Mother Jones

Back in August, Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon did something few outside the state saw coming: She won Florida’s Democratic US Senate primary. Her victory sent shock waves through the political world not only because her opponent Alex Vindman’s war chest dwarfed hers 19 to 1, but also because Nixon ran as a Democratic Socialist.

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Today, she’s one of a number of candidates around the country affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America who could be elected to Congress this November. The sudden rise in the DSA’s popularity is reshaping the Democratic Party and America’s political landscape. But Nixon says she wants people who are considering her campaign to forget all about those labels.

“It’s not about progressive vs. moderate vs. conservative, or Democrat vs. Republican, or DSA member vs. Working Families Party member,” Nixon says. “It’s about the rich are getting richer, and they’re making it harder for working families to be alive.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Nixon talks to host Al Letson about going from community activist and comic book co-author to upstart US Senate candidate, being “the biggest thorn” in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ side, and whether her progressive message can win in deep-red Florida.

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

On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill banning law enforcement officers in the state from using electrical shock gloves, a “pain compliance” tool and recent hit with ICE officers that function similarly to tasers at a lower voltage. ICE recently purchased about 6,000 pairs of the gloves, which have been roundly condemned by human rights groups as “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture”—for $16.7 million dollars.

“This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed.”

“Trump has put his political interests above the health, safety and livelihood of American families. California is taking action to strengthen transparency, accountability, and oversight around immigration enforcement in our state,” Newsom said in a statement that accompanied the bill’s signing. “This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities.”

The ban will go into effect in 2027 as part of a suite of bills Newsom signed in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in California, including a 25 percent tax on companies that operate immigration detention facilities in the state, a ban on face coverings by federal agents—a previous version of which was blocked by a judge—and a law expanding oversight requirements for federal immigration detention centers in California.

As I have previously reported, the shock gloves ICE purchased have been the subject of several lawsuits, including a wrongful death suit:

A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. A man with heart problems sued over allegations that he was shocked at a Las Vegas trade show, as the Associated Press reported.

And in 2023, a man who was incarcerated in Kentucky’s Bullitt County Jail sued an employee of that jail for shocking him repeatedly with the gloves. “The gloves feel just like a taser,” Josh Elswick, who was in handcuffs and shackles when he was shocked, said. Bullitt County Jail representatives told local media they would stop using electric shock gloves shortly thereafter. 

California’s ban on shock gloves is likely to be challenged in court—and the Department of Homeland Security has already promised that it will flout any such law. As a DHS spokesperson told me earlier this month, “Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers. To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional bans. The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that California’s sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement.”

Jeff Niklaus, CEO of Compliant Technologies, the firm that manufactures the gloves, blamed “political bias” and lack of understanding of his product for the ban in a September 22 YouTube video.

“We were never contacted by any legislator or agency within California,” Niklaus said, calling the firm’s gloves the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

“First of all, the polls are fake.”

When asked about competitive congressional races in Iowa, Donald Trump predictably dismissed Iowa Republicans’ lackluster polling numbers as “fake” and blamed Democrats for the high prices squeezing farmers and other businessmen across the state—even as the war in Iran has sparked soaring energy and fertilizer costs. 

Video by Peter Berger

“I don’t know, I love Iowa,” Trump said during an Oval Office address announcing a new $15 billion steel plant in the state. “I’ve always been very strong with Iowa. There’s been some things that the Democrats have done that are very bad for our country.”

Meanwhile, one Iowa farmer stressed just how difficult the economy has become for small business owners.

“Folks that have trucking businesses, they’re just bleeding money right now like crazy,” he said during an appearance on MSNOW. “Farmers are bleeding money like crazy. We need to get this problem resolved, and we need to get it resolved right away.”

Still, Trump appears unmoved by the economic warning signs, as prices climb and his poll numbers continue to slide.

“I got more votes than anybody in history during the last election,” said Trump. “I’m more popular now than I was then.”

On Wednesday—the fourth day New York’s annual Climate Week—a federal judge handed the Trump administration a major victory by striking down New York’s landmark Climate Change Superfund Act.

Judge P. Kevin Castel ruled that the law, which sought to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for climate change-related damages, overstepped the state’s authority because it was preempted by the national Clean Air Act and interfered with the federal government’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. Castel’s ruling comes just a few weeks after a similar decision by Judge Brenda Sannes in a parallel case brought by a coalition of Republican-led states, business groups, and fossil fuel companies.

“So is it taxpayers who are going to pay for it? Or is it billionaires?”

Enacted in 2024, the New York law was part of a major push in Democratic-leaning states to crack down on carbon pollution in a way the federal government has so far failed to do. It employed a familiar strategy from the 1980s: Make polluters pay. Modeled after the federal Superfund statute for toxic waste dumps, New York’s climate superfund law would have charged fossil fuel companies $75 billion over 25 years to fund climate adaptation and infrastructure projects. Since the measure’s introduction in 2023, lawmakers in other states have pursued similar legislation. 

As of now, the back-to-back court decisions directly apply only within New York state. But these rulings could offer the fossil fuel industry a roadmap for challenging similar laws, and the judges’ reasoning could ultimately be adopted by other courts, including the Supreme Court. Now, state lawmakers considering their own climate superfund legislation face a difficult choice: Change course in response to the New York rulings, or push ahead and try to defend their bills in court.

I spoke to lawmakers and advocates from Minnesota, Washington, Connecticut, and Vermont, all of whom have either drafted legislation, are considering legislation, or, in the case of Vermont, have successfully passed their own climate superfund law. While slightly different in their state-specific parameters, the legislators and activists behind these bills share the same goal: With climate-related damage already costing states and residents considerable amounts of money, the companies responsible for a significant share of historical emissions should help cover the bill. 

In Minnesota, a superfund bill has already been introduced, and legislators in Washington and Connecticut are planning to propose bills for their upcoming legislative sessions. Bloomberg recently reported that lawmakers in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts are all continuing to move forward with superfund legislation. 

After the first New York ruling, I asked Minnesota State Rep. Athena Hollins, a deputy floor leader for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, what she thought of the decision. “I find it personally disappointing,” she replied, “because the reality is these costs are coming.”  

According to NOAA’s archived Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database—which is now run by Climate Central after being shuttered by the Trump administration—Minnesota has experienced 62 confirmed weather or climate disaster events exceeding $1 billion between 1980 and 2024. Climate change has contributed to higher temperatures and more intense rainfall in the state, leading to major challenges for its agricultural sector and outdoor adventure industry.

Hollins, who introduced and co-sponsored Minnesota’s superfund bill earlier this year, told me that Minnesotans could face $20 billion or more in climate-related costs by 2040. “That’s roughly a third of our state’s current budget,” she said. Her state’s superfund legislation would charge major polluters for damages to bridges, roads, and buildings caused by greenhouse gas emissions. That money would pay for natural disaster recovery, infrastructure projects, and public health efforts linked to pollution. 

Infrastructures costs, Hollins notes, are inevitably going to rise.  “So is it taxpayers who are going to pay for it?” she asks. “Or is it billionaires?”

For Hollins, the New York rulings “has literally no bearing on what we’re doing in the State of Minnesota.” She also notes the “shaky” appellate court precedent on which the rulings are based aren’t necessarily relevant to federal courts in Minnesota.

Washington State Rep. Shaun Scott, a Democratic Socialist representing part of Seattle, actually sees the New York ruling as a “silver lining” for his own state—a roadmap for avoiding legal vulnerabilities in crafting his own legislation.

“We have watched with great interest the way the federal government has dealt with New York State because we understand there’s the potential that we will experience similar roadblocks,” Scott said. “It gives us the opportunity to see where any landmines might be and legally sidestep some of them.”

“It gives us the opportunity to see where any landmines might be and legally sidestep some of them.”

In Scott’s view, Washington State is uniquely positioned to successfully pass a climate superfund law, given its passage of the Climate Commitment Act in 2022 requiring greenhouse gas emitters to buy pollution credits. Last year, he spearheaded the passage of the Wildfire Alleviation Support Act, which charges major financial and tech firms that rely heavily on data centers and uses the funds for the state’s wildfire resilience efforts. The state is particularly vulnerable to wildfires given its large, lush forests and decreasing snowfall earlier in the season, and, according to Scott, overuse of energy-intensive data centers has contributed to that risk. Scott hopes to use these existing laws as models for a future climate superfund bill, which he plans to introduce in the upcoming legislative session in January. 

To help draft the bill, Scott’s office has been working with 350Seattle, a climate justice organization that advocates for communities most impacted by climate change. Akiksha Chatterji, 350Seattle’s campaign director, said the group began organizing around superfund legislation after seeing Vermont and New York move forward with their laws in 2024.

Chatterji says the New York litigation won’t deter 350Seattle’s plans. “We are very clear that no matter what the outcome is in other states, we are moving full steam ahead because rulings in those circuits don’t impact us.” 

In Connecticut—which is subject to the same appellate court precedents as New York—State Rep. Josh Elliott expressed more concern about the implications of the Empire State’s legal battle. Connecticut’s bill, a cost-recovery program, would calculate what share of emissions since 1995 is attributable to the largest fossil fuel producers. Then the state would issue payment demands. It would put the proceeds toward adaptation work on stormwater upgrades, flood mitigation, coastal protection, and grid resiliency. The bill received a public hearing in February and is expected to reach the floor in January 2027 when the legislature is back in session. 

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy damaged approximately 3,000 homes across Connecticut, and over the last few years, the state has faced increasing rainfall, coastal flooding, and infrastructure injuries and deaths due to extreme weather events.

“People pay for it through their property taxes,” Elliott said. “But the costs of externalities should be borne by the companies that pollute.”

Across the border from New York, Vermont is also facing a legal challenge—brought by the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute—over its own “polluters pay” climate law. Vermont State Sen. Anne Watson, a co-sponsor of the bill, is hopeful that it won’t suffer the same fate as the New York law. “We feel very good about our legal standing moving forward with the law,” Watson said, “and what happens in Vermont can be wholly different.” A decision is expected sometime this fall.

In the summer of 2023, Vermont experienced catastrophic flash flooding, with devastating road and bridge washouts and landslides. In Montpelier, where Watson lived at the time, she said the conversation quickly shifted from if extreme flooding would happen again to when it would happen again. Shortly after the bill was passed in May 2024, Vermont experienced another summer of major flooding. 

“It was so painfully apparent that the costs of climate change were falling on residents, on business owners, and on municipalities that all just simply could not afford it,” Watson said. “And [we were] also recognizing that this was going to keep happening.”

“The costs of externalities should be borne by the companies that pollute.”

A recent Brown University study reported high support for climate superfund laws across nearly all surveyed states, finding a 3-to-1 ratio of support to opposition for these bills during public hearings. In Vermont, for example, Ben Edgerly Walsh, a climate and energy program director for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which helped support Vermont’s law, told me that his organization received 12,000 petition signatures in favor of the legislation during the summer of 2023 before it was introduced. “For a state like Vermont, where you’re talking about 650,000 people total,” he said, ”that is really significant grassroots support.” 

But what the Brown report also showed is that, behind the scenes, lobbying groups opposing climate superfund bills outnumbered supporters. “Those lobbying interactions are probably the most influential in terms of swaying legislators,” said Trevor Culhane, a research associate at Brown’s Climate and Development Lab and one of the co-authors of the report. 

Apart from oil and gas companies, the Justice Department’s Energy and Natural Resources Division has also joined the fight against climate superfund legislation. In 2025, the DOJ filed two motions for summary judgment challenging both New York’s and Vermont’s climate superfund acts. After Judge Castel issued his ruling, DOJ official Adam Gustafson said in a statement, “Both [New York federal judges] hold that the federal government is responsible for setting national policy on global pollution, not states.” Of course, the Trump administration has little interest in actually doing that. In February, the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its own authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The administration has also weighed in on various climate liability lawsuits in which plaintiffs, including state governments, are seeking damages from fossil fuel companies under various state and federal laws. Celebrating the dismissal of one such lawsuit, brought by the state of Michigan, Gustafson said in a statement last week, “We are pleased that the district court has rejected another aggressively anti-energy lawsuit, and we are committed to protecting American energy from this sort of state overreach.” 

The most anticipated climate liability case will be before the Supreme Court next week, with the justices scheduled to hear arguments over whether Boulder, Colorado, can sue Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil. The underlying legal questions of the case are distinct from climate superfund litigation, but a broad ruling in Suncor’s favor could be used to inform legal analysis on future climate litigation, said Alejandro Camacho on a recent webinar sponsored by Covering Climate Now and Point Source. “Climate superfund statutes could start to borrow from the analysis of the court pretty immediately,” he said.

When I asked Anne Watson, the Vermont lawmaker, about challenges coming from private industry and the federal government, she smiled. “This isn’t going to make us back down. Maybe it’s a little intimidating in certain ways, but we’re not giving up,” she said. “I think it’s just a matter of time before the fossil fuel industry is held accountable.” 

OpenAI called off plans to launch its latest GPT-6.1 Astra model on Tuesday, after the system failed to meet the company’s safety standards. 

The model was scheduled to release sometime in October, but OpenAI’s head of safety systems, Saachi Jain, told the Wall Street Journal that GPT-6.1 Astra, as compared to the previous GPT-6 Astra, was less honest about notifying users of the steps it did or did not take to achieve a task.

Jain described to the Journal that the models needed to strike a balance between proceeding with tasks on their own and taking shortcuts to provide an easy answer instead of doing a thorough job—a behavior Jain and others in the industry call “laziness.” Astra is OpenAI’s top-tier model. 

The startup’s cancellation comes amid a series of security threat incidents—tens of thousands of which it is reportedly investigating, according to a Saturday Axios report. OpenAI apologized on Monday for how it hacked Australian government websites in June, accessing non-public data and adding files onto the server: “We are sorry and working to do better in the future,” the startup in part wrote in a statement. 

Also on Monday, the company said it would only continue training after it has improved safeguards—including making its internal testing security strong enough to contain models and establishing live monitoring of models. 

Lawmakers and officials across the political spectrum are outraged. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, filed a temporary injunction to a June lawsuit, which claimed the company knowingly released unsafe products to the public, that OpenAI should stop developing new products without safety standards approved by a third party. 

Despite suggesting they would “do better in the future” to ensure safe AI development, as I wrote on Sunday, OpenAI has a history of aligning with the Trump administration to expand development. Many companies, such as OpenAI, Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle have military agreements with the Defense Department. 

On Tuesday, several of their leaders, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, are set to meet with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson for lunch to discuss AI. 

The most unusual ritual in American politics in the scorched and cynical runup to the 2026 midterm elections takes place as often as five times a day—in restaurants and breweries, in rec centers and old churches, in train depots and art spaces, and in at least one possibly haunted pioneer museum—when Rob Sand, the 44-year-old Democratic nominee for governor of Iowa, asks someone in the audience to hit a note.

“It starts, ‘Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,’” Sand reminds them. “I will not kick us off.”

He has been building up to this moment since he first grabbed the mic. Sand, a trim and uncannily youthful state auditor with a shock of light brown hair, starts every appearance on his 99-county tour with an invective against the “two private clubs” that dominate politics. The major parties win by convincing us to “be scared of our neighbors,” he says. So he leads a round of applause for the Republicans in the room, and for the independents and Democrats, too. Finally, to “show each other that we can actually work together,” he invites everyone to sing the first verse of “America the Beautiful.”

Sand campaigns at the Dubuque County Fairgrounds. Over 500 people attended the event, one of the largest town halls of his campaign. Danny Wilcox-Frazier

Someone might whisper “Vicky!” or “Amy!” a little too loudly, and then someone else (Vicky? Amy?) gets it going. Some people close their eyes. Some look around. But by the end—in two-stoplight towns and urban satellites alike—they are starting to sound alright. In the back room of a speakeasy-themed bar on a courthouse square in a Missouri River county that Donald Trump carried by 39 points, an older man in a shirt that says “Iowa: We all are going to die” tells the candidate that he and his wife have “been harmonizing for 43 years,” and Sand, after savoring the moment, poses a variation of the same question he often asks:

“What if politics just felt like that all the time?”

You may have noticed that it does not.

Set aside the constitutional crises and the democratic backsliding and the corruption, and just consider the vital signs: Trust in Congress is at a modern low of 9 percent; just 17 percent of Americans believe elected officials care what voters think; more than a third report losing relationships with friends or family over politics. If this civic miasma has left the country grimmer and scarier, sleepless and vengeful and suspicious and just generally feeling bad, well, it has also done a pretty poor job of addressing the actual problems that make people feel even worse.

Sand asked a large crowd at Rustic Brew in Hampton to raise their hands if they had been touched by cancer. Nearly everyone in the room acknowledged the cancer reality in Iowa, a state now ranked second in the nation for new cancer diagnosis.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

When I tagged along for 10 campaign stops over three days just ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday, the subjects Sand was asked about most often were toxic water, cancer, data centers, and a succession of healthcare horrors. Iowa is No. 2 for cancer-rate growth and 48th in economic growth. It has been teetering on the edge of a recession for more than a year, battered by a trade war with the world and a not-a-war with Iran. Its public schools, once memorialized on the state quarter, are sliding down national rankings, as teachers battle book bans and legislators drain the budget to pay private school tuition for kids who already attend one. Farmer bankruptcies are rising. The population in much of the state is shrinking. Iowa is dead last in OB-GYNs per capita, and one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws is keeping it that way. For these reasons and many more, 49 governors had a higher approval rating last year than Iowa’s retiring Republican, Kim Reynolds. The state was once synonymous with participatory democracy. Now its politics is stagnant and beginning to stink—an algae bloom where a reflecting pool once stood.

His tone may be pitch-perfect and his policies may strike a balance between doable and desirable, but Sand is above all an uncommonly disciplined politician trying not to get burned.

Sand doesn’t talk much about what’s happening in Washington. But he argues that Iowa’s leaders have prioritized power grabs and culture wars over problem-­solving and that it’s time to “rotate the crops” after nearly a decade of one-party rule. Voters seem ready to give divided government a try. This November, Democrats expect to finally break the GOP supermajority in the state House. The race for US Senate is an unexpected toss-up. And Sand has a narrow edge in his bid to be the first Democrat to be elected as Iowa governor in 20 years.

But that’s where it gets a bit more complicated. Because if Sand is on familiar ground in his indictment of Republican governance, he and his fellow Democrats are more divided on how to turn the page. Much of the left, in much of the country, is fixated on payback and power—governing trifectas and sweeping reforms. Even mild-mannered 77-year-old Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon is promising “Nuremberg 2.0.” Sand strikes a different chord.

For much of his career, Sand has been discussed, often outside Iowa, as a kind of electoral cheat code—a bowhunting, churchgoing, small-town Democrat whose background and congeniality could reclaim the party’s beating heartland: “The Democrat Who Republicans Fear in Red-State America,” as The Wall Street Journal once called him. And in a key sense, they’re right; he has two statewide wins to prove it. But for even longer, Sand has been, sometimes quietly and sometimes very publicly, arguing for something else. Temperamentally evenhanded, he is a zealot about polarization. Sand does not want to turn a red state blue, he insists. He wants to be the candidate who gets you to stop thinking like that altogether.

Sand, an avid hunter and outdoorsman, poses at his office in Des Moines. He calls his room at the state capitol the “public-sector Cabela’s.”Danny Wilcox-Frazier

Sand grew up in Decorah, a college town of about 7,500 in the state’s far northeast corner, nestled amid rolling hills on the outdoor enthusiast’s paradise of the Upper Iowa River. Decorah is scenic, fairly liberal, and famously Norwegian—a place where people joke about being in mixed marriages because they ended up with a Dane. Sand’s mother was a physical therapist. His father was a doctor. Before I could ask the mayor, Andy Carlson, how he knew the family, he told me that Dr. Sand had delivered him.

As a teenager, Sand dabbled in improv and caught capons at a poultry barn for $5 an hour. He sometimes tells crowds he learned the power of democracy as a skateboarder. “He’ll probably get mad at me for saying this, but they were, like, skating off Darin Peterson’s roof,” Carlson recalls. (“It was a low roof,” Sand told me.) Sand met with the parks and rec director about building a skate park, pitched the city council, and got buy-in from local businesses tired of kids loitering on their curbs. The experience, he says—using words no one has ever used to describe a quarter pipe—fostered “a belief that our system of self-governance can help us solve problems together.”

This appeal to common ground is impossible to miss at Sand town halls. Every line on his résumé becomes a lesson in unexpected harmonies. There was his decision to re-register from an independent to a Democrat (in part because President Bill Clinton balanced the budget with Republicans). The decision to name his second son Axel (it means “father of peace”). And his decision to leave the Iowa attorney general’s office to run for auditor (because CPAs could use a prosecutor in the office).

Notwithstanding the skateboarding­-off-roofs thing, or maybe because the ­skateboarding-off-roofs thing comes wrapped in a Tocquevillian gloss, Sand has acknowledged that “some people think of me as a bit of a square.” That includes his brothers-in-law, who nicknamed him “Baby Jesus,” and his wife, Christine, who compares him to Mr. Rogers. He is a teetotaler from the Upper Midwest who went to Brown University and never smoked pot. Sand’s TV ads over the years have leaned into this affect, depicting him as a paragon of Nordic efficiency, turning off the lights on his showering wife and holding a stopwatch as he chops onions.

Since running for auditor, Sand has stuck to a tradition of holding annual town halls in all of Iowa’s 99 counties. He says it should be mandatory for all statewide elected officials.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

But looks can also deceive. A Brown professor from that time, John Tomasi, recalled his first impressions: “tall, skinny, huge blue eyes, the worst hair I ever saw in my life.” Tomasi thought Sand’s mother had cut it with a bucket over his head, only to discover that Sand had been moonlighting as a model in Europe and that the mop was the work of a renowned stylist “with a single name, like ‘Chago’ or ‘Chara.’” Sand began modeling shortly after arriving at Brown, looking to make a quick buck. He graced the pages of Arena Homme+ and Vogue Italia and posed for Terry Richardson in an ad called “Adole-scents.” Sand, in his book, wrote that such experiences “taught me about where I feel at home.”

The origin story of overcoming differences came at Brown, where Sand went door to door to introduce himself to the entire freshman class and penned a generally liberal column for The Brown Daily Herald. One day during his sophomore year, Tomasi arrived at his office to find Sand waiting with another classmate—Stephen Beale, a founder of the conservative Brown Spectator.

“It was the most unlikely couple I could have imagined on campus,” Tomasi recalls. “What they said to me was that they never had a course at Brown that would help them understand why an intelligent person could be a Republican.”

The result was a student-led seminar on contemporary conservative thought. A draft syllabus Beale shared with me featured readings from Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek, but also Pat Buchanan and the founder of the anti-immigrant website VDARE, Peter Brimelow. “What made [Sand] distinctive was his desire just to understand the other side,” said Beale, who could recall only one session that sparked a heated argument: their discussion of The Bell Curve, the 1994 book purporting to link race and IQ. “He really criticized that.”

Iowa farmer and entrepreneur Caleb Renner at a campaign stop for Sand at Rustic Brew in Hampton.Danny Wilcox-Frazier A Sand campaign staffer sets up before a town hall at Robey Memorial Library in Waukon.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

There was a part of me that wondered, as I watched every aspect of his life story become a parable for common ground, if Sand wasn’t laying it on a little thick. Iowa Republicans certainly think so. But flip over any rock and you find the same bugs. He used his college thesis to argue that public financing of elections could transcend ideological divides. At 22, he wrote a letter to The Gazette in Cedar Rapids making the case for “honest, straightforward discussion” to overcome polarization. And for one month in 2007, while building houses in post-­Katrina New Orleans, Sand kept a blog.

It was in many ways a twentysomething’s chronicle of a twentysomething’s pursuits. But a familiar tone poked through. He was eager to answer questions, “even especially the antagonistic ones!” Sand pored over news reports and policy papers and concluded that the cure to the storm-wracked city’s ills lay in electing “problem-solvers instead of politicians.”

As the 2008 Iowa caucuses loomed, Sand, now in law school, made his debut in the national media as an electoral talisman. He was a “typically overscheduled twentysomething,” Newsweek reported­—an exemplar, the magazine noted in a follow-up story, of a voting bloc “theorists call ‘millennials.’” While Sand had chosen to model in Milan four years earlier instead of caucusing for Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, he was determined not to miss out on the caucuses again.

“Dean was polarizing,” Sand explained. “Obama brings people together.”

Two men listen at the doorway as Sand speaks during a town hall at Sanity Room in Independence.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

In hindsight, Barack Obama might have given a lot of people the wrong idea. The 2008 caucuses were the springboard for hope and change and turned Iowa into a fleeting symbol of bridge-building possibility. Obama carried the state twice, handily. Sand is the only Democrat to win an open statewide race since, and presidential results have not been close. Some of the biggest rightward shifts anywhere in the Midwest came in Sand’s backyard. While Decorah went nearly 2-to-1 for Kamala Harris, its county swung from Obama +23 in 2008 to Trump +9 in the last election.

Sand sometimes addresses this change by asking his interrogator a question of his own: What did Obama and Trump have in common? His answer is that they rejected the status quo. This can take you only so far. (How similar are Reconstruction and Jim Crow?) But it underpins a deeper argument—that Iowa was never as “blue” as Obama made it seem, nor as “red” as Trump’s successes might suggest. Its true heritage, Sand argues, is a culture of give-and-take: Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley; divided government; independent redistricting; public town halls where a voter can stand up, like the man in the Norman Rockwell painting, and tell a gubernatorial candidate that it is time to create a special hunting season just for crossbows. Iowans still don’t feel served by the status quo, Sand believes. His events are crafted to make them feel at home.

At the town halls, after the group finishes singing, Sand speed-runs through the rest of his unlikely-bedfellows story. There was his career as a white-collar prosecutor (mentored by a Republican) and his successes as auditor, in which he started a government efficiency program that was copied by a Republican in Mississippi. (It is nothing like DOGE; Sand delivers homemade pies to school districts and local governments that find innovative savings.) Then partisanship struck.

Following Sand’s 2022 reelection, wary of his ambitions or maybe just tired of his investigations, GOP lawmakers gutted the auditor’s power to conduct oversight of state agencies. Sand says he is running now in part because they left him with little to do. Republicans, anticipating he will win, have already moved to limit the next governor’s powers. This is emblematic, he argues, of a decadelong trend of Republican leaders in Des Moines using their power to consolidate even more of it, usually at the expense of other governmental bodies.

Meta’s Altoona data center has been featured in TV ads touting the industry’s benefits. But the data center boom has led to a pushback from both parties in the state. Sand tells voters he’d end tax breaks for data centers. His Republican opponent is calling for a full moratorium on new construction.Danny Wilcox-Frazier A grain elevator in Eldon—home to the American Gothic House. Tariffs and high fuel prices have hammered the state’s farm economy in Trump’s second term.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

“Power corrupts,” he begins, “and absolute power—”

The choir finishes the sentence: “corrupts absolutely.”

Early signs look promising for Iowa Democrats. Last year, the party flipped a state Senate seat in a district where Trump won by 11 points, breaking a GOP supermajority. Doug Gross, a former chief of staff to Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, told me Sand was Democrats’ most impressive candidate in years—someone who could speak to voters’ “dissatisfaction” while bridging cultural divides. In Council Bluffs, I met the kind of voter Sand’s campaign dreams of: a young Republican who brought his mother to the event after listening to Sand talk about tracking a 206-inch buck through Des Moines on a podcast called MeatEater; he liked what Sand said about partisanship. J.D. Scholten, a populist state representative who nearly flipped a deep-red congressional seat in 2018, calls Sand a “model of how to run in the Midwest area right now.”

Most of Sand’s proposals, such as his promise to reverse Medicaid privatization or to require private schools that accept voucher funds to open their books to auditors, are not revolutionary. That’s the point. He wants people to make peace with divided government and acknowledge that the “broken clocks” in their communities are still right twice a day. If Trump 2.0 represents the culmination of an era of declining political trust, Sand offers a vision for how to get it back. It means mandatory prison time for public officials who steal public funds and mandatory town halls for every statewide politician.

Blessing Health hospital in Keokuk has been closed since October 2022. The state’s rural health facilities are in crisis. Sand has warned that the Trump administration’s budget cuts will make the situation worse.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

The only time you’ll catch Sand calling for radical structural change concerns the partisan electoral system itself. Sand recommends a 2020 book called The Politics Industry, by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, which argues that the two-party duopoly drives toxicity and inaction by warping incentives for cooperation. The book proposes a two-tiered reform: The top five candidates advance from an open primary, and voters use a ranked-choice system to sort the finalists in the general election. It’s similar to the system currently used in Alaska—an oasis of power sharing and independents.

Sand’s favored variation—when we first met, he described it as “a piece of what Alaska does and a piece of what Fargo, North Dakota, was doing”—would see the general election conducted under what political scientists call “approval voting.” Vote for every one of the five you’d be okay with; the most-approved candidate wins.

“If you made me king for a day…that would be it,” he says. “When we have a political system that actually is oriented to solve problems, we will have fewer problems.”

Sand’s talk of “two private clubs” can make for a sometimes-awkward arrangement with the one he is ostensibly leading. At many of his events, a field organizer who says she met Sand after forming a college study group devoted to cross-partisan news analysis (there is a Rob Sand on every campus) invites attendees to volunteer with the Iowa Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign. Then Sand takes the mic and says parties are ruining America.

Sand told me he intended to pull his weight with party fundraising but wasn’t going to lighten up. “I think there’s a lot of people—and I’ve heard from some of them multiple times—who don’t like the way I talk about the system,” he says. “They don’t like some of the phrases that I use, and so they tell me that. But I take their calls and I answer their text messages. I treat them the way that I would want to be treated, and it’s okay for us to have disagreements. At the end of the day, there are some people who want me to be, quote unquote, ‘more of a Democrat.’ I am who I am.”

His tone may be pitch-perfect and his policies may strike a balance between doable and desirable, but Sand is above all an uncommonly disciplined politician trying not to get burned.

No one in Iowa expects Democrats this year to win a trifecta of the sort that has remade the politics of neighboring ­Minnesota and Illinois. But when I asked Sand whether he would like one down the road, he gave a long answer that included a description of the class he designed at Brown and a leadership seminar he once attended but did not include the word “yes.” Even when he is being a company man, he can go to great lengths to avoid sounding like one. In 2020, worried that Republicans might tamper with the state’s independent redistricting system, Sand encouraged people to vote for Democrats “to stand up for nonpartisanship.” When he talks about downballot races this year, he says Republican leaders have told him that they want smaller majorities.

“I’m not someone that runs around saying that the answer to 10 years of one-party control is to give the other party 10 years,” he tells voters. “If you think that that’s the answer, I invite you to visit California or New York. There, you will find problems. Some of those problems are different because the parties are different, but many are the same because human nature is the same.”

Although he does not spend all that much time punching left, it is not hard to find areas of significant friction. While Sand has vowed to veto any “culture war bill” that comes to his desk, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, he’s on board with barring transgender athletes from participating in girls’ high school sports in the name of “fairness”—something Iowa’s Republican leaders have already done. He does not think soda and candy should be covered under food stamps and said at one town hall that “I don’t understand why people in my party ever wanted to ban private health insurance.”

Northwest Iowa is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. But the state’s industrial farming operations have damaging downstream effects. Voters at Sand town halls want to talk about water quality and cancer rates more than almost any other issue. Danny Wilcox-Frazier

For his running mate, Sand picked Dave Muhlbauer, a cattle and hog farmer from a big Democratic family who serves as supervisor in a county that went 71–28 for Trump—a “bridge builder,” Sand says. But he sometimes tells crowds that he thought seriously about picking a Republican or an independent. When I asked what the sticking point had been, he said, “I don’t want to get super into it” and sort of looked up at the ceiling for 10 seconds, as if trying to decide whether he really did. Sand eventually asked to go off the record. On the record, he’s said it was “hard to do, given some of the issue divides in the parties,” and there was difficulty in finding “folks where you have a demonstrated record on an issue, where there is still overlap.” The parties, after all, are different.

The one thing voters across the political spectrum seem to want to talk about in Iowa right now is whether their water is slowly poisoning them. For years, the state’s cancer rates have been rising while its water quality has been deteriorating. Researchers have placed at least part of the blame on industrial agriculture, which spreads nitrates, forever chemicals, and pesticides into the air, soil, and streams.

Heather and Cordell Hughes with their son, Jagger, spent time at Pleasant Creek Beach after kayaking. “It is what it is,” said Heather when asked about the high E. Coli levels that have caused the state’s Department of Natural Resources to post “Swimming Not Recommended” signs at this and other beaches. “We won’t let it stop us from living our lives. We are perfectly healthy, but I told our son don’t swallow the water.”Danny Wilcox-Frazier

“It’s killing all of us—everything, not just our children, our animals,” a woman told Sand in Council Bluffs. A voter at the same event told me, “They took away all the sensors so we don’t know what’s in the water,” which sounds conspiratorial but more or less happened: As the water crisis intensified, Reynolds and the legislature slashed funding to the University of Iowa’s monitoring system, forcing nonprofits and counties to pick up the bill. Test no nitrates, see no nitrates.

More than just a public health threat, the loss of something so elemental represents a massive failure of self-governance. The election could hinge on what kind of solution Iowans want. Sand, when discussing the state’s years of inaction, evokes Jesus confronting the money changers: “I would love to flip some tables over on water quality in the state of Iowa.” But he has not been the loudest voice on the issue. During the year Sand spent developing a policy, the ultra-­MAHA Republican nominee, Zach Lahn, was explicitly linking cancer with monopolistic corporate agriculture. Sand doesn’t call out Big Ag, nor is he picking a fight with the Iowa Farm Bureau by floating punitive measures. When cancer comes up, he acknowledges the toxins in the water but often broadens the list of culprits to include alcohol, smoking, and radon. Sand’s most ambitious idea to clean the water is to provide more incentives for farmers to participate in conservation programs like wetlands restoration. Cooperation.

 
“I would love to flip some tables
over on water quality
in the state of Iowa.”

Beaver Creek, south of Iowa Falls, Iowa, surrounded by farm fields with numerous tile drainage pipes draining water from the fields directly into the creek.

This is a neat distillation of Sand’s long-standing approach to most structural problems. There is an aversion to bluster, an emphasis on deliverables, a belief that stakeholders often accused of standing in the way would work collaboratively if politicians would let them. It also happens to be the area where Sand’s biography is most vulnerable to a populist critique. His current campaign, like all of his previous ones, is heavily financed by his wife and her family, the Lauridsens—owners of an Iowa conglomerate that makes additives for soup stock and pet food, among other things, and that Christine Lauridsen Sand currently runs as CEO. The Laurid­sens have contributed $11.5 million to Sand’s gubernatorial run, including $7 million before he officially announced. In a 2022 contest that he survived by 2,893 votes, family money helped Sand outspend his opponent 40–1.

Lahn, who upset a Trump-backed congressman in the primary by castigating hedge funds and corporations, told voters at the Iowa State Fair that Sand had been “coronated” because of his wealth and was propped up by a company “which, by the way, makes a lot of the products that end up in our streams and are causing sickness in our state.” The Lauridsen Group declined to comment, but Sand, challenged by a voter at a recent town hall on this idea that his secret ingredient is literally a company that makes secret ingredients, argued that the firm reduced the industry’s excesses by turning waste products into commodities. The family’s money was real, but so were his grassroots contributors; at last count, Sand pointed out, he even had more small-dollar Republican donors than Lahn. Ultimately, it was about trust.

Could Sand, the voter demanded, really separate his family from his responsibilities? “Watch me,” he said.

RelatedZach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?

These questions of who is really what they claim to be hang over the race. Lahn maintains that Sand is using an agreeable disposition and affinity for gas station pizza to mask a secret California-style liberalism. Sand’s most persistent argument against Lahn is that he is an interloper, a “part-time Iowan” who commutes by private plane from Wichita, and in fact has poured his own considerable fortune into the race. (Sand does not generally add, but could, that Lahn moved to Kansas after fighting Medicaid expansion in Montana on behalf of the Koch network, then founded a private school funded by fertilizer magnate Chase Koch and later—after both men divorced—married Koch’s ex-wife.) Sand’s Derek Zoolander era has also come in for a critical reappraisal. At a community center in the town of Harlan, as Sand asked for donations to combat negative ads, an elderly lady in the front row interrupted to ask very nicely if he had really been “a European underwear model.”

“For starters, I’m American,” he said. He changed the subject to volunteering.

Cornfields near Masonville. Iowa is the number one producer of corn in the United States with annual harvests in the range of 2.5 billion bushels of corn.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

Listen to Sand for long enough and you might start to notice that something important seems to be missing from his diagnosis of America’s fraying civic culture. Perhaps some larger force, or figure, pushing people toward cruelty and division. Across the 10 events I attended, Sand spoke for more than nine hours and mentioned Trump zero times. When I asked him about it, he looked at me like I had grown a rack of antlers.

“Why would a guy who is the state auditor, who is running for governor, talk about the president?” Sand says. “Like, this is one of those really big-picture things where I think, again, I’d really like all of us to totally hit the reset button.”

In fact, Sand does talk about how policies in Washington are hurting Iowa. Lahn’s practically giddy support for DOGE, and its attendant slashing of cancer research and food assistance, seem to be fair game. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is throwing rural hospitals into further crisis, is toxic, too. But he insisted to me that the man behind it wasn’t worth his time: “People know who the president is—I don’t need to remind them.”

In an era when the stench of national politics has seeped into every facet of life, it is jarring to go to a political event that avoids it entirely. But it wasn’t just Sand. The singing seemed to have an effect. The closest anyone came to uttering Trump’s name was a woman who brought up the “dictator-friendly Republican Party.” Sand gently cut her off. “I want to bring a lot of people in, and we’ll just talk about Iowa,” he said. That was that.

But if Sand can avoid talking about Trump on the trail, he would find it harder to avoid dealing with him in office. The administration has subjected Democratic governors to federal investigations, blocked their projects, denied their requests for disaster relief, and sicced masked agents on their communities. Sand speaks about the administration’s militant crackdown on immigrants sparingly. Would he co­operate with ICE like the current governor? Sand didn’t want to compare himself to Rey­nolds, he told me: “I’m happy to co­operate in doing good things. I’m not going to cooperate in doing bad things.” I brought up the mass deployments to Illinois and Minnesota. What, I wondered, had Sand learned from that experience?

“I guess if we had those situations here in Iowa, I’d just be interested in assessing them as they are happening here, assuming they would be the same,” he told me. “Obviously, the tactical decisions at the federal level have changed a lot since then, and so I don’t think that we would find ourselves redoing what happened there, and I don’t want to prejudge what might be happening in Iowa later based on what happened there.”

Sand wants a chiller civic life. A politics you can escape from at Thanksgiving, rooted in the idea that more of us would be singing the same tune, more of the time, if the incentives were simply better aligned. Sometimes he’ll literally just offer the mic to a Republican in the room to say whatever they want. And, as if to prove his point, it’s often kind of boring.

Lyle Grimm pushes chickens into the freezer after slaughter at Grimm Family Farm in Williamsburg. Danny Wilcox-Frazier

But it is also hard to avoid the sense that one reason Sand so studiously avoids touching the stove is not because the stove is a construct we really need to get away from or because Iowans really aren’t that interested in the stove, but because the stove is actually very fucking hot. His tone may be pitch-perfect and his policies may strike a balance between doable and desirable, but Sand is above all an uncommonly disciplined politician trying not to get burned.

At the last stop on my tour, a reporter asked him about the Supreme Court’s decision that week to uphold birthright citizenship. It had been the correct decision, Sand said, but it should not have come to that. The reasons it did get so far are worth acknowledging, though. Surely someone who has read Pat Buchanan and Peter Brimelow understands that there is a powerful political movement that doesn’t want to play nice and doesn’t want to harmonize. How, I asked Sand, could he expect to overcome these forces without confronting them?

“I don’t think that reflects most people, I truly don’t,” Sand says. “I think that the vast majority of people, they’re supporting the party they’re supporting because they agree with it more—but that doesn’t mean that they’re thinking that it’s doing a bang-up job.”

And then, just like that, he returned to a more comfortable space. “Look at how low the Democratic Party’s approval ratings are,” he says. “A lot of that’s from Democrats. Why? Because our two-party system sucks at solving problems. People want results.”

If you are a podcast-ready, 44-year-old white male pushing a New Kind of Politics, people are inevitably going to start to talk about what comes next. The chatter has followed Sand since college, when friends speculated that their buddy would run for president. Twenty years ago, when Sand ran Denise O’Brien’s campaign for Iowa ag secretary, she says she believed even then “that Rob would be our governor.” In his first year as auditor, he was already being followed by a Republican tracker. In May, The New York Times included Sand on a list of possible 2028 presidential candidates. Sand is, depending on the publication, “the most dangerous Democrat in Iowa,” the party’s “bowhunting influencer,” or maybe even “Kennedyesque.” Sand is also, according to Sand, kind of tired of being talked about like this.

Sand takes questions at the Dubuque County Fairgrounds.Danny Wilcox-Frazier

“People from somewhere else talk about it like they’re from somewhere else—I’m the state auditor in Iowa, I’m running for governor,” he protested when I asked about his national reputation.

Some of the frenzy of interest and speculation, however, is self-inflicted. It was Sand who pitched a profile of himself to the Times after he was elected and took the reporter bowhunting. One supposes a reporter for The Atlantic did not end up sitting shotgun in his truck three years ago after a day of hitchhiking.

“I know that there’s a lot of people who pay attention to all this stuff, and they get excited about it, even if it has no impact on their life because it’s half a country away—I probably would have described myself that way a long time ago,” he says. “But as I have gotten more and more responsibility, I’ve had to narrow my focus of the things that I read about or care about, because I really can have an impact if I know a lot about stuff that’s happening right here.” Politics is “a hobby for a lot of people,” Sand says; Iowa is life.

But if the job he really wants is indeed the one he’s running for right now, his story resonates outside the state because of the question Sand invites people to answer. It is one that Democrats have been asking for 10 years, and forever—both in Iowa and about it. It is not really so different from the impulse that once compelled a 25-year-old law student from Decorah to triumphantly email a Newsweek reporter hours after Obama won the caucuses and promised to move “beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger.” It is the dream of a Different Kind of Democrat, someone strong in the ways people think of them as weak, a unifying figure from the heartland who can clear away the fog and leave you wondering, if only for a moment, What if politics just felt like this all the time?

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.

I just published a book that exposes Russian disinformation operations. Now I—that is, a fake version of me—have become part of a Russian disinformation operation.

How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America chronicles the shadow war of clandestine influence and disinformation operations—many implemented to aid Trump—that Putin has been mounting against the United States for a decade. It ends with the warning that Moscow would likely attack the ongoing midterm elections to help Trump and the GOP. Within days of the book’s publication two weeks ago, media outlets reported that Russia’s disinformation operatives, using phony accounts on social media platforms, had started hurling derogatory material at Democrats.

Last week, this covert disinformation operation widened to spread scurrilous allegations against Democratic candidates—phony accusations that were falsely attributed to me.

So after writing a book about Putin’s disinformation efforts and noting they posed a threat to the current elections, I am being used by a Russian disinformation network to influence the midterms in Trump’s favor. This is a bizarre snake-eating-its-tail situation.

In the book, I report on several secret Russian disinformation units that produced and disseminated false allegations about Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during the 2024 campaign. One was dubbed Matryoshka by disinformation trackers. (That’s the name for those iconic Russian nesting dolls.) It zapped out on X and other social media platforms assorted lies about Harris: She had an abortion when she was 17. She was exhibiting early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her grandfather was a communist. Her family was connected to Pfizer and Big Pharma.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

When news organizations recently revealed that Matryoshka was at it again, this time concocting videos that purported to be CNN news segments covering Hollywood celebrities trash-talking Democrats (Nazi whores!), I reported that these covert operatives were also generating and posting fake videos that appeared to be CNN spots with damaging information on Democratic senatorial candidates. James Talarico (Texas) “despises” Hasidic Jews because they don’t allow gender affirmation treatment. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) owns a business that has “caused the bee population in Ohio to decline by a factor of nine.” Jon Ossoff (Georgia) has “called for a complete halt to military aid to Israel and for all resources to be redirected to Ukraine.” And there were others.

While I was working on that story, @antibot4navalny, a group of anonymous activists who monitor Russian disinformation, informed me that Matryoshka had also posted on X a supposed Mother Jones video that reported that the Democratic Party had paid $289 million to Mark Thompson, the head of CNN, so the cable news network would run reports that “promote gender transition among minors.” I quickly published a piece exposing this absurd disinformation. After a lawyer for Mother Jones contacted X, the company took down this fraudulent video.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

On Friday, @antibot4navalny informed me that Matryoshka—through an obvious bot account on X—had posted a purported CNN video of me promoting a new book. But the book isn’t How Russia Won. It’s supposedly called Enemies of Democracy for Dummies, and the video declared, “The book will feature over 300 stories related to crimes committed by members of the Democratic Party.”

This counterfeit video displayed the text of a made-up quote from me: “Apparently, there’s a fissure somewhere in the US that leads straight to hell; otherwise, I don’t understand where all these devils from the Democratic Party are coming from.” That’s quite the analysis. The video noted that “information from David Corn’s book will further damage the Democrats’ reputation and standing ahead of the elections.”

Here are screenshots from that video:

Mother Jones Mother Jones

To be clear, none of this is true—though Enemies of Democracy for Dummies is not a bad idea for a book.

Again, a lawyer for Mother Jones reached out to X. But by then, it was the weekend, and this fake CNN video claiming I had published a book full of dirt on Democrats that would affect the election remained online. It looked as if it initially drew nearly 200,000 views, but I was reliably informed that Matryoshka was using bots to juice this number and that this post likely had only reached a few thousand X users.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate.

As with the previous fake and nonsensical video reporting that Mother Jones had revealed a $289 million payment from the DNC to CNN’s chief for pro-trans coverage, this one seemed a bit too silly to have much impact. It was more of an irritation than a cause of great concern.

Then came other fake videos.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate. One “revealed” that a Democratic senatorial candidate “is a closeted gay man who hides his sexual orientation in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle.” It said he had previously been accused of “embezzling public funds to pay for the services of male sex workers.”

With ominous synth music playing, this video segues to footage of me and written text in which I purportedly state that in my Enemies of Democracy for Dummies book “I present evidence” this Democratic candidate “dated underaged boys and had sexual relations with them.” The quote continues: “As a gay man, I find it outrageous that a gay man would hide behind a woman to maintain his lavish lifestyle.” (Not that it matters, but I’m not gay.) The video ends with a card saying, “Read more at MotherJones.com.”

Throughout this one-and-a-half-minute video, the Mother Jones logo appears in the top right corner.

The other videos are all in the same style. (For obvious reasons, I am not linking to them or mentioning the candidates by name.) They claim that a Democratic candidate for governor who served in Vietnam “is suspected of killing 37 civilians” in a massacre during that war, that another Democratic gubernatorial candidate recruited minors into sex work and “while working for the Girl Scouts…organized sex parties for members of the Democratic Party,” that a third Democratic candidate for governor caused “a fatal car accident while under the influence of alcohol,” and that another Democratic gubernatorial nominee sold crack to college students, “resulting in 17 deaths,” and so on.

Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels.

Each of these videos features me offering a colorful quote about the allegation and noting it’s straight out of Enemies of Democracy for Dummies. Similar to the bogus video about the DNC payment to the CNN chief, some of these X posts show nearly 200,000 views. But the real numbers are likely much lower. They have not, as of this writing, gone viral. (X did not respond immediately to a request to delete the posts with these videos.)

So the journalist who wrote a book to call attention to Putin’s disinformation crusade against American democracy is now being used by Moscow’s disinformation operatives to subvert the midterm elections for Trump’s benefit.

I’ve been asked by colleagues and friends if this is frightening. Not yet. Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels. And, as we all know, it’s tough to beat back a lie on the internet. We’re all vulnerable to a cyber assault.

There are five weeks to go to Election Day. How extensive might Putin’s war on the midterms become? How far will he go to boost Trump and the Republicans? If Trump tries to spark chaos and a crisis with accusations of vote fraud or actions to interfere with the election and the vote tally, Putin’s disinformation army can be expected to do whatever it can to bolster any false claims and conspiracy theories flying about—or to cook up its own.

One reason I wrote How Russia Won was to counter the false “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative peddled relentlessly for years by Trump, Republicans, MAGA influencers, and right-wing media personalities who have denied Russia has been covertly intervening in US elections. By echoing Putin’s own denials, these useful idiots have been complicit in a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy. My point was to show the United States has been under continuous assault from Moscow, as Russia has schemed to assist Trump and the Republicans. With this disinformation operation incorporating truly fake news about me, Putin’s Matryoshka crew has proved the premise of my book.

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

Recent attacks on US universities by the Trump administration have built on decades of efforts by libertarian donor networks, fossil fuel companies, and conservative think tanks to reshape university governance and increase outside influence, according to a new study.

The authors of the new perspective study argue that the erosion of university autonomy has left colleges more vulnerable to corporate interests, especially within climate and energy research.

In 2025, the Trump administration froze billions of dollars in research funding, launched investigations into 75 institutions and pushed colleges to sign agreements supporting administration policies in exchange for federal funding. The federal government canceled $4 million in climate research grants at Princeton University alone and accused scientists of fueling “climate anxiety.”

If you’re a young researcher watching that, you might think twice about asking a question that could cost you your funding, said Noel Healy, of Salem State University, the lead author of the study published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science.

“Climate policy is only as good as the evidence behind it. When the industry being regulated gets to shape the questions researchers ask, it ends up shaping the policy too,” he said.

The Academic Freedom Index, which measures how freely scholars and universities can teach, research and express ideas without interference, found that US institutional autonomy fell from 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025, on a scale of 0 to 4.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control.”

“Since 2025, scientists have been deleting words like ‘climate change’ from their grant applications because those words can get an application rejected,” Healy said. “Some universities have shut down programs before the government even asked them to, hoping to avoid becoming a target. You don’t have to ban speech if people fear that speaking up will cost them their funding. People start deciding it’s safer to stay quiet.”

Outside influence on US universities is not new. In the 1920s, electric utilities worked with academics to defend their monopoly positions and oppose regulations. Fossil fuel companies followed suit in the 1950s, funding research to sow doubt about the public health impacts of their products. Internal industry documents have shown that companies viewed academic research as a way to build credibility and influence public debate.

Corporate-funded research was only one way powerful interests influenced universities. Libertarian donor networks also influenced program content, faculty hiring and gained appointments to university governing bodies. For example, David Koch, the billionaire industrialist whose wealth came from Koch Industries, gave more than $185 million to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and served as a lifetime member to the elite research university’s highest governing body.

Between 2010 and 2020, six fossil fuel companies alone gave more than $700 million to US universities, helping to legitimize industry solutions to the climate crisis and undermine regulatory approaches. Some of this funding came with donor agreements that gave outside actors control over decisions traditionally made by faculty, such as in hiring and curricula.

At the same time, donor-influence models were written into state law. For example, in 2016, the Arizona state legislature created the first publicly funded libertarian academic center. Other states have followed suit. These centers bypass faculty control, instead answering to legislators. These centers are expected to receive $50 million in US taxpayer dollars during the 2025-2026 school year, according to reporting by the Hechinger Report.

State legislatures have also tried to limit faculty power through legislation that could abolish tenure, block faculty participation in lawsuits, and police educational programming. From 2021 to 2023, more than 150 state bills were introduced targeting tenure, faculty governance, and diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the Energy Research & Social Science perspective.

“Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom.”

Soaring tuition and student debt, which are also products of the corporate model, have contributed to mistrust in higher education. The authors of the study argue that to regain public trust, administrators must confront how corporate donors have reshaped their priorities, disclose donor contributions and influence, and give faculty committees the ability to reject funding that undermines the university’s public mission and create conflicts of interest. Union contracts can protect faculty and empower them to confront corporate capture.

“Transparency lets you see the deal, but it doesn’t let you stop it. Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom,” Healy said.

Universities don’t have to start from scratch. For example, the national UnKoch My Campus campaign published a model gift-acceptance policy that gives faculty a say before gifts with conditions are accepted, makes donor agreements public, and sets clear grounds for rejecting gifts that give donors influence over hiring or teaching. Universities can draw on examples like this to write their own rules, Healy said.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control,” he said. “Universities came under attack before those governments had full control, not after.”

MIT has previously said it would not divest its endowment from fossil-fuel companies, arguing that working with industry could help develop climate solutions. The MIT Energy Initiative has also said that funders have no control over the content or findings of its research reports.

The first hint that I needn’t be so anxious to interview Min Jin Lee came as the bestselling author descended the creaky stairs of her five-story Harlem townhouse and pronounced my name. Not in the way my brain has articulated it for decades, smoothed over by an anglicized version that made it easy for teachers to call out from an attendance roll. Which is to say, Lee, on a Friday afternoon in August, pronounced my name the way the people who brought me into this world had intended.

The next came when Lee, smartly dressed in a gray vest and jeans, with a pair of delicate drop earrings, doled out lively profanities. She was recalling her time attending Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case that would later reach the Supreme Court and dismantle race-based affirmative action, as part of her nearly decade-long research process for American Hagwon, the much-anticipated third installment of a planned quartet dedicated to Korean diasporas. As a supporter of affirmative action, she witnessed testimony teeming with stereotypical portrayals of Asian American students, including, as Lee puts it, making them out to be like “machines.”

“I sat there in the press box, and I remember thinking, this whole idea that Asian Americans have shitty personalities—that’s really shitty. It’s a really shitty thing to say.”

“Also, we’re talking about children,” she continued, her voice intensifying. “How dare you insult the children of my community?”

To hear Lee condemn the racial stereotyping of Asian Americans, including the “stupid, horrible racial epithet called ‘tiger parenting,’” with such blunt rigor, in a living room sumptuously bedecked with books, was deeply satisfying. My own fondness for profanity, my Korean-born mother used to warn, was a sign “of an uneducated person.”

“I think your mom was right,” Lee said, warmly laughing as I shared the memory with her.

American Hagwon is Lee’s third novel and follows Pachinko, the vast 2017 saga that traces four generations of a Korean family as they weather war, discrimination, and cruelty in Japanese-occupied Korea and in Japan. A finalist for the National Book Award, Pachinko established Lee as a master of sweeping historical narrative. American Hagwon, on the other hand, takes place in more contemporary times, with Lee’s aperture shifting between a multigenerational family drama and broader meditations on the human costs of heedless ambition.

What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

“I asked myself, if I had one more book to write, I wanted to write about what’s most important to Koreans around the world, and it was so clear to me that it was education,” Lee said. “It’s not money. It’s not religion. It’s not status. It’s actually education. This kind of faith in it, even if you hated it.”

As its title telegraphs, the Korean for-profit tutoring academies known as hagwons provide a central motif in Lee’s latest novel. Hagwons typically offer classes from elementary school all the way through high school, but it is the courses aimed at boosting test scores for college entrance exams that they are best known for. (If you’re imagining a Korean equivalent to a Kaplan prep, think bigger; in South Korea, hagwons are a multibillion-dollar industry that one of the country’s leading English-language newspapers once described as “thriving on anxiety.”) To outsiders, they can conform to a long-standing stereotype of Asian students: relentlessly driven, much to their own personal misery, with cutthroat parents digging into their bank accounts to further their children’s competitive advantage.

The criticism hagwons attract can be well earned; as I once experienced, fierce competition, at times bordering on toxic, is often central to the hagwon mentality. But for Lee, sensationalistic portrayals of them risk reinforcing simplistic racist tropes. For kids in the United States, hagwons are also often places of community, one of the few spaces, in a white world, to connect with other kids of Korean descent. They can also function as de facto daycare centers, she said, where parents can have their kids picked up from school, safely driven to the hagwon, and “given a juice box, pretzel rod, and worksheets” instead of having a child “stay at home and have a shelf fall on them.” In a country lacking adequate childcare, Lee sees hagwons as “an ethnic solution to a state problem.”

American Hagwon arrives amid a wider reckoning over the value of a top-tier education, particularly in the United States, as the yearly total cost of some colleges surpasses $100,000 and AI threatens the very foundations of what it means to hold knowledge. There’s an “anxiety that the modern person feels right now,” Lee said, referring to the existential questions born out of AI.

A similar anxiety courses through American Hagwon, as multiple families of Korean ethnicity, compelled as so many émigrés are by the desire to secure better futures for their children, are upended by unexpected outside forces, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

When we first encounter the novel’s central family, the Kohs, John and Helen appear to be typical middle-class parents who had just moved to Seoul from Sydney, Australia, dutifully attentive to their three children’s education, while John toils away as a manager at a large corporation. But when he endures a devastating betrayal, both professionally and personally, it forces the family to emigrate, eventually landing in Southern California. Throughout the sacrifices that follow—John takes up a physically demanding job at a fish-fry restaurant; Mido, the youngest and only daughter, pauses her college education and works at an American hagwon to support her family, including her brothers’ education—the thread of familial devotion grows only stronger.

It is through this lens of empathy, paired with prolific research, that Lee shows us how hagwons reflect the deep-rooted desires of a culture fixated on upward mobility and one that has long identified education as the ticket to a vertical trajectory. As one mother in American Hagwon notes: “The cost doesn’t matter. We all know you have to pay up for the best coaching.” Still, such a narrow view of success inflicts its own damage, raising some of the deeper questions in the novel: What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

Min Jin Lee once worked as a corporate lawyer, but quit to become a novelist after thinking: “I don’t want to die working this way.”Mary Kang

The middle child of three sisters who emigrated with their parents from Seoul to the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York, when she was 7, Lee did not attend a hagwon. But she wrestled with such questions during the brief period she worked as a corporate lawyer after Georgetown Law, its own kind of pressure cooker. “The more work I would do, the more work I would be given,” she recalled. “Capitalism, right? Because I am not getting paid more. The more hours that I bill, the more the firm makes.”

“I was really thinking,” she told me, “I don’t want to die working this way.”

So Lee, who was diagnosed with a serious liver disease in high school, quit law to pursue a full-time career in writing, publishing her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, in 2007.

Were her parents—Korean immigrants who owned a wholesale jewelry store in midtown Manhattan—ever disappointed by her decision to quit law to pursue something as impractical as a career as a novelist? I wondered. “My parents aren’t pushy,” Lee replied. She stressed, however, that the support for the literary ventures she now enjoys did not always come easily. On the same day Pachinko was published, her husband lost his job in finance.

What followed is a familiar middle-class story, a moment of great upheaval not unlike the devastating twists that upend the families of American Hagwon. Lee, who was 48 at the time, and her husband struggled to obtain healthcare and navigate the administrative hellhole of COBRA; her efforts to find a job in teaching were regularly dashed. “Absolutely nobody would give me interviews,” Lee said. “It didn’t matter that I had two published novels. So what? So does everybody else. Some people were very unkind. Truly, it kind of struck me how cruel younger people could be to somebody older.”

In a gentler world, locking eyes with a life-threatening disease would not be the only way to clarify how we want to live. But Lee’s decision to quit law cuts to the central tension that roils throughout American Hagwon: What constitutes a meaningful life? Toward the end of the novel, Mido and her hagwon colleagues ask their students’ parents: What does an impressive résumé, all that schooling, and a lucrative career amount to if you’re miserable?

“Our children cannot know everything,” Lion, one of the hagwon’s co-owners, tells the parents during a lecture he organizes about the value and pressures of education: “This flawed but worthy American project of immigration, reinvention, and multiple chances creates more possibilities, but it requires us to explore different paths in order to have lives of greater purpose.” Any sense of “failure” that creeps in when kids don’t get into their top-choice school, Lion continued, is “a terrible way to start their higher-educational experience, and adulthood.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life,” Lee said. “What I really saw when I was doing the research is that the people who are doing the best were not necessarily the wealthiest or the most elite; they’re the ones who actually had love in their lives.” The Kohs, despite having lost so much, are clearly animated by such love.

After we spoke for about an hour, we climbed the creaky stairs and reached Lee’s office on the third floor of the townhouse, where, surrounded by family photos, she offered snacks. First, a pack of black garlic almonds, and then Kopiko, an Indonesian coffee-flavored hard candy that she noted is ubiquitous in K-dramas—even though it’s not Korean.

I wasn’t familiar with either and accepted both. As I left her Harlem home, I couldn’t help but walk faster, excited to share the Kopiko with my mom. After all, it was her sacrifice and hers alone that afforded me my own time at a hagwon in Edison, New Jersey, while she picked up shifts at a nearby dry cleaner. I’ll always have a sense of uneasiness about that time. But at that moment, picking up the pace as I headed down to the subway clutching coffee candies, I felt only gratitude.

A sign is placed in the yard of a residential property off US Route 322 approaching the small town of Philipsburg in central Pennsylvania. The sign appears almost as if it is floating in the lush green grass. Greeting passersby entering this town of some 3,000 residents, it displays a weeping Statue of Liberty covering her face in shame and sorrow before Route 322 twists and curls through the heart of town.

Philipsburg is a town with a history built on timber, industry, and coal. Industry has disappeared, and it’s been decades since coal was a significant employer. Yet one employer has remained in Philipsburg: GEO Group, the second largest for-profit prison company in the US. 

Yard sign on US Route 322 at the southern entrance to Philipsburg.

Eager to replace lost jobs, developers from the private prison company Cornell Corrections, and the state, believed the construction of a prison would fill this need. Built on the grounds of an old strip mine, Moshannon Valley Correctional Facility opened in 2006 and operated as a federal prison for fifteen years. Cornell was acquired by GEO Group in 2010, and in 2021, the prison temporarily closed only to reopen later that same year as an immigration detention center. ICE signed a 5-year agreement with Clearfield County. Clearfield County then signed a “management agreement” with the owner and operator of the prison, GEO Group. The prison was renamed the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC). 

Buried away and completely hidden out of sight in a dense forest, more than 1,600 immigrants are imprisoned there on any given day in what is the largest immigration detention center in the northeast. Eighty-five percent of those detained in MVPC have no criminal record. In 2025, two immigrants died in ICE custody in MVPC, including 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, found hanging by his neck in a shower stall on August 5.

In April, dozens of detainees launched a hunger strike to protest conditions. While anti-ICE and anti-detention advocates have sustained an active campaign to shut down the facility, many Philipsburg residents and local officials see things differently. An annual $200,000 administrative fee to Clearfield County for serving as the middleman in this pass-through of federal funds is one reason for keeping it open. The benefits of local tax revenue and jobs remain the other. 

Moshannon Valley Processing Center Philipsburg, Pennsylvania

“I have no problem with the facility,” a local resident told me at a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast one Sunday morning. “When jobs are lost, that place provides something for people here. If they don’t put immigrants here, they’ll find somewhere else. Keep the jobs here. I don’t have an issue with it.” 

Outside its major urban centers—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, and the capital, Harrisburg—as well as the town of State College in Center County, home to Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania voters helped return Trump to office. Despite Democratic control of the governor’s office and House, rural counties have driven Pennsylvania to rank fifth nationally in 287(g) agreements, which allow local law enforcement to help carry out some ICE duties. Currently, 130 township and borough police departments, county and district attorney’s offices, constables and sheriffs statewide assist ICE. In 2026, nearly 5,500 immigrants have been arrested and detained in Pennsylvania. None of the state’s eight ICE detention facilities compare in size and function to MVPC. It incarcerates locals and out-of-state transfers in a system structured to sever and isolate immigrants from family, community, legal counsel, and due process. Moshannon has become a vital instrument in Trump’s mass deportation—rather, mass detention—machine. 

An ICE bus filled with detained immigrants travels down GEO Drive from the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC). Light from MVPC in the distance illuminates storm clouds during a heavy rain.

It’s also a valuable piece of GEO Group’s “secure services” portfolio. Invoices obtained through open records requests show that from January 2025 to May of this year, GEO earned nearly $90 million in revenue from MVPC. As ICE retreats from using warehouses to expand detention capacity, it has spent more than $2.2 billion to directly purchase existing detention facilities from GEO Group’s competitor, CoreCivic. During a Q2 earnings call, GEO Group CEO George Zoley reported that the company was in an “active process” for the sale of several turn-key facilities. In late August, ICE published a solicitation to award contracts for “turn-key detention facilities” in four regions in the US, including central Pennsylvania. In early September, with the contract for MVPC set to expire at the end of the month, DHS requested a 6-month extension. Two weeks later, Clearfield County Commissioner approved the extension in a 2-1 vote.

Church service at Christian & Missionary Alliance Church in Philipsburg. July 19, 2026. “It should stay because of jobs,” a man named Larry tells me before the service. “Because they give $200,000 to Clearfield County for every year of that contract. And it’s not hurting anybody. That money goes to the county. Even if it helps pay for the annual fair, it’s still worth having people there. They got to have a jail anyway. They got to put the people somewhere.” After a Sunday service at Bible Baptist Church of Philipsburg, July 19, 2026. “Politics fade into everything. This is not a local issue where people are against it. If they were being mistreated up there, I’d say, ‘This has to stop.’ That’s where I stand on moral issues. But heaven has its policies to get you in and our country has its policies to get in too. The law of the land must be obeyed. They’re in there for a reason. They didn’t take them because they didn’t do nothing.”

Activists like Timothy Smith, who chairs the Bill of Rights Defense Committee-Keystone State, anticipate based on these moves that DHS is either preparing to contract directly with GEO Group or outright purchase MVPC.

“This will give DHS and GEO more long-term stability and release both from the local risks and oversight that have strained the operation of MVPC. I truly think it will be an outright purchase,” Smith says. Both situations would enrich GEO Group shareholders while landing a financial blow to Clearfield County and Philipsburg. In both scenarios, immigrants and the pain, trauma, grief and loss experienced by their families—including US citizens—are both the raw materials and byproducts of profit-making maneuvers.  

A mother sells everything and relocates to Maryland so she and her son can be closer to her husband. He’s languished in MVPC now for over 500 days. A father and his 18-year-old son, detained together during a routine check-in with ICE, put the pieces of their lives back together. ICE separated them. The father remained detained in Philadelphia. The teenager was transferred to MVPC. A woman in New York City struggles to find legal strategies to stop the deportation of her husband to eastern Europe. As we talk, he’s now in his eighth day in MVPC’s solitary confinement unit. A man sits alone in his studio apartment outside of Pittsburgh and confronts the “empty space” in his life. Faced with the reality of spending more months detained in Moshannon, his husband made the decision to self-deport. 

Charlotte

Charlotte’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for over one and a half years. She was born in California; her husband is from Afghanistan and arrived in the US in 2016 on a valid student visa. They met in 2019, had a child together and got married in 2021. They lived in Illinois, where he received a REAL ID driver’s license and a work permit valid until 2029. In early 2025, while visiting family in Maryland, he was pulled over by a sheriff in West Virginia. No reason was provided for his arrest. He was transferred to ICE detention at Moshannon Valley Processing Center. To be closer to her husband in detention, Charlotte sold everything and moved to Maryland.

Charlotte talks about the impact of her husband’s detention on their son JJ.

“I’m a US citizen and I have a child. They want us to be left with nothing. So then do we give up? But at this point, we can’t give up. Because they won’t even let him self-deport. They won’t let him sign voluntary departure. They won’t let him do anything.”

At the age of two, Charlotte’s son was diagnosed with ADHD and autism. He was incredibly close to his father: “I wish daddy was home. We’re going to fight for daddy to get home. We’re not going to give up.” Charlotte holds hundreds of pages of personal documents, including her marriage license, birth certificates, tax returns, and deeds to homes she and her husband have owned. She prepared the paperwork for an interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to support the change of her husband’s status. The interview date was postponed.

“They want us to be left with nothing, so we do give up.”
We cry everytime we leave a visit.
It’s still so sad.
We can’t even hug him.

Charlotte talks about the pain of going to visit her husband in the detention center.

“We went for my child’s birthday. We went for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. We sit there with him all day wishing we can hug him. But we can’t…We’re trying to get him out and we’re just at a loss. Like, what’s next? What are we going to do?…We just want something other than being locked up. We just want a hug. We just want to move on with answers. That’s all we’re asking, but we still have none of that.”

“Even though the person didn’t pass away, it kind of feels like that. Like he’s been taken away from us. The only thing that’s been helping us is our visits. It’s him being there and seeing him behind the plexiglass. That’s what’s kept us going. If we couldn’t do that, we would be completely lost.”

Elsewhere in the state, networks of trained volunteers accompany immigrants to ICE check-ins, observe courts for ICE waiting outside, and monitor neighborhoods for ICE activity. As Pennsylvania provides no state funding for the defense of immigrants facing detention and deportation, nonprofit legal service providers take on as many clients as possible yet find themselves stretched beyond capacity. Activists and community members attend local government meetings to stop involvement with ICE or end detention. 

Kris

Kris, 28, met his partner in mid-2024. Originally from Brazil, his partner fled to the US and was permitted to stay in the country. Immigration officials scheduled his first hearing for 2028. The two fell in love and were legally married in Pennsylvania in December 2025. At a routine ICE check-in, he was detained and transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center. Faced with months in detention and deportation, he asked for “voluntary departure.” The judge approved the request, and he voluntarily deported himself to Brazil in the middle of June.

Kris, whose partner self-deported after being detained at a routine immigration check-in.

“We provided all of the evidence under the sun,” Kris told me. “Everything you could have with your spouse we had, but nothing was recognized. They only tried to twist it into a fraud. My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered. I’ve been left with a silence that I wasn’t used to.

“My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered.”

“Growing up, knowing I was gay before gay marriage was legalized and having that stigma placed upon people who were gay, I felt persecuted at that time. And now I’m encountering another form of persecution; I feel like I can’t marry who I want. I can’t live the life that I’m entitled to have with the person that I love. It’s so dehumanizing. It’s like he’s less-than. I feel persecuted for loving an immigrant and marrying an immigrant. ‘Oh, you married an immigrant? This is what you deserve.’”

Eastern Europe

This woman’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for five months. She’s a US citizen. Her husband was born in Eastern Europe and settled in the United States in 2023. He received a work permit, had been through USCIS biometric processing, and was issued an ID. In early 2026, while working as a delivery driver in Nassau County, he was pulled over for a broken headlight. He was arrested and then released. When released, ICE arrested and placed him in detention. He found out his lawyer had never filed his asylum paperwork with the courts. He had no criminal record.

Asking to remain anonymous, this woman sits in her apartment in New York.

“Initially he was hopeful he would get out. Then he started getting angry, especially when they put him in solitary confinement. He couldn’t understand what was happening. They put him on major depression medication, but he started losing his emotions. I wasn’t sure if he was at risk of suicide, because I knew how he was changing. It’s like watching somebody die in front of you for a prolonged period of time.”

“I think for the majority of the detained, there’s at least two people on the outside who are fighting for them, struggling. There’s a lot of people who are unseen. You can count the number of detained individuals in ICE facilities, but you can’t really count the number of people affected.

After we met, her husband was transferred to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. In late July he was deported on a series of flights to his country of birth.”

Father and Son Detained

At the age of fourteen, this young man and his family arrived at the US border, immediately applied for asylum, and followed all US immigration and asylum policies and procedures. In early 2026, just after his eighteenth birthday, ICE asked him and his father to appear early for their immigration-check in. When they arrived, ICE detained both of them “due to available bed space.” Within days, ICE separated the two. The young man was transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

After two months in detention in Moshannon and weeks of lawyers tirelessly working and battling his case through the immigration court system, an immigration judge evaluated the actual merits of his asylum claim, and granted him asylum. As a result, he was immediately released. The father, 35, and his son, 18, sit together in their home.

“You could never be calm in there.”

“I didn’t think they could arrest me for just being there,” he said of the ICE appointment. “The second day I was in Moshannon, I got a bloody nose—and I would get bloody noses often. I think it was the stress, my fear, or worrying about what was going to happen. I’d never done anything wrong and I felt undignified. There were a lot of older adults and I didn’t know any of them, so I was very scared because I was the youngest person there. There was a lot of stress and a lot of fighting. There were people who had been in there for years and others who were there for one or two days and then deported. You could never be calm in there.”

John Streno, Mayor

“It’s always been important to the community. It’s never been a big problem. It’s only been a positive for us in this town,” Mayor John Streno said to me as we sat on the front porch of his home in Philipsburg.

John Streno has been the mayor of Philipsburg for over twenty years. Prior to retiring, he spent ten years as a correctional officer for GEO at Moshannon, before it was an immigration detention facility.

When describing Moshannon Valley Processing Center as an ICE facility, the mayor said, “To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetery. It’s a place where people come and end up and you never see them again. They come to the prison, they end up there, and then they go away.”

Bobbi Erickson, co-founder of the advocacy group Indivisible: Mayday, addresses county commissioners at a Clearfield County Commissioners Meeting on July 14, 2026. The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to Legal service providers. Demand for Defender Association of Philadelphia services has rise three times more than the capacity.

Community members provide comments on why the current 5-year contract between the county and GEO should not be renewed: “I come here today with a broken heart. My plan for today was to have somebody from Moshannon call and give his testimony and his words to you. Last night he told me he was too scared to do so, that he was afraid his case would be impacted, that he would be taken away from his family and he would lose his home. He was scared to speak about his experiences. You don’t hear the stories inside this facility because it’s run-on fear. People inside ask me, ‘Why am I here?’ The only thing I can ever tell them is, for profit, and because the men in charge won’t listen to their stories.”

The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to legal service providers. The state ranks fourth in the number of habeas corpus petitions filed by immigrants since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Since December of 2025, habeas petitions filed by the Defender Association of Philadelphia have resulted in the release of 303 people—but demand for their services is three times more than they have the capacity to provide.

“In January 2025, they just started detaining everyone for non-criminal reasons. Regular asylum seekers living their lives, contributing to their community, not doing anything wrong,” Lilah Thompson, chief of immigration for the community unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said to me. “Detention numbers just shot up. There are all these ways in which ICE began ramping up detention, stripping people of rights and status or pending status—detaining people that have no business being in detention, because nothing had changed in their situation to warrant it. ICE is just churning bodies into the detention system.”

Legal Support

“My client is a gentleman who is married to a US citizen. He was on his pathway to citizenship. He was literally one month away from getting his green card when he was detained by ICE, completely unjustly, no warrant whatsoever. He was moved to Moshannon, but thankfully we got him moved back to the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. I was prepared to not really lose this case, but try to encourage my client to stay in detention for the six or eight months needed to wait out his appeal. I kind of sent this lawsuit against the court as a Hail Mary, just to show that we did everything we could do. And the fact that not only did we get the decision we wanted, but also got it pretty quickly to me, it’s a blessing and a miracle.”

Standing outside the ICE office in downtown Philadelphia, immigration attorney Albert Robles waits for a client to be released from the FDC Philadelphia immigration detention center.

The Witnesses

Moments before the photo above was taken, in Evans City in Butler County north of Pittsburgh, local police and ICE pulled over the driver for a broken taillight. He was a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who worked laying carpets; he showed his ID but was arrested and detained by ICE. “I told them he has a work permit but he didn’t have it on him,” said his co-worker, who was sitting in the passenger seat when the arrest happened. “They arrested him anyway.”

A reflection of Jenny, a volunteer for the organization Frontline Dignity, in the window of a work van.

Official Legal Observers from Frontline Dignity stand outside the Domestic Violence court in downtown Pittsburgh. “We’ve witnessed ICE make detentions inside the courthouse and outside when people are on their way in. That’s why we stage ourselves outside, because people wouldn’t even have a chance to get in.” Jenny patrols areas of Cranberry Township for potential ICE activity. Any ICE sightings or incidents of ICE arrests are witnessed and reported to a larger network of monitors. In July 2026, Frontline Dignity documented 55 confirmed ICE incidents in their area and 67 known detentions.

“It’s devastating what’s been going on in Pittsburgh for the last year and a half,” Jenny says. “And it feels so incredibly heavy and dark, and it feels like everything escalated so quickly. Showing up and making sure we’re there to observe and help seems like the only hopeful thing to do at this point, to try to help everybody through what’s going on. It’s sad and it’s devastating.”

In Philipsburg, organizers and activists canvas the town, educate residents and ask for their support and signatures on a petition to push the three county commissioners to not renew the management agreement with GEO Group.

“I think they should ship all of them motherfuckers back to wherever they came from and then all of you Democrats should go and follow them,” a man says to one canvasser.

“That’s very American of you,” the canvasser politely replies. 

To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetary.
It’s a place where people come and end up
and you never see them again.

A bus transfers immigrants detained by ICE from Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

It’s Saturday, July 11. Several thousand people sit in folding chairs along Presqueisle Street in downtown Philipsburg. They wait for the 2026 Heritage Days Festival parade to start. The theme this year is “Let Freedom Ring.” I walk the length of Presqueisle Street, randomly asking people for their feelings about detaining immigrants at Moshannon. One woman says she has friends who were recently hired there and now make $30 an hour.

“I have no problem with those illegals being put up there,” her husband adds.

Another man says jobs and money are the only things that matter, while another says, “Those people detained there bring money to the town.”

A woman talks with me in a whisper away from her family.

Parade for the Philipsburg Heritage Days, a 3-day festival that runs the week after the 4th of July. The theme of the 2026 festival was ‘Let Freedom Ring’. People sit in front of the Philips Hotel for the Philipsburg Heritage Days Parade.

“To treat people like they are all criminals and animals, that’s where I have to draw the line. It’s morally wrong,” she says.

“All the years I’ve lived in this town, I’ve never heard too much about that facility until ICE took it over. Until people from ICE went in there,” a woman shared with me as she sat with family on their porch on Presqueisle Street. “For a long time I didn’t realize it was an ICE facility. And I didn’t even know what the difference was. I don’t really agree with the whole way the immigrant thing’s being handled. I think they’re taking people they don’t need to take. They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody. But here and the way I feel, we’re the minority.”

“They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody.”

On this same Saturday, on Route 322 at the opposite end of Philipsburg, volunteers set up a canopy and table on a corner of a small road that leads up to Moshannon Vallery Processing Center. They provide information and resources to families who have driven hours to visit loved ones. Families have come from New York, New Jersey, Maryland and other parts of Pennsylvania. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to him,” a man says of his son-in-law. “It’s been so painful on his mother.” He and the young man’s mother drove four hours from New York to visit him. 

Visiting Moshannon

For entry, GEO requires visitors to adhere to strict dress code rules. That day, two parents drove four hours from New York to visit their son who had already been detained for three months. Unaware GEO does not permit entrance to female visitors with metal supports in their bras, the mother used the tent to change into a new bra, part of a collection of free clothing available to visitors.

On Saturday, July 11, volunteers set up a changing tent on the corner of the road leading to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

This man, a US citizen, drove four hours from Maryland to visit his brother who has been detained in MVPC for over a month. His brother has lived in the US for 26 years. GEO Group employees denied his visitation, citing his open-toed shoes, which they said did not adhere to dress code rules. He drove to a nearby Dollar General and bought a pair of sneakers, then returned.

“He was pulled over while driving home from work, arrested and put here. He’s never done anything wrong.,” he said. “It’s my third visit. What’s happening is crazy. It’s like they took a plate of spaghetti and threw it against the wall to see what sticks. That’s what happened to my brother.”

Behind them and their SUV parked on the corner, a large roadside billboard funded by several activist groups provides a backdrop to the efforts of the volunteers and the stories of the five other families that stop to ask questions. The billboard compares the costs to detain one immigrant in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for a year versus the cost to educate one child in Philipsburg, and asks who benefits from the detentions. It’s not only a parting message to everyone as they leave Philipsburg on 322, but also a harsh reminder of the yard sign, and Lady Liberty’s somber greeting to visitors, a few miles back.  

A tent set up by volunteers to provide information and assistance to people visiting family members detained in MVPC on July 11, 2026, and an anti-ICE billboard at the road that leads to MVPC off US Route 322 as one exits Philipsburg. The billboard is funded by Invisible: Mayday, the Shut Down Detention Campaign and Pittsburgh Women for Democracy,.

Greg Constantine produced this work, the third in a series documenting immigration detention and its wider impact in Oklahoma, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

This story, originally published by Grist in collaboration with Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal as part of the Report for America Local News Initiative, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There are many ways to enjoy the outdoors, but thrill-seekers visiting the nation’s national forests often turn to motorized recreation. They might ride ATVs along dirt trails, snowmobile down winding tracks, or go off-roading in 4x4s. The United States Forest Service’s approach to all such forms of recreation on trails can be summed up in four words: closed unless designated open. 

Unless a trail is explicitly designated as open to off-highway vehicles, such as side-by-sides and dirt bikes, it can only be used for nonmotorized recreation. Most national forests have travel management plans that outline when a trail is open for nonmotorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding, or hiking, and when it’s open to off-highway vehicles. These plans tend to be exhaustive and list which types of motorized or nonmotorized access are allowed on every trail, two-track, and road. The strict guidelines are a result of a Forest Service policy called the travel management rule. 

But the Trump administration wants to turn the current rule on its head. In late August, the Forest Service announced its plan to revise the rule so that trails are open unless designated closed. It would mean forest managers would be expected to prioritize motorized access on service roads, trails, and even backcountry airfields. 

The US Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, has said that the move will increase recreation access and “simplify regulatory requirements.” The change is being opposed by sportsmen, backcountry horsemen, conservation organizations, and nonmotorized recreation groups. They say opening up all Forest Service trails to motorized access could have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and wildlife that rely on these lands. Healthy, intact forest ecosystems are also critical for sequestering carbon in a warming world.

“I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest. But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive.” 

Hillary Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, a public lands advocacy organization, said everyone who uses forest lands, from recreationists and ranchers with grazing leases to those in the timber industry, relies on the clarity provided by travel management plans. The Forest Service’s formal announcement to revise the rule is “vague,” “somewhat poorly written,” and “difficult to follow,” Eisen said. Without clear guidelines in place, she fears motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape. 

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean if you can get your side-by-side on there, have at it.” 

Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, witnessed firsthand the environmental damage that can happen from off-highway vehicle use on the Middle Fork of the Judith River, which runs through the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana.

Prior to 2023, there were more than 80 entrances and 27 shallow spots along a 6-mile stretch of the river, where various types of vehicles, including cars and side-by-sides, crossed. As these vehicles cut across, they caused erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn. By 2020, the sediment runoff had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish, Edgington said. 

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over-widened and shallow, creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.” 

So Edgington brought together a diverse coalition of groups, including the off-highway vehicle community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, environmental groups, and federal and local government agencies to address the issue. They rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of the off-highway vehicle and jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The vehicles crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules; the Forest Service had designated the area open for motorized recreation, but the number of stream crossings degraded the health of the river and the threatened species that lived there, including the cutthroat trout. “I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.” 

The travel management plan, written by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, recognized this impact to the river and the need to reroute the road out of the river corridor. Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington said that because of those protections and the travel management plan, it was worth investing in this restoration; he knew the conservation work would last. 

He said a full repeal of the travel management rule would create more problems than it intends to solve. A change of this magnitude, he said, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith. 

“Whether that’s off-highway vehicles in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

“This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.” 

The process to change a federal rule is a long one. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the rule, which is the first step in the process, through September 23.  

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread policy changes that could take effect across the 193 million acres of land the Forest Service manages, including more than 19 million acres in Montana alone. Last month, just before the travel management revision, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA was moving forward with rescinding the roadless rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds, and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections. 

The short public comment periods have received public backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding 15 days to the comment period for the roadless rule; it is now open until October 6. In a statement about the decision, the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.” 

Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, said the roadless rule and travel management rule help uphold the purpose of public lands.

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” she said. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie in to that in one way or another.” 

The roadless rule, she said, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but the travel management rule affects far more people every time they visit a national forest.  

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in.”

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White, who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands. 

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods,” said White, who represented a section of Bozeman in the state legislature from 2013 to 2021. This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.” 

White said these new changes will allow for better access and clarity for visitors on ATVs, e-bikes, and other motorized vehicles. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

Karla Gagby, who can’t hike because of a lung injury, rides through the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana on July 4.Gary Friedman

White also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas, and that’s simply not the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana said these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about, ‘How can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

To Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile-on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.” 

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold, clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the roadless and travel management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

On Monday, Nvidia, the multinational tech company—which has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in significant part thanks to its role in developing chips for AI processing and model training—announced the launch of a new safety platform that will monitor and contain AI agents, amid recent reports of “rogue AI” incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacking fiasco.

As my colleagues and I have previously reported, accounts of autonomous hacks by AI models belonging to OpenAI and its rivals have exacerbated concerns about the minimally regulated AI sector, even as leading figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that AI oversight is an “engineering problem” that the industry can largely handle without government involvement—echoing statements by President Trump, who has lashed out at demands to legislate guardrails around what he now calls “superintelligence.”

Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” Among company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures are Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.

Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” The company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures include, among others, Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.

But in the context of Huang’s remarks, the company’s proposals for developing safe AI are in effect being presented as an alternative to regulatory action. The idea that AI safety isn’t a problem for state agencies, or that the recent spate of rogue AI incidents don’t call for swift political action, amount to an argument that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can police themselves. It’s often AI firms’ own conduct, and the words and actions of their leaders, that have made self-regulation a hard sell—especially as public opinion sours towards the technology’s sprawling infrastructure demands and footprint in daily life.

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