Mother Jones

Seven people detained previously by ICE filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the agency, accusing it of illegally refusing to return their personal documents and belongings months after they were released from custody. 

Items allegedly withheld include Social Security cards, employment authorization documents, and phones, which the seven individuals allege is a violation of the Fourth Amendment—and ICE’s own confiscation directive, which only permits officers to keep belongings for a clearly defined reason, such as relation to a criminal case. 

The ACLU of the District of Columbia, one of the bodies representing the seven plaintiffs, pointed in part to a 2024 federal appeals court ruling in Washington, DC, that barred that city’s police from holding personal property they seize for what the court deemed an unreasonable length of time. 

Withholding items like employment documents prevents immigrants from being able to keep their jobs, the suit contends—at least some of the plaintiffs attest that they have indeed lost their jobs—and makes them fear leaving their homes due to lack of documentation. 

One plaintiff from Russia with a pending asylum case, Vladimir Izmailov, was “unable to get meaningful employment without his work authorization documents,” ACLU of DC wrote—the suit details that ICE hasn’t returned these documents, and other items including his wedding ring, for more than five months. 

“Now, I’m struggling to provide for my family because ICE still has my documents that show I am authorized to work,” Izmailov stated; he said that he has been forced to borrow money to make rent and continue to house himself, his wife, and their two children. 

The lawsuit comes following a series of reports of similar incidents. My colleague Julia Lurie wrote about cases in Minnesota in February: “It’s more the rule than the exception that people generally are not given their stuff back,” Graham Ojala-Barbour, a Minneapolis immigration attorney, said in an interview for that article. “As far as I can tell, it’s the practice of ICE to throw everybody’s documents into a black box and then lose it.”

As she reported at the time:

Federal law requires noncitizens to carry proof of their lawful status. “The government not returning these documents to folks is essentially forcing them to walk around without this document that the government itself says these folks are supposed to carry with them,” says Julia Decker, policy director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to order ICE to return their items—and to stop the agency from continuing to unlawfully retain property without just reason.

In March, two Mother Jones videographers and I stood outside the Space Center Houston and watched Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, order abortion pills online. 

We were shadowing Hawkins through Texas for a profile, documentary, and radio story about her role overseeing one of the anti-abortion movement’s most influential organizations, which now claims 1,700 chapters nationwide.

On that spring day, we watched as Hawkins and a Students for Life spokesperson, Lydia Taylor Davis, attempted to show just how easy it was to obtain abortion pills in Texas, despite its stringent laws, in the hopes that state and federal officials would do more to stop the pills.

Now, Hawkins has been sued over the stunt, under a 2025 state law she and her team publicly lobbied for that was meant to target abortion providers and advocates. 

On Tuesday, a 26-year-old Texas woman who says she was forced to carry two pregnancies to term because of the state’s abortion bans sued Hawkins, Davis, and two other Students for Life staffers in state court. The woman, who uses the pseudonym Maria Puerto, claims that the stunt Hawkins staged in the Houston parking lot not only broke the law, but “mocks” Texans like her who have suffered life-altering harms from the state’s draconian laws, which ban abortion under virtually all circumstances. The lawsuit cites Mother Jones’ reporting, along with Students for Life’s social media posts about the stunt.

“Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women have not experienced a free Texas. We have no ability to decide about our own bodies, our own families, our own lives.”

“Our client came to us because she has had a very difficult few years since Roe was overturned,” Molly Duane, litigation director of Amplify Legal, the litigation arm of Abortion in America, which represents Puerto, said in an interview Tuesday. “On the one hand, she loves being a mother, she has two beautiful children that she loves very much. On the other hand, she was forced to become a parent long before she was ready.” 

The suit details how two unplanned pregnancies disrupted Puerto’s life. When she became pregnant the first time, in 2022, she was attending college on a scholarship, but she was forced to quit school when her financial aid was revoked because she missed class due to severe morning sickness. She was also fired from her job at a convenience store.“I lost everything, my job, my career. Everything,” the lawsuit quotes Puerto as saying. 

With her second pregnancy, in 2024, Puerto became depressed, especially when she discovered she was having a girl. “Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women have not experienced a free Texas,” she says in the complaint. “We have no ability to decide about our own bodies, our own families, our own lives.” 

According to the lawsuit, Puerto and her two kids share a bed in a small room in her mother’s home, and she has been unable to find a job that would allow her to cover childcare costs. 

“Where is universal childcare? Where is paid family leave? Where is food and housing support for people that struggle to make ends meet?” Duane said in the interview. “Texas has helped her with none of that.” 

With “nowhere else to turn for assistance,” the lawsuit says, Puerto’s lawyers decided to sue Hawkins and members of her Students for Life team who participated in the pill-ordering stunt, though the organization itself is not named as a defendant. Puerto is seeking $459,782—the average cost of raising two children from birth to age 18 in the state of Texas, the lawsuit says.

In a statement, Students for Life deemed the lawsuit “misplaced” but called the allegation that their legislative work is stopping abortions a “backhanded compliment.” 

“I feel so badly for this child who will forever have it in writing” that Puerto “wished them dead,” Hawkins wrote on X. “It’s child abuse. Texas CPS should be called on this mother asap.”

Duane said the attacks by Hawkins are “disappointing” though “not surprising,” and defended Puerto’s treatment of her children. “I’ve never met a better mother, actually, who’s kinder to her kids,” Duane said. 

The 2025 law at the heart of the case, HB 7, allows private citizens to sue anyone who mails, transports, delivers, prescribes or provides abortion pills to any person in Texas, or intends to do so. People who order the pills for themselves and use them to have an abortion cannot be sued, although Duane noted it’s unlikely Hawkins and her team would qualify for that exemption. 

“Where is universal childcare? Where is paid family leave? Where is food and housing support for people that struggle to make ends meet?”

“The one thing that we can be sure of is that people who are categorically opposed to abortion didn’t take the pills themselves,” Duane said. 

HB 7 was strongly supported by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now running for US Senate, and his anti-abortion allies around the country, who have been irate that telemedicine providers have been able to circumvent red-state abortion bans despite the end of Roe in 2022.

Duane, formerly of the Center for Reproductive Rights, has been involved in several high-profile cases challenging Texas abortion laws, including a lawsuit aimed at forcing the state to clarify its “medical emergency” exception. Last month Amplify and Duane sued Paxton, as well several doctors, on behalf of the family of Tierra Walker, a Black woman who died from preeclampsia in 2024 after being denied emergency abortion care.

“Obviously, I have represented many clients with obstetrical complications during pregnancy,” Duane said. “Those are common, sure, but that is not the vast majority of people who are seeking abortion and can’t get it.”  

“The vast majority,” she said, “look like Maria Puerto.” 

All parties and other social events held in fraternity houses on the campus of Cornell University will be cancelled for the remainder of the 2026-27 school year as the university’s administration contends with a lawsuit alleging a horrific 2024 gang rape in the Chi Phi fraternity house, which has sparked weeks of protest on and off its Ithaca, New York, campus. Michael Kotlikoff, the institution’s president, announced the frat party ban in an email Tuesday afternoon.

“These measures will provide time for a thorough review of fraternity life at Cornell to determine whether and how it can safely continue,” Kotlikoff said in his email. The university will also be allowing New York State Police to investigate on-campus sexual assault allegations; CBS News obtained a transcript of the interview between campus police and the anonymous student who filed suit against seven Chi Phi members, who told them, among other things, “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped”; campus police reportedly never showed that transcript to the district attorney. The city of Ithaca has also suspended all new Cornell-affiliated event permits, a move that primarily affects fraternities.

Cornell is not the first school to temporarily suspend fraternities or their activities in order to “review” their safety. Three major state universities—the University of Arizona, Louisiana State University, and West Virginia University—have suspended some or all of their on-campus fraternities this month alone amid hazing and assault allegations. (The University of Arizona and Louisiana State University partially lifted their suspensions within weeks.)

In fact, the websites of countless large universities include lists of “suspended or unrecognized” Greek life groups. But the suspensions are typically just that: temporary, and limited in scope. In Cornell’s case, it may be difficult for fraternities to move activities off-campus thanks to Ithaca’s ban—but it remains to be seen how feasible enforcing that ban may be. The same goes for the university’s ban on parties organized by Greek groups on campus.

One study found that fraternity members are three times more likely to rape women than nonaffiliated college men are. Sorority women, meanwhile, are 74 percent more likely to be raped than unaffiliated women on college campuses. But while colleges pause fraternity activities in the wake of hazing deaths, sexual assaults, or other forms of frat-sanctioned violence, they rarely force them to close their doors permanently.

After a fraternity pledge died in a hazing incident at Florida State University in 2017, that university indefinitely suspended all 55 fraternities and sororities on its campus—only to partially lift the ban a year later.

At least a dozen fraternity and sorority pledges have died in hazing incidents since 2020—in that year, given the pandemic’s social distancing requirements, only one young woman died in a hazing incident. That was the lowest number in decades. Most years, multiple students have died.

Abolishing fraternities entirely may be an overdue conversation; the idea seems to come up once or twice a decade. But some schools that have actually moved toward banning single-gender fraternities entirely, like Harvard and Wesleyan University, have backed off in the face of legal threats or suits by alumni.

Where fraternities are smaller, less connected, and less significant in campus life, attempts to ban them have been more successful. Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania banned fraternities in 2019 after leaked messages revealed pervasive misogyny, racism, and sexual violence within its two frats. Middlebury College banned fraternities all the way back in 1991; Amherst College and Williams College have prohibited them since 1984 and 1962.

But in Cornell’s case, Kotlikoff said at a faculty town hall last Monday that permanently banning frats would only make things worse—and could send the problems associated with Greek life “into the shadows.” It’s true that banning fraternities does not automatically eliminate the human capacity for violence. It just takes away a setting in which certain kinds of violence against certain kinds of students are demonstrably made much more likely.

On Monday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.” 

The claim quickly picked up speed, and gained specificity: that following the Ukrainian strikes, all kinds of internet users were suddenly less present online, including MAGA accounts, those supporting Reform UK, and ones supporting AfD, the German ultra-right party. A Polish political scientist shared claims that bot activity supporting AfD had dropped by 56 percent, a post that was viewed millions of times and has since been deleted. As Radio Free Europe has reported, a Czech politician shared a similar claim, writing, “So much talk about German patriotism…then the connection from Russia goes down.” 

The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.

“I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but as of now, there is no solid evidence that Russian bot farms have become inactive.”

The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.

Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign. 

The first issue, then, was the word “bot,” which “means different things in different contexts, which is contributing to some public confusion,” explains Renee DiResta. She’s an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, a social media researcher, and a globally recognized expert on disinformation. “It is used as shorthand for both web crawlers and online trolls. Web crawlers plummeting makes sense, but online trolls usually have more resilient infrastructure.” 

The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact. 

“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation. 

Participants in one study tended to “overestimate the prevalence of bots and see others as more vulnerable to bot influence than themselves.”

“I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but as of now, there is no solid evidence that Russian bot farms have become inactive due to the Yandex data centre strikes,” agreed Vatnik Soup, another group that monitors Russian government-backed disinformation. “This doesn’t mean the strikes haven’t had an effect, but no one has demonstrated it with solid data so far,” the account added. “Many users have reported seeing fewer pro-Kremlin posts and replies since the strikes, and some automated pro-Russian and pro-MAGA accounts have reportedly gone silent. But this could simply be a coincidence.” 

“We don’t see it,” tweeted Valedmar Osted, who works at the Scandinavian tech and social media advisory firm Common Consultancy. “We took 76 AfD politicians and 136 MAGA accounts on Facebook. We compared each post with that account’s normal. Same post age. Same weekday. Same time of day. AfD after the strikes: −8% to +5%. MAGA: +4% to +10%. That’s ordinary day-to-day noise.” 

Antibot4Navalny also pointed out that following the Yandex strikes, a group of known Russian disinformation accounts, a network known as Matroyshka, were still active on Tuesday. (Matroyshka is also the network that recently posted fake videos bearing Mother Jones’ name and featuring fake quotes from our DC editor David Corn.) 

It’s not entirely surprising that the bot takedown story spread so far and fast, even in the absence of evidence. “We live in an information environment in which people are rightly increasingly suspicious of artificial participation, even as we are increasingly unable to measure it,” DiResta told me. 

There’s also clear evidence that people have a difficult time separating authentic from inauthentic activity online, even as they overestimate their own ability to do so. A 2023 study from media scholars at Indiana University found that participants tended to “to overestimate the prevalence of bots and see others as more vulnerable to bot influence than themselves.”

While public perceptions on bots are understudied, the researchers added, “A consensus on the definition of social bots is lacking; people appear to use the term to refer to a variety of entities, from fake profiles and spammers to fully-automated accounts. This ambiguity provides social media users with a scapegoat for their unpleasant online experiences. For example, one may reject accounts with opposing political views by labeling them as bot.”

All of this, then, led to an environment where a claim was as viral as it was unproven. 

“The ‘Russian bot takedown’ story is satisfying because people are tired of suspected manipulation,” DiResta added. “And the idea that a Ukrainian strike silenced fake accounts is a compelling story of victory against a common enemy. It also supports the comforting belief that your political enemies aren’t even real.”

But however tempting it is, now isn’t the time to believe in fiction, even if it feels like fact.  

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the embattled US ambassador to Greece, has been asked to resign from her post, the new Trump press secretary Katie Zacharia announced on Tuesday. 

“We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign. She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well,” Zacharia said. She did not answer a question on potential replacements.

Zacharia: "We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-13T13:57:28.857Z

According to two reports by the Wall Street Journal last week, Eric Deters, a Republican donor, accused Guilfoyle of repeatedly pressuring him to send $100,000 to her so that she could pay off her American Express bill. In what he described as a “quid pro quo” deal in an interview with MS NOW following the first report, Deters was supposed to receive political favors in return. 

As my colleague Inae Oh highlighted on Sunday, these favors included meetings with multiple senior Trump administration officials, an introduction to music artist and MAGA personality Kid Rock, and help with his “personal tax and legal issues,” but Guilfoyle never followed through. (Deters did not send over the $100,000, as he said he told Guilfoyle the payment would end his marriage.)

On Monday, Deters told CNN that he plans to sue Guilfoyle and her legal team, who claimed that the Signal text message conversations Deters provided to the Wall Street Journal to support his allegations were false and that Guilfoyle was only trying to collect $150,000 in unpaid fees for previous consulting and speaking engagements. He also said they called him a “known blackmailer.”

Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host, Trump 2020 fundraising adviser, and ex-fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., who was previously married to Gavin Newsom before he became California’s governor, reportedly vexed the Trump administration. She frequently promoted business interests with energy lobbyist Christos Marafastos, and at least once threatened that the US could use its power to interfere with sovereign democratic governments like Greece. On October 1, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) announced that he is investigating Guilfoyle’s actions.

If Guilfoyle resigns, her tenure will have lasted just 11 months.

Any remaining skepticism of America’s literacy crisis vanished Tuesday morning, when Katie Zacharia, a former TV political commentator, stepped up to the White House podium for her first briefing as President Trump’s new press secretary.

It is from this esteemed perch that Zacharia appeared physically strained as she struggled to deliver prepared remarks, as if the task of reading was too much to endure. In other moments, Zacharia sighed heavily. As for the content of her remarks, they fit the usual Trumpian bill, with Zacharia vacillating between thanking the president for anointing her with a dream job and portraying Trump’s job performance as overwhelmingly positive.

But the overtly propagandistic notes took a backseat to Zacharia’s first-day performance, which even included the error of referring to her husband as “my president.” By turns halting and anxious, it made Karoline Leavitt, who resigned in September, seem like a rhetorical genius.

BREAKING: Katie Zacharia takes the podium for her first White House press briefing as President Trump's press secretary:

"I am so honored to work for President Trump and the American people."

"I want to thank President Trump for his trust that he has placed in me." pic.twitter.com/CZSDhtSPMA

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 13, 2026

“The clock is running. Thus far 1/11th of a Scaramucci,” Anthony Scaramucci, the former press secretary during Trump’s first administration, quipped on social media.

As the Cornell rape allegations continue to roil beyond college campuses and into the homes of families across the country, a familiar question has played out: How do we educate our sons? Specifically, how do we raise boys who grow up to be men who will not rape women and who will stand up to perpetrators?

In discussing the case in my social circles, the mere suggestion that our kids could come to mirror the behavior of the so-called Cornell 7 is enough to induce genuine nausea right there smack in the middle of a 5-year-old’s birthday party. The allegations seem perversely unrecognizable to us and the inner lives of our families, leaving parents understandably grasping for strategies for a scenario they can hardly imagine. And so, it’s against this air of anxiety that favor has once again settled on sexual consent, and the need to drill its importance into the minds of our youth.

If consent as a talking point feels like grim deja vu, that’s because it returns with each cycle of outrage over alleged campus sexual assault. Consider how the topic has been the inspiration for two different Saturday Night Live skits across 25 years: a 1993 segment that ridiculed the “Ask First” policy at Antioch College, and another in 2018—albeit depicting consent education in a more favorable light—during the #MeToo movement that emphasized an unambiguous “yes means yes” approach to establishing consent. Which is to say that consent, in different registers and varying deliveries, has informed decades’ worth of discourse around sexual assault.

“Sexual assault has nothing to do with consent.”

But too often, these conversations treat consent as the finish line—not the starting point to addressing more challenging aspects around rampant sexual assault on our college campuses. In doing so, we sidestep more uncomfortable questions of what makes something like rape appealing to perpetrators in the first place: the thrill of violating consent. That rapists don’t just disregard your consent but don’t want it.

“Sexual assault has nothing to do with consent,” Andrea O’Reilly, a professor at York University in Canada, said. “It’s about power, misogyny, and abuse. This is what we’re missing in the conversation with all these memes going around.” (Indeed, the Snapchat thread at the center of the Cornell allegations is littered with comments relishing this rot: “Free pussy” upstairs. “Shop still open?” “Like you can walk in and whip it out rn.”)

“Of course, we need to educate boys about consent,” O’Reilly added, “but we need to reframe the conversation. Why [do some men] even desire sex with an unconscious woman?”

It can be a deeply torturous thought experiment. Once you confront the psychological attraction, you start seeing strains of it everywhere, like an outbreak. When, amid this very climate, a comedian cracks jokes about gym “whores” on national TV. When, for decades, titans of industry prized the company of a known pedophile. When a man held liable for rape, to accompany the dozens of sexual assault allegations, wins the presidency twice over.

Of course, talking to boys about misogyny and abuse is a far more difficult, and frankly, intimidating, task than teaching consent. Who wants to acknowledge, accurately, that plenty of everyday men hate their mothers and that this hatred informs endless corners of an ugly society? But advocates of comprehensive sex education say that small bites at these difficult topics—sitting cross-legged on the floor, keeping hands to ourselves, etc.—can start at the earliest stages of a child’s education, and later, widen the narrow focus on consent to model what desirable, respectful sex looks like.

Once you confront the psychological attraction, you start seeing strains of it everywhere, like an outbreak. When, amid this very climate, a comedian cracks jokes about gym “whores” on national TV.

Robin West, a professor at Georgetown Law, told me that when we restrict the conversation to consent, parents run the risk of sending the message that “sex is the proper subject of a bargain and [once obtained], you’re off the hook.”

“It shouldn’t be problematic for parents to say that you need to make sure that this sexuality you’re introducing into your relationship is actually serving the welfare of all of you,” West added. “That you’re not just doing it for your own selfish ends.”

“There are so many other dimensions of a sexual interaction [than consent],” Jennifer S. Hirsch, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, said. “A focus on consent is not really meaningful if somebody doesn’t understand that the other person is a sexual citizen, that people fundamentally are equivalent human beings. That yes, I have a right to choose my sexual experiences, and so does the other person.”

Such concepts might seem like the bare minimum to some. But in a country so lacking in gender equality—where, as Hirsch told me, so-called blue states such as New York do not mandate medically accurate sex ed—they are far from a guarantee.

“I’ve been working on comprehensive sex education in New York since 2008,” Hirsch said. “We’ve flown through many different legislatures, and it’s never even come to the floor for a vote once. So think about the thousands and thousands of people who have experienced sexual harm in that time because of their political inaction.”

The consent and education-based models of today can be traced to Barack Obama’s first presidency as an effort to address campus sexual violence. But despite their prevalence on college campuses today, campus sexual assault has persisted, with some studies showing that incidents of reported assault have actually increased in recent years. These worrying trends force a thorny question: Does education even work when it comes to reducing sexual violence?

“These approaches have an implicit theory of behavior change,” Ana Gantman, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College who, with several colleagues, conducted a 2024 meta-analysis of related studies, told me. “They assume that changing ideas related to sexual violence—like the endorsement of rape myths that claim ‘a woman says no before she says yes’—will change overall rates of perpetration and victimization.”

Though these programs appeared to effectively shift attitudes and beliefs around sexual violence, curiously, they had little impact on the ultimate goal of this education model: reducing instances of assault. None of which, as Gantman stressed, was to argue “that rape myths are not worth dispelling in their own right—they absolutely are. But as an avenue to reduce rates of perpetration, I think we have tried changing beliefs to change behavior, and it doesn’t seem to be very effective.”

Successfully convincing someone that rape is bad doesn’t mean they won’t commit it.

In other words, successfully convincing someone that rape is bad doesn’t mean they won’t commit it. Gantman emphasized the need for changes beyond education, including creating spaces outside fraternities and dormitory bedrooms where students can socialize.

“What students are getting is the message that sexual assault is bad,” Hirsch said. “Don’t rape someone. Don’t get raped. Don’t let your friends get raped. But as public health professionals, we know that doesn’t equal effective prevention. It is a first step to make people aware of a problem, but it doesn’t give people the tools that they need to not rape somebody or to not get raped.”

One exception to this broad failure, Gantman said, was a school-based program called Safe Dates, which focused on students younger than college age. These educational approaches tended to involve the comprehensive approach Hirsch referenced, with curriculum focusing on more nuanced topics around sex, such as dating norms and gender stereotypes. “This program has been rigorously evaluated and has been shown to decrease reported rates of perpetration,” Gantman said. “It also paved the way for Shifting Boundaries, another school-based program that has been rigorously evaluated, and also takes the literal physical space of the buildings of the school into account.”

Physical spaces as a critical factor in campus sexual assault goes to the heart of the renewed calls to ban fraternities nationwide amid the Cornell allegations, which involve seven former fraternity members, and dozens of others who belonged to a now-famous Snapchat text thread.

“Fraternities represent a very dense concentration of many forms of power: the power of masculinity, the power of wealth, and frequently, the power of whiteness,” Hirsch said. “They also have the power to control alcohol, the power of being third- and fourth-year students, and the power of controlling social space.

But while some of these powers were modifiable—for example, a college could make it easier for younger students to socialize in spaces that weren’t controlled by older men—Hirsch said college campuses that remove frats would still struggle to address more systemic forms of inequality. “If people step onto campus not realizing that the people around them are equivalent human beings who have the right to choose their sexual experiences, the communities that raise those people have failed,” she said.

That might be true. But why not try eradicating just one of the many cradles for male entitlement, secrecy, and generally egregious behavior? Excuses for frats—bonding, community, career networks, alumni donations—are endless, and plenty of ink has been spilled on their supposed values. Yet, for so many of us, watching another round of campus sexual assault allegations unfold, these justifications seem to limp on arrival this time around. Could the current outrage open a rare opportunity for Cornell officials to lead the way to larger institutional change, including, yes, bans on Greek life? Will states like New York move to codify medically accurate sex ed in their schools and make a helluva big deal about it? It remains to be seen. But for now, we can at least go beyond the rallying call of consent.

“I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.”

So said Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril Industries, a military technology company that sells autonomous drones and software to the Defense Department, Customs and Border Protection, and militaries abroad in a vocal defense of “public and brutal” executions in general, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan in particular.

Executions are the “ultimate example of the state’s monopoly on violence,” Luckey wrote in a Sunday night X post, arguing that all executions should be public to discourage the acts in question—and that to “revel in the death of those who truly deserve it…is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order.”

I am getting lots of incoming questions about the public execution of Nidal Hasan, mostly because I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.

My position is simple: Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized. They are the…

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) October 12, 2026

Last week, Trump approved the execution by firing squad of Hasan, who opened fire on unarmed fellow soldiers, killing 13 people, at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced shortly after that the execution would be livestreamed.

Hasan was an active-duty major in the Army at the time, and was shot in the back by police during the mass shooting. He is now paralyzed from the waist down. The mechanics of the execution—including whether Hasan would remain in his wheelchair—have not been officially addressed by the Pentagon. 

Luckey, who has donated $5.9 million to Republicans since 2017 according to FEC records, cited George Washington, who authorized public executions in the military to reinforce discipline, to support his stance. 

“The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms,” Luckey wrote. “It makes needless executions more likely, not less so.”

Jim Craig, a veteran Mississippi death penalty attorney, told my colleague Sophie Hurwitz in April, when the Justice Department announced plans to revive executions by firing squad, that White House supporters of public executions by means like the firing squad have an “affection for causing visible harm to people…They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context.”

Fellow defense automation enthusiast Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of military tech firm Palantir and frequent advocate of far–right positions on social media, leapt to Luckey’s defense. “Palmer Luckey and George Washington are not barbaric,” he wrote. “Our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm.”

But according to Axios, even Trump has expressed doubts on livestreaming the execution. Opposition to broadcasting Hasan’s shooting has been bipartisan. On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told CBS News that a livestream could be used by terrorist groups to recruit more people. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a vocal critic of Hegseth, called the plan “beyond disgusting” last week, comparing it to public executions performed in oppressive dictatorships.

In a follow-up to his first tweet, Luckey concluded by suggesting that non-public executions were fascist.

And consider what happened to the last nation that decided to hide government-sponsored executions behind closed doors, wrapped in a veneer of scientific and medical justification.

There are no words that can convince me or most that America's Founding Fathers, every President…

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) October 12, 2026

The world’s richest man has a vision of the universe’s future with little role for humanity—and is rushing ahead to have his AI company build it.

Elon Musk said in an X post on Sunday that a huge semiconductor factory planned by Tesla and SpaceX in Texas will have an output of at least $1 trillion—rivaling the GDP of some of the world’s larger economies.

Musk has made similarly grandiose projections that are, depending on one’s interpretation, somewhere between ambitious and absurd. He has a long track record of overpromising. In recent SEC litigation, in fact, Tesla’s legal team resorted to arguing that his exaggerations are “corporate puffery.”

The Terafab project, which recently broke ground 70 miles northwest of Houston, is planned to build chips for Tesla cars and humanoid robots, and for the newly-merged SpaceX and xAI. Currently, the design of advanced AI chips is dominated by Nvidia, and their fabrication by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Musk’s famously erratic statements should be taken with a heaping of salt. But his companies do build more electric vehicles than any domestic competitors, and are responsible for the majority of launches into orbit in recent years. So it’s worth wondering: what vision of the future does Musk want his Texas chip plant to help build?

“We aspire to be a galactic civilization,” Terafab’s site says, and “harness all the energy in a galaxy.” But Musk’s recent statements raise a question about who, exactly, the “we” is—including a post he made last week that “Propagating super intelligence to the stars is a great success condition for a biological bootloader.”

A rough translation of what he seems to mean: humanity would fulfill its cosmic purpose by building AI—under Musk’s leadership—that tramples us all on its way to colonizing the universe.

Musk once professed to oppose such ideas, including when he helped found OpenAI with the stated mission to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.” But AI successionism—the belief that humans are merely a stepping-stone in cosmic evolution on the way to a “worthy successor”—is a growing movement, now with more support from a man with unimaginable wealth and power. xAI did not immediately respond to a query on whether AI successionism represents company policy. 

For now, the coming of a machine-god that devours its creators and colonizes the stars is still just a prophecy, feared by some and much anticipated by others. That vision of humanity would probably have served as little consolation to the 780,000 real, breathing people estimated to have died in the first year of DOGE’s cuts to foreign aid.

Over the weekend, a poorly-constructed and very obviously fake claim about Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico sprang up on X only to almost instantly fall apart. The claim was that Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail not because he had the flu, as he and his campaign have said, but because he was secretly flown to Ohio on a private plane and committed to a mental hospital there.

One of the most prominent people involved in spreading the story on X was none other than the site’s owner, Elon Musk. With the midterm elections just weeks away, Musk is pouring money into GOP Senate candidates’ coffers and involving himself in the spread of literal fake news about a Democratic candidate, at a time when basically every true trust and safety guardrail has long been erased from his site. Given that he and his companies stand to profit handsomely from a Republican victory, the pattern is clear: the biggest election disinformation risk in the next few weeks is Elon Musk. 

The Talarico story, as journalists Will Sommer and Andrew Egger have written at The Bulwark, centers around accusations that the candidate had suspiciously disappeared from the campaign trail. Talarico himself said repeatedly that he had the flu, and appeared remotely at an event on September 30, citing his illness. But on Sunday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher began hinting that they had bombshell news about exactly where Talarico had been. Sortor gave Talarico a 1 PM deadline to “reveal” the truth before he said they’d break it themselves, adding in a tweet to a follower: “I’m genuinely trying to give them a chance to respond, but some high profile folks we’ve informed are ridiculously excited.”  

One of those “high profile folks” appears to have been Musk. At the appointed time, Sortor and Amacher released a 55-second audio clip on X of a purported call between Amacher and the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health treatment center in Mason, Ohio. In the call, an unidentified employee is asked about Talarico and appears to say that there is no one by that name in the hospital’s records, but then, in response to further questions, says Talarico had been released on Saturday night. 

This timeline didn’t add up, given that Talarico had been seen campaigning in Texas on Friday and Saturday. Amacher soon tried to explain these appearances away by tweeting that it “is not uncommon in the healthcare industry for a patient to be physically discharged from a facility before all administrative discharge documentation has been finalized.”

Nonetheless, Musk responded to Sortor’s tweet breaking the “news,” tweeting, “The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about.” A few minutes later he responsed to a tweet from presidential special envoy Richard Grenell that shared the story, adding that “The Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening.” 

The Lindner Center released a brief statement Sunday evening that Talarico had “never received treatment” at their facility, and Talarico re-shared it, adding, “I’ve never even been to Ohio,” along with a laughing emoji.

The Lindner Center’s clear denial took the air out of the story immediately, but no one involved—especially not Musk—admitted that they might have made a mistake. Instead, Musk began tweeting clips of Talarico speaking critically about capitalism, which the trillionaire called “troubling.” In other words, in the absence of an actual scandal, Musk resorted to fearmongering.

He stayed in the spotlight on Monday, as the The New York Times reported that Musk has become the midterms’ biggest donor, pouring $276 million into what the paper termed a “rescue mission” to keep Republicans in office and in control of Congress.

The midterms’ largest donor, then, is also a person who controls an enormous information source, one that he frequently uses to amplify politically motivated lies and fake news—including tweeting about the possibility of “large-scale fraud” in elections. Musk’s company SpaceX currently holds several lucrative federal contracts with the Defense Department, which could be probed if Democrats retake Congress. And House Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to subpoena Musk amid an ongoing Democrat-led inquiry into his conduct while working as a part of DOGE. With a Democratic majority, that subpoena could move ahead. 

Besides Musk’s personal behavior and business interests, his threat as a disinformation vector is also due to how he’s changed X since acquiring the platform. Under his watch, X decimated its teams of internal moderators and engineers working on trust and safety. A group of academic researchers wrote in a 2024 paper that they’d found an increase in hate speech on the platform and no decrease in inauthentic activity, contrary to Musk’s pledge to root out “spam bots” when taking it over. If anything, the researchers wrote, there was a “potential increase” in “the activity of inauthentic accounts.”

As it comes to the midterms, recently a network of X accounts tied to a Russian disinformation operation produced a blizzard of fake videos and news articles, each one offering a false and lurid piece of fake information about a Democrat. (One might argue that the disinformation was just slightly too outrageous to even work; one claimed that a candidate had murdered several sex workers; another claimed that a different candidate had sold crack to college students, resulting in their deaths.) Some of the videos purported to be from CNN, others from Mother Jones. The fake videos purporting to be from this new organization weren’t removed until our lawyer contacted X. 

 

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

A new report paints a dark picture of the state of global wildlife—but also highlights flickers of light where some populations are on the upswing. 

Over the past half-century, populations of thousands of vertebrate species across the globe have decreased in size by 73 percent on average, according to the “Living Planet” report published this past Wednesday by the nonprofits World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. A number of factors contributed to this precipitous decline, including habitat loss, overexploitation and climate change. 

However, a closer look at certain regions and biomes offers reasons for hope, the report’s authors say. Roughly half the populations they studied are stable or even increasing. Though these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere, they show that concerted conservation efforts have made a difference for species such as green sea turtles and bluefin tuna, according to lead author Rebecca Shaw, the chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund.

“The report focuses on hope because even though the headline statistic is really, really stark…what we see underlying the statistic is some real movement in some species,” Shaw said. 

Despite these successes, the report stressed the importance of tackling biodiversity loss at a global scale by changing the three major systems driving extinction: food, energy and finance.  

The “Living Planet” reports are released roughly every two years. The latest taps into data from tens of thousands of populations of 5,790 vertebrate species across the animal kingdom—from Laysan albatross to ring-tailed lemurs. 

Rather than tallying the total number of animals lost or gained, the researchers measured changes in relative abundance of populations. That means a small population of monkeys that has dropped from 200 to 100 would have experienced the same 50 percent loss as a large colony of 20,000 bats that has dipped to 10,000. 

This method allows researchers to compare data from different populations and better track overall trends, said Louise McRae, a research fellow at the Zoological Society of London who works on the Living Planet Index that informs the report.

“The reason we do that is so that we can get a good picture of what is happening across different species by giving them equal weight within this index,” she said. “We’re getting a better signal of the health of the environment.”

From 2010 to 2025, tiger populations increased by nearly 80 percent.Banu R / Getty

So while the new report does not mean there are 73 percent fewer wild vertebrate animals in total today than in 1970, it does show populations the report monitored are plummeting on average. However, diving deeper into the numbers reveals the varied stories playing out for wildlife around the world. 

By geography, monitored species populations have faced the most significant decline in Latin America and the Caribbean, with an average 95 percent decrease from 1970 to 2022. In that same timeframe, North America and the combined regions of Europe and Central Asia have seen around 25 percent declines, though the authors pointed out that development in those areas had already had large-scale impacts on nature prior to 1970. Declines in Africa and the Asia and the Pacific region were 80 percent and 49 percent, respectively. 

The researchers also broke the numbers down by biome. Freshwater species were the clear losers, seeing an overall decline of 85 percent—significantly more than terrestrial or marine species, though these vertebrates are also seeing major losses. 

The report attributed the nosedive in freshwater species to a number of factors, including pollution, overharvesting, and habitat loss caused by infrastructure such as hydropower dams. Impacted species included in the report range from migratory fish such as Chinook salmon in the Western United States to the Amazon pink river dolphin in Brazil, which plummeted by 65 percent between 1994 and 2016 alone in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the state of Amazonas. 

For terrestrial species, habitat loss and degradation drove much of the biodiversity decline, while marine life faced major threats from overfishing. 

Viorel Popescu, an associate research scientist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the report, said it’s valuable to bring these “huge amounts of data” that are largely invisible to most of the public “to the forefront.” But he added that the report may be an underestimate of total biodiversity losses, given that it only focuses on vertebrate species the authors analyzed. Other scientists have echoed this critique. 

Popescu pointed to the collapse of many populations of insects, which make up roughly three-quarters of all known animal species on Earth. In fact, beetles alone account for 25 percent of all animal species. 

“Those declines could be even more drastic,” Popescu said. 

The report also pointed to bright spots around the world. For example, in 2025, the green sea turtle became the first marine turtle to be downlisted by the nonprofit International Union for Conservation of Nature, which means populations increased enough around the world for the animal to no longer be considered endangered. 

But this recovery didn’t happen overnight. According to the report, a roughly five-decade coordinated conservation effort launched across more than 80 countries helped populations rebuild through protecting nesting females and eggs, beach management, lighting regulations, turtle excluder devices and other bycatch reduction measures to help reduce sea turtle entanglements in fishing gear. 

“Even though the headline statistic is really, really stark… what we see underlying the statistic is some real movement in some species”

Researchers have also documented population increases for species such as tigers, Southern African elephants and Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna following conservation initiatives and stricter industry regulations. 

However, efforts to help pull species from the brink are struggling to secure the necessary funding to meet the accelerating global extinction crisis, experts say. In the United States, the Trump administration has made deep cuts to conservation programs, both domestically and internationally.

“[D]evelopment aid budgets from national governments and international agencies have historically formed the majority of global conservation funding, with a focus on supporting the communities living alongside wildlife,” Andrew Terry, the chief conservation officer at the Zoological Society of London, said in an emailed statement to Inside Climate News. “Cuts to these aid budgets by governments across the northern hemisphere have had widespread impacts on people and nature alike.” 

Even if additional funding emerges, the new report argues that ensuring the long-term future of the world’s biodiversity requires fundamental shifts to society, particularly in the food, energy and finance sectors. Agriculture is the single largest cause of habitat loss and a major contributor of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions alongside fossil fuels. 

Experts say accelerating clean energy uptake can help decrease emissions that fuel global warming, avoiding climate threats to biodiversity. koldo studio / Getty

According to the report, accelerating solar uptake around the world illustrates how systems can change to reduce their impact on biodiversity. However, financial systems are still pumping money into development that hurts biodiversity, with one estimate suggesting that $7.3 trillion flowed into activities that harm nature in 2023, more than 30 times the money spent on efforts to protect or restore it. 

Shaw said the new report shows countries must simultaneously increase conservation funding to restore wildlife populations, while reducing investments in the activities that undermine them. 

“Go after the root causes, don’t do this species by species,” she said. “Focus on the food system, the energy system and the finance system, and the connections between the three. That’s a recipe for really turning around the loss of wildlife and the loss of species that we’re seeing at a global scale.”

Federal officers raided Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home early Monday morning, reportedly related to an investigation into the lawmaker’s immigration paperwork, filed by a relative when Omar was a child. 

The search was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security that manages criminal investigations, and, according to a Justice Department spokesperson, “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” the agency secured. An anonymous source reportedly “familiar with the situation” alleged to NBC News that the raid was part of a years-long investigation involving whistleblowers. CNN also reported that a federal judge approved the search warrant but did not name the judge. 

White House border czar Tom Homan, the acting head of ICE, stated on Fox News last month that Homeland Security was investigating Rep. Omar for alleged unspecified “criminal” conduct, but claimed he couldn’t “give the specifics of what’s happening.” 

“If someone committed an immigration violation, if someone committed marriage fraud or anything like that, regardless if they’re a congressman or not, no one’s above the law,” Homan said at the time. “So, I’ll leave it at that. We’ll let HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, continue the investigation.”

In a Monday morning Fox interview, Homan confirmed that the search had taken place.

Omar immigrated to the US from Somalia in 1995, when she was 12 years old, amid the ongoing civil war in the country. She became a naturalized US citizen in 2000. Donald Trump and his administration have regularly racially targeted Omar—a progressive Democrat and frequent critic of the administration’s policies—fueling further violent threats against her and other lawmakers of color, and people from Somalia living in Minnesota.

Trump and other White House officials have repeatedly cited the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal that involved members of the state’s Somali American community to justify the mass violence by immigration officers in the area as part of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in late 2025. 

The timing of the raid on Rep. Omar’s Washington-area home—22 days before the November midterms, in which she is a heavy favorite for re-election—adds additional scrutiny, as Justice Department policy prohibits federal prosecutors and agents from timing investigations or charges to affect election outcomes. While not a binding rule, the Justice Department has historically complied by pausing all related actions in the 60 days before an election. (Trump and the wider MAGA movement have repeatedly targeted former FBI head James Comey, and that agency as a whole, in part over the timing and supposed political motivations of the FBI’s own investigations under Comey into both Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.)

“Americans see this for what it is,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who the Trump administration has also targeted, wrote on social media. “President ​Trump is abusing his power to go after political opponents weeks before an election.”

“I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement,” Rep. Omar posted on social media on Monday afternoon. “This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”

I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.I will not be silenced.

— Ilhan Omar (@ilhanmn.bsky.social) 2026-10-12T16:01:52.513Z

On Friday, I hosted a Reddit AMA, prompting the Internet to ask me anything about my coverage of anti-abortion activist Kristan Hawkins and the movement she represents. 

I spent months following and getting to know Kristan. I watched her debate students who were victims of sexual assault, order medication abortion pills online in a state where abortion is banned to show that it was still accessible, and discuss how to weaponize environmental laws against abortion. I also watched her fend off attacks from all sides—from abortion rights supporters to misogynists within her own movement. 

Redditors were particularly interested in the effectiveness of Kristan’s message, and curious about what the anti-abortion movement is planning next.

Here’s an excerpt of the Reddit discussion. Don’t forget to read my full story on Kristan Hawkins and watch our documentary.

Do you think Hawkins is successfully influencing college students at all? How is she perceived on campus?

AL: My colleagues and I watched Kristan in action on two very politically different college campuses—one in Texas and one in California.

What was striking to me in both these venues is that most students seemed to come to the “change my mind” debates that Kristan organized with their views pretty fully formed already. There were some conservative Christian students who strongly agreed with her and saw her as a hero…others who thought she was out of her damn mind.

We have a pretty epic clip in the documentary that shows one student shutting down her arguments, for example…and then some who were in between.

But the polling data shows that overall, young people on college campuses—and especially young women, which is the demographic Kristan cares about most—overwhelmingly support abortion rights. So while I think she’s been able to whip up a relatively small, loyal following, by and large, her message is failing to win over the majority of students.

“We spent enough time together that I did get to see her with her guard down.”

Assuming that you don’t share Hawkins’ views, what is the relationship like between you and your subject? Is the experience one that feels very performative so as to present a very particular image of her and her movement, or does the subject relax and become more genuine? 

Is there a component of trying to be persuasive towards you? Or does the interaction have an adversarial element, like she believes she’s working with the enemy to further her goals?

You are correct in thinking I do not share Kristan’s views, and she knew that going into it. But I have a record of accurately reporting on right-wing figures I disagree with. In fact, Kristan read my book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, before our first interview. I think it sometimes helps with the source relationship when I can be open with my views, because Kristan wasn’t trying to guess where I stood.

While part of my time with her involved sifting through well-rehearsed talking points, some of which were pretty wild (i.e. her views about the dangers of abortion pills in the water supply, which most scientists think are bogus), we spent enough time together that I felt like I did get to see her with her guard down at times…like when she was exhausted, in a T-shirt, putting on makeup in an airport bathroom after we’d both spent the night in the Houston airport during the government shutdown.

This was the moment when she told me: “My brand consultant would probably say you shouldn’t be filming me.” But as a reporter, I was like…actually…I think this version of you is probably more genuine and likable than the version that’s out there posting ragebait on social media all the time.

How do you see the anti-abortion movement on college campuses and among college students evolving in our current political climate?

Young people, especially young women, are overwhelmingly pro-choice. About two-thirds of people under 30 want abortion legal. Among young women, it’s as high as 76 percent. So for conservatives like Hawkins and her followers, it’s really an uphill battle, and I think that leads to a sense of cultural embattlement that has actually been galvanizing for the minority of students who oppose abortion.

Kristan stokes this feeling with her constant stream of content showing pro-choicers angrily reacting to Students for Life displays. IMO, this kind of content shows their message is unpopular…but Kristan is a master of spin, so she’ll use it to suggest that abortion opponents are under attack by crazy pro-choicers.

To Kristan’s credit, though, there really isn’t a pro-choice parallel to Students for Life. No group on the abortion rights side has as much reach and presence on college campuses, even though that is the more popular point of view.

What is their next move? 

First, they’re coming after shield laws—the laws passed in blue states that allow clinicians in New York or Massachusetts or California, for example, to mail abortion pills into states where abortion is banned.

“She’s trying to stop something unstoppable: The mail and abortion pills.”

The Supreme Court lawsuit filed by three red states last week is the opening salvo in this major constitutional showdown. But their holy grail would actually take us back in time…to 1873.

Kristan Hawkins and her allies would like the Trump administration to revive the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law that they believe can act as a de facto abortion ban nationwide to shut down the mailing of pills, maybe even all abortion supplies, including in states where abortion is legal.

There’s also the ongoing review of mifepristone by Trump’s FDA, which will reportedly be out in March, and could disrupt access to one of two drugs used in the ideal medication abortion protocol. But no matter what happens, community suppliers say they will keep sending pills through the mail, and not even the most zealous postal inspectors can confiscate every package. 

Ultimately, one of the major reasons I think Kristan has lost is that she’s trying to stop something unstoppable: The mail and abortion pills.

Is the next plan removal of all birth control? 

Going after birth control was always, always part of the plan—it just happens to be less salient as a political talking point than going after abortion, so they tend to be more quiet about it!

Kristan Hawkins and many of her fellow abortion opponents oppose most birth control methods, because they believe (incorrectly) that they can cause abortions. What’s been fascinating lately is watching the intersection of old-school religious opposition to contraception with the MAHA movement and its crunchy online influencers who claim to eschew birth control for a whole host of other reasons.

Kristan is definitely taking advantage of this trend. I picked up a Students for Life postcard at a conference over the summer, for example, that touted getting off birth control as a way to “go green.”

“I don’t think she’ll quit the movement, but I do think she’ll increasingly have trouble navigating these divides.”

How does Hawkins deal with the attacks from the misogynists in her own movement? How does she move forward without being discouraged, and would there be a point where she quits the movement because of these attacks?

This question is a big part of why I wanted to follow Kristan Hawkins in this moment! She and other women in the anti-abortion movement are getting a wave of animosity right now from a hard-right faction of their own movement that blames women leaders like her for the fact that abortions have gone up, and that wants to punish people who have abortions with jail, maybe even the death penalty.

In fact, Kristan has said she’s more afraid of being shot by these folks than by pro-choicers. Kristan’s walking a pretty wild line here, because she is a brawler by nature whose inclination is to fight off the misogynists, but she can’t sound too feminist or she risks alienating her base of conservative supporters.

So her solution has been to try to have it all. She leans into feminist talking points sometimes as a way to hook in young women and shoot down the misogynists. But then, ultimately, she still embraces an extreme anti-abortion POV.

At least for now, she disagrees with the so-called abortion “abolitionists” who want people who have abortions to be charged with murder…although in her persistent effort to have it all, she told me that there might come a time when criminalizing women makes sense. I don’t think she’ll quit the movement, but I do think she’ll increasingly have trouble navigating these divides, and she’ll spend more and more of her time fighting internal battles.

President Donald Trump keeps pointing the finger at everyone for surging fuel prices but himself. Over the weekend, he once again blamed Ukraine, asserting that the country’s retaliatory airstrikes on Russia’s oil refineries were causing prices to spike. Now Trump is urging Ukraine to scrap its leader.

“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said on Saturday, suggesting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not done enough to broker a peace deal with Russia.

For weeks, Trump has called on Zelenskyy to stop striking Russia’s energy infrastructure, claiming that the attacks are “hurting the world,” while saying virtually nothing about Russia’s strikes against Ukraine.

Responding to Trump’s escalatory remarks, Zelenskyy on Sunday criticized Trump’s framing, telling ABC News that it is near universally understood that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has led to higher prices—not Ukraine’s strikes against Russia. But according to Zelenskyy, it’s easier for Trump to blame Ukraine instead of acknowledging the United States’ overwhelming role in surging prices around the world.

“People have to hear reality,” the Ukrainian president said. “Don’t play games with people.” 

Zelenskyy: "Prices are rising because of the war in the Middle East, the blocking of Hormuz. Everyone understands it. If we want to speak with people fairly, if we want to be clear, if we want to speak with our nations openly, people have to hear reality. Don't play games with people."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-11T13:49:23.365Z

Later on Sunday, Trump claimed on Truth Social that there is now an “ENERGY CEASEFIRE” in the war between Russia and Ukraine. But he gave little detail about what that entailed.

The head-spinning war of words follows Trump’s deal on Friday to allow Russia to supply diesel to other countries, an apparent bid to bring down prices ahead of the midterm elections. But just last month, Trump had signed a bill granting him power to impose up to 100 percent tariffs on top countries that buy Russian oil or gas, namely China and India. 

Even GOP lawmakers have voiced rare opposition to the deal. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) wrote on X that he was “concerned the lifting of sanctions on Russian oil will only fund the Kremlin’s war machine—emboldening more violence and destruction, as we have seen in recent days.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said that Trump should use his new sanctioning authority against Russia instead of allowing the country to “rake in revenues, and continue its catastrophic war in Ukraine.”

On Saturday, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) announced plans for a bipartisan bill that he said would prevent the president from lifting sanctions. “[Ukrainian] President Volodymyr Zelensky has the overwhelming support of the United States Congress, he has the overwhelming support of the American people, and he has the overwhelming support of the Ukrainian people,” Fitzpatrick wrote on social media.

Are Kimberly Guilfoyle’s days as the US ambassador to Greece numbered?

Amid multiple reports alleging outright corruption, on-the-record quotes from Greek officials who seem to detest her grifting behavior, and my personal favorite, the criminal use of “honey” in casual conversation, it appears that Guilfoyle’s ambassadorship could be in peril.

The increasingly precarious standing follows two explosive Wall Street Journal reports alleging Guilfoyle, whose personal finances seemed to be in the gutter even before her ambassadorship, repeatedly pleaded for money from Eric Deters, a Republican donor and failed congressional candidate, in return for political favors. Those favors reportedly included face time with various Trump administration officials, an introduction to Kid Rock, and help with some “personal tax and legal issues.” But according to Deters, Guilfoyle never delivered.

That’s when the apparent begging went off the rails.

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she allegedly texted Deters, referring to her request for him to wire $100,000 to settle some hefty credit card debt. Deters, who said that he had paid her $300,000 over the years, refused the entreaty because it would end his marriage.

All of which sounds like a far cry from Guilfoyle’s days as Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée and a prominent member of President Trump’s inner circle. But it gets even worse for Guilfoyle. According to a follow-up story, the ambassador couldn’t even manage an invite to a Greek House Davos dinner organized for Eric Trump. “You don’t have the f—ing US, you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my f—ing ass,” the Wall Street Journal reports Guilfoyle said of Greek House Davos’ organizer.

Guilfoyle ultimately strong-armed her way into an invite. But the incident apparently did not give her pause about bragging about her connections to wealthy Greek businessmen. A sample: “He loves me. Honey, I spent Christmas with him. New Years. OK? Gstaad. Like, everywhere.”

So what does the president have to say about all of this? “I just heard about it. Too bad,” he told reporters on Friday. “I don’t know too much, but she was always very nice.”

Ouch. Referring to your ambassador and almost-daughter-in-law in the past tense, like she’s already a goner? Seems pretty ice-cold to me, honey.