Microsoft sketches out a Whiteboard extension
CISA confirms hackers targeted over 100 US water systems during July
Trump Just Used a $500 Million Clean Steel Grant to Fund a Coal Furnace
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A $500 million Biden-era grant to decarbonize steelmaking has been refashioned by the Trump administration to upgrade a coal-fueled blast furnace in southern Ohio.
On Friday, Cleveland-Cliffs confirmed that the US Department of Energy had changed the scope of the previously awarded funding for Cliffs’ Middletown steel mill—the longtime economic engine of Vice President JD Vance’s hometown. Vance and Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited the plant on Friday to tout the federal investment.
“The DOE’s support for this project is a testament to the importance of preserving the blast furnace route to produce automotive-exposed grade steels in the US,” Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves said in a statement. The Middletown plant makes steel used in the exposed parts of cars, trucks, and SUVs.
Today’s announcement makes official what Cliffs has been signaling would happen in recent months. The change of plans has drawn pushback from green-steel advocates and some Middletown residents, who say they are dismayed that funding meant to slash industrial emissions could potentially amp up local air pollution instead.
“Cleveland-Cliffs and JD Vance need to get rid of coal and go back to the original project that would clean up the air we breathe and improve our health,” Donna Ballinger, who lives in the shadows of the Middletown steel mill, said Friday in a news release shared by the Sierra Club.
Cliffs initially planned to use its half-billion-dollar award to replace its aging blast furnace with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology and electric furnaces. In March 2024, the Biden administration’s DOE chose Middletown as the place to unveil its broader, $6.3 billion program for decarbonizing key US manufacturing sectors, which was primarily funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Globally, iron and steel production generates roughly 9 percent of human-caused CO2 emissions every year, and the vast majority of that pollution comes from using coal in blast furnaces. Replacing the centuries-old technology is considered key to limiting the worst impacts of climate change, and global efforts to clean up steelmaking are advancing, though in fits and starts.
Cliffs’ original project would’ve replaced coal with natural gas—and eventually hydrogen—eliminating roughly 1 million tons of planet-warming emissions. But after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the Ohio-based steelmaker recommitted itself to using “beautiful coal” at the Middletown steel mill.
Under its current plan, Cliffs says it will refurbish and optimize the 73-year-old blast furnace so that it can run for potentially another two decades. The manufacturer will also install a cogeneration plant that uses waste gases from the blast furnace to generate steam and electricity for the steel mill’s operations. Cliffs said it will invest $500 million of its own money to match DOE’s grant.
Cliffs first outlined the new direction in a February air-permit application submitted to Ohio’s environmental regulator. It wasn’t clear then whether this work would be funded by the DOE, given the nature of the grant program.
However, in July, Goncalves said during an earnings call that the company aimed to redirect the $500 million grant to align with the Trump administration’s priorities. Friday’s announcement cements those plans, with the DOE having “established a framework for Cliffs to finalize negotiations and implementation plans” for the Middletown project, Cliffs said.
In a news release, the DOE said the company “determined that the business case for the original project scope no longer made sense given customers’ unwillingness to pay a ‘green premium’ for steel. Working with the DOE, Cleveland-Cliffs identified a viable alternative that will upgrade and improve the efficiency of its existing coal-fired blast furnace” while also capturing waste gas.
A former DOE official noted that Congress legally mandated that the grant funding be used to, in the words of the Inflation Reduction Act, enable “advanced industrial technology”—defined as something “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emission reduction progress to net-zero at an eligible facility.”
The Middletown project’s revised scope will move the steel mill away from achieving net-zero emissions, not toward it, the former official said.
As Cliffs sees it, the steelmaker is “going above and beyond a standard blast furnace reline, to include the most advanced technology available,” Goncalves said in Friday’s statement, referring to the cogeneration plant and other planned energy-efficiency improvements.
“Cleveland-Cliffs is making a decisive investment in the future of American steelmaking and manufacturing,” he said.
Aug. 26: Trump’s trade war gets stupider … and more!
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Memes and Machine Guns: How Brandon Herrera Built a Path to Congress
If you want to get acquainted with Brandon Herrera, the gun influencer currently favored to win a tight congressional race in South Texas, his YouTube channel offers many opportunities. You could feast your eyes on his most-watched video, with 13 million views, wherein he uses a rifle and head and torso ballistics models to recreate the assassination of JFK. Or there’s the one where he calls a World War II-era machine gun the “original ghetto blaster” and goose-steps to the tune of Nazi military songs. In an episode of his podcast, he brags about owning a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and, departing from his interest in Nazis, he has also appeared with the neo-Confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans and calls the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.”
In an article about Herrera’s excesses and his successes, the New York Times declined to print some of his most profane viral statements “because this is a family newspaper.” I suspect Mother Jones readers may prefer the unabridged edition, so here goes: In a 2023 video, Herrera referred to children as “cum trophies.” Of mothers’ views on current events, he said, “Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.” When Austin-American-Statesman reporter Faith Bugenhagen asked the Herrera campaign about those remarks, the team replied with a photo of a cream pie (the baked good, to be clear).
Herrera, whose campaign slogan, naturally, is “Let’s Go Brandon,” is what’s known in online parlance as an edgelord—an influencer whose entire brand consists of off-color jokes and offensive remarks designed to titillate, outrage, and garner attention. This gambit is not new; the shock jocks of talk radio’s glory days (think early Howard Stern) figured this formula out decades ago—though at 30, he wouldn’t remember all that.
But these days, shit posting alone is not enough to win votes; witness the recent crashing and burning of James Fishback, the Florida groyper who lost the Republican gubernatorial primary with only 10 percent of the vote. Or the case of Casey Putsch, the Ohio challenger to Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor whose campaign included antisemitic dogwhistles. In that primary, Putsch got just 17.5 percent of the vote.
What sets Herrera apart from these mere provocateurs is his massive online fanbase: 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube, where he is known as the AK Guy, after the abbreviation for Avtomat Kalashnikova, the Russian phrase for automatic rifle. His 12-year-old channel is a mix of gun history, memes, and genuine feats of engineering. In 2024, wearing a “More Liberty Less Government” t-shirt, he successfully built and fired the prototype of an AK-50, a long-range rifle that has long been the holy grail of automatic weapon enthusiasts.
Herrera in his AK-50 video.YouTube
Herrera’s success proves that a candidate can harness an online following into a formidable campaign—one whose true supporters are not voters in his district but rather a geographically dispersed, chronically online group of (mostly-male) fans. This model is adjacent to the “network state,” a concept coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and a former colleague of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen. In Srinivasan’s vision, digital networks can amass physical land, forming new sovereign nations. Herrera’s campaign proves they can do something potentially even more powerful: They can accumulate an impressive amount of political capital—thus transforming a scattered online audience into a powerful base and financing juggernaut.
Indeed, Herrera’s campaign is funded almost entirely by people outside his district. In recent months, he has solicited campaign donations on his YouTube channel, sometimes offering donors entry into a raffle for a Cold War-era collector’s item, an AC-556 machine gun. What he does with his donations is unclear; they are funneled through an unregistered opaque entity. Jacob Ware, an extremism researcher with Georgetown University and the author of the 2025 book God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, has observed this phenomenon firsthand. “In the past people would have idiosyncratic or individual ideas but wouldn’t be able to build political movements on that because they were just so disparate,” he said. But now, thanks in large part to social media, this scattered group of people can come together around a shared interest to back “a local candidate and pour their resources and hopes and dreams into him, thinking this is a foothold in the national political picture.”
What makes the success of this impassioned Second Amendment advocate even more improbable is that his district includes the sites of two high-profile mass shootings: Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022, and El Paso, where a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019. A poll earlier this year conducted by the gun control advocacy group Giffords surveyed 600 likely Texas Republican voters in the Senate runoff and found overwhelming support for firearm safety policies like background checks and red-flag laws.
Despite those headwinds, as of mid-August, Herrera was leading his opponent, Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, by six points. He has also garnered powerful endorsements from like-minded celebrities, including right-wing podcasters Tim Pool and Benny Johnson as well as a motley crew of organizations: the Freedom Caucus Fund, MAHA Action, and the National Women’s Prayer and Voting Army, to name a few.
Conspicuously absent is the National Rifle Association, which Herrera has criticized for being a fusty boomer relic that is overly accommodating to gun safety groups. After initially supporting Tony Gonzales, Herrera’s opponent in the primary, House Speaker Mike Johnson did an about-face this summer and began campaigning for Herrera. As someone who has tirelessly promoted traditional family values, Johnson is an awkward spokesman for a candidate whose statements about children and mothers are profane enough to exclude them from the pages of the New York Times. No such awkwardness faces President Donald Trump, who endorsed Herrera in a March post on Truth Social: “Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas, and Republicans in the US House,” he wrote. “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
Raised in a military family in the Fort Bragg-adjacent community of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Herrera’s interest in firearms began in middle school and obviously never waned. He dabbled in building guns as a teen. After a short undergrad stint as a pre-law student at a nearby Christian college, he dropped out to focus full time on manufacturing firearms through his business, The AK Guy Inc., and building his YouTube channel. In 2020, he moved to Texas, where he plugged into a thriving community of firearms enthusiasts and launched his gunsmithing company. The following year, he built and fired the AK-50, a move that immediately increased his prestige in the firearms world.
“If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution. We will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”
The Uvalde school shooting happened two years after Herrera moved to Texas, and in response, lawmakers in the state introduced new legislation to tighten firearm regulation. Tony Gonzales, the Republican who represented Texas’ 23rd district, was the only Republican to vote in favor of the new law—so Herrera took it upon himself to unseat him. “If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution,” he warned Gonzales at a 2024 gun rights rally in Colorado, “we will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”
Herrera did not, in fact, take Gonzales’ fucking job in the 2024 election cycle—he lost, but barely. Gonzales won by 1 percent, a margin of about 400 votes. Two years later in this election cycle, Herrera ran another extremely tight race, drawing 41 percent of the vote to Gonzales’ 43 percent, thus triggering a runoff. But two days after the primary, Gonzales suspended his campaign (and later resigned) after being accused of having had a sexual relationship with an employee who later committed suicide. In his victory speech, Herrera thanked “all those #TX23 constituents that support our campaign.”
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz raises Brandon Herrera’s hand after both speak at a rally for Herrera in March 2024. Herrera was campaigning with Matt Gaetz before his runoff against US Rep. Tony Gonzales.Jessica Phelps/San Antonio Express-News; Getty
In reality, the support of all those #TX23 constituents appears to be dwarfed by the support of internet randos. Just shy of 96 percent of individual contributions to his campaign came from donors outside his district—and 84 percent were from a different state. The Federal Election Commission’s database revealed donors from nearly every state, from many walks of life. Top individual donors included former Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz and billionaire and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, each of whom has given the maximum individual donation of$12,000. Other donors of more than $1,000 included Silicon Valley managers, a Campbell’s soup factory worker, a technician at a Toyota plant, an associate producer at National Public Radio, and many retirees.
Herrera’s fundraising isn’t the only unconventional part of his campaign finance activities. His federal disclosures list a single mysterious entity as the recipient of more than 99 percent of the campaign’s spending—more than $2.7 million. That entity, a business called Texas Strategy Group, doesn’t appear to be listed in any registry as a commercial vendor. In May, the election spending watchdog Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint about Herrera’s campaign with the FEC, alleging that Texas Strategy Group is “a mere shell entity established to serve as a payment clearinghouse for the committees to conceal who they are actually paying.”
Herrera’s campaign didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones about the Texas Strategy Group or anything else. The FEC, meanwhile, is unlikely to act on the allegations any time soon—because the agency currently has only two commissioners, and four are required to enforce campaign spending rules. This lack of oversight has created a free-for-all, creating a gray area for rules around campaign transparency, said Campaign Legal Center’s director for federal campaign finance reform, Saurav Ghosh. His organization has documented several other such cases recently—but the proportion of spending that Herrera’s campaign sends to Texas Strategy Group, he said, puts it “really at the far end of the spectrum.”
It’s unclear whether Herrera’s far-flung donors are concerned about where their money is going. David Meyers, a researcher with the campaign watchdog group Open Secrets, told me the nationalization of local races has become increasingly common, but even in that context, Herrera’s reliance on donors outside of his own district is “an outlier.” His YouTube following was likely playing a key role in driving those out-of-district contributions, Meyers said, and noted, “Having that kind of presence on an issue that people care about is going to help drive those donations.”
Real estate developer and investor Josh Abbotoy has thought a lot about the qualities that allow online communities to amass real-world power. Abbotoy is the founder of the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America in which, as it has outlined in the “philosophy” section of its website, “our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”
Tapping into communities that share those values has worked to Abbotoy’s advantage—he has sold land to friend groups “that wanted to go in together to buy a property somewhere, but they could never quite reach critical mass,” he said. “But then when you build like a neighborhood like that, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll just all buy in there.’” The people who have coalesced around Abbotoy’s Highland Rim Project are not the same as Herrera’s gun-fanatic followers, but both are striking examples of the increasing political and economic relevance of shared-interest digital communities: in Abbotoy’s case, an IRL community, and in Herrera’s, a formidable, galvanized political force.
Of course, there are other reasons for Herrera’s success. Jason Blazakis, a researcher who oversees Middlebury College’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, sees House Speaker Mike Johnson’s endorsement as a shrewd political move aimed at uniting an increasingly fractured national base. Johnson’s endorsement of Herrera, he added, could even be interpreted as an “olive branch” between the pro-Israel camp, which Johnson supports, and Herrera-aligned America-first anti-interventionists. “It makes sense to see someone like Johnson try to prop up someone like Herrera to show that there is a broad tent within the Republican Party,” despite Herrera’s profane persona being out of step with Johnson’s wholesome image, he said.
When news outlets have confronted Herrera with his most controversial statements, Herrera has dismissed them; he was obviously being ironic, he says, and if you didn’t understand that, you are clearly a humorless scold. As he told the New York Times, “I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment.”
But some of his followers appear to be taking him literally. Take Robin Westman, the gunman who killed two children and injured 17 people at a Catholic church in Minneapolis before taking his own life last year. In a video he made shortly before his deadly rampage, Westman spoke favorably of Herrera. “He and I had a conversation, a brief conversation,” Westman said. “We agreed on a lot of things. So, y’all should vote for Brandon Herrera for president.”
Herrera later said in a tweet he didn’t remember meeting Westman, and that he was “sickened and angry about this clearly hate-motivated attack on innocent children, and disgusted that my name came out of this demon’s mouth.”
But his followers, more than a thousand of whom rushed to defend him in the comments on that tweet, didn’t appear to be concerned. “You were clearly only singled out by the shooter as a ridiculous attempt to smear your name,” tweeted an X account named Roman Helmet Guy. “They will always come for the most effective voices in any natural freedom movement,” added a user named Patri0t. “This is planned.” A third saw it as a political sign. “If this isn’t a sign that Brandon Herrera is the right guy for the job,” the user wrote, “I don’t know what is.”
Did the Lindsay Clancy Trial Need to Happen?
Over the course of nearly a month, Lindsay Clancy has stood trial for the January 2023 killings of her three young children, a catastrophic tragedy that has riveted the country. The scenes unfolding in Judge William Sullivan’s courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, have been excruciating.
“I can’t do this,” Clancy sobbed at one point, as testimony about the fatal injuries she inflicted on her children was delivered. Patrick, Clancy’s former husband, who has publicly forgiven her, took the stand amid viral conspiracy theories suggesting that he was the one who really killed their children. Then there were the family members, including Clancy’s mother and sister, who testified to Clancy’s declining mental health in the months before she killed her children, forcing them to relive the pain of a loved one struggling to get the help she begged for. Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, hundreds of people, mostly women, have turned up to support Clancy. Many argue they could have easily been in her place because of the systemic failures around maternal health. Indeed, postpartum psychosis affects roughly one to two out of every 1,000 women after giving birth.
One must wonder if prosecutors ever regret the decision to go to trial.
“It’s a witch hunt for fame,” forensic psychologist Leslie Dobson told a criminal justice podcast in early August, arguing that prosecutors should have offered a plea agreement and civil commitment rather than push a murder trial. “If the prosecutors think they’re winning by winning, they’re horrible people.” The rage resonates across social media, where threads pondering the same themes are rampant, and the prosecution’s strategies, including invoking “mortal sin” in questioning Patrick Clancy’s mother, have been roundly condemned. “This prosecution is a malicious circus with no benefit,” one observer wrote on Facebook.
Lindsay Clancy holds her head as she listens to a description of her children’s injuries during her murder trial August 18, 2026, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.John Tlumacki/Boston Globe/AP
To be sure, Clancy has her detractors. There are those, including prominent right-wing commentators, who call her a “monster” who methodically killed her children and should be punished. Others, like Katie Miller, go further: “Lindsay Clancy deserves to die for murdering her three children.”
Such exhortations for severe punishment tend to elide two certainties: No one, neither Clancy nor her defense team, disputes that she killed her children. And regardless of a verdict, Clancy will never be free. Even if she wins, she will be committed, likely for life, to a psychiatric hospital. Which forces an uncomfortable question: Should this ever have gone to trial?
I spoke with Marisol Orihuela, a clinical professor at Yale Law School and director of the Mental Health Justice Clinic, about the avenues the prosecution could have pursued—and the inherent challenges of evaluating mental health within the American criminal justice system.
Let’s start by defining what it means to evaluate competency to stand trial. What is the difference between competency and the insanity defense?
That’s a great question, because the two can often get confused. Anyone criminally charged in the United States has a due process right to be competent during certain critical moments in criminal proceedings. That includes pleading guilty or standing trial. When someone does not have a rational understanding of the proceedings or cannot rationally assist in their defense, then they do not have the competency to stand trial, and the prosecution cannot proceed. That is different from what we call the insanity defense, or a defense where someone is not criminally responsible for the actions that occurred based on a mental health condition. That has more to do with someone’s ability to appreciate right from wrong at the time of the offense.
“There is another justification in criminal law: retribution…I think that’s what might be one of the motivators for this prosecution.”
My understanding of what the commonwealth is arguing is that Lindsay Clancy wanted to and tried to specifically kill the children and had the intent to kill the children and knew what she was doing. Competency is not an issue here. It’s really about criminal responsibility, which also matters for what happens after the trial. In jurisdictions around the country, when someone is acquitted based on a mental health condition, what follows is commitment based on that status.
In the Clancy trial, what incentivizes prosecutors to deliver such a harsh sentence?
If we give every benefit of the doubt to the commonwealth in this case, we would have to think that they really believe that she is criminally responsible, that she understood right from wrong. And the way that we give meaning to that is to provide a very lengthy sentence. We call these justifications for sentencing and how to respond to crimes through sentencing. Another justification is what we call deterrence: an effort to prevent this person from doing it again or to send a message to the rest of the community so nobody else does it. Prosecutors might think that they need to deliver a hefty sentence to send that message.
But here in this case, Clancy is not going to be free, no matter what happens. And I think there’s a really good debate about what role deterrence has here. But there is another justification in criminal law: retribution. That you did something really wrong, so we’re going to give meaning to that wrongness by imposing a lengthy sentence—and I think that might be one of the motivators for this prosecution. I haven’t watched the whole trial, but the parts I have watched and some of the questions, specifically how they’re phrased by the prosecution, suggest a level of blame-worthiness on Lindsay Clancy, especially for having concerns about taking medication.
Another feature of the Clancy trial I found illustrative of the way our society treats mental health as an individual responsibility is some of the resources that were provided to Lindsay when she sought help. For example, when asked what resources were offered to her upon discharge from one of the treatment facilities, one of the psychiatrists pointed to a guide to going on Psychology Today, which, as many can relate to, isn’t exactly adequate. People who turn to it still have a really tough time finding care. Thinking that Psychology Today is an appropriate resource for someone who might be in crisis is a real thing that we should talk about. Yet it’s being presented as, “How could Lindsay not have done more?”
Similarly, another psychiatrist testified that Lindsay was able to access care on the online portal and that she could have easily contacted her provider for additional crisis resources. But this expectation that someone in crisis is going to have the wherewithal to go on an online portal to find out the right information, as opposed to trying to make information immediately available to them in any particular moment, or having follow-ups of people who are calling her, is another illustration of how we see how we have a system that’s really based on individual responsibility and an assumption that treatment is easy and that it always works.
I’ve seen the argument floating around that this case never should have gone to trial. Can you speak to that?
I don’t know a ton about what happened in plea negotiations; I only know what’s been reported in the news. But my understanding is that the defense would have agreed to a plea of the commission of the acts but that Clancy was not criminally responsible based on her mental health condition at the time of the offense. In other words, an agreement to commitment under that statutory scheme. But the prosecution was not interested in that. The thing to know is that the prosecution, in this case, the government, can decide whether they think it is valuable to its jurisdiction to proceed with a criminal trial. So they made that decision. Why? I don’t know the factors that went into that decision. But I think that people are raising really good questions about the decision to go to trial. Because trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.
“Trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.”
There are other victims in this case. The husband. He lost three children. His family is a victim. The grandparents who testified. They lost three grandchildren. I even wonder what it’s like to be one of the medical professionals that attempted to treat Lindsay. Assuming the best intentions for each medical professional, they wanted Lindsay to be well, and Lindsay was not well, and that has to be a difficult thing for a doctor. Now these individuals are being put through a lengthy trial. So again, I think there are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what. So what is a trial really doing in this case? And is it worth the costs of what they’re imposing on everybody going through it?
How does the legal system hurt people with mental health vulnerabilities? Why are prosecutors so incentivized to deliver harsh sentences, and how does this come up in cases involving mental health?
I could not do that question justice. But the mental health system and the criminal system have long been in conversation. Because the criminal system does not exist separate of the mental health system. Both because jails and prisons are massive providers of mental health care to the population doesn’t necessarily mean that they provide great mental healthcare, and because there are so many individuals in the criminal system who have mental health conditions. This is one of the main places where people get some kind of mental healthcare.
“There are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what.”
They’re also really related because of exactly the kind of things that are getting reported about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is that even if her defense team is successful in having her not be held criminally responsible for the killing of her children, that does not mean that Lindsay Clancy goes and lives a life that you and I may be living. Like, she will not be going to get ice cream tomorrow or to the grocery store or hold a job. She will be committed to a facility that we call a hospital, but in many ways bears resemblance to a jail or prison, in that she is not free to leave, that she will be forced to undergo the treatment that is being offered to her, and will likely be detained for very long periods of time, if not for the rest of her life. Which brings up the question that some people are talking about, which is: What is the value of a criminal prosecution when incapacitation could be met through other avenues?
Psychosis is already so misunderstood among the general public, how it operates, that it can wax and wane, etc. How does the legal system fail to address conditions like psychosis?
The legal system has expectations for what should flow when something is attempted. But mental health conditions can be very complex, and the legal system is not designed for the nuance needed to handle them. In my work representing people with significant mental disabilities, both in the criminal system and in the civil commitment system, different mental health conditions can have overlapping criteria. For example, sometimes doctors will have different views about what the actual mental health condition that a particular individual meets criteria for. The criminal system wants to have criminal responsibility flow from a set of actions and wants to know intent. And intent is a very difficult concept to understand and to prove, particularly when we’re talking about a moment in time that has passed.
It’s all so depressing.
It’s very sad. But I think that’s one of the things that appears to be resonating for many people who are tuning in to this trial: that this is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing that has happened to three young kids and that every aspect of this is incredibly sad. And people are wondering about how we provide mental healthcare to try and avoid things like this happening. It is all incredibly sad.
What are some ways society can center mental health to help prevent these kinds of tragedies?
Everybody wants to know what kind of world we could build to avoid the awful tragedy that occurred. We won’t ever know exactly what could have prevented it. But this case is not just raising questions around the mental healthcare system, but also more broadly, including postpartum care in general. One of the things to think about in the mental healthcare system is that we underfund community-based supportive mental healthcare systems, both at the beginning and after any period of commitment. Testimony from the Clancy trial really illustrates that postpartum and mental healthcare were not thought of holistically. So you could imagine people who go to the home and provide both medication management therapy and postpartum care. That’s helping take care of the kids, helping get Lindsay to sleep, which seemed to be a significant issue for her in the months preceding the killings. These are the kinds of things that a society that prioritizes care as a normative matter does, where we approach getting people support and care as something that we really value, and do it as a matter of economics. That this is where we choose to spend the dollars that we have.
Did the Lindsay Clancy Trial Need to Happen?
Over the course of nearly a month, Lindsay Clancy has stood trial for the January 2023 killings of her three young children, a catastrophic tragedy that has riveted the country. The scenes unfolding in Judge William Sullivan’s courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, have been excruciating.
“I can’t do this,” Clancy sobbed at one point, as testimony about the fatal injuries she inflicted on her children was delivered. Patrick, Clancy’s former husband, who has publicly forgiven her, took the stand amid viral conspiracy theories suggesting that he was the one who really killed their children. Then there were the family members, including Clancy’s mother and sister, who testified to Clancy’s declining mental health in the months before she killed her children, forcing them to relive the pain of a loved one struggling to get the help she begged for. Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, hundreds of people, mostly women, have turned up to support Clancy. Many argue they could have easily been in her place because of the systemic failures around maternal health. Indeed, postpartum psychosis affects roughly one to two out of every 1,000 women after giving birth.
One must wonder if prosecutors ever regret the decision to go to trial.
“It’s a witch hunt for fame,” forensic psychologist Leslie Dobson told a criminal justice podcast in early August, arguing that prosecutors should have offered a plea agreement and civil commitment rather than push a murder trial. “If the prosecutors think they’re winning by winning, they’re horrible people.” The rage resonates across social media, where threads pondering the same themes are rampant, and the prosecution’s strategies, including invoking “mortal sin” in questioning Patrick Clancy’s mother, have been roundly condemned. “This prosecution is a malicious circus with no benefit,” one observer wrote on Facebook.
Lindsay Clancy holds her head as she listens to a description of her children’s injuries during her murder trial August 18, 2026, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.John Tlumacki/Boston Globe/AP
To be sure, Clancy has her detractors. There are those, including prominent right-wing commentators, who call her a “monster” who methodically killed her children and should be punished. Others, like Katie Miller, go further: “Lindsay Clancy deserves to die for murdering her three children.”
Such exhortations for severe punishment tend to elide two certainties: No one, neither Clancy nor her defense team, disputes that she killed her children. And regardless of a verdict, Clancy will never be free. Even if she wins, she will be committed, likely for life, to a psychiatric hospital. Which forces an uncomfortable question: Should this ever have gone to trial?
I spoke with Marisol Orihuela, a clinical professor at Yale Law School and director of the Mental Health Justice Clinic, about the avenues the prosecution could have pursued—and the inherent challenges of evaluating mental health within the American criminal justice system.
Let’s start by defining what it means to evaluate competency to stand trial. What is the difference between competency and the insanity defense?
That’s a great question, because the two can often get confused. Anyone criminally charged in the United States has a due process right to be competent during certain critical moments in criminal proceedings. That includes pleading guilty or standing trial. When someone does not have a rational understanding of the proceedings or cannot rationally assist in their defense, then they do not have the competency to stand trial, and the prosecution cannot proceed. That is different from what we call the insanity defense, or a defense where someone is not criminally responsible for the actions that occurred based on a mental health condition. That has more to do with someone’s ability to appreciate right from wrong at the time of the offense.
“There is another justification in criminal law: retribution…I think that’s what might be one of the motivators for this prosecution.”
My understanding of what the commonwealth is arguing is that Lindsay Clancy wanted to and tried to specifically kill the children and had the intent to kill the children and knew what she was doing. Competency is not an issue here. It’s really about criminal responsibility, which also matters for what happens after the trial. In jurisdictions around the country, when someone is acquitted based on a mental health condition, what follows is commitment based on that status.
In the Clancy trial, what incentivizes prosecutors to deliver such a harsh sentence?
If we give every benefit of the doubt to the commonwealth in this case, we would have to think that they really believe that she is criminally responsible, that she understood right from wrong. And the way that we give meaning to that is to provide a very lengthy sentence. We call these justifications for sentencing and how to respond to crimes through sentencing. Another justification is what we call deterrence: an effort to prevent this person from doing it again or to send a message to the rest of the community so nobody else does it. Prosecutors might think that they need to deliver a hefty sentence to send that message.
But here in this case, Clancy is not going to be free, no matter what happens. And I think there’s a really good debate about what role deterrence has here. But there is another justification in criminal law: retribution. That you did something really wrong, so we’re going to give meaning to that wrongness by imposing a lengthy sentence—and I think that might be one of the motivators for this prosecution. I haven’t watched the whole trial, but the parts I have watched and some of the questions, specifically how they’re phrased by the prosecution, suggest a level of blame-worthiness on Lindsay Clancy, especially for having concerns about taking medication.
Another feature of the Clancy trial I found illustrative of the way our society treats mental health as an individual responsibility is some of the resources that were provided to Lindsay when she sought help. For example, when asked what resources were offered to her upon discharge from one of the treatment facilities, one of the psychiatrists pointed to a guide to going on Psychology Today, which, as many can relate to, isn’t exactly adequate. People who turn to it still have a really tough time finding care. Thinking that Psychology Today is an appropriate resource for someone who might be in crisis is a real thing that we should talk about. Yet it’s being presented as, “How could Lindsay not have done more?”
Similarly, another psychiatrist testified that Lindsay was able to access care on the online portal and that she could have easily contacted her provider for additional crisis resources. But this expectation that someone in crisis is going to have the wherewithal to go on an online portal to find out the right information, as opposed to trying to make information immediately available to them in any particular moment, or having follow-ups of people who are calling her, is another illustration of how we see how we have a system that’s really based on individual responsibility and an assumption that treatment is easy and that it always works.
I’ve seen the argument floating around that this case never should have gone to trial. Can you speak to that?
I don’t know a ton about what happened in plea negotiations; I only know what’s been reported in the news. But my understanding is that the defense would have agreed to a plea of the commission of the acts but that Clancy was not criminally responsible based on her mental health condition at the time of the offense. In other words, an agreement to commitment under that statutory scheme. But the prosecution was not interested in that. The thing to know is that the prosecution, in this case, the government, can decide whether they think it is valuable to its jurisdiction to proceed with a criminal trial. So they made that decision. Why? I don’t know the factors that went into that decision. But I think that people are raising really good questions about the decision to go to trial. Because trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.
“Trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.”
There are other victims in this case. The husband. He lost three children. His family is a victim. The grandparents who testified. They lost three grandchildren. I even wonder what it’s like to be one of the medical professionals that attempted to treat Lindsay. Assuming the best intentions for each medical professional, they wanted Lindsay to be well, and Lindsay was not well, and that has to be a difficult thing for a doctor. Now these individuals are being put through a lengthy trial. So again, I think there are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what. So what is a trial really doing in this case? And is it worth the costs of what they’re imposing on everybody going through it?
How does the legal system hurt people with mental health vulnerabilities? Why are prosecutors so incentivized to deliver harsh sentences, and how does this come up in cases involving mental health?
I could not do that question justice. But the mental health system and the criminal system have long been in conversation. Because the criminal system does not exist separate of the mental health system. Both because jails and prisons are massive providers of mental health care to the population doesn’t necessarily mean that they provide great mental healthcare, and because there are so many individuals in the criminal system who have mental health conditions. This is one of the main places where people get some kind of mental healthcare.
“There are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what.”
They’re also really related because of exactly the kind of things that are getting reported about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is that even if her defense team is successful in having her not be held criminally responsible for the killing of her children, that does not mean that Lindsay Clancy goes and lives a life that you and I may be living. Like, she will not be going to get ice cream tomorrow or to the grocery store or hold a job. She will be committed to a facility that we call a hospital, but in many ways bears resemblance to a jail or prison, in that she is not free to leave, that she will be forced to undergo the treatment that is being offered to her, and will likely be detained for very long periods of time, if not for the rest of her life. Which brings up the question that some people are talking about, which is: What is the value of a criminal prosecution when incapacitation could be met through other avenues?
Psychosis is already so misunderstood among the general public, how it operates, that it can wax and wane, etc. How does the legal system fail to address conditions like psychosis?
The legal system has expectations for what should flow when something is attempted. But mental health conditions can be very complex, and the legal system is not designed for the nuance needed to handle them. In my work representing people with significant mental disabilities, both in the criminal system and in the civil commitment system, different mental health conditions can have overlapping criteria. For example, sometimes doctors will have different views about what the actual mental health condition that a particular individual meets criteria for. The criminal system wants to have criminal responsibility flow from a set of actions and wants to know intent. And intent is a very difficult concept to understand and to prove, particularly when we’re talking about a moment in time that has passed.
It’s all so depressing.
It’s very sad. But I think that’s one of the things that appears to be resonating for many people who are tuning in to this trial: that this is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing that has happened to three young kids and that every aspect of this is incredibly sad. And people are wondering about how we provide mental healthcare to try and avoid things like this happening. It is all incredibly sad.
What are some ways society can center mental health to help prevent these kinds of tragedies?
Everybody wants to know what kind of world we could build to avoid the awful tragedy that occurred. We won’t ever know exactly what could have prevented it. But this case is not just raising questions around the mental healthcare system, but also more broadly, including postpartum care in general. One of the things to think about in the mental healthcare system is that we underfund community-based supportive mental healthcare systems, both at the beginning and after any period of commitment. Testimony from the Clancy trial really illustrates that postpartum and mental healthcare were not thought of holistically. So you could imagine people who go to the home and provide both medication management therapy and postpartum care. That’s helping take care of the kids, helping get Lindsay to sleep, which seemed to be a significant issue for her in the months preceding the killings. These are the kinds of things that a society that prioritizes care as a normative matter does, where we approach getting people support and care as something that we really value, and do it as a matter of economics. That this is where we choose to spend the dollars that we have.
GOP Voters Boo Trump After Lindsey Graham’s Sister Wins Runoff
Donald Trump just lost a lot of support in South Carolina.
Supporters of defeated Republican candidate Ralph Norman booed and jeered at mentions of the president’s name during his concession speech Tuesday night, expressing their palpable aggravation over Trump’s unwanted involvement in the contentious Senate runoff.
Trump had endorsed—and actively campaigned for—Darline Graham for South Carolina’s open Senate seat. Against all odds (and the predictions of Republican strategists, who thought Graham was headed for a heavy defeat), he got his wish: Graham won the race by five percentage points.
“The president got involved. He has that right, that’s his prerogative,” Norman said, sparking a wave of boos from the crowd.
“His policies are good, I never understood why he got in this race,” Norman continued as the crowd clapped.
“But it is what it is, and I’ll accept it,” he added. “I’ve always said something good will come out of this. I don’t know what it is, but something good will come out of it.”
The junior Graham took the reins of her sibling’s powerful office last month, after the 71-year-old suddenly passed away from an aortic dissection. Despite having zero relevant experience or qualifications, Graham gained the president’s support and was subsequently appointed by South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster.
Within the span of a few short weeks, the 62-year-old undertook a gambit to make her interim responsibilities more permanent, throwing her name on the ballot to be formally selected by the state electorate. The money poured in behind her, with chief executives, lobbyists, and prominent Republican donors pumping thousands of dollars into her nascent campaign, violating the weekly thresholds set by the Federal Election Commission—a detail not lost on Norman in his closing remarks on Tuesday.
“We had $8 million spent against us. I couldn’t come up with that much money,” Norman said. “All of our money came from South Carolina and my personal account. My opponent—the money came from outside PACs, I mean it’s a fact, I’m not being critical.”
Graham’s next political hurdle arrives in November, when she’ll have to face off against Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in the general election. This time, the odds will be more in the Republican nominee’s favor: The last time South Carolina elected a Democrat to the Senate was in 1998.
Surprise: Z.ai is the AI lab behind the mysterious Ox Alpha model
Meta Caves With $17 Billion Settlement in Social Media Addiction Case
Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in a settlement with 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands, for the harm that its social media platforms have done to kids and teenagers.
Under the terms of the settlement, the company will agree to put a cumulative two-hour limit for users of Facebook and Instagram under 18, which will require a parent’s permission to override. Meta will also hide likes on minors’ posts by default and block “extreme makeup filters.” The only states that weren’t a part of the settlement were New Mexico, which won its own lawsuit against Meta earlier this year, and Florida.
Meta only has to pay 70 percent of the total sum unless TikTok, owned by Paramount Skydance, and YouTube, owned by Google parent Alphabet, also agree to pay states $5.3 billion between them and implement default time limits on their apps and services. If they don’t, Meta doesn’t have to pay the remaining 30 percent, which is also $5.3 billion.
Meta is still facing thousands of lawsuits from individuals, organizations, and school districts. New Mexico’s lawsuit resulted in the company having to pay $375 million in civil penalties, create a $567 million fund to address harms to children in the state, and put limits on how minors interact with the app.
The settlement is a rare agreement across political lines, with Democratic as well as Republican state and territorial attorneys general all seeking to hold Meta accountable. CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemingly sought to avoid accountability by cozying up to President Trump after the 2024 election, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and changing Meta’s content moderation policies after meeting with the president.
But Meta is now on the record agreeing that restitution needs to be made due to the harms of its social media platforms, even if it isn’t outright admitting guilt. It remains to be seen if other social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube follow suit.
The settlement still needs approval from a federal judge.
This story has been updated.
BUDDY Turns Cheery Kids TV Into a Total Horror Show (Review)
- Casper Kelly’s Buddy takes a dark twist on cheerful nostalgic childhood shows, and builds a world that is indeed chilling.
- Buddy has a lot of humor and promise, but it never quite capitalizes on its premise and goes off the rails in its third act.
- Nerdist’s Take: Buddy is fun, absurd, and worth a watch for horror comedy fans.
As kids, many of us wanted to inhabit a fictional world for various reasons. Maybe we wished we could be in Narnia with talking animals and adventures. Or we wanted to be in the Shire eating food, farming, and having fun. If you were a kid in the early 1990s, you probably wanted to exist on a TV show like Barney & Friends. Who wouldn’t want a big talking dinosaur who wants to play all day as a forever friend? Every problem is solved quickly, the kids on the show are all smiles, and there are comforting and catchy songs. But, as we all know, the idyllic world that Barney presents is far from reality and, in fact, hints are some darker elements of our lives.
There are careful constructs that these kid characters must abide by. They are almost perfect, they never cry for more than a short spell, and they don’t have mean grown ups in their lives or complex family problems. They behave like well-trained dogs, reacting to commands and never stepping out of line to just be a messy and chaotic kid. It all feels 1) cultish and 2) like the foundation of the toxic positivity that many people radiate on social media today. What if those smiling faces were hiding deeper pain and disturbing knowledge? What if Barney wasn’t as jovial and loving as he seemed?
This is what Casper Kelly takes a humorous and oft-disturbing stab at with Buddy, a horror comedy film about kids trapped in a 1990s era show with a malevolent orange unicorn who will only accept compliance. The character is expertly voiced by Keegan-Michael Key, and the film likely wouldn’t have worked without his careful attention to Buddy’s vocal inflections and tone. (Sidenote: I could be reading this wrong, but I find it funny that Buddy is an insecure orange rage machine who lures in followers via television. And he is ready to threaten and take down anyone who even slightly disagrees with him or “hurts his feelings.” Sound familiar?)
Roadside Attractions/Saban Films
The film really dives into the cult-like aura around nostalgic kids shows and interweaves in pop culture staples like The Wizard of Oz. Buddy balances dark humor, camp, and pointed commentary about childhood autonomy, rebellion, and narcissism well. But it never feels like it fully leans into its unique premise quite hard enough. Despite some shockingly bloody moments, there’s something about Buddy that feels underbaked, and that keeps it from being a great movie.
Buddy opens with kids who are indeed NOT actors singing the show’s tune and seemingly having a good time. However, things soon begin to unravel when one kid is tired of playing along and decides to do what a normal kid does: make a firm choice on his own.
Well, his pushback against Buddy’s wishes doesn’t go well, and the kids soon begin to piece together the dark truth about this world they are in. Buddy becomes increasingly violent and intimidating in-between his attempts to maintain his joyful facade. He wants a great big hug at the end of whatever the day brings so they can do it all over again, but ain’t shit sweet about this show.
Roadside Attractions/ Saban Films
The film’s child actors are delightful to watch and play their palpable fear relatively well, especially Freddy, which is quite the interesting name choice for obvious slasher history reasons. Played by Delaney Quinn, young Freddy begins to lead the rebellious charge against Buddy and expose him for the murderous s**t that he is. It is interesting that, even after witnessing Buddy’s bad behavior and his threatening against them, the children still used many of the foundational lessons they learned from him (often in song form) to find courage and resolve.
It speaks to the dynamic that kids can have with the adults in their lives, even when the latter are truly terrible people. They have the ability to filter the darkness and desperately try to hold onto the nuggets of joy, security, and light. There’s even an allusion to Stockholm Syndrome in one character’s case.
Things begin to get murkier on the storytelling front when the film loops from its nostalgic fantasy hell to make real-world connections. While Cristin Milioti is always a delight in any role, her character’s introduction into this nightmarish situation starts off intriguing and subsequently fizzles. The film’s final showdown unveils new truths and leaves much to speculate. That isn’t inherently a bad thing because, well, we don’t always need an explanation for why evil exists nor deep lore about the world it is couched in. But it would have played better with more suspense, scares, bizarreness, and higher stakes for Freddy and friends.
The conceit of turning cheery children’s television into a secret horror show is a fantastic premise. However, Buddy never maximizes on the bleak absurdness that should abound. It’s entertaining and weird enough to keep your attention, and doesn’t feel overly long thanks to its 90 minute run. It nails the quirky aesthetics and tropes of those kinds of shows, and doesn’t shy away from killing kids. There’s even a couple of unsettling moments that will make you cringe. So it is certainly not a bad film overall. I’d watch it again, and plan to go to the theater to see it. But it doesn’t quite sink its horn all the way in and leaves a little too much of its world nebulous to feel fully satisfying.
Buddy ⭐ (3 of 5)
Buddy hits theaters on August 28.
Tai Gooden is the Features Editor for Nerdist, a fictional villain apologist, and a horror aficionado who is forever waiting for her trip in the TARDIS.The post BUDDY Turns Cheery Kids TV Into a Total Horror Show (Review) appeared first on Nerdist.
The Supreme Court’s Security Upgrade Fits the World It Helped Make
The Supreme Court may be deferential to President Donald Trump and the legal arguments put forward by his Justice Department. But when it comes to their own physical safety, the justices seem to view the administration with appropriate skepticism.
The court is now ditching the longtime protection of the executive branch’s US Marshals Service, and instead creating a robust, in-house security force to guard themselves at all times. Though famously without its own army, the Supreme Court is building up its own police.
While the new security seems necessary, the change is also the product of the world the Roberts Court has built: one where the executive branch cannot be trusted, a violence-prone political movement has returned to power, dangerous people have readier access to firearms, and the justices decide the biggest political questions of the day.
Historically, the marshals, housed in the Department of Justice, provided security to the justices, lower court judges, and federal courthouses, as well as to selected witnesses and lawyers. In addition, the Supreme Court relied on a small police service, called the Supreme Court of the United States Police Department, to patrol its building. In recent years, its officers have begun to take up work once done by the marshals; this spring, the justices’ residential security details changed hands.
Now, the justices are expanding the Supreme Court police into a sweeping force that can replace their longtime protectors. The justices are seeking to rapidly grow the department, which numbered some 200 officers last year, to more than double its size. The justices’ 2027 budgetary ask to Congress includes funds to build their own police command center, assess threats, and provide round-the-clock security to the court’s nine members. To compete with other federal agency forces, including the Capitol Police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Supreme Court Police offers starting salaries between $86,530 and $147,928 with up to $60,000 in bonuses with a three-year contract, depending on experience. The tagline in its recruitment videos: “The highest court. A higher calling.”
The justices empowered Trump—and placed their own security in his hands.
It’s essential for our political system that the justices live and work free from fear and violence. “The security request is important and necessary,” says Gabe Roth, who runs Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group that advocates for reforms to make the Supreme Court more transparent and accountable to the public. “They don’t want to be beholden to the whims of another branch, which is more political.”
It is not mere happenstance that the justices no longer trust the executive branch to protect them. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has embraced the unitary executive theory, cooked up by Republican lawyers in the 1980s, which gives presidents direct authority over everything carried out inside the executive branch. The Republican appointed justices explicitly gave the president power over the Department of Justice in their 2024 immunity decision. While never technically independent, since Watergate, the DOJ had worked to keep its prosecutorial functions walled off from the White House. But Roberts’ decision in Trump v. United States clarified that the attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer for the president, redirecting the office’s ultimate loyalty from the rule of law to the occupier of the Oval Office. The result is that the Justice Department under President Donald Trump is increasingly unmoored from Congressional oversight and acting as the personal legal attack dog of the president.
This is important because the US Marshals are part of the DOJ. By removing any taboo around presidential meddling in the department’s affairs, the justices more directly placed their own security in Trump’s hands. The head of the Marshals’ Service reports to Attorney General Todd Blanche, who not only serves at the pleasure of the president but has described his department as being in a “war” against judges. Trump, who has called Supreme Court justices “disloyal to the Constitution” and said some “sicken” him, is ultimately in charge of their personal security. It’s not hard to imagine Trump ordering the marshals to lighten security to apply pressure over a particular decision, or to withdraw it as a punishment for a ruling. Clearly, the justices are uneasy with this arrangement, too.
The concern is “probably 10 or 20 percent of the reason that this transition is happening,” Roth says. “They just want to have that control.”
While the marshals struggled to meet demand under a stagnant budget since the Biden administration, the squeeze has tightened under the chaos of Trump’s corrupt and personalist second term. As threats to judges ramp up—in part because of rhetoric from Trump, his deputies, and allies—the judiciary’s security needs have increased. But at the same time, the marshals have been pulled onto Trump pet projects, immigration enforcement, and crime, depleting resources for protecting judges and the courts. The marshals were also assigned to provide a security detail to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr, an unusual arrangement that took staff away from the service’s core duties. Meanwhile, some of the justices were unnerved that officers showing up to protect their homes were sometimes only a few weeks out of training, according to Politico. In response to questions, the Marshals Service confirmed it provides security to Kennedy; its 2027 budget request includes an additional $34 million for judicial security and $228 million for immigration enforcement and local crime operations.
The Trump administration has also overseen more direct political weaponization of the marshals. In March 2025, DOGE and an official from the State Department used the marshals to gain access to an international development agency they were attempting to dismantle, wielding the marshals against another federal agency. “There’s some question of whether it falls under the marshals’ duties,” one expert told Mother Jones last year. “You have an extragovernmental agency assigning marshals to do something that’s questionable in the first place.” Indeed, the marshals assisted DOGE, a rogue operation greenlit by the president alone. (While the Supreme Court justices never weighed in on this particular Musk-induced skirmish, they generally abetted DOGE’s efforts, granting it access to Americans sensitive Social Security data while denying the public access to information about DOGE.)
In what may have been a signal of the marshals’ unreliability, this spring the Justice Department informed the Supreme Court that they would stop providing security at the justices’ homes before the Supreme Court police were expected to take over the job, sending the justices scrambling. “We were suddenly confronted with the loss of US Marshal protection,” Justice Elena Kagan explained in testimony to a Senate panel last month as the court asked for an additional $18.9 million to cover its growing security costs. “We thought we were going to have US Marshal protection at our residences for another six months, and all of a sudden learned from the Justice Department that that was going to be impossible.” Left in the lurch, the court’s police department took over their residential security with the help of outside contractors. The US Marshals did not answer a question about why they pulled security ahead of schedule.
The court has made it harder to keep guns from dangerous people.
The level of protection around the justices has increased dramatically in recent years. “I joined the court in 2010, and it was an entirely different world then,” Kagan told the senators. “I just walked out on the street, I had no security with me at any time. I drove back and forth to work by myself… Honestly, none of us particularly thought about it.” But after Justice Antonin Scalia died on vacation in remote Texas, hours from the closest marshals, the court began to reconsider its protocols. Not long after, two congressmen who served on the House oversight committee and were assessing the government’s personal protection practices paid a visit to the chief justice. “They said, ‘We think you’re out of your mind,’” Kagan summarized. “They said the director of the Office of Personnel Management has more security” than the justices of the Supreme Court. Slowly, the high court began to raise its guard. This accelerated in the wake of the May 2022 Dobbs leak indicating the court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, when protests erupted at justices’ homes and a would-be assassin showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house. Now, the justices have round-the-clock security and arrive at work in armored SUVs.
As part of that ramp up, some justices turned to the court’s police department. According to public records obtained by Fix the Court, Roberts, Kagan, and Justice Clarence Thomas have been using the court’s police when they travel for several years. “Life has changed a great deal for all of us,” Kagan said.
The Supreme Court has played a part in the country’s uptick in political violence. The justices helped Trump return to office after he incited a deadly insurrection, and his MAGA movement is behind many of the threats the justices now face. But more broadly, the court has made it easier for people to access guns. The court’s landmark 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller gave every individual the right to a firearm. In 2022, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc v. Bruen added another hurdle to state firearm regulation: even though guns themselves have changed drastically, a six-justice majority held that gun restrictions must be similar to a law that existed in the nation’s past. The court went on to greenlight bump stocks, and this year, blocked state attempts to limit guns on private properties like stores and restaurants. In the coming term, it will decide the constitutionality of assault weapon bans.
The United States was racked with gun violence before the Roberts Court began loosening gun restrictions, but its decisions have made it harder to keep firearms away from dangerous people. Notably, the court upheld a Biden-era regulation of untraceable ghost guns, several months after Luigi Mangioni used one to assassinate the CEO of United Healthcare—perhaps a moment of clarity for some of the conservative justices, realizing that the nation’s elite are not immune from the violence spurred by letting anyone be armed.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, testifying to senators alongside Kagan, relayed how one of her kids noticed she had a bulletproof vest. “I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one,” Barrett said. It’s not something anyone’s job should entail, yet it’s one that the justices’ own decisions made more likely for many people—including themselves.
Barrett, a Trump appointee who in a few important cases has ruled against the president, including by invalidating his claim to broad tariff powers and his birthright citizenship executive order, has seen violence directed at her and her family alongside right-wing vitriol tinged with sexism. She described a swatting hoax directed at her home, and the eerie pizza deliveries sent in the name of a federal judge’s murdered son, which have been received by many federal judges since Trump returned to office. “I think the message on the deliveries being sent is clear,” Barrett said.
The court is drawing more attention because it keeps putting itself in the position to decide contentious issues, from college admissions policies to whether Trump can stand trial for instigating an insurrection. Again and again, the justices are taking cases that make them the ultimate deciders of not just the law but the pressing social and political debates dividing the country. Indeed, the justices’ security was increased after a leak showed the court poised to end the right to abortion.
The justices have never been so important, nor further from the people whose lives they impact. In the 19th century, the justices rode regional circuits, spending months presiding over trials. It put them up close with not just local judges but juries and ordinary people. In 1935, as the justices were striking down New Deal legislation, their courtroom moved from the basement of the US Capitol to the august marble facade across the street; an appropriate perch for a branch of government busy upending the work of the other two. Today, there’s usually a security detail or a bullet-proof windshield between the justices and the people.
More than ever, the justices shape the country we live in—and as their new security is evidence, it isolates the justices from the privilege of living in it.