Mother Jones

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

Since the start of his second term last year, President Donald Trump has sought to weaken the federal foundations underpinning American science, slashing or stalling research funding, firing or pushing out thousands of scientists, canceling grants for ideological reasons and shuttering research facilities across the country.

But even against that bleak backdrop, the administration’s firing of all 22 current members of the National Science Board last week stands out as “one of the darkest moments” of the past year and a half, said Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist and biogeographer at the University of Maine. 

“It was incredibly chilling, and my stomach just dropped to my feet when I saw that the entire board had been fired,” Gill said. “Because now this last bastion of accountability and transparency and scientific expertise has been dismantled overnight.” 

“It’s not a surprise,” notes one scientist, given the Trump administration’s “continuous onslaught of attacks on science.” 

The National Science Board plays a key role in overseeing the National Science Foundation, a major research funder in fields such as chemistry, engineering, biology, the environment, computing, and technology, which supports academic inquiry and helps train the next generation of scientists. 

The NSB and the NSF were designed to be “driven by our best and brightest scientific experts who are really representing a consensus of where science should go in this country,” Gill said. “It’s not at the whims of whatever president steps into office.”

Created by Congress in 1950 as an independent body of scientific advisors, the board is appointed by the president in staggered six-year terms and chosen for their distinguished service and eminence in their disciplines. Last Friday, members received an email saying their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” The NSF website now reads “pending new appointments” instead of listing members’ names.

“This board is so important for being able to advise Congress as well as the president on issues that are so important to the country,” said Geraldine Richmond, presidential chair in science and professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon and a former member of the NSB. Richmond was first appointed to the board by President Barack Obama and later by Trump during his first term.

In the wake of the board’s sudden dismissal, experts fear that its members will be replaced with people chosen for their political loyalty rather than their scientific qualifications and who will be focused on short-sighted partisan concerns rather than the greater societal good. 

Because of the board’s importance in the ecosystem that fosters American innovation, observers worry the decision will contribute to a loss of trust in public science and cause long-term damage to American competitiveness in critical research areas and the pipeline for educating and retaining new scientists.  

“As concerning as this is, it’s not a surprise because of what this administration has been doing now” since January 2025, said Carlos Javier Martinez, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who previously worked for the National Science Foundation. “It’s a continuous onslaught of attacks on science.” 

In a statement to Inside Climate News, a White House official implied the decision to fire the board stemmed from a 2021 US Supreme Court case related to the appointment of administrative patent judges. 

This ruling “raised constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board,” the official said. “We look forward to working with the Hill to update the statute and ensure the NSB can perform its duties as Congress intended. The National Science Foundation’s work continues uninterrupted.”

The “beautiful thing” about the NSF has been its “recognition that science without an immediate benefit or application was worth pursuing.” 

“Like many of the legal claims they’ve made so far, it’s more of a smoke screen than a really plausible legal argument,” said Lauren Kurtz, an attorney and the executive director at the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. The Supreme Court ruling cited by the White House is “factually, legally very different” from the process governing appointments to the NSB, she said. “I think trying to apply it in this case is disingenuous.” 

The statute governing the National Science Board was updated in 2022, Kurtz pointed out. Martinez agreed with Kurtz’s assessment of the White House’s argument. “It doesn’t hold water,” he said. 

“They’ve basically taken a wrecking ball to this [board], and we don’t know exactly how they plan to rebuild it, but if history is any indication, they will want to put in very administration-loyal, probably unqualified people,” Kurtz said.

“Without that body, really, the agency is now fully at the behest of the White House,” Martinez said.

In Gill’s view, the NSF is already being guided by industry priorities, especially Silicon Valley’s behemoth tech companies, which have tried to win over the second Trump administration with donations and public flattery. 

“Having a scientific enterprise that focuses primarily on the needs of industry just means that we’re losing curiosity-driven science,” she said. That emphasis also shortchanges research, like her own, that focuses on areas industry is typically uninterested in or even hostile to, such as climate change, biodiversity and pollution monitoring. 

The “beautiful thing” about the NSF, Gill said, was its “recognition that science without an immediate benefit or application was worth pursuing.” 

“We studied electricity for hundreds of years before it had any practical purpose. We don’t know what we’re going to be missing out on in the decades and centuries to come because we have hamstrung our ability to do exploratory research,” she said. “You never know what is going to lead to the next breakthrough.”

On Friday, International Workers’ Day, tens of thousands of people across the US will walk out of school, skip work, and refrain from shopping as part of a nationwide economic blackout against President Donald Trump’s agenda. Organizers with the May Day Strong coalition, a coalition of labor unions and community groups, are helping oversee more than 3,500 marches, rallies, and teach-ins. The coalition’s May Day action is inspired by the mass popularity of the Day of Truth and Freedom, in January, when more than 70,000 people took to the streets in Minnesota to demand ICE leave their state.

But are either of these events general strikes? And does it matter?

To better understand this moment, I spoke with Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and author of Organizing America and A History of America in Ten Strikes. We discussed the history of the general strike in America, the legal barriers hindering today’s labor movement, and how workers can use their strategic power to stand up to the Trump administration.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

What is a general strike, and how does it differ from a typical labor strike?

A regular strike comes out of a workplace. It’s usually affiliated with a singular workplace action by a group of workers who are angry about something going on in the workplace. They’re trying to form a union and the company won’t negotiate, or they have a union and the company won’t come up with a fair contract.

The idea behind a general strike is that the workers writ large, workers generally, will all come together and walk out in favor of some goal—a kind of broad-based revolution. It can be across sectors. Let’s say I go on strike as a college professor because my university is treating me really badly, and the hospital workers also walk out on strike with me. They’re trying to use their influence over their sector of the economy to increase the stress of the conditions so that I can win what I want to win. It doesn’t have to be about the workplace if a bunch of unions come together. Part of what they were trying to do in Oakland in 1946, for instance, was to overthrow the Republican political machine that controlled the city.

Has the US ever had a true general strike? What conditions preceded them, and what were the demands?

Basically every general strike in the US has come out of the established labor movement. We’re talking about Seattle in 1919, San Francisco in 1934, Oakland in 1946, New Orleans in 1892. These general strikes have been attempts by the labor movement that usually come out of a specific workplace issue but then explode as part of a general discontent with the system as it exists at that time—to place pressure on employers, the city, the forces of order.

“If people can use these terms in order to push for a more just world, then that’s a heck of a lot more important than whether it technically is or is not a general strike.”

In Seattle in 1919, it’s very much about employers not raising wages on docks after World War I, and the Seattle labor movement comes together as one to try to force a general increase in wages. In San Francisco in 1934, the longshoremen were led by the famed radical Harry Bridges, who had come out of the Industrial Workers of the World, in an attempt to form a union, which the companies and the police were very strongly resisting. In Oakland in 1946, it starts at a department store and spreads throughout the city of Oakland. In that case, it’s very much also about wages.

These have not always really been that radical. But the second thing you have to understand is that the general strike—or more specifically, sympathy strikes, where you strike in sympathy to try to put more pressure on the employer—were declared illegal by the United States as part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. A union cannot actually legally engage in what would be required to hold a [true] general strike today. They could do it, but they would break the law and face all kinds of penalties for doing so.

Some people were using the term “general strike” to describe Minnesota’s Day of Truth and Freedom in January, and other people were pushing back against that word choice. Is “general strike” the correct term, and how much do definitions matter?

I am one who is a little skeptical about the way this term is being used. I don’t think what happened in Minnesota is a general strike, and I don’t really think what’s going on May 1 qualifies either.

But maybe it doesn’t matter. People are using the terms and the ideas that they have access to through their education and trying to apply them to the presently terrible political situation, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s exactly what people should be doing. Whether or not it is technically a general strike is far less important.

If people can use these terms in order to push for a more just world, then that’s a heck of a lot more important than whether it technically is or is not a general strike.

In 2022, it felt like we were seeing an inflection point in the American labor movement. There were key unionization efforts with companies like Amazon and Starbucks. Do you think that momentum has continued, or has it been really diminished by Trump’s second term?

I think there’s a few things there. One is the anger over economic inequality is very real. I think that hasn’t changed at all. I think we’re seeing that with the increased success of more left-wing candidates in the Democratic Party. Trump may be a liar and a terrible human being, but one of his lies is that he’s good for the working man. A lot of working people believe that because they’re so angry about the system as it exists.

So the economic anger is still very much there. And then every time a union wins something these days, there’s a sort of liberal-left world of writers and readers that want to blow up every single small victory into the revival of the labor movement, and that’s more pressure than it can bear.

We saw this with the Amazon vote, which, let’s face it, was one vote in one factory. We saw this with the Starbucks workers. And we saw this with the successful organizing by the United Auto Workers at that one plant in Chattanooga.

The reality is that the barriers to successfully organizing, in part because of the Taft-Hartley Act, are enormous. The Starbucks workers have done one heck of a job, but what they’re facing is a company that simply refuses to negotiate a contract. The burden to win a union vote and then win a contract is enormous, and if anything, winning that first contract is even harder than winning that first union election, and so companies can wait for years before actually seriously negotiating.

“Labor law is completely captured by corporations, backed by the courts and with the full support of the Republican Party.”

The reality is American labor law is broken. It’s controlled by corporations. President Biden’s idea of the [union-supporting] PRO Act would have tried to reset the playing field on this. But that’s what we need to happen in order to see this kind of energy turn into wins. It really is about political power. The reason that the unions were able to succeed in the 1930s, yes, it was going out on strike and all of the actions they took—but that had happened before.

The difference was massively electing pro-union officials to office, and then those pro-union officials putting the laws into place that create a pathway for those union actions to succeed. You need both the action on the ground, the strike, and you need the electoral side. And we haven’t had that electoral side in many, many decades. And that often has been true under Democrats and is always true under Republicans. So I think the energy is there, and there’s a huge demand for unions. But I don’t think people understand just how hard it is, because labor law is completely captured by corporations, backed by the courts and with the full support of the Republican Party.

I’d like to dive into the Taft-Hartley Act some more. What led to its passage, and how does it shape what’s legally possible when striking today?

First off, the Taft-Hartley Act is one of the worst laws in American history. It continues to severely limit what unions can do today. 1946 is a huge strike year in America. You have all these workers who had struggled through the 1930s and the Great Depression, and even if they’re forming unions, there’s not a lot of money in the economy, so their standard of living is still pretty low.

Then World War II happens, and sure, everybody has a job, but the government’s controlling wages, and we’re not really making consumer goods because everything’s for the war. And so there’s all this massively pent-up demand for increased wages. People want to live a good life, and that’s what a lot of these strikes were about, right? And so it was an enormous strike wave. Over 5 million Americans go on strike in 1946—almost certainly the most in any year in American history.

At the same time, Congress and America generally were moving sharply to the right. We’re seeing the beginnings of Cold War anti-communism, and some unions were led by communists. They were seen now as the enemy, and a lot of employers hated everything that had happened since the unions had started forming in large numbers a decade earlier in the mid-30s and wanted to roll all of that back. So the Taft-Hartley Act bans almost everything that labor unions were able to do to succeed. The sympathy strike is banned. Wildcat strikes—in which you’re under a union contract, but the employer does something bad and you walk out [without a formal strike vote]—are banned.

States were then allowed, through this law, to create the so-called “right to work” laws, in which anti-union states basically incentivize people to not join unions. These have been used in more recent years to try to destroy the labor movement. Taft-Hartley also requires union leaders to pledge they’re not communists, which takes out many of the best-organizing unions in the labor movement [of the time]. It’s a horrible law that continues to have massive impacts on the American labor movement today and goes very far to explain why the movement has become weaker.

It often feels like workers in European countries are engaging in the types of mass strikes we haven’t seen in the US in a long time. Part of it, like you said, is because there’s a lack of the political conditions that that we need to have in the States.

But is there anything else we can learn from other countries that maybe have stronger labor movements?

I think the key is the cultural differences. And this goes back to the mythologies that Americans tell themselves about America: That this is a nation of the individual. This is a nation where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This is a nation where the poor man can become rich if he just works hard enough, and all this other bullshit. And you don’t see that in nearly the same kind of way in Europe, in which you have a much more defined system of class consciousness.

Not that European politics are an amazing utopia. But I think it’s always been a challenge in this country to overcome the cultural barriers within the working class that can be this kind of pro-capitalist pathology that lots and lots of people have. And the gig economy, or the rise of Uber, really builds on that—saying, You can make more money by your side hustle.

Racial divisions also absolutely have been a major issue in American labor history. In the past, American workers have often chosen to divide themselves by race. And on top of that, the power of evangelical Protestantism and religion has been a real issue too, in that you have many, many Americans being told messages at churches about individualism, about getting rich, about power structures, about listening to your employer, about obeying. Religion has often been used to crush and bust American strikes as well. So politics is a piece of it, but the biggest difference between here and Europe are cultural issues around class consciousness.

I think a lot of people are looking for strategic actions to take to resist the Trump regime outside of just going to protests and see the general strike as one potential pathway. Given the state of the labor movement, do you think a general strike is the most useful tool to deploy in this moment? Or are there other more strategic pathways?

I think that people want to have one thing that they do and it stops Trump. That’s not going to happen. Everybody’s looking for a shortcut, and I think a lot of general strike rhetoric is a shortcut—if only we come together, we could solve this problem—but I’m not sure that’s really true unless it’s a very real general strike, where the American labor movement leads millions of workers off the job and says they’re going to keep it up for days with clear demands against an anti-worker Republican Party.

Unfortunately, the labor movement is doing nothing. A few unions are even Trump-supportive. The labor movement as an actual organized movement continues to not rise to the occasion. Some state federations have done a pretty good job, but at a national level, it’s been very poor.

So in the absence of that strong labor movement, what do we have?

We have people doing the best they can. And I think that that’s really noble in its own way. We can’t just snap our fingers and stop Donald Trump, and I think this is where learning from other historical movements really makes a difference— thinking about the ways in which people were organizing in the American context in tremendously difficult conditions.

We’re talking about civil rights organizers from the 1920s through the ’50s and ’60s pushing back on Jim Crow. We’re talking about the early organizers in the gay rights movement in the ’70s and ’80s, and the hate and murderous violence that they faced. These are people that we could be inspired by. It might not happen overnight, but we have to understand that struggle happens over the long term, and we have to commit ourselves to that struggle and continue to try to move these conversations forward through our actions, through our organizing.

Whether or not what’s happening on May 1 is a general strike, people using those terms to come together and try to put more pressure on a terrible situation is really a positive thing. And people should take heart from whatever happens out of that and use it as the next moment to continue to build the struggle.

Did you know there is a second-term Republican congressman from North Carolina named Chuck Edwards who owns six McDonald’s franchises? I certainly did not. Neither, for that matter, did his constituent, Leslie Boyd—until she received a letter notifying her that she was now banned from all of them. The Assembly‘s Jessica Wakeman has the full story, featuring an interview with the offending constituent, Leslie Boyd. A Republican congressman banning his own constituent from McDonald’s for protesting his vote to cut SNAP benefits? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more House Republicans story than this.

It has always perplexed me that the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)—known colloquially as food stamps—doesn’t allow recipients to use the benefit to purchase hot food items at grocery stores.

Bread, steak, fish, potato chips, bananas and nearly every other food item lining the shelves? Sure. The ready-made rotisserie chickens, mac-and-cheese, or mashed potatoes on warming racks near the check-out? Nope.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, nearly 80 percent of SNAP households include a child, an elderly individual, or someone with a disability—families that would plausibly benefit from having affordable and efficient meals and side dishes as dinner options. Until now, it’s been a no-go.

However, there was a tender development in the US House of Representatives on Thursday, when the legislative chamber voted to include an amendment on their broader $390 billion Farm Bill package that redefines “food” from an earlier law as to include rotisserie chicken. (The other hot-and-ready dishes weren’t lucky enough to be included.) Before being folded into the Farm Bill, the idea was most recently touted as a stand-alone bill, the aptly named “Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act” by a bipartisan group of Senators earlier this month.

While the legislation still needs to move through the Senate, the House passed the Farm Bill mostly along partisan lines, 224-220. Just 14 Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in supporting it.

You may be wondering what kind of monster would want to deprive a SNAP households—75 percent of which live below the poverty line—of such a convenient delicacy. But to vote for the rotisserie chicken would have meant to vote for other components of the Farm Bill, too. Namely, $187 billion in cuts to the SNAP program.

That part wasn’t as appetizing to most House Democrats.

Daniel Reilly takes 19 pills in the morning and 13 at night. He lives with hemophilia and HIV, which he contracted in the 1980s. No one expected him to live this long.

In most respects, that’s a blessing—the product of generations of extraordinary medical advances. But it also means there are entire medical specialties he can’t find.

 “I don’t know if there’s such a thing as [a] geriatric hematologist,” Reilly, who is 58 and retired, told me: a physician who would know what it means to age as a person with HIV contracted through a blood transfusion, with an understanding of the effects of decades of antiretroviral therapy on the body and blood—or how HIV-related comorbidities interact with the normal processes of getting old. Reilly recognizes how new, and unusual, his situation is: “The vast majority of us”—HIV-positive people with hemophilia—”who were infected in the early ‘80s have passed,” he said.

Reilly’s situation is emblematic of a gap in the medical infrastructure: a generation of people who, amid a variety of expanding and improving treatments, are the oldest ever cohort with their conditions. HIV patients, like Reilly, are a significant part of that. So are some with severe traumatic brain injuries, like social worker Brason Lee. Then there are the growing lifespans of those on dialysis, like retired judge advocate general Evelyn Dove Coleman, whose Air Force service also led to the inner ear disorder Menière’s disease.

As people with complex immune and neurological conditions age into their 60s and 70s, their lifespans are now often extending beyond the expectations of their doctors—and the design of the systems meant to support them. Health care professionals in most fields typically receive little training in disability, less in aging, and virtually none at the intersection of the two. And as federal Medicaid cuts reduce access to the home-and community-based services some aging disabled people depend on, many rely for their survival on networks of personal connections: siblings, spouses, neighbors.

Attacks spearheaded by RFK Jr. and Russell Vought strike at the kind of research that has let people like Daniel Reilly live far longer than anyone expected.

I spoke with Reilly; Lee, who is 63; and Coleman, who is 72—all of whom have lived with significant disabilities since before the age of 50—about their lives and their intricate medical realities, which involve both their disabilities and the normal processes of aging. All three were able to work: Reilly largely on the business side of specialty pharmacies, Lee in social work, Coleman as an attorney and JAG. They are navigating what it means to age into a system that, in many respects, wasn’t built with them in mind.

In 1986, when Reilly was diagnosed with HIV, the condition as he put it, “a death sentence.” He was 20. The stigma was unfathomably high. There was no approved treatment. He had contracted it through a blood transfusion for his hemophilia; he also contracted hepatitis C, since resolved, in the same way. “It was just kind of numbness and disbelief, because it all just kind of unfolded so quickly,” he said. Growing old with HIV—let alone getting married and having an HIV-negative child—seemed very unlikely.

Daniel Reilly (center, with wife Jacque, right, and daughter Liv) contracted HIV when it was a “death sentence.”Courtesy of Daniel Reilly

The world has transformed for people with HIV. For those with access to treatment—in many cases endangered by the expiry of enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits and by the rise of Medicaid work requirements—it’s now often a chronic condition rather than a fatal one. I spoke with Todd Brown, a physician and researchr who runs a lab at Johns Hopkins University examining the health of those living with HIV. 

“In the mid-to-late ‘90s, good antiretroviral therapy became available, and so people are living longer, which is great,” Brown said. “But what we’re noticing is that people living with HIV have a higher burden of many common comorbid diseases, things like cardiovascular disease, liver disease, diabetes, lung disease, and the list goes on and on.” In Reilly’s case, the list includes Type II diabetes and chronic kidney disease.

Reilly’s search for a geriatric hematologist speaks to a less unusual predicament: a medical profession that has not caught up with its own patients.

Reilly is acutely aware of what his survival has required. During his daughter’s university homecoming, he fell and “crushed my left kneecap and broke my left elbow,” Reilly said. “For 12 weeks, I was in a stabilizer where they were waiting for the bone to grow back together…and my wife was there the entire time taking care of me. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my wife. I really would not.” 

His daughter Liv, who lives with her own chronic illness, has benefited from Reilly’s decades of hard-won knowledge. “He really has been sort of a guide on how to gracefully deal with it to the best of his abilities,” she told me.

Brason Lee’s introduction to life with a disability was sudden. At 18, he was riding his motorcycle without a helmet in San Diego when an accident left him in a coma for a week, in the hospital for a month, and with a severe traumatic brain injury for the rest of his life. He spent more than a year in intensive rehabilitation and many more months in and out of different types of therapy.

“When I first met my speech therapist, she said that I couldn’t write a complete sentence,” Lee recalled. Even that ultimately took him more than six months.

Lee went on to pursue an undergraduate degree, then a master’s, facing tremendous cognitive challenges and lifestyle adjustments on the way; he took seven years to complete his bachelor’s degree. Lee nevertheless excelled in internships and found steady employment as a social worker. But he didn’t marry until 40 and was, for much of that time, deeply lonely.

Now 63, Lee has developed a set of strategies for navigating daily life with his injury. He employs text-to-speech software to read documents aloud, tools designed for blind users that turn out to be tremendously valuable for people in Lee’s situation—and which did not exist in anything like their current form when he was first injured. And he relies on his wife, Ling, to organize other elements of his life.

A motorcycle accident as a teenager left Brason Lee with a severe brain injury for the rest of his life.Colleen Ibarra Photography

But Lee now confronts newer cognitive issues, and faces fresh difficulties in trying to understand which stem from regular aging and which are long-term consequences of his traumatic brain injury. The difference in best-practice treatment could be major. But—not unlike Reilly’s challenge around geriatric hematology—the medical expertise simply is not there yet. It’s a distinction his doctors cannot yet make clearly, in which respect Lee is left waiting for new generations of researchers and physicians to develop answers. 

A traumatic brain injury “is really one of probably lots of factors that go into developing aging, or dementia, or behavioral concentration problems down the line,” said Jared Knopman, a neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “It’s really hard to narrow down this causative effect of TBI and aging.” Most research on traumatic brain injuries and aging focuses on people who sustain them when older, leaving a significant gap in understanding the long-term trajectory of people like Lee, who have lived with severe cases for decades.

“In health care in particular, there is very limited education or training of any professional at any level of care specific to aging. And there’s very, very little specific to disability.”

Coleman, the former judge advocate general, faced prolonged noise exposure at her Air Force base. That led to Menière’s disease, eventually resulting in deafness in one ear. Her experience with hearing-related disability as a veteran is far from unique: Approximately 1.3 million veterans receive compensation from the Veterans Administration for hearing-related disabilities. “Most of these veterans have a hearing loss that’s not only difficulty hearing soft sounds, but also not being able to listen to speech and engage in conversations and environments that are most important to them,” said Victoria Sanchez, a clinician-scientist in the University of South Florida’s Department of Otolaryngology. Those difficulties are associated with loneliness and social isolation—which in turn is linked with accelerated aging. 

Coleman knows that Menière’s also puts her at risk of falls, another major concern for aging adults. But that has nothing on her experience with kidney disease, for which Coleman received a kidney transplant in late 2024. Life expectancy for dialysis, which she requires, has risen significantly in recent years, from well under a decade to as much as 30 years.

Still, said Coleman, who used to run five-kilometer races, “You can’t be carefree and just run around and do what your mind wants to do. You have to follow what your body is able to do.”

That’s made possible for Coleman above all by her sister, Dee, who moved to Coleman’s home in North Carolina to help care for her, managing her medications and providing the daily oversight that Coleman’s medical situation requires; by her brother, Bill, who credits their walks with keeping his sister’s spirits up when they’re together; and by her faith and community volunteer work.

Retired Air Force judge advocate general Evelyn Dove Coleman celebrating her birthday.Courtesy of Evelyn Dove Coleman

The support networks that Reilly, Lee, and Coleman rely on are not incidental to their survival. They don’t lack for community. (All three also have meaningful relationships with their adult children.) But many disabled people do experience gaps in community that could be substantially addressed—and in other contexts has been—with more robust federal and local support for social services. It’s a structural failure in particular for people who, like them, contend with complex medical needs. 

Michelle Putnam, director of the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, described a compounding dynamic: many disabled people are excluded, earlier in their lives, from environments where adult relationships are normally built. 

“One of the challenges for anyone growing older is sort of when you leave the sort of common pathway, whether it’s education or work, you sort of move outside of formal groupings,” Putnam said. “And for younger people with disabilities, they may have had difficulty getting into those pathways in the first place because they didn’t have employment or had trouble having access into groups and organizations.”

For aging people with multiple disabilities, that can mean a more limited social fabric at exactly the time when it’s most needed. That Reilly, Lee, and Coleman are, in important ways, exceptions to that rule is partly why it was possible to talk to them at all: they have strong ties that let them manage their conditions exceptionally well, and that have helped them beat the odds.

The underpinning of future breakthroughs is being dismantled.

The data for the wider population is less promising. Not only is social isolation linked to accelerated aging, with physical inactivity (which many disabilities compel) and disrupted sleep (which many disabilities cause) among the contributing factors, but adults in the United States already face exceptionally high levels of loneliness: around one in three US adults between 50 and 80 reported a lack of companionship, in a society that is unaccommodating of informal networks of care. 

For disabled people, finding community can be exceptionally difficult—the product of inaccessibility, difficulty with transit and commutes, and rising sentiment against, or simple failure to create, the kinds of remote activities that became commonplace during Covid stay-at-home orders.

“Social isolation and loneliness are recognized as a national and global public health concern, adversely impacting physical, cognitive, and mental health, quality of life, health care expenditure, and longevity across the lifespan,” said Cecilia Poon, a geropsychologist and the chair of the American Psychological Association’s committee on aging.

Senior centers, a legacy of the Johnson administration’s Great Society initiative, address some of those needs: training for caregivers, support with public benefits, and potential training sites “for health education and caregiver support programs,” Poon said. But the overall gap in community support for aging disabled people is matched by gaps in how the health care system itself is equipped to treat them.

“What we can say pretty clearly is that in health care in particular, there is very limited education or training of any professional at any level of care specific to aging,” Putnam told me. “And there’s very, very little specific to disability.”

There is also, she said, inadequate research on how disabled people who have been disabled since before age 50 are faring in the health care system and what their specific needs are. Reilly’s search for specialties like geriatric hematology is part of a wider predicament: a medical profession that has not fully caught up with its own patients.

That deficit ties back to a broader dynamic examined in a 2024 study in the journal Gerontologist: the link between ageism and ableism. Surveying nearly a thousand people, researchers found that ageism was associated with ableism, including among older adults who had internalized ageist beliefs about themselves. Positive feelings toward older adults were associated with lower rates of ableism—suggesting that those forms of discrimination are mutually reinforcing, and that efforts to reduce one may help reduce the other.

“Public policy initiatives to address community-level interventions and targeted training to inform discourse about ageism and ableism are critical,” the researchers wrote. That intersection may also help explain why some aging disabled people do not identify as part of the disability community at all.

The population at stake is not small. According to the Census’ 2024 American Community Survey, more than 7.5 million people living outside of institutions over the age of 65 have a disability that makes living independently difficult, over a tenth of that age group. As disabled people with complex health issues live longer, that number will grow. And it will grow during a period when home- and community-based services will be cut across every state as a consequence of sweeping attacks on, and reductions to, Medicaid services.

Then there’s the cost of being disabled. What the disability community calls the Crip Tax is already a constant pressure: mobility devices that insurance won’t cover, cumulative costs of medications, like the more than 30 that Reilly takes, and transit services like rideshares for those who need them. Many disabled people, as Rebecca Cokley wrote in the Nation, are forced to work until they die, purely as a consequence of the cost of living. Those systemic issues are daunting and arguably disabling in themselves.

All the while, biomedical research is being cut by the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and elsewhere in the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, among others in the Trump administration. Their attacks strike directly at the kind of research that has made it possible for people like Reilly to live far longer than anyone, themselves included, were led to expect. The underpinning of future breakthroughs is being dismantled.

Still, for Reilly’s wife, Jacque, who has been with him since the early 1990s—in a life made possible by radical medical progress—those existing wins are a source of hope: “a vision for the future of what could be possible,” in her words.

Those breakthroughs require a health care infrastructure designed to preserve and build on them, with professionals trained to treat the people who benefit from them, and support networks that are better-funded and less at the mercy of election cycles. Living for decades with conditions like Reilly’s is no longer unimaginable. In a growing number of cases, it is simply what aging looks like, amid systems that have yet to adapt.

This article was written with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the John A. Hartford Foundation.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dealt a death blow to the country’s most important civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the law that defeated Jim Crow.

For 100 years, from 1865 to 1965, Black people were systematically and actively excluded from participation in American democracy through racial violence, but more commonly through race-neutral tricks like poll taxes and grandfather clauses. Governments across the country also used redistricting to dilute the Black vote without ever having to talk about race explicitly.

That’s what Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, enacted federally, went after: The slippery tricks deployed to destroy the political power of Black folks and other people of color—especially in the South.

And the Supreme Court just took us right back to that time.

The majority opinion in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, struck down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana. In so doing, the court rendered Section 2 of the VRA basically useless, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.

As soon as this decision dropped, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to. My colleagues Ari Berman and Pema Levy are two of the sharpest minds reporting on voting rights and the Supreme Court in the country. And they were clear: This is bad. “Today is so heartbreaking because we’ve been writing about this for so long,” Pema told me. “And this just really feels like the final nail in the coffin.”

“When we weaken the Voting Rights Act, we don’t just weaken one law,” Ari agreed, “we weaken the very fabric of American democracy.”

The two went on to explain the staggering potential costs of the decision. “Who needs poll taxes and literacy tests if you have partisan free for all?” Pema explained. “If your partisan designs trump everyone else’s rights, then you can just, under the guise of partisan gerrymandering, eliminate the voting rights of minority voters simply because they don’t vote for your party. It is absolutely a Jim Crow tool now.”

“We could see the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction,” Ari warned. “We could lose a third of the Congressional Black Caucus.”

Our sobering conversation about the Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act, and the future of multiracial democracy is above. I got a lot out of this, and I hope you do too.

OpenAI admitted it had to develop a specific instruction in the code of its latest model of ChatGPT to stop it from repeatedly referencing “goblins, gremlins, and other creatures.”

In an explanation posted on Wednesday, the company said the “strange habit” came from its chatbot personality feature—specifically for users who chose the “Nerdy” personality. According to OpenAI, this personality receives the following prompt from its system: 

You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. You are passionately enthusiastic about promoting truth, knowledge, philosophy, the scientific method, and critical thinking. […] You must undercut pretension through playful use of language. The world is complex and strange, and its strangeness must be acknowledged, analyzed, and enjoyed. Tackle weighty subjects without falling into the trap of self-seriousness. […]

OpenAI said it first noticed the trend last November and some users said they found increased “goblin” references over newer model releases, even beyond the “Nerdy” personality. 

Some exact quotes that users reported:

• “sensible little goblin”
• “because ovens are filthy little goblins.”
• “Brutal little goblin of a dynamic” 
• “Tragic little digital swamp creature”

Through “reinforcement learning,” where the chatbot accounts for whichspecific responses receive high rankings from human evaluators in terms of accuracy and quality, the “playful” responses performed better.

As Wired first reported on Tuesday, the latest ChatGPT model, released last week, included the instructions: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” OpenAI did not immediately respond to Wired’s request for comment but the same day the report was published, Sam Altman posted a meme on X, making light of the situation by joking that the upcoming GPT-6 would have “extra goblins.”

pic.twitter.com/PR7C3NPxqk

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 28, 2026

After the company explained its troubleshooting process and how it implemented the override instruction to reduce goblin-related outputs the next day, it stated in its Wednesday post that “taking the time to understand why a model is behaving in a strange way, and building out ways to investigate those patterns quickly, is an important capability for our research team.”

The explanation may bring to mind how Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot repeatedly brought up “white genocide” in South Africa. Although xAI stated that Grok’s responses were due to an “unauthorized modification” from an employee, chatbot models should not be that easily manipulable if user safety was an actual concern. 

Despite all this, the company is pushing for less regulation of its products while simultaneously acknowledging that it is still learning how its chatbot models work. As I wrote on Monday, Sam Altman and OpenAI have publicly wiped their hands of the detrimental effects their products are costing people now and have demonstrated a blatant disregard for potential lasting impacts.

A true embrace of goblin mode.

In a brief ruling late on Wednesday, a Texas appeals court panel declined to immediately turn over Infowars, the conspiracy empire founded by Alex Jones, to a federal receiver, pending further court proceedings. That receiver had previously signed a deal with the satirical news site The Onion to take over Infowars’ physical and intellectual property; the emergency ruling puts that plan in jeopardy. The stay was first reported by Ben Mullin, a media reporter at the New York Times. The ruling does not, however, save Infowars, which is expected to stop broadcasting today, because no one is currently paying the rent. Jones said in a video posted on X that April 30 would likely be the company’s last day of operation.   

Global Tetrahedron, the company who owns The Onion, announced earlier this month that they’d reached an agreement with the federal receiver overseeing Infowars, Gregory S. Milligan. The terms of that deal would allow a new LLC created by Global Tetrahedron to lease Infowars’ physical studio as well as its intellectual assets, but at the time, the plan still needed to be agreed to by a judge. In a motion last week, attorneys for Milligan said that the Sandy Hook families, to whom Jones and Infowars owe more than $1 billion in defamation judgments, support the plan. The Infowars studio rent, per the motion, costs $81,000 each month. 

The Sandy Hook families have not yet been paid a dime of what they are owed. 

On Thursday, Jones said on X that the receiver was no longer paying the rent or any other bills associated with the property. Jones has vowed for years that if Infowars is ever shut down, he’ll immediately begin broadcasting at a new studio; he’s also been selling products on a new site, Real Alex Jones, and encouraging supporters to donate money to him there to keep him on air. On Wednesday night, he celebrated the ruling on X, writing, “We Give Thanks To God and Infowars’ Supporters For Standing Against These Pathetic Weasels.” He also directed listeners and viewers to a new website, while stressing that the new site “was not Infowars.”

“I am the Infowar,” he declared. “You are the Infowar.” True to form, Jones then went on to falsely claim that the FBI and CIA were secretly behind the original civil lawsuits filed against him and the company. 

This is the latest development in Jones’ and Infowars’ ongoing legal sagas, after the company lost a series of defamation lawsuits by default in both Texas and Connecticut. The suits were  brought by the families of children and school personnel who died at Sandy Hook. Jones maintained for years that the shooting, as well as numerous other mass casualty events, were hoaxes. He’s inconsistently admitted that he was wrong in making those claims. Jones and Infowars both filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022; since then, the Sandy Hook families have not yet been paid a dime of what they are owed. 

In a statement on Bluesky, Onion CEO Ben Collins said the Texas ruling had “created… an unprecedented situation” where “no one knows who is in charge of InfoWars, and therefore no one can pay rent.”

“Since no one controls these assets right now, it does appear InfoWars will shut down tonight at midnight,” Collins continued, adding that the Sandy Hook families are seeking relief in several different courts. “We’re hopeful they will resolve this immediately so we can take over and pay these families.” 

Over the last few months, Trader Joe’s has pulled thousands of cases of focaccia bread and frozen fried rice from its shelves for potentially having fragments of metal or glass, respectively. If that makes you a little nervous about stocking up on other TJ favorites like cookie butter and Everything But the Bagel crackers, you’re not alone. (Trader Joe’s website notes that the company takes “these matters seriously—personally, even.”)

Monti Carlo, a chef who breaks down food recalls on her Substack, told me in November that at one point during the fall, it felt like there were too many recalls for her to keep track of. There was a listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals, an infant botulism outbreak in ByHeart whole nutrition infant formula, and a recall of certain corn dogs and sausage-on-a-stick products for potential pieces of wood in the batter. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What is going on?’” Carlo said. 

According to experts, the answer is complicated. For the past year especially, food safety has been in turmoil. 

Last fall, the 43-day government shutdown led to the furlough of over 30,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, stalling public health communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and delaying inspections of food facilities. Then there was the Trump administration’s layoff of 3,859 FDA and 2,499 CDC employees by the end of 2025, as part of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services in accordance with the DOGE effort to cut costs. 

Firing all the epidemiologists wouldn’t get rid of foodborne illnesses, it would just stop us from knowing about them.

While it isn’t totally clear yet how the shutdown and layoffs will affect the food safety system, when a system on the brink loses thousands of workers, it creates fractures in an already delicate food system. In a March 2025 Consumer Reports article, food safety experts in and outside the agency agreed “that the food program’s budget was already inadequate to carry out the amount of oversight required even before the new administration took over.” 

For animal products like meat and poultry, food safety regulations are created and maintained by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, while the safety of all other food products is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration. Many USDA facilities are under continuous inspection, but the FDA may visit each facility only once a year, leaving much of the daily oversight to food manufacturers. State and local health agencies may be the first to identify cases of illness and determine the cause to be foodborne. Sometimes the FDA will delegate food manufacturer inspections to these agencies, but its main purview is typically the inspection of the retail food industry. When illness cases in different states are linked, the CDC will often get involved to coordinate an investigation and contact the appropriate agencies once an issue is identified. 

It’s a fragile system that becomes even more tenuous in situations like last year’s multistate listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals. Donald Schaffner, an extension specialist in food science and professor at Rutgers University, recalled how that outbreak was an eye opener because it happened at a company making fresh pasta for meals, which made it an FDA-regulated company, but because the pasta might have been used to make a fresh or refrigerated entree that has meat in it, that became a USDA issue. They were still able to unravel the threads, but it showcased just how intertwined, and occasionally arduous, the system oversight can be. 

The ultimate hope is that with these overlapping systems in place, all food will be safe, but it’s not perfect. It’s unnerving to have to worry about whether the food you’re eating is safe, and most foodborne illnesses are identified first by the consumer—once they’re already sick.

“We have recalls as a last recourse. Everything else that we need to do in order to produce a safe food product must be done,” said Angela Anandappa, founding executive director of the industry nonprofit Alliance for Advanced Sanitation. “And the worst-case scenario is for someone to get sick and die.”

Despite how unnerving a recall might be, experts argue that it might be a good thing that we’re still seeing them, because that means there are still people within the government doing the work to keep our food safe. 

Schaffner noted that firing all the epidemiologists wouldn’t get rid of foodborne illnesses, it would just stop us from knowing about them.

“If you undermine those resources, things could get worse, and probably will get worse, and you might not even know it, because the people who are keeping track of whether it’s getting better or worse no longer work for the federal government,” he added.

When you see a new food recall, don’t take it lightly, but also remember that it means there are still food safety specialists working hard to make sure your food is as safe as it can be. 

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority would have you think that its latest gerrymandering decision is a mere tweak to the legal rules governing political map-drawing. No doubt hoping for mild headlines, the court’s 6-3 opinion framed its holding as hewing to “the plain text” of the Voting Rights Act and “consistent with” the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination in voting. In compliance with these two guideposts, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion styles itself as a humble “update.”

Don’t be fooled. This is a counter-revolution. Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requires that people of color have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Wednesday’s decision effectively strikes down Section 2—at least what this Supreme Court had left of it—and takes the country back to the dark days when Black and brown voters in many states cast meaningless ballots, having been diluted and gerrymandered into powerlessness. In the decades since the Voting Rights Act, southern states have sent Black representatives to Congress, state legislatures, and local political bodies because this seminal civil rights law demanded that minority voters have an equal voice in the political process. Congress has repeatedly defended and continued these protections. On Wednesday, a court majority watered them right down to nothing.

The Republican appointees elevated partisan concerns over the rights of minority voters.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out the stakes of what the court had just done, and repeatedly chided the majority for downplaying the gravity of its holding. Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais “could destroy most of the majority minority districts that in the past 40 years the Voting Rights Act created,” Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The decision has “thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction. Under cover of ‘updat[ing]’ and ‘realign[ing]’ this greatest of statutes, the majority makes a nullity of Section 2 and threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”

This case is not the first that the Roberts Court has taken to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, but it may be the last. It is likely the final nail in its coffin, and the lid is now so firmly in place that it is improbable that any plaintiff will be able to pry it open and avail themselves of the law’s protections. This court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, began its assassination of the law in 2013, striking down the requirement that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get pre-clearance for new maps and changes in voting rules. The court went on to make it harder to win cases against discriminatory voting laws that block minority voters from casting their ballots. And in a related line of cases, the justices green lit partisan gerrymandering and made it increasingly difficult to prove racially discriminatory map-drawing had occurred. The Callais decision marries these two lines of cases, destroying the Voting Rights Act while elevating permission to conductpartisan gerrymandering above minority voting rights. 

The dissent opens with a hypothetical that illustrates the import of the majority’s decision: Imagine a state with a history of virulent racial discrimination, in which Black and white voters prefer different political parties. The population is 90 percent white, save a single county, shaped like a circle, which is 90 percent Black. The Black voters elect a representative of their choice because they belong to one congressional district. Then “the state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts,” Kagan writes. “The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.”

Congress, under the Voting Rights Act, forbid this kind of racial vote dilution. Under Callais, the Roberts Court brings it back. Indeed, if the white majority in the dissent’s hypothetical seeks to hand all their state’s congressional districts to Republicans, then the Black population cannot have a meaningful vote because they would choose a Democrat. “The majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,” Kagan writes. “For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process? And with that, the majority as much as invites States to embark on a new round of partisan gerrymanders.” Notably, the majority does not dispute this. Alito does not counter that this hypothetical district—the paradigmatic Section 2 district—would survive Wednesday’s opinion. It’s a damning silence that tacitly admits just how sweeping his decision is. 

Partisan gerrymandering, the court’s preferred tool for dismantling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is not a constitutionally protected practice. In fact, it’s long been viewed as a big problem. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court appeared poised to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering and its obviously corrosive impact on democracy and individual rights. But two years later, after Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court swung in the other direction. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that federal courts could not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims because they were ill-equipped for the task. Rucho “did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding,” Kagan recalled in her Callais dissent. “To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ and ‘lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.’” But, seven years later, the majority has transformed partisan gerrymandering into a weapon with which to extinguish the political voice of minority voters.

Partisan gerrymandering—indeed any partisan concern that a legislature might raise—can now perform the same function that Jim Crow tactics did prior to the Voting Rights Act. There’s no need to resurrect poll taxes or literacy tests when legislatures can simply draw maps to exclude minority’s preferred candidate from winning. Against any accusations of discrimination against minority voters, legislators can simply invoke a political motive and prevail. The Voting Rights Act was “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Kagan wrote. Callais not only tramples the Voting Rights Act, it creates the scaffolding upon which to build a new discriminatory political system.

Defenders of the Roberts Court chafe at the accusation by liberal critics that it is guided by partisan concerns rather than faithful application of the law. But on Wednesday, the Republican appointees literally elevated partisan concerns above the individual and collective rights of minority voters. They ruled that helping your preferred political party trumps the rights of Black and brown citizens. It’s hard to imagine a less justifiable decision—or a more precise representation of this court’s agenda.

Richard Pan is no stranger to blood. As a pediatrician, he was trained for its inevitability. But unlike your average medical professional—and despite his approachable and buoyant demeanor—he’s had menstrual blood launched at him in protest. He’s been assaulted on the street by a person livestreaming the attack on Facebook. He’s been the subject of racist memes comparing him to Asian despots. He’s encountered demonstrators clad in t-shirts depicting his face smeared with blood. He’s gotten plenty of death threats, too.

Oh, and by the way, he’s running for Congress.

What’s with the hate? Most of it stems from the fact that during his tenure as a California state senator, Pan authored some of the nation’s strongest vaccine laws. In 2015, he introduced legislation that nixed the ability of parents to use “personal beliefs” to exempt their children from the routine immunizations required for public school enrollment. Four years later, he wrote a bill cracking down on fraudulent medical exemptions for vaccines, which passed despite protesters’ clamorous attempts to shut down the Legislature. “They brought the militia to the capital,” Pan recalls.

“I like to say I met RFK Jr. twice. I debated him twice. I beat him both times.”

“When we came out of the hearing room, I was shaken by the level of vitriol, and I was almost in tears—but Dr. Pan was so calm,” says Leah Russin, a parent who, concerned about high rates of vaccine exemptions in California schools, began working with Pan to generate support for the 2015 bill.

Opponents had been bussed in from around the state—mostly mothers who described their children as “vaccine-injured”—to address lawmakers in Sacramento. As anti-vax firebrands yelled into the microphone and religious leaders promised imprecatory prayers, Pan stood and listened calmly. “It was like the ocean lapping against a wall without eroding it at all,” Russin remembers.

This scene repeated in 2019, but escalated to include the blood throwing and even a bodily assault. “It was the roots of what we now call the MAHA movement,” Russin says, and Pan endured their “crucible.”

Pan, now 60, his dark hair peppered with gray, ditched his usual coat and tie for our interview, opting for a crisp blue Oxford shirt. He has never been too rattled by the vitriol, he tells me: “When you resort to violence, then I think you’ve already admitted you’ve lost the argument.”

After four years in the California Assembly and 12 in the state Senate, Pan termed out and took a hiatus from politics—returning to his teaching post at UC Davis School of Medicine. But the rise of the vehemently anti-vaccine Make America Healthy (MAHA) movement and its erratic figurehead, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has compelled him to jump into the national ring, where his résumé, unflappability, and knowledge of vaccine science and its deniers make him uniquely qualified to push back.

Pan in 2024, during a Sacramento Bee-KVIE mayoral forum.Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/ZUMA

Having tousled with the anti-vax movement for decades, Pan has watched it shift from a hodgepodge of religious fundamentalists and lefty hippie types toward a more violent, right-leaning contingent obsessed with personal freedoms and urged along by peddlers of bogus cures. “As a physician,” he says, “I learned a lot about both the diseases and the vaccinations themselves, but I had to learn more about this anti-vaccine—not just ideology, but all their myths.”

Suddenly, “the concept of a health system broadly not meeting someone’s needs clicked in his mind—you could see the world open up to him.”

This knowledge, he believes, is his best weapon against vaccine dissenters, including RFK Jr., who butted heads personally with Pan after showing up in Sacramento to argue against his public health bills. “I like to say I met him twice. I debated him twice. I beat him both times,” Pan says. The first time was a true debate; the second not so much. During a hearing on his 2019 bill, other anti-vax witnesses didn’t leave enough time for Kennedy to speak. Sitting next to the pediatrician, he grumbled something, whereupon Pan said, “It’s not my fault. You know that your guys didn’t figure this out.”

A 15-minute slot on the floor of the California Senate is one thing, but Kennedy has since gained a powerful national platform—watching him spew misinformation during a raucous four-hour Senate hearing last September served as the final straw for Pan’s return to politics. Soon after, Pan announced he would run for the House of Representatives, challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Kevin Kiley in California’s Third congressional district.

The Third District contained a sliver of left-leaning Sacramento, where Pan lives, along with a large tract of the more conservative Eastern Sierras. But he’d flipped a Republican seat during his first bid for elected office. Maybe he could do it again? Plus, Gov. Gavin Newsom was mounting a campaign to redraw California’s electoral map in response to an aggressive gerrymandering effort by Texas Republicans. The political landscape Pan was launching himself into was about to be overhauled.

The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Pan was born in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Pittsburgh. He knew he wanted to be a doctor since the third grade, he remembers, after he read a book from the school library about (of all things) blood. It took another few decades for him to find his penchant for politics, but he began straying from the conventional med-school track while studying biophysics at Johns Hopkins in the late-1980s.

He had taken up a genetics research project between semesters, but another lab published findings that made it moot. “Oh, great, now I have to find a new project for the summer,” Pan recalls thinking.

That’s how he began working with Gerard Anderson, a professor of health policy who needed help collecting data for a book on how Medicare can fail to meet the needs of people with multiple chronic diseases. “I would have never anticipated him going into politics,” Anderson told me.

The trauma of ICE’s abuses isn’t limited to “the person it happened to,” Pan says. “It’s the person who’s witnessed it. It’s the person who hears about it.”

Pan had people skills, his former mentor recalls, but was overly focused on the details. “In biophysics, you’re dealing with very minute, specific topics,” Anderson explains. But as Pan delved deeper into the work, “all of a sudden the concept of a health system broadly not meeting someone’s needs clicked in his mind—you could see the world open up to him.”

Pan likes to say that he traded a micro view of health for a macro one: “We need people to discover the next great cure. We also need people to work on being sure people can get access to those great cures.”

To that end, he spent his summers during medical school on rotation with the Commissioned Corps of US Public Health Service, which places medical professionals in regions of the country that are experiencing public health crises. His first assignment was in a Pennsylvania trucking town, where the locals weren’t too concerned with infectious disease; they wanted officials to address an epidemic of domestic violence. The next year, the Commissioned Corps dropped him into a Philadelphia-area clinic at the center of a measles outbreak fueled by fundamentalist churches whose congregations refused to vaccinate their children. These experiences, Pan says, “really made me think about social determinants of health before that name was popular.”

This public-health lens informed his work on a range of policies, even ones with seemingly no medical connection. His core issues as a state legislator, including affordability, housing, and violence prevention, are also prominent features of his House campaign—as is countering President Donald Trump. But Pan says he doesn’t view his opposition to the administration’s agenda as separate from his medical obligations.

Part of his work as a pediatrician—he continues to treat low-income children at the Sacramento County Health Center—is to determine whether his young patients have experienced trauma. Because unaddressed, trauma is itself a risk factor for the kinds of chronic diseases RFK Jr. and Trump promised to tackle. (In fact, the administration has slashed research grants to scientists who study them.) And now, on Trump’s watch, we have “armed, masked agents going around breaking into people’s houses without warrants, breaking into people’s cars, children worried that their parents may not be home when they come home from school,” Pan says. “Think about the chronic impact of that trauma.”

“It’s not just to the person it happened to,” he adds. “It’s the person who’s witnessed it. It’s the person who hears about it—that our own federal government is in defiance of our Constitution.”

There’s no shortage of ways to portray the second Trump administration as a threat to people’s wellbeing, but its detrimental actions on vaccines and health coverage, in Pan’s view, are only a part of why medical professionals should feel obliged speak out. Because policies that make people fear for their rights and freedoms constitute their own public health crisis.

The anti-vaxxer stalking Pan wore a t-shirt depicting Pan’s face splotched with blood, and the word “LIAR” sprayed across his glasses.

Congress has its share of physician members, but the majority of the 20 currently serving are Republicans. And most have supported Trump despite his detrimental public health policies and appointees. The Senate’s four MDs all voted to confirm RFK Jr., for example. But the rise of MAHA and the Republican gutting of Medicaid have prompted other doctors to launch Democratic congressional bids—counting Pan, at least three are running in California.

After voters approved Newsom’s redistricting plan, the district Pan had planned to run in, the Third, suddenly tilted liberal. A game of musical chairs ensued. Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, the incumbent in the adjoining Sixth District, announced a run in the Third. So Pan pounced on the Sixth.

His prospects look decent: 70 percent of voters in the newly drawn Sixth already know Pan pretty well—they’re his former constituents. And as the dust settled, Pan secured several key endorsements, including from the Sacramento Bee. Still, the race is anything but decided, especially now that Pan may get his match-up with a conservative incumbent.

Last month, Kiley announced he, too, would run in the Sixth—not as a Republican, but as an independent. His incumbency in the Third has given him a big money advantage. As of late March, per the most recent disclosure report, he’d raised nearly five times as much as Pan or Thien Ho, the Sacramento County district attorney who is also running as a Democrat and is slightly ahead of Pan in fundraising. But Kiley’s rebrand may not be enough to get him elected in the freshly left-leaning Sixth. He was endorsed by Trump in 2022, and has consistently voted with his conservative colleagues in the House.

In some ways, the challenges Pan will face in Congress if elected are not that different from what he confronted as a state legislator. He drafted the 2015 vaccine bill in response to a nonfatal measles outbreak in Disneyland, then the largest since 2000, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the virus eliminated in the US. But that outbreak was only about 3 percent as big as the ongoing wave, which has resulted in 4,080 confirmed cases, 344 hospitalizations, and three deaths since the beginning of 2025. Roughly 93 percent of those afflicted were unvaccinated.

A few months into Trump’s first term, Pan and Russin got on a plane to attend the first March for Science in DC. They weren’t the only envoys from California’s vaccine wars. As they ambled down the National Mall with the rest of the procession, two familiar faces caught up. One was Joshua Coleman, a prominent anti-vaxxer from the Sacramento suburbs, and the other was Pan’s: Coleman’s sign and t-shirt bore a depiction of Pan’s face splotched with blood, and the word “LIAR” spray painted across his glasses.

Coleman has been a “perennial person,” Russin told me. Even after getting into legal trouble, he kept popping up, sometimes donning Star Wars themed costumes that obscured his identity. He followed Pan throughout the march, shouting accusations and documenting his actions for a 30-minute highlight reel he later published on YouTube. At the end of the video, Coleman stands on a DC sidewalk in the rain, beaming: “I ruined his day!”

Well, maybe. Much of the rest of the video consists of Pan strolling down the mall in his white coat, chatting with other science supporters and taking pictures with fellow physicians, despite Coleman hovering just a few feet behind. Beyond the occasional moment when Pan gestures towards the camera with a shrug, Coleman might as well be invisible—at least to Pan. Other science-minded demonstrators circle by with uneasy looks. A few bold ones block Coleman’s camera and ask him to leave.

All of this happened before anti-vax influencers helped convince nearly a third of Americans surveyed that childhood vaccines do more harm than good, before some of those right-wing skeptics were placed in key public health posts, and before Pan’s opponents began resorting to violence.

Yet though the political power dynamics have shifted immensely in a relatively brief period, Pan doesn’t plan to change how he responds. “To a certain degree,” he says, “some of the threats that I get are no longer about me. It’s about scaring other people, because they know I won’t give in.”

Increasingly desperate negotiations. A plea from the president himself. An eleventh-hour sleight of hand, followed by a surprise vote in the dead of night. 

Over the past month, chaos has unfolded on Capitol Hill as House Republicans fracture over a central question: Should the federal government need a warrant to spy on US citizens?

According to most interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, the answer is a simple yes. But for nearly two decades, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has created a nifty loophole. The law authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals abroad, but in practice, it allows intelligence agencies to scoop up the electronic communications of US citizens, too. Agents can then perform “backdoor searches” on records that would normally require a warrant to obtain—querying databases for Americans’ phone calls, text messages, and emails.

Privacy hawks and civil libertarians have long warned that the program undermines Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. Yet when Congress last reauthorized the program in 2024, Democrats were largely in favor. Joe Biden signed it into law with minor reforms; Donald Trump urged Republicans to “KILL” it.

But much has changed in the past two years, and FISA reform advocates say the 2024 changes have failed to stymie abuses. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has collided with an unprecedented push by the Trump administration to expand government spy powers. ICE is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new surveillance technology while the FBI buys up Americans’ cell phone location data from commercial brokers. Shortly after returning to office, Trump fired all three Democrats on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent body tasked with advising the executive branch and reviewing programs like Section 702. And in May, the FBI shuttered an internal office that audits for Section 702 abuses.

Now that Trump stands to benefit from the spy program himself, he’s demanding that Republicans pass a “clean” reauthorization, pushing a bill through without any amendments. The law is set to expire Thursday, and despite the bill clearing a procedural vote in the House today, deep divisions remain in the Republican Party. GOP privacy hardliners have insisted that any reauthorization of Section 702 must include a warrant requirement for government searches of Americans’ communications.

Meanwhile, all but four House Democrats are opposing a clean reauthorization, as the abuses of Trump’s second term have crystallized the dangers of handing warrantless surveillance powers to an aspiring authoritarian. Administration officials have publicly labeled anti-ICE protesters “domestic terrorists,” ICE agents have collected biometric data from activists, and Trump has used the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.

Congressional staffers familiar with the negotiations told me that the growing bipartisan opposition to Section 702 marks a significant opportunity to reform America’s outdated surveillance laws. “It’s very clear that the presidency being in a different hand has totally changed the dynamic,” said one Democratic staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “While AI is part of that new opportunity, I really think it’s because people are cognizant of how dangerous it is to have a federal government with someone like Stephen Miller actively going around talking about domestic terrorists.”

Earlier this month, the Lever and the American Prospect reported that the Democratic-led Congressional Black Caucus planned to support a clean reauthorization of the program, despite its use in federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists in 2020. A few days later, facing media scrutiny, the caucus came out against a clean reauthorization and called for a judicial warrant requirement and a ban on backdoor searches.

“As it stands, the Trump Administration has already committed serious violations that undermine democratic norms. We cannot allow federal law enforcement officers to have unfettered and unregulated access to information to persecute political opponents or intimidate American citizens,” CBC members wrote in a statement. 

In fact, FBI searches of US citizens’ data under Section 702 rose 35 percent last year to more than 7,000 queries, according to a letter the agency sent to Congress in March. An April report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the FBI also conducted 839 “sensitive” searches in 2025—queries related to journalists, elected officials, political candidates, and religious groups—up more than 200 percent from 2024.

Critics say that those findings underscore that the 2024 reforms—which included a requirement that the deputy director of the FBI approve “sensitive” searches—did not go far enough.

“Until two months ago, the Deputy Director was Dan Bongino, a longtime conspiracy theorist who has frequently called for baseless investigations of his political opponents. His replacement, Andrew Bailey, is a highly partisan election denier who recently directed a raid on a Georgia election office to justify Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter on April 13.

Wyden also deposited a classified Dear Colleague letter with House Security, detailing a secret legal interpretation of Section 702 that “directly affects the privacy rights of Americans.” That letter has made a splash in Washington, DC, two staffers told me, even though it’s largely been absent from mainstream media coverage. In other words, the public doesn’t know the full scope of the spy law that Congress is battling over. 

“I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized,” Wyden said in a Senate floor speech last month. “In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.”

Some reporting has incorrectly conflated Wyden’s warning with a classified March 17 opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That ruling found compliance issues with how intelligence agencies used “filtering tools” to query Section 702 data, winnowing down the results without specifically searching for a target, and therefore evading oversight. Wyden’s warning is about a different classified opinion, sources told me.

“Senator Wyden does not cry wolf,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director for liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In the past, when he has said that there’s a secret legal interpretation that will shock Americans, he has been right.” Goitein pointed to Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified documents revealing a massive, indiscriminate global surveillance operation by the National Security Agency and its allies. Two years before the leaks, Wyden had warned the public of a secret intelligence court interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

“Through the Snowden disclosure, we found out what that was. And that was that the NSA was collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk, and it was doing it based on a legal interpretation that the phone records of every American in the country were relevant to specific foreign intelligence investigations,” said Goitein. “That’s not a plausible interpretation of the law.”

In an outcome that was widely expected, the US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that New Jersey’s efforts to investigate an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center for allegedly misleading consumers violated the First Amendment.

In a 9-0 decision, the justices said a sweeping subpoena by the state’s then-attorney general, Matthew Platkin, seeking information about donors to First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a chain of anti-abortion pregnancy centers in northeastern New Jersey, “burdened First Choice’s associational rights.” The full opinion in the case can be found here. 

The decision clears the way for First Choice to proceed with a federal lawsuit challenging the subpoena. “Demands for private donor information…’chill’ protected First Amendment associational rights even when those demands contemplate disclosure only to government officials and not ‘the general public,’” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for his fellow justices.

The decision drew parallels between New Jersey’s demand for information and Alabama’s attempts in the 1950s to force the NAACP to turn over the names and addresses of all of its members in the state. The high court sided with the NAACP in the landmark 1958 ruling.

“Associational rights carry special significance for political, social, religious, and other minorities,” Gorsuch wrote. “Take that freedom away and ‘dissident expression’ stands particularly vulnerable to marginalization or outright ‘suppression by the majority,’ leaving all of society poorer for it.”

But Wednesday’s decision—the second major Supreme Court victory for the CPC industry in recent years—is likely to make it even harder for state lawmakers and attorneys general to investigate anti-abortion organizations. In 2018, the court blocked a California law that would have required pregnancy centers to inform patients about state-funded family-planning services, including abortion.

Crisis pregnancy centers, faith-based organizations whose mission is to deter women from having abortions, attract clients by offering free services such as pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, baby clothes, and diapers. But they also have a well-documented history of using misinformation and deception to dissuade abortion seekers from terminating their pregnancies. Like many CPCs, First Choice—which has served more than 36,000 clients in New Jersey since its founding in 1985—created different websites for donors and the general public, tailoring its anti-abortion message for each audience.

“Strip away the ability of individuals to work together free from governmental oversight and intrusion, and the freedom to associate may become no freedom at all.”

The question before the justices was narrow: Should First Choice be able to directly fight a state agency’s subpoena in federal court, or must it initially go to state courts? The long-accepted procedure for enforcing or challenging such a subpoena, New Jersey argued, is to first seek relief in state court, and then, should it be necessary, appeal to federal court.

But the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented First Choice, accused Platkin of “selectively target[ing] the nonprofit based on its religious speech and pro-life views.” According to ADF, the Platkin subpoena had such serious implications that First Choice should be able to seek immediate relief in the federal courts, rather than having to expend time and resources litigating the issue first in state court.

Lining up behind First Choice was a predictable collection of anti-abortion and conservative groups. But they were joined by progressive groups, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the ACLU, which also raised concerns that the same type of subpoenas against First Choice could be weaponized against humanitarian groups, journalists, and protesters. In Wednesday’s ruling, the justices seemed to concur. As Gorsuch wrote, “Strip away the ability of individuals to work together free from governmental oversight and intrusion, and the freedom to associate may become no freedom at all—individuals deterred, groups diminished, and their protected advocacy suppressed.”

Anti-abortion groups hailed the decision. Erin Hawley, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom who argued the case before the Supreme Court in December, called the ruling a “resounding victory,” and blasted New Jersey’s investigation tactics as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“This is a triumph for every faith-based ministry in America,” William Haun, senior counsel at Becket, a legal group that focuses on religious cases, said in a statement. “The Court made crystal clear that our First Amendment freedoms—including religious freedom—are ‘necessarily’ associative, and that keeps the federal courthouse doors open for religious groups to protect their governance from intrusive state bureaucrats.”

For the first time since the US began bombing Iran two weeks ago, our military leadership testified before a congressional committee today. The main takeaway: there is no real plan for ending this war. But there is a plan for giving the Pentagon more money. 

At today’s House Armed Services Committee hearing, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, General Dan Caine, and Comptroller of the Army Jules Hurst each explained why they believe it is critical to American security to fund the Pentagon to the tune of 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027. The military’s budget surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2026—but, Hegseth said, building a “lethal arsenal of freedom” requires 500 million more dollars per year. This, he said, would both allow military “domination” and fuel the “American economic engine.” 

Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, invoked the power of mathematics to justify the budget proposal. Another half-billion dollars in funding for the Pentagon—an agency which has never passed an audit—is necessary, he said, because “China announced a 7 percent increase in defense spending this year” and “as a result, they are spending more of their GDP on defense than we are.” As are “all of our adversaries,” Rogers said. 

Moreover, he added, American defense spending as a percentage of GDP has “been falling since World War II.” American defense spending as dollars, however, has consistently risen. Adjusted for inflation, current U.S. defense spending is more than $400 billion higher than in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, Rogers said, “we don’t have enough munitions, ships, aircraft, and autonomous systems” to get the country “where we need to be if we want to truly deter conflict.” 

The military wants more money: as Hegseth put it, that money will go to “where technology is evolving. And as I mentioned, the character of war fighting is changing pretty quickly, mass simultaneity autonomy undersea space, cyber information.” All these big words require “a higher end of capital investment. It’s an important down payment on the future.” 

As Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) pointed out, the Pentagon that’s asking for all that money has not yet provided Congress with an estimate of how much money they’re spending on war with Iran. Hurst, for the first time, answered on the record: about $25 billion in 60 days, or over $400 million dollars per day at war. Some independent researchers’ estimates, however, are nearly double that. And according to Iran’s ministry of health, well over 3,000 people have been killed since the US and Israel started bombing Iran in late February. When Hegseth was asked how much this war is costing American families in fuel and food costs, he said “that’s a gotcha question.” 

Pressed by several members of Congress, Hegseth—who spent yesterday on a helicopter joyride with Kid Rock—did not outline a plan for ending the war. 

“Their nuclear facilities have been obliterated. They’re buried underground,” he said. 

“So we had to start this war, you just said 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat, and now you’re saying that it was completely obliterated?” Smith asked. 

“Their facilities were bombed and obliterated, their ambitions were not,” Hegseth said. This—bombing on the basis of ‘ambitions’ is a “peace through strength” strategy. 

Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) said that from his perspective, Hegseth’s strategy has been one of “astounding incompetence.” 

“You have misled the public about why we are at war, you and the President have offered ever-changing reasons for this war,” he said. 

Hegseth, for his part, said that criticizing him is providing free propaganda for America’s enemies. “Shame on you,” he told Garamendi. “Calling this a quagmire, two months in? Handing propaganda to our enemies?”

“Don’t say you support our troops on the one hand, and then a two-month mission is a quagmire. That’s a false equivalation. It undermines the mission.” 

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

In what might be the ultimate encapsulation of Donald Trump’s disgraceful perversion of the Justice Department, the acting attorney general (Trump’s former personal defense lawyer) has selected an conspiracy theory peddler and election denier—who was part of a group that colluded with Russian intelligence to smear Joe Biden and who was deplatformed by Fox News for making an antisemitic comment—to run a baseless and biased criminal investigation that seeks to serve Trump’s revenge fantasy.

Last week, Joe diGenova, a former US attorney, was sworn in as a counselor to acting AG Todd Blanche and handed the mission of overseeing a probe being run out of the Miami US attorney’s office that aims to prove that Trump was the victim of what right-wing influencers call the “grand conspiracy” to destroy him. This alleged Deep State uber-plot encompassed the individual investigations that targeted Trump, including the Russia investigation and special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of his alleged pilfering of top-secret White House documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Under this theory, these inquiries were not separate matters but each a component of a years-long clandestine scheme pursued by a nefarious cabal of government officials to persecute Trump and deprive him of his constitutional rights.

The grand conspiracy case was first launched last year as an investigation of former CIA chief John Brennan for testimony he gave years ago to Congress about the Russia investigation. This probe was triggered by a stunt pulled by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who in July declassified and released documents that she falsely claimed showed that Obama administration officials at the end of 2016 fabricated the intelligence community’s finding that Russia intervened in that year’s presidential election to assist Trump.

Initially, Trump’s Justice Department focused on whether Brennan had misled Congress about one aspect of the process that led to that conclusion. But this case was so weak that US attorneys in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and in the Eastern District of Virginia couldn’t pull together a prosecution. With Trump pressing the Justice Department to lock up his perceived enemies, the matter was shifted to Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney in Miami and an ardent Trump loyalist. He eagerly took it on.

The goal: show trials for Brennan and other Obama and Biden officials, such as former FBI director Jim Comey, former DNI James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and perhaps even Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

In November, Reding Quiñones zapped out subpoenas to Brennan and more than two dozen former intelligence officials who had toiled on the Russia investigation. Working with Mike Davis, a former Senate staffer and informal Trump adviser (who had publicly vowed to get even with former officials who had investigated Trump), he has sought to expand the case far beyond Brennan’s testimony to Congress to cover just about all of Trump’s grievances. The goal: show trials for Brennan and other Obama and Biden officials, such as former FBI director Jim Comey, former DNI James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and perhaps even Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

After the Justice Department’s failed attempt to prosecute Comey—which might be revived— Reding Quiñones’ investigation has become the ground zero of Trump’s crusade of vengeance. Not surprisingly, it’s been marred so far by irregularities and signs of significant bias. Reding Quiñones called for a second grand jury to be set up for this investigation in the Fort Pierce courthouse, which is 130 miles from Miami but under the supervision of federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who issued a series of controversial and highly favorable rulings for Trump in the stolen-papers case. (Brennan’s lawyer protested this unusual move.) And earlier this month, a senior career federal prosecutor withdrew from the investigation, expressing concerns about the case’s legal viability.

Enter diGenova. In hailing his appointment, the Justice Department proclaimed that the 81-year-old former prosecutor has had a “distinguished career.” And he once boasted a decent reputation in Washington as a no-nonsense and savvy Republican. But in the Trump years, he has become a highly partisan purveyor of conspiracy theories and disinformation—a right-wing crank.

Prior to partnering up with Giuliani for this smear crusade, diGenova was a prominent Russia denier, who excoriated the Trump-Russia investigation as a “hoax” and insisted that “people should be put in jail for this.”

During the 2020 campaign, diGenova and his wife and fellow attorney, Victoria Toensing, were part of the small group Rudy Giuliani assembled to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and promote the false story that Biden, when he was vice president, forced the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to kill an investigation of Burisma Holdings, an energy firm that recruited Biden’s son Hunter for a well-compensated spot on its board of directors. (Biden had indeed pressured Kyiv to get rid of this prosecutor, but so had many European governments, as well as a bipartisan group of US senators, for he was widely reputed to be corrupt. At that time, there was no investigation of Burisma.)

Prior to partnering up with Giuliani for this smear crusade, diGenova was a prominent Russia denier, who excoriated the Trump-Russia investigation as a “hoax” and insisted that “people should be put in jail for this.” He claimed that a “group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.” In a speech, he called Comey a “dirty cop.” At one point, he and Toensing nearly joined Trump’s legal team, but the pair didn’t come aboard due to potential conflicts of interest.

As part of Giuliani’s squad, diGenova worked with Ukrainians who were making unsubstantiated allegations about Biden that were debunked. He and Toensing also represented right-wing journalist John Solomon, another member of Giuliani’s hit team, who was promoting spurious allegations about purported Biden corruption in Ukraine. Appearing on Fox News, diGenova accused Biden and his family of engaging in “bribery and extortion”—offering no proof. He blamed Ukrainian officials for somehow triggering the Russia investigation. At times, he sounded like an extremist nutter. On Laura Ingraham’s podcast, he blasted the media and Democrats and said, “We are in a civil war in this country…It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things: I vote and I buy guns.”

This meant that Giuliani’s get-Biden operation—of which diGenova was a key participant—had been in league with Russian intelligence in spreading bullshit allegations about Biden.

While looking for dirt on Biden, diGenova and his wife ended up working for a Ukrainian oligarch who had been indicted by the Justice Department for allegedly scheming to bribe officials in India. Giuliani was hoping this Ukrainian businessman could help unearth derogatory information on Biden. A Justice Department filing in the case identified the oligarch, who denied the charges and was fighting extradition to the United States, as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.” Oddly, the Ukrainian prosecutor who had been fired at Biden’s insistence filed an affidavit in the oligarch’s extradition case claiming that Biden had “manipulated” the Ukrainian government and “forced” him out of his job. Giuliani used this affidavit to hype the case against Biden.

The Giuliani group even had a direct connection to Moscow. During his frantic chase for negative information about Biden, Giuliani joined forces with Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia Ukrainian legislator who claimed to have evidence of Biden corruption in Ukraine. He didn’t, and Derkach was far from a public interest–minded legislator. In the summer of 2020, Trump’s own Treasury Department sanctioned him, calling Derkach a “Russian agent for over a decade.” It noted that he had “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election”—meaning Biden. The department noted, “Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.”

This meant that Giuliani’s get-Biden operation—of which diGenova was a key participant—had been in league with Russian intelligence in spreading bullshit allegations about Biden. DiGenova was a (presumably) unwitting helpmate for a Russian agent running an operation to benefit Trump.

diGenova called for Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who pronounced the election free of significant fraud, to be “drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

And there’s more. In November 2019, while appearing on Fox, diGenova remarked, “There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department. He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas who work for NGOs…He corrupted FBI officials, he corrupted foreign service officers. And the bottom line is this: George Soros wants to run Ukraine.” This baseless comment—reflecting longstanding right-wing conspiracy theories about Soros—was widely criticized as an antisemitic trope. It was even too much for Fox News. DiGenova’s appearances on the cable channel trailed off.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, diGenova became part of the legal team led by Giuliani that challenged the result. At one point he called for Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who pronounced the election free of significant fraud, to be “drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

DiGenova has demonstrated an immense bias against the targets of the Miami investigation, a tendency to recklessly spout unproven accusations, and a penchant for hawking conspiracy theories. And he was part of an endeavor that promoted Russian disinformation concocted to assist Trump. It’s absurd that he would be placed in charge of any federal investigation. But this grand conspiracy case is a bogus inquiry and a profound abuse of power. It’s not about justice; its goal is to defy the truth and obtain personal revenge for a corrupt and deceitful autocrat. That makes it the perfect case for diGenova.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mapmaker doesn’t want you to know who helped gerrymander Florida.

That was one of the most significant takeaways from Jason Poreda’s testimony Tuesday before the Florida legislature. Poreda, a senior official in DeSantis’ governor’s office, told lawmakers during a special session that he was responsible for drawing a proposed new map that would tilt the Sunshine State’s already lopsided congressional delegation even further toward Republicans—potentially giving the GOP up to 24 of 28 US House seats. The map, which was publicly released Monday after first being given to Fox News, is expected to be formally approved Wednesday by the Republican-dominated legislature.

During committee hearings, Poreda walked lawmakers through the changes. He said he began working on the new map two weeks ago and had finished it over the weekend. While he said he was the sole creator of the map, he acknowledged that others also worked on it and reviewed it. But refused to say who they were.

When state Sen. Jennifer Bradley, a Republican representing several counties in northeast Florida, asked who else was involved in producing the map, Poreda answered: “I did work with other EOG [DeSantis’ Executive Office of the Governor] counsel and staff, but I’ll leave it at that.”

State Sen. Lori Berman, a Democrat from Palm Beach County, questioned Poreda further.

“Can you tell us who reviewed this map before it was published yesterday?” Berman asked.

Poreda didn’t budge. “I’m going to leave that with the same answer I just gave,” he said.

Berman pressed on: “I’m confused. Why can’t you tell us who had the opportunity to review this map?”

Poreda responded that he was “advised by counsel” not to disclose anything further. 

Standing next to Poreda was Mohammad Jazil, a private attorney representing the governor’s office. Berman asked Jazil what legal basis there was for declining to reveal who was involved. Jazil said that a previous court ruling gave DeSantis the same legislative privileges that shield lawmakers from having to disclose documents or testify regarding their work. 

Poreda also fielded questions from Democrats about the origins of the red-and-blue-colored version of the map DeSantis’ office provided to Fox News Monday morning, even before submitting his proposal to the Florida Legislature. The explicitly partisan shading—red for GOP-leaning seats, blue for Democratic ones—is particularly notable given that the state’s constitution prohibits partisan gerrymandering. Poreda said he did not know who had colored the map in that way. He did, however, disclose that he used partisan data, among other datasets, to draw up the map, which would create up to four more Republican-leaning districts.

Florida is the latest state to engage in aggressively partisan mid-decade redistricting after President Donald Trump last year successfully pushed Republicans in Texas to revamp their maps. Other GOP-controlled states, including Missouri and North Carolina, followed suit. But as my colleague Ari Berman reported last week, “the gerrymandering arms race [Trump] started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned”—at least not yet. California Democrats, for example, successfully countered the Texas map with a ballot measure creating their own gerrymander. And last week recently, Virginia voters approved a map that would help Democrats secure up to four new seats there. “Right now,” Ari wrote, “the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer.”

Much now depends on the impact of a raft of high-stakes legal battles. On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court dramatically limited a key Voting Rights Act provision. While its unclear how that case will affect this year’s redistricting fights, the ruling, as my colleague Pema Levy wrote in October, will ultimately help Republicans “dismantle Black political power as well as Democratic seats.” Meanwhile, Republicans are suing to block the new Virginia gerrymander, arguing that the Democratic-backed referendum there was illegal. And Democrats have already promised to sue over the new Florida map.

On its face, the Florida proposal does seem to violate the state’s constitution—specifically an anti-gerrymandering amendment that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2010. As Politifact reported, “Mid-decade redistricting wouldn’t be illegal, but doing it to intentionally benefit one political party would be,” according to law professors the news outlet interviewed.

DeSantis has attempted to cite other reasons for his redistricting agenda. In a memorandum to the Florida Legislature on Monday, his staff argued that the changes were necessary in part because Florida’s population has increased by nearly 9 percent since the 2020 Census. They also cited the then-pending Voting Rights Act case, which the US Supreme Court decided Wednesday while state lawmakers was voting on DeSantis’ map.

The Supreme Court’s six-to-three Republican-appointed majority issued a staggering ruling on Wednesday essentially killing the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act, dealing a death blow to the country’s most important civil rights law. The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Louisiana v. Callais strikes down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana and in so doing narrows Section 2 of the VRA to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.

“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.”

Alito’s opinion essentially overrules the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, finding that there must be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to show that district lines discriminate against voters of color, which is extremely difficult to prove. He also adds a series of new tests to the law that will similarly make it nearly impossible for states to draw majority-minority districts. As University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald pointed out, “my quick read of Callais decision is that the majority says if a racial community votes consistently with a party, then it is okay to deny them representation because that’s just partisan gerrymandering.”

Justice Elena Kagan forcefully dissented. “I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote,” she wrote. “I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

The decision will be devastating for communities of color and the candidates they support.

She added: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks… But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

The decision crippling Section 2 of the VRA, which required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in the electoral process, will be devastating for communities of color and the Democratic candidates they usually support. The only silver lining for those harmed may be that the ruling came be too late to have a major impact on the 2026 midterm elections. Candidate filing deadlines have passed in most Southern states; primary elections have been held already in North Carolina, Texas, and Mississippi; and Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia have mailed ballots for upcoming May primaries. Nonetheless, the watchdog group Issue One estimates that the ruling could still shift two to four seats to the GOP before the midterms, “concentrated in Florida and neighboring Southern states.”

In the long run, however, the court’s decision will turbocharge the GOP’s current gerrymandering efforts for future elections in 2027 and 2028, potentially costing Democrats up to 19 House seats, according to one study. As much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats, according to a report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund. Nearly 200 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the South could also be wiped out. 

Republicans could ultimately eliminate a dozen Democratic congressional seats in the South as a result, leaving no Democratic representatives or majority-minority districts in states including Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana—the very places where voting discrimination has historically been most prevalent. That will take America back to the Jim Crow era, with no Black representatives in Southern states with sizable Black populations. It will be reminiscent of what happened after Reconstruction was violently overthrown, when white supremacy and one-party rule were locked in for decades across the South. Indeed, the Callais decision is likely to trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction.

The hypocrisy of the Roberts Court is simply astounding. The GOP-appointed wing of the court is clearly inventing one set of rules to approve maps that favor white voters and Republicans while using another set of rules to block maps that benefit racial minorities and Democrats.

In December, the Court allowed a mid-decade redistricting plan in Texas that was designed to give Republicans five more seats on Trump’s orders to go into effect despite a lower court, with the majority opinion written by a Trump appointee, finding that there was overwhelming evidence of the use of race to draw district lines and disempower people based on the color of their skin. In Callais, by contrast, the court held that race could not be a factor in drawing district lines because it violated the 14th and 15th Amendments. But they allowed Republicans in Texas to do just that just months ago.

An exasperated Sonia Sotomayor summed up the double standard during oral arguments in October. “What you’re saying to us [is]…‘You can use [race] to help yourself achieve goals that reduce particular groups’ electoral participation, but you can’t use it to remedy that situation,’” she said.

The Roberts Court concocted a doctrine of​​ giving legislatures accused of racial gerrymandering the “presumption of legislative good faith” in order to allow Texas and other GOP-controlled states to get away with discriminating against voters of color. But the Court’s majority has made it clear that such good faith only goes in one direction; they’ll agree to let racial gerrymandering stand when it suits GOP interests and benefits white lawmakers, but strike down any map in which legislatures try to ensure fair representation for minority groups.

Up to 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus members could lose their seats.

The Court’s bias is also evident in its timing. The Texas map wasn’t enacted until the end of August and the district court ruling blocking it was issued in November, a full year before the 2026 election. Nonetheless, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a concurring opinion that the lower court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” But in the Louisiana case, the Court has issued a sweeping ruling relatively late in an election year, when maps are already in place around the country, that has the potential to upend district lines across the South—the very thing the justices have told lower courts not to do.

The Callais ruling is even more stunning because the Louisiana map at issue in this case followed a very recent precedent set by the Court. In a rare victory for voting rights, the Court ruled in June 2023 that Alabama violated Section 2 of the VRA by failing to draw a second majority-Black district in a state whose population is more than a quarter Black. That led federal courts to order Louisiana, which has a larger Black population than Alabama, to draw a second majority-Black district as well. Despite the near-identical nature of the Alabama and Louisiana cases, the Supreme Court quickly turned its back on the VRA after white voters claimed that an increase in Black representation was an affront to their “personal dignity.”

In truth, the Callais opinion is the latest in a long line of cases attacking the VRA–which has been an obsession for Chief Justice John Roberts for more than four decades. “Today’s ruling is part of a set: For over a decade, this Court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act,” Kagan wrote.

In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, Roberts ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. While he argued that “things [had] changed dramatically” since 1965, the ruling, not surprisingly, led to a proliferation of new voter suppression laws, with at least 31 states passing 115 restrictive voting measures over the ensuing years, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 

Roberts performed a bait-and-switch in Shelby County, claiming that it “in no way affect[ed] the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in Section 2” of the VRA, which prohibits voting changes that discriminate against voters of color. But the Roberts Court has been steadily chipping away at that remaining part of the VRA too, limiting the ability to challenge laws that target minority voters in the 2021 Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee case and now gutting Section 2’s prohibitions on racial gerrymandering.

That same bait-and-switch applies to the Court’s redistricting jurisprudence. In the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts could not review, let alone strike down, claims of partisan gerrymandering, asserting they were “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” He claimed in Rucho that federal courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting” but the Supreme Court has now made that nearly impossible to do as well.

Rolling back the civil rights revolution of the 1960s represents the culmination of Roberts’ legal career. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, he worked strenuously to weaken the VRA, claiming it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that fight when Congress voted overwhelmingly to strengthen and reauthorize the law in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, presiding over a series of cases that have crippled the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. In the early 1980s, Roberts wanted to find that violations of the VRA only applied to cases of intentional discrimination. Congress overruled him then, but now the Court has brought back that intentional discrimination standard in Callais.

“The Voting Rights Act is not a relic,” Louisiana’s two Black members of Congress, Reps. Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, wrote in The New York Times last October. “It is a living promise to all Americans that our democracy belongs to everyone. For nearly 200 years, Black Americans had virtually no representation in our collective governance. Section 2 was enacted to right that wrong. It remains as vital today as it was when it was first signed into law 60 years ago.”

Like so many decisions by the Roberts Court, the Callais ruling will boost Republican efforts to distort the political system in their favor, throwing a late lifeline to Trump’s efforts to rig the midterms after the gerrymandering arms race he started has suffered numerous setbacks in recent months. It comes at a particularly perilous time for American democracy, with Trump threatening to “nationalize the voting” and his administration taking unprecedented steps to interfere in the midterms, from seizing ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, to demanding sensitive voter roll information from all 50 states, to aggressively supporting new voter suppression measures.

But today’s decision is much bigger than just partisan politics. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made America a multiracial democracy. It ended an authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow South that prevented millions of people from enjoying the fundamental promise of equal citizenship under the law. With an authoritarian president now in the White House and the Voting Rights Act a dead letter, America may become a democracy in name only once again. 

“The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—’one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history,'” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

Remember “the most transparent administration in history”? That’s what Donald Trump promised at the beginning of his second term, and it’s been going about as well as the rest of his promises. The ongoing Epstein files debacle is the most glaring example, but contempt for the public’s right to know reaches far deeper in this administration.

Every day, the government creates reams of data, information, emails, and reports that belong to and are paid for by the public. That’s why the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records laws require the government—with some exceptions—to let anyone see these documents whenever we ask.

Before Trump took power again last year, he and many in the MAGA movement were big fans of this principle. Trump filed FOIA requests with the IRS to stymie its audit of him and the National Archives when he got into trouble for retaining classified information. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. FOIA’d information about vaccines and his Secret Service detail and sued the government for not responding quickly enough.

But now, Trump and Kennedy are singing a different tune. Across the government, offices responsible for public information have been gutted by DOGE and subsequent waves of layoffs. How badly gutted? No one knows exactly…because employees who would answer questions like that have been laid off. But we do know that, for example, at Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, multiple public information offices have been closed virtually overnight.

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised “radical transparency”: HHS would share so much information, people wouldn’t need to wait for responses to FOIAs anymore. Sure enough, there’s a “Radical Transparency” page on the HHS website, but it has information on only five topics, all administration pet causes such as alleged conflicts of interest among vaccine advisers, “wasteful spending,” and “ending anti-semitism on college campuses.” Have a FOIA request for HHS? You now need to file it with the central government platform FOIA.gov, which, according to the latest report, had a backlog of more than 267,000 requests. By law, the government must respond to a FOIA request within 20 business days; at HHS right now, the average turnaround time is 490 days. For faster service, seal your request in a bottle and toss it into the ocean.

What we’re seeing is not the occasional delay or foot-dragging; it’s what the law calls a “pattern and practice.”

Some examples from our own reporting: More than a year and a half ago, Julia Métraux, who covers disability issues at Mother Jones, filed a request seeking information about a school in Massachusetts that uses electric shocks on children with disabilities. Last May, Madison Pauly, who covers LGBTQ issues, requested documents used to create a widely criticized report on gender dysphoria. The same month, Julia Lurie, who covers child welfare, sought information about “wellness farms” (which RFK Jr. has said can be used to “reparent” those taking antidepressants) and the psychedelic drug ibogaine, which the secretary wants to use to treat trauma-related disorders. Number of documents we’ve received so far: zero.

We’re not alone. Hundreds of organizations and individuals have requests pending with HHS, on everything from Medicare fraud investigations to the origins of Covid. What we’re seeing is not the occasional delay or foot-dragging; it’s what the law calls a “pattern and practice.” HHS seems to have essentially stopped responding to FOIA requests altogether.

So in November, Mother Jones and our parent organization, the Center for Investigative Reporting, filed a lawsuit against HHS, asking it to provide the records the public is due. “FOIA guarantees the public and the press access to information about what our government is actually doing—information that’s crucial for democracy to work,” says Peter Bibring, a civil rights attorney who prepared the lawsuit along with other lawyers, including CIR’s general counsel, Victoria Baranetsky, and our legal fellow, Brooke Henderson. “The government can’t use cost-cutting and efficiency as excuses to violate the law and keep the public in the dark.”

Kennedy has upended the way our government approaches vaccines, drug trials, water fluoridation, and much more. He’s turned the department’s autism programs into anti-vax propaganda. He has authority over who loses and who keeps Medicaid coverage. He has targeted abortion medication. The public deserves to know how those decisions came to be, and the records that can show us—emails, text messages, drafts of reports, and much more—are public by law. We look forward to seeing RFK Jr. in court.

Victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting and their families sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US district court in San Francisco on Wednesday, claiming various negligence, product liability, and other violations. The civil complaints are the latest in a wave of litigation against OpenAI alleging that its globally popular chatbot, ChatGPT, helped people commit lethal violence.

The complaints were filed by families of multiple victims wounded and killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, where a suicidal 18-year-old opened fire on February 10. Shortly after the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported and OpenAI later confirmed that the company had “banned” the shooter’s ChatGPT account eight months earlier for discussion of scenarios involving gun violence—but chose not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some members of its safety team.

One lawsuit includes plaintiff Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old survivor who was injured catastrophically by gunshots to her neck and head. It alleges that “ChatGPT deepened the Shooter’s violent fixation and pushed them toward the attack—the predictable result of a design choice OpenAI made to let ChatGPT engage with users about violence in the first place.”

The lawsuit argues that Altman and other OpenAI leaders knew their product was dangerous and acted negligently, and that they have tried to cover up the danger as the company barrels toward what is anticipated to be a mammoth initial public offering.

The contents of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s second ChatGPT account remain unknown to the public.

“ChatGPT is not the safe, essential tool the company sells it as, but a product dangerous enough that its makers routinely identify its users as threats to human life,” the lawsuit claims.

An OpenAI spokesperson said in an email that the company has “a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence” and has “already strengthened our safeguards.” The spokesperson declined to comment on specific allegations in the lawsuit.

The new litigation underscores crucial questions that I examined recently with an in-depth investigation into the emerging risk of people using ChatGPT or other AI chatbots to plan violence. As I reported, there have been several publicly known cases since 2025 in which troubled individuals allegedly used ChatGPT to focus on grievances and prepare for attacks. In addition to Tumbler Ridge, those include a suicidal bombing with a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas, a stabbing attack by a teenage boy at a school in Finland, and a mass shooting at Florida State University. The defendant in the FSU case received encouragement and tactical advice from ChatGPT just before opening fire, according to chat logs I obtained.

OpenAI says it uses guardrails—built-in limits on what ChatGPT will say or do—to prevent misuse and block harmful content. The company has also said that it improves such safeguards continuously.

Leaders in behavioral threat assessment told me, however, that AI chatbots make it far easier than traditional internet use for a troubled person to move from violent thoughts toward action. They described high-risk threat cases in which the tactical advice and steady encouragement had a powerful effect, fueling users’ delusions and accelerating their violent planning. (The danger in those cases was thwarted with interventions before any violence occurred.)

The Gebala lawsuit claims that OpenAI leaders handled the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account with “full knowledge that ChatGPT had already been used to plan violence.” It argues the company knew of the above attacks, all of which predated the banning of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account in June 2025. OpenAI has acknowledged that it identified an account associated with the FSU shooter shortly after that attack in April 2025 and said it “proactively” shared information with law enforcement. The company now also faces a criminal probe in Florida; it denies wrongdoing.

The suit argues OpenAI’s conduct is a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé.

My investigation in part highlighted key questions about a second ChatGPT account used by the Tumbler Ridge shooter. That account is under analysis by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and its contents and time frame remain unknown to the public. OpenAI declined to answer my questions about the second account, which it said it found only after the attack. The reason for the belated discovery remains unclear. But threat assessment experts told me that perpetrators often get past tech company restrictions and continue refining plans for violence.

The Gebala lawsuit says the Tumbler Ridge case goes beyond even that pattern: It alleges that the banning of the shooter’s first account is further evidence of OpenAI’s negligence, because in reality it was merely a one-off deactivation for misuse that was easy to circumvent—by following OpenAI’s own published guidance. Here, the suit in part cites customer service instructions from an OpenAI article titled, “Why Was My OpenAI Account Deactivated?” According to the suit, that article explains how to re-register “immediately” for a new ChatGPT account by “using an alternative email address. If you don’t have another address available, you can use an email sub-address instead.”

In other words, customer engagement and retention are paramount, the lawsuit says, arguing that OpenAI’s policies are driven by growth and profit motives that are in direct opposition to product safety:  

The features that make ChatGPT unsafe—its willingness to engage on any topic, to validate any user, to sustain any fixation over time—are the same features that have made it one of the most popular products in history. Fixing those features would cost OpenAI its market share, its path to an IPO, and hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation.

The company’s conduct with ChatGPT is a new twist on a familiar societal danger, according to the lawsuit—a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé:

In the 1970s, Ford kept selling the Pinto after its own engineers warned that the fuel tank design would cause people to burn to death in rear-end collisions. Ford concluded that paying settlements to the families of the dead would cost less than fixing the car. OpenAI has made a version of the same calculation. For Ford, the dangerous design was a flaw in an otherwise ordinary product. But for OpenAI, the dangerous design is the product.

The lawsuit will test interesting and potentially consequential legal terrain; it further alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot de facto “engaged in the practice of psychology without licensure.” It notes that, in July 2025, Altman acknowledged in an appearance on Theo Von’s popular podcast that “people talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT” and that users—“young people, especially”—use it “as a therapist, a life coach.” 

As I reported in my investigation, a Pittsburgh man who pleaded guilty in March to stalking and violently threatening 11 women relied on ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “best friend” to justify his thinking, according to court documents.

The Gebala lawsuit also says OpenAI neglected a duty to warn, pointing to the longstanding Tarasoff precedent that is well known in the world of mental health. “By engaging in the unlicensed practice of therapy,” the suit claims, “OpenAI created a special relationship with certain users, including the Shooter, and assumed a heightened duty to take action when confronted with knowledge of a credible and foreseeable threat.”

The CBC reported on April 22 that the RCMP’s investigation into the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting is “in its final stages,” with BC Premier David Eby suggesting that the results will soon be public.

In a letter dated the following day, April 23, Altman apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community, stating, “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.” He also offered generalized statements that the company has made repeatedly about working with “all levels of government” to improve on safety and prevent harm.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.