking the Supreme Court to let them impose their abortion bans on New York and punish our doctors for providing legal health care,” she said. 

In a statement, Amanda Allen, executive director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, described the case as “a desperate bid to weaponize the legal system against providers working to ensure patients can access safe, private abortion care.” 

Renée Good’s family filed two federal lawsuits on Thursday, nine months after she was fatally shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross amid the Trump administration’s violent occupation and mass deportations campaign in Minneapolis. 

One lawsuit accuses the United States of being liable for the actions of federal agents, alleging wrongful death and excessive force.

The second alleges a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights, naming Ross, as well as Greg Bovino, the former commander-at-large of the Border Patrol who led Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House border czar Tom Homan, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and others.  

Ross fatally shot Good on January 7. Video recordings of the shooting show Good in an SUV and her partner, Becca Good, standing outside in the street to observe and record ICE agents stopping their car. Renée Good is seen turning the steering wheel away from Ross and beginning to drive away before Ross fires at her multiple times. 

The Trump administration defended the shooting, claiming that Ross was protecting his and other officers’ lives and accused Good of “domestic terrorism.” Days after Good was killed, ICE agent Christian Castro shot and wounded Julio Sosa-Celis, and two weeks later, immigration agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez shot and killed Alex Pretti—both in Minneapolis.

Castro pleaded not guilty in September to federal charges that he lied to the FBI about being attacked before he shot and wounded Sosa-Celis. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the chief elected prosecutor in ​Minneapolis, is investigating the agents who killed Good and Pretti for possible violations of Minnesota law. In March, Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration for access to evidence to independently investigate the shootings of Good, Sosa-Celis, and Pretti. In July, Moriarty announced the Justice Department had provided previously withheld materials related to the three shootings. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed charges in the shooting of Sosa-Celis but has not filed charges in the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti.

On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new entity within the Pentagon: the Office of Religious Affairs. The office, Hegseth promised the assembled troops in Quantico, Virginia, would “report straight to the top. No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary.” Chaplains would “finally have an advocate at the highest levels.” What’s more, “policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.”  

A hallmark of Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War has been his muscular Christian religiosity. Earlier this year, he spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. Shortly after the start of the Iran War, during one such event in March, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth’s own faith is relevant here: He is a member of a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. As I reported:

At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

The new Office of Religious Affairs isn’t explicitly Christian; a memo (PDF) published yesterday specifies that “Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to compel religious participation or to diminish the free exercise rights of any Service member, civilian employee, or family member of any faith or no faith.” Yet earlier this year, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of War, drawn from the 200 that had previously been accepted. On the new list, 22 of the 31 groups were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, all on the original list, had vanished. 

Details about what exactly the Office of Religious Affairs will do have not yet been released, but yesterday’s memo offers a few clues. In addition to moving chaplains directly under the control of the new office and overseeing the groups that decide who can become a chaplain, the office also will “sponsor and oversee research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience.” It doesn’t define those terms, but Hegseth’s track record speaks volumes. As I reported a few months back:

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”

Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.

Hegseth has also long been preoccupied by what he sees as a “spiritual battle” between secular and Christian culture:

On an episode of the podcast CrossPolitic [produced by Doug Wilson’s Canon Press] that aired shortly before Hegseth became Secretary of War, he railed against Godless America, lamenting that liberals “used patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible.” He also praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”

Among the funding priorities listed in the Department of War memo about the new office are “faith-based homeschool support for military families,” faith-based suicide-reduction initiatives, and “contracted services from faith-based non-Federal entities.”

As I wrote, Hegseth’s own book echoes those themes:

Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.

Notably, Wilson’s Canon Press publishes popular homeschool curricula. “Education is warfare,” the website says. “Canon curriculum is designed to help you raise faithful, dangerous Christian kids, one subject at a time.”

The new memo promises that within 90 days, the office will deliver “a comprehensive baseline report of all unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements.” In the meantime, Hegseth has lofty ambitions. “We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health,” he said in his speech. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”

“She never says that she was drugged without her knowledge. She admits to taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily and with knowledge. She does not allege that she was forced to engage in any acts. She does not say that she was physically helpless or unconscious or incapacitated at any point during the time at the fraternity house.”

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten didn’t directly refer to New York’s voluntary intoxication loophole in his statement confirming this week that his office is taking a fresh look at rape allegations at Cornell after declining to do so in 2024. But the controversial law—which many say requires an extraordinarily high bar for victims of rape who willingly became intoxicated to prove that they were unable to consent to sex—seems to animate nearly every turn of his remarks. Specifically, that the victim in the incident, identified as Jane Doe, “admits to taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily and with knowledge,” and that she does “not say that she was physically helpless.” Take a look, and much of the same language appears in the state’s laws on rape.

If that strikes you as victim-blaming, you’re not alone; advocates of sexual assault victims and a majority of New York’s State Assembly members have long condemned the law for exactly the same. Now, amid national outrage over the allegations, questions have emerged about whether the statutes may have deterred prosecutors from pursuing the case.

I talked to Jane Manning, director of Women’s Equal Justice, about the laws’ likely role in tanking the Cornell case back in 2024, the history behind the statutes and the movement to reform them—and the person standing in the way of change.

Let’s give a brief overview of the rape laws surrounding the Cornell allegations.

There are several different rape statutes at play here. First-degree rape requires that the victim either be the victim of forcible compulsion, meaning that extreme violence took place, or that the victim be “physically helpless.” Rape in the second degree applies when a victim is involuntarily drugged, such as a drink being spiked. Rape in the third degree applies where none of the above statutes apply, but the victim gives an express verbal declaration of non-consent. Those laws also include other provisions, including age-related provisions. But these are the statutes that mainly apply in a situation like the Cornell case where a person is intoxicated.

How does the law determine “physical helplessness?“

Under New York State law, being physically helpless is defined as being unconscious or physically unable to communicate a lack of consent. That word “physically unable” is really important because what that means is that it’s not enough if the person is severely mentally disoriented or confused. They have to be physically unable to speak, and case law basically says that means unconscious. That language excludes somebody who is severely intoxicated to the point where they are falling down, or when they are so disoriented that they don’t know where they are, or when their speech is slurred. None of those things is enough to deem a person incapable of consent if they are voluntarily intoxicated.

“The [reform] bill has been blocked by one man, and that man is Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.”

The suggestion that an accuser who became voluntarily intoxicated and engaged in sex cannot be raped feels extremely antiquated. But where does it come from? What’s the history behind this exception? 

Our rape statutes were written decades ago, at a time when women were gravely underrepresented in the legislature, and when we understood far less about rape than we understand now. Most survivors of rape were in the shadows because of a culture that silenced them, and so many of our statutes do not reflect a modern understanding or a survivor-centered understanding of the realities of rape and sexual assault. The [voluntary intoxication loophole] is a good example.

Can you give me an example of what other rape laws were like decades ago?

In the 1950s, New York law was something out of the dark ages. There were special corroboration requirements that applied only to rape and not to any other crime. It had an earnest resistance requirement, saying that if you didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape. That no matter how the person threatened you or frightened you or overpowered you, if you didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape. Also, marital rape was legal back then. New York didn’t have a rape shield law in the 1950s, either. So if a rape victim did, by some miracle, make it onto the witness stand, it was perfectly legal for the cross-examination to start with the question, “Were you a virgin before this happened?” and to spend hours cross-examining the victim about her unrelated sexual history. This routinely happened.

How did these laws change?

All those laws that I just mentioned to you have been reformed. But they did not reform themselves. They were reformed because of survivors and feminists who banded together and demanded changes in the law. Over the years, including recently, others have been reformed. For example, in the year 2000, New York added a no-means-no statute to the third-degree rape statute, which means that if a person explicitly expresses non-consent and the perpetrator proceeds anyway, that’s considered third-degree rape in New York. Another 21st-century reform came in 2006 when New York eliminated the statute of limitations on first-degree rape and other high-level sex crimes. In 2010, we finally made strangulation a crime.

“They certainly played a role in [Van Houten’s] decision, but they do not let him off the hook.”

Bit by bit, survivors and feminists have fought for reform of New York State’s laws from a place of extreme bias against survivors to a place where, little by little, we are chipping away at that bias. However, the work is not done, and the voluntary intoxication exclusion is an example of a very victim-blaming, biased law in New York that advocates and survivors have been calling out for years to reform, and our legislature has not yet done it.

What are some of the arguments by those who oppose reforming the voluntary intoxication exclusion?

There are the arguments that are made explicitly, and then there’s the belief system that is subtext to these arguments. There are small numbers of people who believe that nobody should go to jail for anything, those who oppose any effort to strengthen our criminal law, even for rape survivors. I think that viewpoint fails to take into account the perspectives of women and other groups that are disproportionately targeted for violent crime. For me, that philosophy fails to be intersectional because it fails to take into account the reality of women who are targeted and preyed on deliberately by those who would deprive us of our rights.

That’s the subtext. Now, what are the explicit arguments? It’s a good question because there are valid concerns that we want to make sure we address when we redraft a law. One concern is that we don’t want to criminalize drunk sex—and my answer to that is that’s absolutely right. We do not want to do that. The bill we are supporting does not criminalize drunk sex and has two important requirements. The first is that the victim is incapable of appraising or controlling their own conduct. Not just that they fail, not just that they didn’t appraise or control their own conduct, but that they’re incapable of controlling their conduct. That’s how we define the victim’s condition. The second requirement applies to how we define the perpetrator’s state of mind and that the victim’s condition was known or reasonably should have been known to a person in the actor’s situation. The reason that language is there is that we want to make sure that a person is only held criminally responsible when it was obvious that they were victimizing someone. Because there are situations when two people are very far gone and have sex, but nobody’s preying on someone; it’s just drunk sex that somebody may regret the next day. That is very much not what we are looking to criminalize. We are looking to criminalize predation, not a mistake.

One more important thing to keep in mind about this is that the prosecution will have the burden of proof on both of those elements. And if the prosecution can’t prove either element beyond a reasonable doubt, they can’t prove their case. So, for instance, if you have a scenario where two people have blurry memories, that’s a grey area; that’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Where does the bill stand now?

For two years running, this bill has passed unanimously in New York’s Senate. And both times, it has had a supermajority of support in the Assembly. But the bill is being blocked by one man, and that man is Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. [On Wednesday, Heastie announced that the Assembly is forming a “working group” to review the law.] He has not allowed this bill to get to the floor for a vote. He didn’t allow it in 2025. He didn’t allow it in 2026, when we had 60 percent of the State Assembly signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. He still wouldn’t allow it to go to a vote. He has not provided us with an explanation. He has not met with advocates or survivors. He has not provided any public statement about why he will not allow a vote on this bill that a supermajority of his own house supports.

So, Gov. Kathy Hochul really has the opportunity to lead here by calling on Speaker Heastie to pass this bill or by sponsoring it herself by including it in her budget bill.

The allegations in the civil complaint in Cornell have prompted widespread outrage. Can you describe your reaction upon hearing about the case?

This young woman was failed by many people. She was clearly failed by people who took advantage of her state of incapacitation. She clearly was failed by the district attorney, and she was failed by the law of New York State. This district attorney saw an allegation of a gang rape and didn’t even bother to interview the victim. He looked at a summary of the allegations and came to the conclusion that there was no provable crime, and didn’t bother to conduct an investigation. That is outrageous. The young woman who survived this incident was interviewed by campus security officers who are not trained in trauma-informed interviewing and are not trained in investigating complex and serious sex crime cases. She was let down by the person responsible for enforcing the law, and she was let down by the law itself because even if the district attorney had done a good job, we don’t know if he would have found a prosecutable crime because of the voluntary intoxication exclusion.

That’s actually my next question. Do you see these laws as having had a role in the DA’s decision not to prosecute the Cornell case?

They certainly played a role in his decision, but they do not let him off the hook. What I see far too often in my work as an advocate for rape survivors is district attorneys who don’t place a high priority on rape. They just don’t take the trouble to do a thorough investigation because they don’t see the need to treat this as a serious crime. That’s the truth.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

On April 3, four weeks after Donald Trump claimed the Iran War would be over in four to five weeks, and with his approval ratings in reputable polls dipping below 40 percent, the president made a wildly audacious ask: Congress, he said, should approve a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion.

Such a number was unheard of. Congress gave the military an official budget of nearly $1.1 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year—more than the next five runners up (China, Russia, Germany, India, and the UK) combined. Now, counting supplemental funding for the War in Iran, which is entering its eighth month, Trump wants US taxpayers to shell out just under $1.6 trillion ($1,570,000,000,000) to a “Department of War” that’s so un-auditable it probably doesn’t know where it left the car keys.

That’s an increase of almost 50 percent for things that go boom.

“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” and the extent of the undercounting “is likely to stun most Americans.” 

As much as we Americans may value our military readiness, 65 percent of US adults polled by the Washington Post in late April opposed Trump’s unprecedented funding request, and two-thirds disapproved of his “little excursion” in Iran. (They still do.) The disapproval numbers would be higher still, no doubt, if those people were aware of a dirty little secret: We’re already spending more—way more—than what the Pentagon reports, and most media outlets dutifully parrot.

A recent report I helped coauthor for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) estimates that, properly accounted for, US military expenditures last year were at least $1.5 trillion, and possibly a lot more. If Congress grants Trump’s requests, we’ll be spending $2 trillion to $3 trillion on the military and its wars.

This isn’t just about Trump, but rather the DC establishment. For decades, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon have been obfuscating military spending by means of arcane bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. And yet most journalists and experts quote the official numbers, which are profoundly incomplete.

Consider, for example, that the Treasury Department covers about $100 billion of the annual cost of supporting retired military personnel. And that the $7.3 billion the State Department shelled out for “global health programs” in fiscal 2025, according to data from USASpending.gov, is actually controlled by the Pentagon. (The money, as I point out in my book Base Nation, is used for military intelligence gathering and gaining strategic access to locations around the world.) Sometimes it’s smaller sums, like the $385 million the Justice Department shelled out that fiscal year to settle old Vietnam War claims and compensate people harmed by radiation from nuclear weapons testing.

If the routine concealment of hundreds of billions in military spending doesn’t feel scandalous to you, imagine the uproar were the Wall Street Journal to suddenly reveal that federal officials were secretly spending almost a half-trillion beyond what Congress budgeted for Medicaid, affordable housing, education, childcare, climate programs, or food assistance. This fuzzy accounting “is not a new phenomenon. It has been a bipartisan effort spanning years,” Air Force veteran and former military budget analyst Christian Sorensen told me in an email. “When the sheer size of the figures revealed in [the] accounting sinks into public consciousness, the body politic will be even more furious.”

“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” concurs Heidi Peltier, an economist and budget expert with Brown University’s Costs of War Project. This overlooked spending raises the total, she says, by “50 percent to 130 percent higher than is usually reported, a figure likely to stun most Americans.” 

“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon.”

Quantifying miliary expenditures should be a relatively easy task for journalists and researchers. It is not. “The non-obvious costs” of what budget expert Stephen Semler, a fellow at the progressive Center for International Policy, calls “status quo” military spending are “so vast that it’s difficult to take [their] measure,” he told me.

The POGO report details how military expenditures are spread across a host of federal departments beyond the Pentagon. And how, taken together, those amounts may exceed the total of what those agencies receive for nonmilitary purposes. This is not the result of some single diabolical plan, but rather the product of obscure bureaucratic processes wherein the Pentagon, over time, has taken control of money Congress appropriates to other agencies, as a Senate Budget Committee staffer told me on condition of anonymity. While lawmakers’ actions and motivations in some cases may demand further investigation, their collective complacency has allowed the military to claim a significantly larger share of the federal budget than the public is aware of.

Using five methodologies and data from three government sources, we calculated how much money the government really spent on the military. For fiscal 2025, depending on the methodology used and how one defines military spending, that number ranged from $1.5 trillion to $2.3 trillion. For example, most of the $33.5 billion in nuclear weapons spending tracked by USASpending.gov was tucked into the Department of Energy budget. And most of the $393.3 billion cost of military pensions, veterans’ benefits, and related retirement expenditures were found on the ledger of the Department of Veterans Affairs, thus relieving the Pentagon of a substantial long-term expense. The USASpending.gov data allowed us to identify billions more in the budgets of at least 15 other agencies, expenses that don’t make it into commonly reported military spending totals.

“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee from San Diego, which has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of military personnel, said in a statement. And without the accounting to prove the money is properly spent, she added, “we shouldn’t keep footing a bill that gets bigger every year.”

The chart below is based on one of the methodologies described in POGO report. These figures reflect actual dollars spent that fiscal year, including funds Congress appropriated in prior years for multiyear programs.

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Even our estimates are likely undercounts, thanks to spotty federal budget transparency, classified funding, and Pentagon accounting failures. Indeed, the Department of Defense remains the only federal agency, as Jacobs’ statemente noted, that has never passed a financial audit.

We taxpayers don’t get to choose everything our money is used for, and that’s part of the grand bargain. Progressives would rather not see their tax dollars supporting Trump’s deportation machine. And plenty of conservatives would repeal the Affordable Care Act tomorrow if they could. But even as we bicker over priorities, whatever our politics, an accurate accounting of where our money goes is indispensable to an honest debate.

“Federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late.”

That’s where Congress comes in. Lawmakers could stop putting military spending in budgets beyond that of the “Department of War.” They could also, for example, order the Congressional Research Service to compile an annual “total military” roundup that details everything in one place. Until that time, journalists and analysts might want to include a large asterisk whenever they cite the Pentagon’s official numbers.

The concealment of our true military budget, wittingly or unwittingly—as many members of Congress may not even realize this subterfuge is happening—shows just how out of control Pentagon spending has become, and how wildly disproportionate it is to the military threats we face. Because the reality is, we’re not merely spending more on our military than the five runners-up, but likely more than every other nation on Earth combined.

Why does this matter? Several reasons. Trump and his “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth have purged military leaders who put the Constitution first and stacked the Pentagon with loyalists. The president has dispatched National Guard troops to US cities and hasn’t ruled out ordering them to the polls during the elections, which would be in clear defiance of the Constitution. For people around the world, US military spending is a life and death matter, given the debacle in Iran—which Trump recently threatened to annihilate—and the president’s periodic threats to wage war on Cuba, Greenland, and Colombia, despite campaign promises that he would be the president who didn’t get the United States embroiled in foreign conflicts.

Put bluntly, a larger military budget means more war. It also means a bigger deficit, which pressures Congress to further slash funding for health care, Social Security, climate resilience, food safety, and all manner of domestic programs people depend upon. If Congress gave Trump what he asked for, our military spending would gobble up some 75 percent of discretionary federal funds.

In this light, his budget request should be treated as the sick joke that it is—an opportunity for the people and their representatives to insist on a different path.

Democrats and even some Republicans who claim to be concerned about our $40 trillion-plus national debt, have so far resisted Trump’s request for a Pentagon bump. In early September, the president signed a bill that extends current military funding levels into December. Both chambers of Congress are now in recess until after the midterms, so the matter may not even be resolved until after new members are seated in January 2027.

In the meantime, “federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late,” Sorensen said.

That would mean reining in runaway military spending before laying a finger on the domestic programs that already help accomplish what should be the US military’s most fundamental purpose: keeping Americans alive and well.

After 23 years of war and occupation, the last US soldiers officially left Iraq on Wednesday, Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced in a statement on the “successful conclusion” of operations against the Islamic State organization in Iraq.

The war, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and cost, conservatively, more than a trillion dollars (though tallying government war funding, like counting the dead, can be difficult).

In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confidently predicted that the war would be short: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks or five months. But it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

US troops have withdrawn from Iraq at least twice before. After the Bush administration launched the war in 2003, US troops formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011. George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner was, reportedly, packed up and sent to his presidential library. At the time, one military analyst called the whole thing the “least effective war for oil in American history.”

But it wasn’t over yet: the US military ramped up its presence in 2014 under “Operation Inherent Resolve” to combat ISIS. Mother Jones maintained a “We’re Still At War” daily series between roughly 2009 and 2014. US soldiers stayed in the country for the rest of the decade, and beyond, until their “combat role” in the country ended in 2021.

Even then, about 2,500 US soldiers remained stationed in Iraq as “military advisers.” Today, all those troops, too, are gone.

“A new phase has begun, characterized by Iraq’s sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision-making, and balanced partnerships with its friends,” Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said in a statement.

On July 3, the “Wings of Freedom” demonstrations over the National Mall featured three hours’ worth of aerial entertainment cooked up by the Trump administration as part of the America 250 celebration. There were parachute teams, the Air Force Thunderbirds, fighter jets, helicopters, and a “tri-bomber” formation that included a B-2 stealth bomber. On Independence Day, military aircraft flew over DC every 18 minutes for nine straight hours. For some people watching the show, it was a glorious display of American military power and aviation prowess. For many who live here, though, it was a form of “noise terrorism,” according to one TikToker, who likened the celebration to living in a war zone.

During these nonstop military flyovers, locals shared stories online of pets hiding under the couch, night workers losing sleep, and the roar of low-flying aircraft setting off car alarms. Some complained that the jets recalled the terror of 9/11 after the plane hit the Pentagon. “Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC?” posted New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia Navarro during the July 3 display. “Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.”

Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC? Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.

— Lulu NYT (@LuluGNavarro) July 3, 2026

Enduring the occasional jet flyover comes with living in the Nation’s Capital. But none of those regular episodes compares with the martial air traffic Trump has inflicted on the city since taking office last year. “We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery,” says former local traffic reporter Dave Statler who tracks aviation activity on his website. “But the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”

“We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, but the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”

In previous administrations, the military flyover “was treated as an exception rather than the rule,” says Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress from California who served as both Defense secretary and CIA director during the Obama administration. “That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.”

Trump, who escaped the Vietnam War draft by claiming to be hobbled by bone spurs, has long shown a fascination with military hardware. He began deploying it for his own entertainment almost as soon as he took office in his first term. Trump was the first president since Harry Truman in 1949 to have a military flyover for his inauguration. (President George W. Bush had a flyover two days before his actual inauguration.)

The new president had hoped to have a Red Square-style parade, complete with tanks and missile launchers, to celebrate his unexpected electoral victory in 2016. After much opposition including from inside the military, he had to settle for a flyover that included all five branches of the military: Air Force F-35, F-16, F-22 and F-15E fighter jets, Navy F/A-18 combat jets, Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, Marine V-22 Ospreys and four MH-65 rescue helicopters. Trump had planned a repeat performance last year, but frigid weather brought his second inauguration indoors.

On one of his early foreign trips in 2017, Trump attended a military parade in Paris on Bastille Day, which seems to have inspired many of his ideas for using the military at home. “We’re going to have to try and top it,” Trump said of the parade. The Pentagon objected to involving the armed forces in a political event that would have cost nearly $100 million.

But in 2019, Trump finally got his military parade in DC, and flyovers were a highlight.

Then came the pandemic in March 2020. Six days after he went on TV to suggest that Americans might inject a disinfectant to kill the virus, Trump organized several military flyovers in the Washington area and elsewhere as a “tribute” to struggling health care workers who were on the front lines without sufficient protective gear.

If Trump’s first term was marked with an excess of military displays unheard of in the US, his second term has vastly surpassed it. “I don’t think there’s much question that this president is very interested in symbolic displays of military power,” Panetta says. “The flyover is obviously one of those symbols that has in particular attracted him.”

Indeed, Trump loves showing off American war hardware, especially to foreign leaders. During his August 2025 meeting in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a B-2 stealth bomber and four F-35 fighter jets flew overhead as they stood on the tarmac. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was implicated in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was honored with a ceremonial formation of F-35s and F-16 fighter jets during his White House visit in November last year. (Bin Salman has repeatedly denied any role in the killing.)

NOW – Trump welcomes Saudi crown prince to the White House, with a military flyover, to close F-35 arms deal. pic.twitter.com/z1HnhNwatQ

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 18, 2025

In September 2025, Trump feted the president of Poland with a White House flyover that just happened to disrupt a press conference underway nearby at the US Capitol by the victims of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. This year, both King Charles and Chinese President Xi Jinping got the full flyby during their White House visits. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the middle of a press conference at the old RFK Stadium site when she was interrupted by the flyover for Xi, which was so loud even Trump winced from the noise.

“Only in DC.” @MayorBowser has to briefly stop her remarks during a press conference announcing RFK Stadium Redevelopment Master Plan for a military flyover including a stealth bomber flanked by jets. pic.twitter.com/ophDGFYD0i

— Eric Flack (@EricFlackTV) September 24, 2026

While it certainly seems like DC has suffered a lot more air space disturbance since Trump took office last year, I wondered if the actual numbers would bear it out. In August, I asked the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency for a list of all the public advisories it issued about a scheduled military aircraft event, going back to the beginning of 2023.

The list shows that during the last two years of the Biden administration, almost all of the DC flyovers were either for veterans’ funerals—63 of them—or a sporting event, including four over Nationals park, the city’s Major League Baseball stadium. None went over the White House or were tied to state visits by foreign leaders, aside from two over the National Mall during a NATO summit.

During the Biden years, planned military flights over DC outside of veterans’ funerals were rare enough that in 2022, when the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team jumped out over Nats Park, it triggered a threat alert and the US Capitol was evacuated.

It’s hard to even quantify the exponential growth in flyovers over DC in 2026. Historically when DC sends out a public flyover alert, it indicates the specific time and date of the event. But this year, the agency alerts have warned of flyovers happening over multiple days at a time.

Screenshot

The opening of the Great American State Fair; the 4th of July; and the DC “Grand Prix” Indy car race in August all featured multiple days of military aviation displays. But some of the most concentrated flights were scheduled around Trump’s 80th birthday celebration on June 14. The DC area suffered through multiple flyovers every day for four straight days, starting with flights over the Lincoln Memorial on June 11 and culminating on June 15 with the 12-plane formation of Thunderbirds and Blue Angels that flew over the White House just as country star Zach Brown was finishing the National Anthem at the UFC cage match.

US Air Force Thunderbirds and US Navy Blue Angels aircraft fly in a rare Super Delta formation over Washington, DC, June 14, 2026US Air Force courtesy UFC

Trump has so overwhelmed DC with air shows this year that he appears to have shut out some of the traditional “missing man” flyovers that honor veterans at Arlington Cemetery. According to DC records, by August 23, there were 27 flyovers for funerals at Arlington Cemetery in 2024, and 20 in 2023. This year, there were just 13.

The flyovers have also impacted the DC region’s normal commercial air traffic. For instance, with only two weeks’ notice, the Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority announced that Reagan National airport would close for several hours on July 3rd and all flights on the 4th would be cancelled after noon, with ongoing disruptions throughout the summer due to the flyovers.

“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand.”

“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand,” says Statter. The day before the UFC cage match in June, for instance, his wife had an early Saturday morning flight out of DCA to Boston for a final visit to a relative in hospice. Ever the traffic reporter, he checked her flight status around 1 a.m. and discovered that it had been cancelled at two hours earlier due to a flyover practice. “She had to drive to Boston,” he told me.

Of course, Trump’s love of flyovers creates bigger problems than just terrorizing DC residents or inconveniencing air travelers. Statter says that Trump is “tempting fate with so many low-flying demos or ceremonial flights.” He explained that, during his many years as a traffic reporter, pilots told him that the lower the altitude, “the less time a pilot has to correct anything that goes wrong.”

He points to the many crashes at both military and civilian air shows. Just this May, two Navy fighter jets collided mid-air during an air show in Idaho. The four pilots ejected from the planes, which crashed into a fireball on the runway. Flying in the Navy’s Blue Angels, which have regularly featured in Trump’s displays, is so dangerous that 1 in 10 of the unit’s pilots have died in crashes. But air show crashes usually happen around airfields. “Imagine one happening over a populated area like DC,” Statter says.

It’s not a hypothetical question. In March last year, a Delta flight leaving DCA for Minneapolis nearly collided mid-air with an Air Force T-38 Talon that was part of a formation headed to Arlington Cemetery for a funeral flyover. CNN reported that one of the Delta pilots believed the military aircraft was flying just 500 feet below it when the passenger plane took off. Air traffic controllers had to issue “corrective instructions” to avert disaster.

Irv Halter is a retired Air Force Major General and fighter pilot who used to be involved with ceremonial flyovers, both flying in them and later, helping to decide which ones the Air Force should approve. He says previous presidents did not demand flyovers the way Trump has, and for good reason. They “eat up resources” by tying up ground crews during launch and recovery, he told me, and requiring assistance from cargo planes, tankers and ground control assets.

Flying just one F-35 jet for an hour can cost $40,000. That’s peanuts compared to the cost of flying the B-2 stealth bomber, which has become a regular fixture in DC skies since Trump took office. The most expensive plane in the world, the B-2 cost more than $2 billion to build and as much as $150,000 an hour to keep in the air, in part because the specialized anti-radar skin on it is so expensive to replace should it, say, hit a bird. It needs anywhere between 50 to 60 hours of maintenance for every flight hour. The Air Force has fewer than 20 of them.

In the past, the Defense Department has defended the cost of flyovers by calling them training missions. “That’s BS,” Halter says. “Yes, every hour a pilot gets in an airplane is of some value.” But with all the GPS equipment on modern war planes, he says flying straight and level over something like the National Mall is “a big yawn” for fighter pilots. “And every hour you run on them now is an hour you don’t get for real training or combat training.”

The real cost of such ceremonial flights, Halter notes, “doesn’t show up as a dollar amount but as wear and tear on people. Airplanes and crews need rest. You can’t just keep pounding them into the ground.” He says using critical aircraft for so many frivolous events seems unwise “especially in the middle of a war where we’re wearing out equipment and we’re running out of stocks.”

None of this seems to concern the current administration. “After Joe Biden broke our military, President Trump rebuilt it—and he is deeply proud of his work renewing the strength of our armed forces,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told me in an email when I asked about the consequences of so many flyovers. “The United States possesses the most powerful fighting force in the world, and beautiful aircraft inspire patriotism for all who see them fly overhead.”

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here.

Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.”

The swirl of scandal around Patel seemed like it would imminently end his career, but the Trump administration’s depth and breadth of scandal is such that Patel was able to fade into the background for a few months as others took center-stage. Instead, Trump spent the spring cashiering all the high-profile women in his national security team — attorney general Pam Bondi, DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and then spent the summer dodging the possible impeachment of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

In the last two weeks, though, Patel has roared back to the headlines with a series of scandals — two of which appear to be reaching an apex this week, today even — that underscore the dangerous discord and disorganization at the FBI under his leadership.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Scandal #1: Personnel Hacked. In what might turn out to be the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of US history — a criminal hacking group is claiming to have compromised the bureau’s hiring and personnel records. The group, known as ShinyHunters, appears to have “exfiltrated” data on perhaps tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees, both agents and not, perhaps even effectively everyone who has been hired by the bureau in recent years. “We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the group told 404 Media.

The threat of a breach this massive is almost incalculable — and could destroy or undermine a generation of agents who work undercover or on assignments like counterintelligence. It’s not entirely clear what the breach includes, but preliminary information from the hackers seems to indicate it includes everything from home addresses and Social Security numbers to potentially even medical records. News organizations like 404 Media have been able to authenticate that at least some of the data lines up with actual FBI employees. Reuters and the BBC have seen other documents that include mental health evaluations and blood and urine test results.

Ciaran Martin, who used to head the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and who is not normally known for his hyperbole, told The New York Times that the hack could have a “huge impact” on the bureau, given the uncertainty of where the data might end up, and might ultimately come at a higher operational cost than China’s also-devastating hack of the federal personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management. “Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Martin told the NYT. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”

In the last 24 hours, the hacking group sent out statements saying it was backing away from publishing the data it stole — the BBC’s Joe Tidy says perhaps the group is “simply now regretting hacking the world’s biggest police force” — but if this information is out there, even if it’s never published, you can be sure that adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran are hungry for it, and would potentially be willing to pay top dollar for it.

It’s too soon to tell exactly how far-reaching and damaging the reported theft and data extortion scheme may be, but it might just be that Patel is presiding over the most damaging personnel scandal since FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a top Russian spy — and, depending on how the coming weeks and months play out, it might even turn out to be more damaging in the long-term to the bureau’s mission and personnel and our country’s national security.

Scandal #2: Deputy Director Departs. If you’ve only been following the FBI since Kash Patel took over, it might surprise you that the FBI’s deputy director used to be a job agents worked their entire careers to achieve and then stayed in for a meaningful length of time—often three or four years. It was a position always held, in fact, by a career agent—a nonpartisan appointment.

This week, though, Kash Patel’s “co-deputy director” Andrew Bailey announced he’s leaving, after just a year. That follows the January departure of Bailey’s one-time “co-deputy” Dan Bongino, the MAGA podcaster, who quit in frustration after just about nine months (including a few periods when rumors swirled he wasn’t showing up for work at all).

The “co-deputy” is an invention of the Trump administration. When it became clear that Bongino wasn’t up to the task and that Kash Patel was a fool, the White House tapped Andrew Bailey, a right-wing idealogue who had been Missouri’s attorney general. Bailey was widely seen as the heir-apparent to Patel’s role when his partying and general incompetence finally caught up with him, but now it turns out Bailey is the first to go (which doesn’t necessarily preclude him returning as director someday). To the extent that anyone at all outside the Hoover Building noticed Bailey’s presence at the FBI, it was due mainly to his being an “anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses.”

The reason for Bailey’s departure is just as disturbing as one would imagine: He evidently was too focused on the Constitution.

As CBS News reported, “From the outset, Bailey’s relationship with Patel was troubled. Initially, Bailey was not invited to meetings, according to two sources familiar with their dynamic, with one adding that Patel instructed staff to refer to him as director, to Bongino as deputy director and Bailey as co-deputy director. The sources added that Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm’s length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional.”

An additional source of tension appears to have been the recent demotion and reassignment of two senior counterterrorism officials at the Washington Field Office who apparently balked at launching terrorism investigations into threats against Katie and Stephen Miller. The demotions are a good reminder of what to me is one of the most chilling sentences written about Kash Patel, from The New York Times last December that helps explain why Patel continues to outlast the odds given his scandal-laden tenure: “One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”

Now, following Bailey’s impending departure, there will be just one “co-deputy,” for now at least, a career agent name Christopher Raia, who has a very traditional background—rising through the agent ranks since 2003 and serving as the case agent on the investigation of Mansour Arbabsiar, who was part of a 2011 plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a DC restaurant.

Whether the White House installs a new political commissar as “co-deputy,” either to watch over Kash Patel or to help ensure the bureau continues to waste its time on such dumb Trump-friendly assignments as walking street beats in Washington, D.C., remains an open question.

Of the 22 people who have served as the FBI’s deputies, in times good and bad, it’s notable that all of them have been white males. While Pete Hegseth’s crusade to whiten up the Pentagon has received most of the attention, it’s worth highlighting how Kash Patel also forced out the two career women best positioned to rise to be the bureau’s first female deputy director: Jacqueline Maguire, who helped lead the 9/11 investigation and was ordered to resign even before Patel assumed office, and Tonya Ugoretz, who had been the FBI’s top intelligence leader before she was also forced out last year amid Patel’s Quixotic crusade to bolster MAGA conspiracies around the 2020 elections. Ugoretz was a career intelligence analyst and, under a more normal bureau directorship, her choice as deputy would have been an important sign of maturation and recognition of the FBI’s post-9/11 evolutions.

Scandal #3: Kash being Kash. Even beyond these larger questions and challenges about the bureau’s future, Kash Patel’s day-to-day tenure as director remains a national embarrassment, marked by ethical compromises, partisan grandstanding, and MAGA-land associations that would sink any normal presidential appointee to the FBI.

In recent weeks, that’s included Patel appearing with attorney general Todd Blanche at a Trump campaign rally, where Patel said, “I’ve spent 10 years working for President Trump,” and him throwing a temper tantrum and pausing critical international cooperation with Canadian law enforcement over exactly how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — which, to be clear, has nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence — characterized the 9/11 attacks. Just this weekend, a photo posted of Patel at the wedding of MAGA darling Alina Habba — who you may remember as the completely unqualified acting US attorney for New Jersey who was forced to resign — and Patel laughing it up with a former FBI informant suspected of being a double agent. It’s the type of relationship that would normally raise all sorts of red flags for FBI counterintelligence personnel — except this time, it is the director himself displaying the red flags!

And then we get to the bestiality. I never thought I would write a sentence that involved the FBI director and bestiality, but the Trump era continues to surprise all of us. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Patel got into an extended back-and-forth about how the FBI is revising its employment guidelines. CBS first reported the new hiring guidelines a month ago, saying, “The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation’s top law enforcement agency.”

There appears to be an arguably reasonable explanation for some of the changes — the FBI doesn’t want to punish victims of various sex crimes and human trafficking who then seek to become law enforcement — but the policies don’t appear to actually delineate that nor is it clear, for instance, why someone hiring prostitutes should get the same benefit-of-a-doubt.

In his back-and-forth with even the Republican senators who questioned him, Patel couldn’t help but play the cute MAGA brawler, cracking a bestiality joke about the FBI’s “great canines.” As David Graham wrote at The Atlantic, “President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler. The problem, as Patel demonstrated yesterday, is that he is not a very good one: No skilled political messenger would have allowed nearly every headline about a Senate hearing to connect their name and agency with bestiality.”

The incident has led to the first of two great Onion headlines about Patel in the last week: “Dog Can’t Believe Guy She Hooked Up With 10 Years Ago Now Head Of FBI,” followed by the hacking-themed “Kash Patel Phished By Scammer Posing As Kash Patel.”

And therein lies the cumulative problem: The FBI has succeeded across the last century because it has developed — and carefully cultivated — a reputation for rigor, thoroughness, and discipline. (The extent to which it lived up to that model is a subject of much debate!) Patel, month after month, has been mostly failing to succeed at his original mission to weaponize the FBI against Trump’s political enemies, but he is certainly succeeding at turning the FBI into a laughingstock, which in some ways will likely prove even more damaging to our country over the long term.

Patel has created an environment where the FBI can’t protect its own employees, and where they are now the butt of all-too-many jokes about his own personal behavior and the standards to which he holds its agents.

Nearly a year ago I wrote that “the slow public unraveling” of Kash Patel’s tenure was “the biggest little scandal in Washington.” In April, I wrote, “It’s safe to say that things haven’t improved since.” And the verdict today remains the same — but worse.

October, meanwhile, promises to bring more eyebrow-raising antics: Patel is apparently planning a trip to Russia, a country that (a) is no friend of the United States nor the FBI specifically and yet (b) is quite friendly with Patel, including via a “Russia-linked production company” that evidently previously paid Patel $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI TV series.

None of this, to be clear, is typical behavior for an FBI director.

A new poll from the Associated Press and KFF shows that while half of rural voters support the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again policies, most also say those policies have not benefited their communities.

About 7 out of 10 rural voters went for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. But now, about 8 out of 10 rural voters polled say the administration’s healthcare platform—which includes abandoning long-standing vaccine policies, researching ultraprocessed foods, criticizing Big Ag, and promoting a red-meat-heavy diet—has “had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live,” according to the AP/KFF poll of 2,241 rural voters, released today. 68 percent of those who self-identified as MAHA supporters agreed: while they support Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA platform, it isn’t making them healthier.

At Mother Jones, we’ve been tracking the fractures in the Make America Healthy Again movement in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Read more below.

Women Built MAHA. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over.Forget regulating food—manly MAHA cares about meat, testosterone, and erectile dysfunction. The California Lawmaker Forcing Big Food to Clean Up Its ActWhile DC dithers, Jesse Gabriel has quietly become America’s de facto food safety chief. Zach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?He’s running for Iowa governor on promises to bust up Big Ag. But some farmers are questioning his authenticity.

This story, originally published by Grist in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It didn’t take long for prospectors to stake their claims on land in southeast Utah that was previously protected in Bears Ears National Monument.

On September 11, the first day the 1.2 million acres were opened up, miners filed 16 claims, two months after President Donald Trump shrank the monument by about 90 percent. All of the claims appear to have been filed by small-scale local miners with other jobs, small businesses, and an interest in uranium mining. But the rapid timing of those claims alarmed environmental groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and they expect more to come. 

“Hobby miners who want to go locate claims, play miner on the weekend, leave disturbance and pollution in their wake, that really damages the monument resources,” said Steve Bloch, an attorney for the environmental nonprofit.

Trump “was kind of flagging for people that he [and] the administration think that mining is a better use of these areas.”

George Schultz, an off-roading guide based in Moab, filed three claims in the Lockhart Basin. He said staking a claim is merely a “step” in the mining process and noted Bureau of Land Management Lands outside of monument protections are meant for multiple uses. 

Schultz declined to say which minerals he expected to mine at his claim sites, but his LinkedIn profile notes experience in uranium exploration.

Thirteen of the Bears Ears mining claims were filed by Kimmerle Mining based in Moab, a family business, including two modifications to the 21-acre Easy Peasy mine and 11 additional claims nearby.

Kyle Kimmerle, a managing member of the mining company, declined to comment. He was appointed to the board of directors of Urano Energy, a Canadian mining company focused on uranium, in 2024. He also apparently operates a Moab-based general contracting business and a tire shop. 

Bears Ears became a political ping-pong ball immediately after the monument was established by President Barack Obama during his final weeks in office in 2016, adding protections to 1.35 million acres of federal land in the southeastern corner of the state.

The next year, Trump slashed the monument’s footprint by about 85 percent. President Joe Biden restored the monument’s original boundaries and also slightly expanded it during his term, only for Trump to once again shrink its size this summer.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, saw a similar back-and-forth between the Trump and Biden administrations.

In the latest proclamation shrinking the monuments, Trump disbanded the tribal commission that managed Bears Ears along with the Bureau of Land Management. He also listed a “grab bag of minerals” the lands “may or may not” contain, Bloch noted, including silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc in Bears Ears. Trump’s proclamation said that these minerals “create jobs, fuel prosperity, and are essential to important sectors of the economy of the United States.” 

“He was kind of flagging for people that he [and] the administration think that mining is a better use of these areas,” Bloch said.

Bloch doubts there is enough uranium available to justify the expense and environmental damage of mining on the lands in question.

Kimmerle was also party to a 2023 lawsuit challenging Biden’s restoration of Bears Ears’ boundaries in 2021. His company owns the Easy Peasy mine and dug up 30 tons of ore in search of uranium in 2018. Uranium prices weren’t high enough to make mining profitable at the time, however, and the mine stopped operations.

But with the rise of artificial intelligence and massive projected demands on the electricity grid, the Trump administration and Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s own Office of Energy Development have championed nuclear energy as a solution for powering the country’s future. Uranium is the main fuel for nuclear power.

Having his mining claims “locked up” in the Bears Ears monument made them “useless,” Kimmerle asserted in the 2023 lawsuit, and cost him up to $3 million in lost profits.

Kimmerle attempted to file his Bears Ears claims in July, shortly after Trump issued his proclamation slashing the monument’s boundaries. But the proclamation did not open the lands to new mining claims until September 11—the same day San Juan County recorded both the Kimmerle and Schultz claims, according to records obtained by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The CEO and chairman of Energy Fuels also bought thousands of shares of his company’s stock just days before Trump downsized the monument. Energy Fuels operates the White Mesa Mill directly next to the former Bears Ears monument boundary, the last conventional uranium processing site in the country.

Utah was historically the third-most productive state for uranium, according to information from the Utah Geological Survey, with most of those minerals coming from the Colorado Plateau.

Bloch said he doubts there is enough uranium available to justify the expense and environmental damage of mining on lands removed from Bears Ears.

“It’s not like people weren’t poking around in the monument, locating claims, moving dirt, seeing what was there” in the decades before Bears Ears became a monument, and during the first Trump administration when it was originally shrunk, Bloch said. “There were no production-level mines that were established.”

The end of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was supposed to be devastating for abortion access across the US. Thousands of women every month—the ones who could afford it—would be forced to travel long distances to receive care. Many more women would be forced to continue pregnancies they didn’t want and couldn’t afford. The crisis would be worst in the South, the thinking went, because right-wing lawmakers were competing to see who could pass the most draconian bans. 

Then something astonishing happened: In the four years after Roe’s demise, the number of abortions rose by almost 20 percent.

It’s one of the paradoxes of the Dobbs era: While abortion rights have been drastically curtailed in much of the country, abortion access has exploded. Galvanized by the extremism of the Supreme Court’s decision, reproductive health advocates have built an entire healthcare, legal, and financing infrastructure that has made abortions possible for hundreds of thousands of women in some of the most conservative parts of the US.

In this package, we look at the surprising resilience of the abortion access movement—and at how abortion opponents, including Students for Life’s Kristan Hawkins, are doubling down on their hardline agenda. At the center of the post-Dobbs story is the growing availability of abortion pills, which now account for almost two-thirds of all abortions in the US. “Medication abortion is here to stay,” one leading telehealth provider says. “You can’t put this genie back in a bottle.”

She’s Remaking the Abortion Landscape One Pill at a TimeFar from buckling under Dobbs, the access movement has created “a whole new way of doing healthcare.” The Post-Roe Surprise: More AbortionsAbortion rates were expected to tank after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Instead, medication abortion became easy to get—and it changed everything. Kristan Hawkins Helped Kill Roe. Now She’s Fighting to Control the Movement She Created.How the Charlie Kirk of abortion moved from the fringes to the mainstream. Meet Kristan Hawkins, the “Charlie Kirk of Abortion”“I want your audience to be like, ‘Wow, I really don’t like her, but she had some good points.'" Inside the Clandestine Network of Abortion Pill Mules"There may come a time where we are one of the only, if not the only, option for the nation.”

This story is part of the Life After Roe package, appearing this week, which looks at the surprising resilience of the abortion access movement in the Dobbs era—and at how hardliners are doubling down on their efforts to ban abortion nationwide.

When Lena walks into the cafe near an airport somewhere outside the US, she looks like any other traveler grabbing a cup of coffee before a flight. She orders a drink and picks a table out of earshot of other patrons, keeping her suitcase close by her side.

In the clandestine world of underground abortion activists, Lena—not her real name—is a courier. The trips she takes abroad—we can’t say where—are supply runs to pick up generic versions of mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs that make up the standard medication abortion regimen. Soon, another traveler—her supplier—approaches her table, also dragging a suitcase.

After a few minutes, the supplier heads to the bathroom, toting both their bags, and transfers abortion medication into Lena’s. Back at the table, neither has another pressing appointment, so they linger and chat. “It’s almost like we could be medical people discussing innovations and research,” Lena says. “It is nice to nerd out in safe places with safe people, because no one in my real life knows what I do.”

Lena will sneak the pills back into the US, where they will be distributed to community support networks, a modern version of the underground feminist activists who helped women get abortions before Roe v. Wade. Since Roe’s overturning, these grassroots groups have sent abortion meds—for free—to tens of thousands of women who struggle to access care through mainstream channels, including minors, undocumented immigrants, and pregnant women past the first trimester.

Unlike telemedicine providers who practice under blue-state shield laws, community networks operate outside the legal and medical systems. “It really doesn’t matter what [state and federal authorities] do legally—we will continue,” Lena says, adding, “there may come a time where we are one of the only, if not the only, option for the nation.”

As the signs of an impending crackdown on aboveground abortion-pill providers become increasingly ominous, Lena and her fellow activists are stockpiling the medication—building relationships with new suppliers, devising new ways to get pills into the country, and sending more couriers on more supply runs around the world.

“It’s kind of a let’s-take-matters-into-your-own-hands situation. No one’s coming to save us; we have to save ourselves.”

“We’ve tried for so long to do it the right and legal way, and that’s never worked, so it’s kind of a let’s-take-matters-into-your-own-hands situation,” Lena says. “No one’s coming to save us; we have to save ourselves.”

As the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision loomed in 2022, my question wasn’t if an underground abortion movement would reemerge in the US, but who and how. The answer came through a surprise message on Signal from an activist I’ll call Stephanie, a retiree in a red state whose soft-spoken demeanor belied an iron will. Like many liberal white women who revered Roe as a landmark victory, she had assumed that because abortion was legal, it was also widely accessible. But after the 2016 presidential election, she started volunteering for reproductive rights organizations and witnessed the massive financial and logistical hurdles many patients face, particularly the young and the poor. A seminar on self-managed abortion further radicalized her. Clinics or doctors or multiple screenings weren’t necessary for safe abortions, she discovered; a handful of pills in the privacy of home was just as effective.

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Stephanie says her catalyst for becoming an underground supplier was the pandemic, when an activist acquaintance asked her to help her college-student daughter obtain an appointment at a clinic. The student drove six hours across state lines only to find the clinic was closed, and at the time, FDA rules forbade abortion pills from being prescribed via telemedicine and mailed.

So Stephanie reached out to a doula friend for misoprostol, a routine medication in obstetrical care that can be taken alone to end a pregnancy. She put the pills in the mail, the student self-managed her abortion without complication, and the seeds of a community support network were sown. Soon, Stephanie was mailing pills to a handful of people every month who found her through word of mouth.

When Roe’s demise seemed imminent, Stephanie scaled up: refining security and mailing protocols, recruiting new volunteers, and exploring ways to source both mifepristone and misoprostol, because the combined regimen is more effective and has fewer side effects than misoprostol alone. At first, she purchased the drugs from online pharmaceutical sites and international telehealth services such as Aid Access and Women on Web, but they were expensive. Then she connected with a prominent Mexican activist named Verónica Cruz Sánchez, whose organization Las Libres had created an underground system to distribute abortion pills in Mexico.

After Texas implemented its 2021 law banning abortion after six weeks, Cruz offered to train American activists on how to start networks of their own, using mifepristone from Las Libres’ own donated stockpiles and misoprostol purchased in Mexican pharmacies. Stephanie sent a trusted colleague on a test run—meeting Cruz at a Starbucks in San Miguel de Allende, stocking up on over-the-counter misoprostol, and smuggling it home in her toiletry bag. When the Dobbs ruling hit, Stephanie and dozens of other activists already had the framework for expanding community networks across the US.

Lena found her way to Stephanie’s network through a friend. Younger than Stephanie, she’d gotten involved in activism during the Trump 1.0 era. Then Dobbs made abortion her top priority, and a breakup changed her personal life. “I had always felt like I should be doing more, but you know how boyfriends can be draining,” she says, half-joking that she does this work “so no one gets stuck with a shitty boyfriend they don’t want.”

When she first started at the end of 2022, community networks—which never require real names or payment information, since the pills are free—were one of the only options for women in red states who couldn’t afford to travel for care. Requiring only a mailing address, they work with people who need to keep their abortions secret from ultra-religious parents, abusive partners, or anyone else who might try to stop them. I once heard about an activist who hid pills inside a small plush toy for a teenager in an abortion-ban state who didn’t want her family to find out she was pregnant—an impossible option in the conventional system with its parental consent laws and strict regulations for pharmaceutical packaging.

The networks follow a decentralized model, Stephanie tells me, operating as regional affiliates that serve their own communities. This structure also spreads the risk and workload, which is critical because volunteers like Lena are unpaid. Each network has an encrypted email address where it receives inquiries, which abortion seekers can find on informational websites such as Plan C, Red State Access, and INeedAnA.

Once an order is received, the meds will go into a prepaid envelope with a fake return address gleaned from unsold properties on Redfin and Zillow. Mailers don’t have direct contact with recipients, so when she was in that role, Lena adopted a ritual to help her feel more connected. Every time she dropped a package in the mail, she’d whisper, “You’re going to be okay.”

In the early days, community networks primarily relied on mifepristone from Las Libres, but that strategy wasn’t sustainable. When it came time for American activists to set up their own supply chains, the obvious option was India, the center of the global generic pharmaceuticals market.

“I’ve knocked on a lot of doors, I’ve made a lot of phone calls, and you can’t feel any of those results. And this has real results.”

I traveled to India in 2024 to learn about this supply chain for my book Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom. My main takeaway: Far from being shoddy knockoffs, abortion medications originate from the same manufacturers working with global NGOs and government programs. “The drugs are high-quality, generic pills,” Lena confirms. “They’re carefully packaged and at an excellent price.”

The real challenge was getting them into the US undetected. The networks experimented with international shipping, but found that packages with more than 90 doses tended to get flagged or confiscated by customs, and relying on smaller shipments was too slow and expensive. It might seem counterintuitive, but sending people abroad to pick up the pills in person turned out to be cheaper, even with the expense of international travel.

The courier model has a long history of bridging gaps in politicized forms of healthcare. During the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, advocates like Ron Woodroof—Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dallas Buyers Club—traveled the world to buy experimental treatments and smuggle them back into the US. India, where scientists successfully reverse-engineered generic versions of AIDS treatments in the 1990s, was a primary source.

Today, thanks to sky-high prices at home, large numbers of Americans travel abroad for all kinds of lower-cost drugs, often to Mexico or Canada. The global medical tourism industry is also booming, and transporting medication for longevity or weight loss is common, making it easier for abortion-pill couriers to hide in plain sight. As Lena says, “I am a drop in an ocean of travelers.”

So far, no couriers or community activists have been caught, but Texas and Louisiana have passed laws targeting abortion-pill providers with especially harsh penalties. Lena spent a month learning safety and security protocols honed by other couriers—turning off the Face ID feature on her phone, using a VPN, and deleting sensitive chats before traveling. Then she booked her first plane ticket, flew to her destination, met with the supplier, and returned home without incident. If anything, she says, it was all a little anticlimactic, and she volunteered to go again. She discovered she was suited for the job: She’s good at staying calm under pressure and well positioned to take on the risk. Some people in the network have partners, kids, important jobs, and elderly parents they care for. “I don’t have as much to lose as many other folks,” she says. “That’s a big factor.”

RelatedThe Post-Roe Surprise: More Abortions

Lena invested in durable luggage and learned to nap on chairs at unoccupied gates. She and her fellow activists use aliases when talking to each other (and me) and communicate only via encrypted channels. During meetings with the suppliers—usually in a cafe, once in a parking garage—she is acutely aware of her surroundings, on the watch for seemingly innocuous people who might be trying to eavesdrop.

After the handoff, Lena spends the next few days in her hotel room, working. Her anxiety level ratchets up as her departure nears, because going through customs is when the risk of getting caught is the highest. She reviews her emergency contacts, wipes her phone, and rehearses her backstory for why she’s traveling, in case anyone asks. Then she does a ritual a therapist friend suggested: visualizing a safe arrival home. Only when she’s in her car, driving back from the airport, does she finally let herself relax.

I’ve long heard people from across the abortion movement discuss the importance of “redundancies”—creating multiple pathways for abortion access that can endure despite politics or the courts. If mainstream channels—such as telemedicine providers operating under shield laws—or other modes of access are forced to shut down, the underground channels are prepared to pick up some of the slack, doubling or even tripling their volume. “As far as our operations go,” Lena says, “we will continue to provide the two-medication protocol, mifepristone and misoprostol, no matter what.”

She’s determined to keep doing these runs, even when she returns home exhausted to a mountain of deferred chores and pets grumpy because of her absence. Most of her family and friends don’t have a clue what she’s up to, so she can’t reach out for support. But she believes that the risks are worth it. Now, as the abortion access movement faces a new series of dire threats, the stakes have never felt higher. She’s in it for the long haul.

“This is one of the most tangible acts of resistance you can get,” she says. “I’ve knocked on a lot of doors, I’ve made a lot of phone calls, and you can’t feel any of those results. And this has real results.”

Additional reporting by Sophie Bridges.

This project was supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.