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Becerra and Hilton Advance in California Governor’s Race
A week after polls closed in California’s closely watched open gubernatorial primary last Tuesday—following a slow trickle of votes that fueled unsubstantiated claims of fraud from the president—Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton will advance to the November general election, winnowing down a crowded race to succeed two-term Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has held the position since 2019.
Since 2011, California has had a “jungle primary” system that allows voters to choose any one candidate for statewide offices, like the governor’s seat, regardless of their party—a method that sometimes yields runoffs of two Democrats or two Republicans. Out of the 62 names on the ballot, Becerra, the former state Attorney General and Health and Human Services Secretary under Biden, and Trump-endorsed Republican and former Fox News host Steve Hilton were the top two vote-getters, receiving 27.9 and 25 percent of the vote, respectively, as of Tuesday night. Tom Steyer, a billionaire businessman, climate activist, and 2020 Democratic presidential contender, placed third, with 22.5 percent.
The lead-up to the primary election was marked by the dropping out of then-frontrunner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell in April, who subsequently resigned from Congress following sexual assault allegations first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. With no clear runner-up on the Democratic side, some worried that votes would be split among the handful of leading Democrats on the ballot, potentially resulting in Republicans taking the top two spots. (A Republican hasn’t won a race for California governor since moderate former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was reelected in 2006.)
With the field wide open, wealthy donors, special interest groups, and large corporations spent a record-breaking amount of money trying to influence the outcome of the primary. After Swalwell dropped out of the race, most of his supporters seemingly consolidated behind Beccerra, the favorite of the state Democratic establishment. Becerra also received significant backing from oil and gas companies, which spent millions of dollars in support of him and against his Democratic rival. Steyer, the former hedge fund manager, who has promised to divest from fossil fuels and vowed not to accept funding from the industry, contributed more than $200 million of his own money to his campaign.
The candidate with the second-most contributions was San Jose’s first-term mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate Democrat representing a key tech stronghold who entered the race late with support from Silicon Valley. Although venture capitalists and executives from Big Tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Palantir donated tens of millions to his campaign, Mahan received less than 4 percent of the vote—behind the roughly 10 percent won by Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who seized more than half a million ballots in last year’s special election in an alleged investigation into ballot count discrepancies, and former Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, who received slightly more than 4 percent. While Porter, the only woman among the top six candidates, was well-known for flipping a Republican-held House seat in 2018 and grilling CEOs during congressional hearings, her campaign suffered after a series of viral setbacks.
Now, Becerra and Hilton will face off to become the next governor of the Golden State—although any path to the governorship will likely be a struggle for Hilton, given Trump’s unpopularity in the state.
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Lawmakers Demand Answers After We Revealed Forest Service Spraying Roundup All Over Public Lands
Two members of Congress have sent a letter to US Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz calling on the agency to justify its actions following an investigation by Mother Jones that found glyphosate—the controversial key ingredient in the herbicide Roundup—was being sprayed in record amounts on public lands.
“Given the recent scientific disputes, retracted studies, and litigation surrounding glyphosate due to serious ecological and health harms, we are deeply concerned by the alleged use of the herbicide and lack of information available regarding current and planned use,” wrote Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).
Rep. Chellie Pingree: “It’s bullshit. I’m really mad.”
While glyphosate is more well-known for its use in agriculture, its fastest-growing use in California—where our investigation analyzed more than 5 million state pesticide records—is on forestlands. Private timber companies and the Forest Service have been dousing hundreds of thousands of acres of the state’s forests in the herbicide, especially areas affected by wildfires.
Local communities have struggled to understand where the agency is spraying. In one case, the Forest Service published maps showing where it had sprayed glyphosate in the Lake Tahoe area, including at the ski resort Sierra-at-Tahoe, a full year after the work was done.
View this post on Instagram“It’s bullshit. I’m really mad,” Congresswoman Pingree told me when asked about the Forest Service spraying in environmentally sensitive areas.
The lawmakers’ letter calls on the Forest Service to publish a database showing its herbicide use across the country, and to report what safety measures it has put in place—such as monitoring waterways and soils for contamination—following its use of Roundup and other glyphosate-based products.
They also wondered about potential harms to humans: “Have there been any reported worker illness incidents, accidental exposures, or contamination complaints associated with glyphosate applications?” the letter asks.
Workers contracted to spray Roundup on US Forest Service Land in 2021 not wearing required protective gear and exposed to an herbicide that the World Health Organization determined is a probable carcinogen. Photo credit: El Dorado CountyOur investigation found that workers hired to spray Roundup on the El Dorado National Forest in 2021 were covered in Roundup, including directly on exposed skin, and that they were not wearing the required protective equipment nor did they have the state-required training, according to a report by a county inspector.
Bayer, the German company that manufactures Roundup, provided a statement that “regulators, including the EPA, EU, and others around the world, have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate-based products—which are the most widely used and extensively studied products of their kind—can be used safely according to the product label directions.”
Glyphosate is at the center of several legal, scientific, and political controversies. Bayer is on the hook for more than $12 billion in legal payouts to people who say exposure to the chemical made them sick. The World Health Organization classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen in 2015, and the Environmental Protection Agency says the herbicide likely harms 93 percent of endangered species. The EPA last approved the chemical’s safety in 1993. A more recent review in 2020 that found it was safe was overturned two years later by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined the agency had not fully assessed the risks to human health or the environment.
The Forest Service says it is using the chemical at record levels in California because it is the least expensive way to help conifer trees—the ones with pine needles—grow back after wildfires. The often stated goal of these Forest Service herbicide projects is to regrow trees more expeditiously. This helps the agency meet its desired forest density for future timber sales, according to hundreds of pages of Forest Service documents reviewed in our investigation. (The agency is part of the US Department of Agriculture and manages many of the nation’s public forests, similar to how a farmer oversees rows of corn: optimizing the land for higher yields, lower costs, and greater revenue.)
In 2025, President Trump issued an executive order for the Forest Service to increase timber sales by 25 percent, while the administration simultaneously cut the agency’s budget. In 2026, Trump called for an increase in the domestic production of glyphosate.
Spraying glyphosate and other herbicides both before and after replanting conifer trees results in the death of all other plants that reemerge after fires.
In their letter to the Forest Service, Reps. Pingree and Huffman urged the agency to consider “safer or more sustainable approaches to forest management.” With such indiscriminate spraying of glyphosate,“you’re talking about just wiping out all biology, you know, just like all life forms. It’s bonkers,” Pingree told Mother Jones. “If there’s one thing we learned from Rachel Carson [author of Silent Spring] in the sixties it’s that we have to look at the cumulative impact, both on humans, but also the species and the food chain, and the loss of diversity.”
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Trump screwed himself when he screwed Latino voters
The latest sign of a Latino revolt against President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans arrives in California. In the state’s 22nd District, GOP Rep. David Valadao is trying to hold onto his majority-Latino seat, which Trump carried by 2 percentage points in the 2024 election. With nearly three-quarters of the primary vote counted, Valadao received just 41.9%, while the two Democrats…
Crypto bro pleads for pardon, and Ted Cruz thinks he’s a masculinity expert
A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Infamous crypto bro makes pathetic plea for future pardon from Trump That is some wuss-ass behavior. Ted Cruz debuts impotent attack on James Talarico The GOP sure loves to try to narrowly define masculinity. Trump gets booed, takes world’s most expensive nap at…
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Fox News host asks Tom Homan what we’ve all been wondering
“Border czar” dunderhead Tom Homan appeared on Fox News Tuesday, where he was asked by host John Roberts about Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s idea to suspend customs operations at international airports in sanctuary cities. “This idea of pulling customs agents from these major airports—I’m reminded of that line from the movie ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’” Roberts said.
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US says it has begun strikes against Iran following crash of Army Apache helicopter off Oman coast
The U.S. military said Tuesday it has begun strikes against Iran following the crash of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter off the coast of Oman that U.S. President Donald Trump blamed on the Islamic Republic. In a statement posted to social media, U.S. Central Command said the strikes would be “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.” It comes after Trump blamed Iran for…
Gwyneth Paltrow Just Goopified Drone Warfare
Despite reaping billions in the weapons industry as cofounder of the military-tech company Anduril, Trae Stephens says he does not believe that “wartime profiteering is ethical, really, in any way.”
That was just one takeaway from an hourlong conversation he had with Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop podcast last week, during which Stephens held forth on God, great power conflict, the male loneliness crisis, and what he thinks the Pope really meant when he said “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
At first glance, they make a strange pair: Paltrow’s known for hawking vaginal eggs and antidepressive flower essences; Stephens sells drones. But the Goop podcast is actually the perfect stage for Stephens to do a little reputation-management for Anduril, which develops unmanned submarines, border-surveillance towers, missiles, and “smart battlefield” technology, with the aim of killing thousands more cheaply than traditional weapons might.
As for Paltrow’s role in the reputational war, on last week’s podcast, she appeared determined to make weapons-tech legible and even appealing to Goop’s affluent, wellness-focused audience. She sympathized with Stephens’ plan to build up America’s military arsenal, because of her trauma around the Cold War and 9/11: “I’ll never forget moving to New York City to start seventh grade, like in the height of the Cold War and being petrified at night that the Russians were gonna bomb us.”
An Anduril Bolt drone, designed as a tactical, backpackable and precision strike system, is used as a one-way attack drone delivering an explosive charge to the enemy, seen here at an undisclosed training ground near the Russian border in Finland.Ben Birchall/PA Wire/ZumaEach spoke of their childhoods, and their children. Stephens wondered whether his children could be proud of him “without feeling like they’re in this really weird twilight zone where they’re constantly having to defend with their peers what it is that their dad does for a living.” His job is, after all, “complicated.”
Paltrow, charitably, responded that “We as human beings are complicated. We have all kinds of gradations of light and dark. And, you know, we’re always sort of fighting with the good wolf and the bad wolf within us to a certain degree.”
But the ease with which Paltrow and Stephens traded thoughts on light and darkness elides the morally questionable convergence of woo-woo, hippie aesthetics and the Silicon-Valley defense-tech universe. It comes amid a larger rightward turn in both Silicon Valley and American wellness culture, perhaps best exemplified by the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Things got particularly odd when the two dug into religion. Stephens, a devout Christian, brought up the Pope’s Palm Sunday homily, in which Leo XIV declared that “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those that wage war.”
“You could look at that and say, wow, what am I doing?” Stephens said. “Like, the Pope himself is telling me that the thing that I’m doing is bad.”
Luckily for him, Paltrow was there to apply a thick layer of mystical equivocation and soften the blow.
“You could approach it from a more mystical aspect of Christianity, like, as opposed to taking it literally,” she said. “This is just a random hypothesis. It’s occurring to me. If you were using it as a metaphor of someone who is engaged in against-ness all the time, you know. It could’ve been something more mystical or metaphorical.”
Stephens liked that. Warmongering can be good, he seemed to interpret, if only done with a pure heart, and without against-ness. “And so if you’re approaching it with a heart of peace, I think it’s very different on a mystical level than approaching it with a heart at war.”