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At 11:00 PM Sunday night, Donald Trump endorsed a conservative influencer’s suggestion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be renamed National Immigration and Customs Enforcement (NICE), “so the media has to say NICE Agents all day everyday.”

“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT .” the President wrote. He has rarely been able to resist the magic of a good rebranding opportunity. Days after his inauguration, Trump announced that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the “Gulf of America,” though that name has not caught on in the year since.

A few months later, he renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

This, at least, was an honest move. The United States has been at peace for fewer than 20 years out of its 250-year history; calling our nation’s war-making machine the Department of Defense has always been a euphemistic choice.

Some of his renaming attempts have been more baldly self-centered: see the recently-re-dubbed Trump-Kennedy Center.

But none of these rebrands, no matter their motives, have reshaped the realities of the things they name: the gulf is still the gulf, whether of Mexico or of America. The Department of Defense or War is still vacuuming up over half the federal government’s discretionary budget in order to bomb at least seven different countries during Trump’s second term.

And whether National is tacked onto ICE or not, they’ll still be the same agency: bloated, overfunded, and killing roughly one person in their custody per week.

No. More. Exclusivity. Redmond keeps the ring until 2032, but OpenAI is free to see other clouds

Once tied tightly together, Microsoft and OpenAI have amended their agreement, making the Windows giant's license non-exclusive. In exchange, Microsoft will no longer owe OpenAI a revenue share.…

Governments across Europe are looking to rely less on American tech providers.

The Boys may be coming to an end with its fifth and final season, but this diabolical universe still has lots of bizarre stories to tell. Vought Rising will take us back to the 1950s to explore the early days of Vought with a murder mystery and lots of Soldier Boy shenanigans. We will learn more about supes and people we’ve already met as well as meet new characters who certainly ain’t heroes. Who will star in Vought Rising and what can we expect from the series? 

Here’s everything we know about Vought Rising.

Title

The official title of the series is Vought Rising. 

Vought Rising’s Plot 

We don’t have a ton of plot details at this point, but here’s the general synopsis for Vought Rising is that it’s a “twisted murder mystery about the origins of Vought in the 1950s, the early exploits of Soldier Boy, and the diabolical maneuvers of a Supe known to fans as Stormfront, who was then going by the name Clara Vought.” 

There is a hint into Vought Rising’s twisted journey, thanks to an IG post revealing that the first episode is titled “Red Scare.” The episode is written by EP/showrunner Paul Grellong and directed by Sam Miller. 

This title is likely a reference to the real-life Red Scare that took place in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a period of time where people were really afraid of anyone whom they perceived to be a part of communist and socialist movements in the USA. The fears/suspicions from this moral panic could quickly escalate to persecution and violence. People found their freedom of speech and right to assemble being thwarted by the powers that be in charge. Sadly, this sounds all too familiar, even in 2026.

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Fort Harmony in THE BOYS, Explained: Its Ties to V-One and Vought

We have gotten some tidbits about what we might see in Vought Rising, thanks to The Boys season five. The show took Soldier Boy to Fort Harmony, where Frederick Vought did early experiments on soldiers and injected them with V-One. As we know, that’s what’s running in Soldier Boy’s veins and what Homelander wants in his. We ran into Quinn, who was mutated by V-One and causing a haze of hate in the dilapidated former military base. It’s clear that Quinn and Soldier Boy had a connection and a terse relationship, so we should get more of that and Fort Harmony in Vought Rising.

And, we will get more about the deep ties between Soldier Boy and Stormfront, whom he knew better at Clara Vought. Bombsight will eventually show up in The Boys, and we will likely learn more about him and how he relates to Soldier Boy in Vought Rising as well.

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VOUGHT RISING Will Show a Softer Side of Soldier BoyBehind-the-Scenes 

Paul Grellong will be the showrunner and executive producer for Vought Rising. The Boys’ showrunner Eric Kripke, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Neal H. Moritz, Ori Marmur, Pavun Shetty, Ken Levin, Jason Netter, Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson, Michaela Starr, and Jim Barnes are all executive producers on the series. We know that Sam Miller will direct at least the first episode of the series. The show wrapped production in March 2026, and is now going through the post-production process.

Vought Rising’s Cast Prime Video

Of course, Jensen Ackles and Aya Cash will return as Soldier Boy and Stormfront/Clara Vought, respectively. It really works in their favor that many supes do not age. Mason Dye will portray Bombsight, a supe who will make his debut in The Boys season five. Will Hochman and Elizabeth Posey will portray Torpedo and Private Angel. KiKi Layne, Jorden Myrie, Nicolò Pasetti, Ricky Staffieri, and Brian J. Smith will all star in this show as well in undisclosed roles. Raphael Sbarge, Romi Shraiter, Aaron Douglas and David Hewlett are all in Vought Rising in recurring roles that are currently under wraps.

Vought Rising’s Release Date 

There is currently no release date for Vought Rising but it is coming sometime in 2027.

Originally published October 21, 2025.

The post VOUGHT RISING Will Arrive in 2027 appeared first on Nerdist.

Side boosters to make simultaneous touchdown while center core takes one for the team

SpaceX is preparing to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in more than 18 months, kicking off what could be a busy time for the vehicle.…

On May 27, the web will start to unravel as Nicolas Cage takes on the role of Ben Reilly in Spider-Noir. This Prime Video live-action series is coming at the perfect time, giving us a different type of Spider hero before Peter Parker swings into theaters for what will surely be a summer blockbuster. In the latest trailer for Spider-Noir, the mystery and chaos of this universe start to ramp up with a spiraling mystery.

Reilly is a private investigator in a chaotic New York City who used to be the Spider, the only hero on the streets. A woman comes to his agency asking for help to find her friend, but the details are scarce. She says the world is a dangerous place but Ben is braver than he seems to be.

Prime Video

And well, we see Sandman punch him clean off a building. Yikes. But of course he’s able to web-sling himself out of that situation, and Spider-Man is back once again to defend 1930s NYC. Entertaining, intriguing, and action-packed, the trailer for Spider-Noir sets the tone for this series perfectly.

The post SPIDER-NOIR Trailer: A Spiraling NYC and a Hero Reborn appeared first on Nerdist.

China has ordered Meta to unwind its multibillion-dollar Manus acquisition, dealing a potential setback to Zuckerberg’s push into AI agents.

The phone could go in mass production in 2028, an analyst says.

The American technology giant provides water and energy monitoring and utility meters to hundreds of millions of homes and businesses.

Space Force awards 11 firms prototype deals to build orbital interceptors

The United States Space Force (USSF) has awarded eleven companies contracts to develop space-based interceptors for President Trump's Golden Dome program, in agreements worth up to $3.2 billion.…

If you’re a watch person and you’re a Star Wars lover, Citizen Watch has a rare gift for you. In celebration of “May the Fourth” (Star Wars Day), Citizen will create its first-ever Disney collab in its premium ATTESA line. That means that you’ll get all the incredibly nerdery of a Star Wars watch mixed with all the high-end luxury of an ATTESA watch. But you’ll really have to use the Force if you want to get your wrist into this watch—the limited edition ATTESA Beskar watch will only release 100 pieces worldwide. That makes it not only a first-of-its-kind watch, but a SUPER rare creation. Don’t worry, though, Citizen has you covered if you want a more widely available timepiece that celebrates The Mandalorian. Let’s see what Citizen Watch has in store for you this Star Wars Day.Citizen Watch

Beskar, also known as Mandalorian iron or Mandalorian steel, is an incredibly rare metal in the Star Wars universe. It can be found only on Mandalorian worlds. So it makes sense that Citizen Watch would be inspired by Beskar to create its first-ever nerdy ATTESA watch. I mean, Beskar can repel even lightsaber strikes. That’s serious business.

Click To View Gallery Citizen Watch Citizen Watch Citizen Watch Citizen Watch

Citizen shares of its new watch, “Where the strength of the Mandalorian meets Citizen’s ATTESA premium line, this high-performance chronograph is forged from lightweight, scratch-resistant Super Titanium™ – a nod to Beskar, the legendary metal used to craft Mandalorian armor. Advanced features include Atomic Timekeeping, world time across 26 time zones, a perpetual calendar, and a power reserve display. Subtle design details like the mythosaur emblem on the crown and the Mandalorian helmet etched on the case back underscore its collectible appeal. Finished with Mandalorian-themed packaging, the release is limited to just 100 pieces worldwide.”

Nerdist Nerdist Nerdist Nerdist

We love the nods to Beskar’s wavy patterns in ingot form on the watch, as well. And the tiny Mythosaur emblem is just perfect. That’s the kind of attention to detail we expect from Citizen Watch. Having seen a preview of the watch, we can also exclusively share the nice heft of this creation, and the truly sleek design. Not to mention, all the Star Wars nuances are both really ornate and really subtle in the best ways. Our favorite part of any Citizen Watch is the incredible etchings on the back, and this watch is no different.

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Bring Beskar Into Your Kitchen with This MANDALORIAN Collection from Hedley & Bennett

Of course, this watch will set you back as much as a Beskar helmet, it costs $1,500. And as we mentioned, with only 100 pieces created, it’s pretty dang rare.

But, of course, Citizen Watch wants all Star Wars fans to celebrate in style ahead of The Mandalorian & Grogu, which debuts on May 22.  Not just 100. Even you can’t snag the limited-addition ATTESA Beskar watch, fear not. Citizen has made available a new timepiece inspired by The Mandalorian that all can own.

Click To View Gallery Citizen Watch Citizen Watch Citizen Watch Citizen Watch Citizen Watch

Here’s what Citizen Watch has to share about this one, “Inspired by The Mandalorian, this chronograph features a black dial, gold-tone bezel, and dark brown leather strap. Sub-dials highlight key elements from the series, including the Mudhorn, Mandalorian helmet, and Grogu, bringing subtle storytelling to an everyday wearable design.” This Star Wars watch will cost $450. And really, who can resist a glow-in-the-dark element?

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Citizen’s Dark Side STAR WARS Watches Keep You Marching on Time

If you’re looking to snag either one of these watches, the Star Wars ATTESA Limited-Edition will be available beginning 4/27, and The Mandalorian will be available on 5/18, ahead of the film release, both available on Citizenwatch.com. 

The post Snag This SUPER Limited STAR WARS Citizen Watch Release appeared first on Nerdist.

Getting banned from Elon Musk’s X for pointing out Palantir’s fascism has created more interest in my work.

Last week, I spoke with Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report about the Palantir manifesto and the company’s role in Trump’s fascist regime. You can watch the full interview below.

I also spoke with Cydney Hayes of the SF Gazetteer, one of the few journalists to write about my baseless suspension from X, for her piece on Palantir.

“Palantir is quickly becoming one of the most hated companies in the world, due to its open complicity with an authoritarian regime,” I told her. “They have a major public relations crisis.”

Here’s a gift link to read her story.

Reading Palantir: Why the defense tech giant’s manifesto may signal panic inside the companyThe war tech firm is suffering from a lethal combo of stock price superinflation and midterms anxietyGazetteer SFCydney Hayes

The word “fascism” gets tossed around a lot, often as a generic term for authoritarian or dictatorial. But it has a more specific meaning. I’m currently writing a piece that will explain why the Palantir manifesto is a clear expression of fascism. (Makena Kelly of Wired reports that “Palantir Employees Are Starting To Wonder If They’re The Bad Guys.” Spoiler Alert: Obviously.)

In the meantime, I explain some of my thinking in the Majority Report interview (transcript below).

Prefer audio?

• Listen to the Majority Report on Apple Podcasts
• Listen to the Majority Report on Spotify

Full transcript below

The Palantir Manifesto | The Majority Report with Sam Seder|Gil Duran Interviewed By Emma Vigeland

Transcripts may contain errors.

Emma Vigeland: We are back, and we are joined now by Gil Durán, publisher of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter about the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley. Gil, welcome back to the show.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

Emma Vigeland: Of course. So earlier this week, Palantir took out a full-page ad in the New York Times — or was it the Wall Street Journal? I forget which paper — about how they "stand with Israel." We knew that already. But they also published this so-called manifesto on social media, and I want to get to that in a second. Before we do, can you explain to people what Palantir is? It's talked about all the time — it's kind of this boogeyman — but its origin story, how it came to be, and really what role it's currently playing in American politics and in our economy.

Gil Durán: Sure. Palantir came into being after 9/11, when there was a lot of concern about national security, fears of terrorism, and the need for vastly increased surveillance of everything in the United States and internationally as well. It was funded partly with an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm, but most of the funding came from Peter Thiel and his venture capital funds. He's a co-founder along with several other people, like Joe Lonsdale and Alex Karp, who was Thiel's law school buddy and is now the CEO and has been a part of it a long time too.

What Palantir does — they keep the whole thing kind of opaque, so it's hard to explain — but they're a surveillance technology giant with software that helps governments sort through, collect, and organize large troves of information on whatever their chosen targets are. It's a program that sits on top of other systems and helps them have more of an all-seeing-eye effect. That's why they chose the name Palantir. The name comes from The Lord of the Rings, and it's that little orb the evil wizard uses to see what's going on with the hobbits as he tries to take over the world. So they literally named it after a technology wielded by an evil, corrupted wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Think of it that way: it's the little all-seeing orb. That's what they want you to think of.

Emma Vigeland: Yeah. And their insistence on portraying themselves in this braggadociously evil, mendacious manner is unique. It's manifest in this manifesto, if you will. Let's pull it up here. From what I understand, it's basically a summary of Alex Karp's book — Karp being the CEO of Palantir, who we've played on the show before, a very manic and bizarre individual. A lot of this is just summarized from what he's previously written. But this is what they say the new Palantir manifesto is — their role in the United States.

The first plank: Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible, and they have an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. Number two — rebelling against the iPhone apps — that seems a little less consequential. Number three: free email is not enough; the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. Whatever. But one and four seem to link together. Number four: the limits of soft power or soaring rhetoric alone have been exposed; the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal — it requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

We'll come back to this in a second, but those two seem to connect. And the fifth plank is about how AI needs to be used to develop weapons and military and national security technology. So this is them announcing publicly: one, we shouldn't be bound by morality, and yet Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to contribute to the national defense via surveillance; and also, we're going to use AI weapons. Are they going to do that for free, or are they going to take government contracts? I think we know the answer.

Gil Durán: Yeah. What's interesting about that first point is that the greatest threat to our nation right now is from the Trump regime, which is attempting to destroy the country from the inside — and Palantir is a major conspirator in that project. They are reaping billions in contracts, expanding their footprint like never before. To be clear, Palantir has thrived under Democratic and Republican administrations — something that really needs to change. But the country they're talking about defending is not the country we think of as the United States of America. It's this new authoritarian regime that's being brought into being by Trump, and which they plan to defend with their software violence.

The important thing to understand about this Palantir manifesto — which, as you said, comes from Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic — is that it rings all the bells of classic fascism. It is a call to arms for a group of chosen Silicon Valley elites to merge with the military-industrial complex, on a moral imperative to defend against an existential threat to Western civilization posed by inferior cultures that are invading us and weakening us, along with liberal elite decadence. This is fascism.

In addition, they call for Silicon Valley to get engaged with law and order and fighting violent crime to save lives — fascists always try to exacerbate fears around crime. And they call for a new respect for religion and the fusing of corporations with government. That's pretty much what Mussolini did when he created fascism: you fuse corporate, state, and religion. So without saying the f-word, they're winking and nodding and saying it other ways.

The thing is, this is what many of these venture-capital-funded tech companies are doing right now. Everyone's issuing some kind of manifesto about acceleration, about the need for more warfare and technology — and this is basically classic fascist rhetoric. They're all competing to be the new Mussolini, essentially. It should terrify Americans, and it should radicalize Americans, that these people are becoming so completely extreme while living off our taxpayer dollars.

Emma Vigeland: And it is notable that Palantir's technology has been integrated with ICE activities. You mentioned how Palantir started after 9/11, and that the CIA's venture arm invested in it. ICE is also an outgrowth of 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security is an outgrowth of 9/11. And viewing Palantir and its growth as an extension of the national security state that came out of 9/11 — many leftists, many people, warned that eventually these technologies and the rollback of our civil liberties would result in this being used on American citizens. It feels like Palantir is central in that project, as is its work with ICE specifically.

Gil Durán: Oh, definitely. It's part of the immigration machine. It's part of the war machine. It is completely bought in. Its entire fate depends on this increased surveillance model. They're also doing stuff in hospitals, like monitoring the work schedules of nurses. There's a large level of buy-in to this company right now.

One of the big problems is that the United States government is creating a company that now feels entitled to rival government power — to start issuing its own political manifestos. It's the hazards of privatization unfolding in real time. If the government needs some of these technologies, it should own those technologies. It should not have a company that now decides what the new political structure of the country is going to be.

Why aren't the CEOs of Lockheed or Raytheon issuing manifestos? I'm not saying those companies are good, but for the most part, in the past, you didn't have government contractors out there pushing radical political ideas of their own. Their job is to do what the president and Congress decide. They are contractors. So you have contractors acting like they're the CEOs of government, and this is very much the idea they have in mind: a privatization of government and a seizure of power through surveillance and military might. It's important to be aware of that. It has to become a political goal of all of us to destroy this company and disentangle it from our government.

Emma Vigeland: We had Rana Dasgupta on a few weeks ago to discuss his book After Nations, and he compared Silicon Valley and the growth of the tech industry to the East India Company historically — a private entity acting alongside and in conjunction with the imperial power of the time, but privatized, with its own incentives, and so powerful at this point that it can have more sway than even the most powerful nation states that supposedly have some sort of democratic input.

Gil Durán: And they talk about that very openly. Balaji Srinivasan uses the Dutch East India Company as a framework — returning to a world where these sort of corporate guilds have a tremendous amount of power. A big idea I've talked about on your show before is what they call the Network State: the creation of a new power source that is not national, that is not based on democracy or government power, that's based on pure corporate power. They explicitly talk about that, and everywhere we look we can see examples of them doing it.

I should say, too, that meanwhile, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has been traveling the globe talking about the Antichrist, saying the Antichrist will seek to establish a one-world rule through technology under the slogan of "peace and safety" — which sounds a lot like what Palantir is doing, as people have pointed out.

Emma Vigeland: Isn't he saying Greta Thunberg is the one ushering it in?

Gil Durán: He throws in a lot of words like that, but those are distractions. What he's really saying, if you read the whole speech, is that the United States is the cradle of the Antichrist, apparently because it's the cradle of what we call democracy — and that Silicon Valley should not help the United States spread democracy, but should find a way to decentralize this power. Basically what Karp is saying: make it privatized, and reverse what the country has traditionally stood for.

A lot of what these guys are afraid of is the fact that this is going to become a minority-majority country, and they fear what will happen to white supremacy when that happens. So that's the thread: these expressions of public political psychosis coming out of Silicon Valley. It's extremely concerning.

Emma Vigeland: Yeah. And as Matt just said off-mic — what a coincidence that these are all white South Africans who seem very obsessed with demographics. I just want to return quickly to what you said about crime — Silicon Valley coming out of San Francisco, where there has been this large-scale panic about homelessness and crime, and the insistence that crime was out of control when we saw a temporary spike during COVID and now have seen precipitous declines. The network state concept you've written about is about the privatization of government, as you say. They made those efforts within different cities — they funded an effort to recall Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. But it feels like their ambitions for the privatized surveillance state to combat crime aren't just limited to the cities where they were making billions. It's now about expanding that to the entire United States.

Gil Durán: Crime is a tried-and-true way to create anxiety about poor people, about poverty, to create racial anxiety. This goes back many decades. They're not creating anything new there. They're just saying they've got to supercharge it. That's what we saw in San Francisco at a time when crime was declining and crime rates were generally at historic lows across California, including in San Francisco, which is a very safe city. They created a moral panic around crime and were able to achieve their political aims by doing so.

I definitely think they want to deploy that strategy at a larger scale. Again, everywhere you look, this is the extreme right-wing fascist playbook being played out: creation of fear of the other, a need to centralize elites and wealthy people around a goal of purging the enemy. They speak about inferior cultures that don't contribute to the country. It's all very transparent, but they put it in this pseudo-intellectual format that makes it seem like they have some kind of high-minded philosophy, when it's really some of the ugliest stuff in our politics.

Emma Vigeland: My last question: how seriously should we take it? How much is this Alex Karp branding himself? How much is a way to attract investors by overstating their power? How concerned should we be about a manifesto like this? Is it PR? Is it bluster? Is it a mix of all of the scary things?

Gil Durán: I think it's a mix of all of them. And I would say, too, I think Palantir is starting to panic a little bit, because they're becoming one of the most hated companies in the world. People are now associating them with some of the worst abuses of the genocide in Gaza. So they have a massive public relations problem, and I think they thought this would somehow assuage that, but it seems to have only made it worse.

What we have to do is take it very seriously. These people mean what they say. They do mean to destroy our country and our democracy, and we have to organize against them in order to purge Palantir from our government, and from the planet, really.

Emma Vigeland: I really appreciate your time today, Gil Durán. You can read The Nerd Reich newsletter about the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley — it's essential reading these days. Thanks so much.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

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Spotify is adding fitness as its next major category, launching workout videos, playlists, and Peloton classes inside the app for free and Premium users.

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Watsonville Hospital, a critical community lifeline, is under increasing financial strain and is actively seeking a major health care partner to help it evolve into a stronger regional hub. As those pressures grow, Lookout’s editorial board sought to better understand how leadership is managing the hospital, but found a level of transparency that falls short of what the public deserves. We see no indication of wrongdoing, but with physician shortages, aging infrastructure and heavy reliance on Medi-Cal funding, the stakes are rising quickly. Saving the hospital will require not only financial investment, but also trust, accountability and greater openness.

The post A Lookout View: Watsonville Community Hospital is too important to fail — but it can’t survive without transparency appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Una Lookout View es la opinión de nuestra sección de opinión Community Voices, escrita por la editora de Community Voices, Jody K. Biehl, y el fundador de Lookout, Ken Doctor. Nuestro objetivo es conectar los puntos que vemos en las noticias y ofrecer una visión más amplia — todo con la intención de ver al condado de Santa Cruz enfrentar los desafíos del día y arrojar luz sobre los temas que creemos deben estar en la agenda pública. Estas opiniones son distintas e independientes del trabajo de nuestra sala de redacción y de su cobertura informativa.

El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville no es solo otra institución en dificultades: es un salvavidas. Y hoy, ese salvavidas se está desgastando de maneras que deberían alarmar a cada residente, legislador y actor del sistema de salud en el condado de Santa Cruz. 

El hospital reportó 137 millones de dólares en ingresos en 2025, aproximadamente 23 millones por debajo de las proyecciones y por debajo de lo que el liderazgo dice que se necesita para mantener operaciones estables. Ahora busca activamente un socio estratégico y está tratando de concretar un acuerdo con un actor importante del sector salud como Sutter Health, el candidato más probable, u otras grandes organizaciones como Kaiser Permanente, UC San Francisco o Stanford. 

Este hecho subraya una realidad simple: en el entorno actual, uno de nuestros dos hospitales locales no puede estabilizarse ni modernizarse por sí solo.

En este contexto, la transparencia importa ahora tanto como el financiamiento. Este hospital es demasiado grande para fracasar y demasiado dependiente del apoyo público para ser opaco. 

Por eso nuestro consejo editorial se sintió decepcionado cuando, durante una reunión, el director ejecutivo del hospital, Steve Gray, rechazó nuestras solicitudes de materiales de auditoría, informes de acreditación y hallazgos de supervisión. Esa falta de divulgación es preocupante, no porque pruebe un problema, sino porque limita la capacidad del público para entender una de las instituciones más importantes de la región en un momento de verdadera vulnerabilidad.

Cuando una institución esencial para el público y respaldada por contribuyentes enfrenta presión existencial, la comunidad merece una visibilidad clara de su salud financiera, su estado regulatorio y su toma de decisiones, no solo garantías de que todo se está manejando bien.

Los riesgos son altos. Debido a que es uno de solo dos hospitales que sirven al condado de Santa Cruz, cualquier interrupción en Watsonville tendría efectos en cadena tanto en el norte como en el sur del condado, alargando aún más los tiempos de respuesta de emergencia, ajustando una capacidad ya limitada y reduciendo el acceso a atención crítica. Un sistema ya frágil sería empujado más cerca del límite.

Estas presiones no son aisladas. Sabemos que los hospitales rurales y aquellos que atienden a poblaciones de bajos ingresos en todo el país sufren por los recortes federales a los reembolsos de Medicaid/Medi-Cal. Para el Hospital de Watsonville, donde aproximadamente el 85% de los pacientes dependen de Medi-Cal, los recortes se traducen en 10 millones de dólares menos al año. Como Gray nos señaló, las tasas de reembolso pueden caer a centavos por dólar para la atención de Medi-Cal.

Los recortes federales no son el único problema en el Hospital de Watsonville. Los desafíos internos —agravados por décadas de negligencia bajo propiedad privada—, incluidos el mantenimiento diferido y la infraestructura envejecida, han aumentado la presión financiera, al igual que las jubilaciones, ahora generacionales, de numerosos médicos. El hospital, nos dijo Gray, actualmente no cuenta con médicos en obstetricia, neurología ni urología. Los pacientes que necesitan esos servicios deben acudir a otros lugares.

Estas carencias —junto con la infraestructura envejecida— significan que el hospital actualmente opera muy por debajo de su capacidad, con aproximadamente 29 de 106 camas ocupadas en promedio. Cuando lo escuchamos por primera vez, fue una cifra impactante, pero la explicación de Gray —y su base en la escasez de especialistas— es comprensible, nuevamente cuando se comparte de manera clara y directa con el público. Toda esa capacidad no utilizada es una ineficiencia que contrasta marcadamente con la saturación del departamento de emergencias en el Hospital Dominican, donde los pacientes reportan dormir en los pasillos porque no pueden conseguir una habitación. 

Esta historia se desarrolla en hospitales rurales de todo el país. 

Y sin embargo, para nosotros, esta no es simplemente una historia de declive. También es una historia de posibilidad. Con la inversión y la asociación adecuadas, creemos que el Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville podría convertirse en un centro regional moderno de servicio completo, capaz de atender a un valle agrícola de rápido crecimiento, de mayoría latina, que durante mucho tiempo ha funcionado como un relegado en el sistema de salud frente al norte del condado. Si se hace bien, podría ayudar a reescribir patrones regionales de atención obsoletos y anclar un sistema de salud más equitativo para el sur del condado.

Ese futuro, sin embargo, depende tanto de la confianza como del capital.

Muchos líderes comunitarios con los que hemos hablado valoran positivamente a Gray y su liderazgo durante un periodo difícil, y nosotros lo hemos encontrado accesible y comprometido. Ese apoyo es real y vale la pena reconocerlo. Pero la confianza en el liderazgo no puede reemplazar la transparencia en la gobernanza.

La historia reciente del hospital ayuda a explicar por qué la urgencia y la cautela coexisten. 

En 2022, el Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville salió de la bancarrota y volvió a la propiedad pública bajo el Distrito de Atención Médica del Valle de Pájaro mediante una combinación extraordinaria de intervención estatal, incluidos los esfuerzos destacados del senador estatal John Laird, organización local, apoyo filantrópico y financiamiento aprobado por los votantes. 

Fue un rescate poco común, pero nacido de la crisis tras años de inestabilidad, estructuras de gestión cambiantes e incertidumbre sobre el control. 

Esa historia hace que el momento actual sea aún más decisivo. El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville sigue siendo indispensable, pero opera bajo presión financiera sostenida, brechas estructurales en la fuerza laboral y desigualdades sistémicas no resueltas en el financiamiento de la atención médica.

Los líderes locales, estatales y federales deben abordar esas desigualdades y presionar a posibles socios para que den un paso al frente. Y el liderazgo del hospital debe responder al público con una apertura acorde a la magnitud de su responsabilidad.

Porque si este hospital fracasa, las consecuencias no serán abstractas. Se medirán en atención retrasada, acceso reducido y vidas en riesgo.

El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville es demasiado importante para fracasar. La única pregunta es si la región actuará con la urgencia —y la transparencia— que esa realidad exige.

Esta traducción fue generada utilizando inteligencia artificial y ha sido revisada por un hablante nativo de español; si bien nos esforzamos por lograr precisión, pueden ocurrir algunos errores de traducción. Para leer el artículo en inglés, haga clic aquí.

The post Una Lookout View: El Hospital Comunitario de Watsonville es demasiado importante para fracasar — pero no puede sobrevivir sin transparencia appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Data reporting by Melissa Lewis

In remote Northeast California, about 10 miles outside the lumber mill town of Chester and a half-hour’s drive from the old hunting cabin I bought and fixed up about a decade ago, I steer my old Toyota Tacoma down a bumpy dirt road to where the Lassen National Forest gives way to private timberland. Lilly rides shotgun.

We’d come to this exact spot seven years ago. Lilly, my sharp-eyed border collie, had jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit through a meadow of knee-high grass, returning covered in mud and burrs. The landscape was straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog: a flower-dotted meadow buzzing with life. Douglas firs, incense cedars, and some of the tallest sugar pines on the planet sheltered protected species ranging from gray wolves to Pacific fishers and northern goshawks. The Sierra Nevada red fox, one of California’s rarest mammals, was known to live nearby, amid the vast patchwork of private and public lands. The Lassen area is where I come to reset, forage for wild mushrooms, and let stress evaporate.

But today, I’m looking out over a barren, sun-bleached expanse that stretches across the former meadow and up the sides of denuded mountains as far as the eye can see. No birds. No animals. No insects. No big trees. Just some waist-high piles of volcanic rock, a nod to the still-active Lassen Peak nearby. It is eerily quiet—desolate. The Dixie Fire roared through here in July 2021, burning nearly 1 million acres. The Park Fire three years later took out another 430,000 acres nearby. But the fires aren’t directly responsible for what I’m seeing today. People did this.

Just a few minutes down the road, nature has crept back to life. There, I saw vibrant green mountain whitethorn bushes, rabbitbrush, and purple-tinged bull thistles, with energetic bees bopping from flower to flower. The towering trees were gone, but new saplings abounded—cedars, pines, firs, and more—scattered randomly amid the greenery, already a foot or two high. No such verdant revival is visible on the private timberland before me. No bees, no flowers—it’s a virtual dead zone where the only life consists of row upon row of manually planted, tightly packed conifer saplings, all less than a foot tall.

This is because, unbeknownst to most people, logging companies and the US Forest Service have been spraying massive amounts of herbicide in clear-cut and fire-ravaged forests of California—and throughout the nation. And not just any herbicide, but glyphosate, a potent and problematic weed killer best known by the brand name Roundup.

This once-idyllic landscape, spanning tens of thousands of acres, is among California’s most heavily sprayed forest areas. The Pacific Crest Trail—a hiking route immortalized in the Hollywood movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon—runs straight through it. Yet thanks to all the chemicals, it remains a moonscape even now, nearly five years after the Dixie Fire.

I keep Lilly in the truck.

Burn zones treated with glyphosate lack signs of life even years after the fires. The Pacific Crest Trail passes through this area—California’s most heavily sprayed forestland in 2023.Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson examines land sprayed with glyphosate in the wake of the 2021 Dixie Fire.Scott Anger

My first hint of all this was a single word in a letter the Forest Service sent to me and my neighbors about a year and a half ago. Lassen, it said, was to be part of an ambitious new wildfire recovery project. This was welcome, as the fires had burned perilously close to our properties. Workers would remove selected trees, cull undergrowth, and set prescribed fires, as Native Americans have done for millennia to keep forests healthy and reduce the risk of megafires. The agency also would plant new trees where few had survived.

Then I came to the word “herbicides.” The Forest Service would, starting in spring 2026, spray glyphosate on some 10,000 acres of public land in Lassen to wipe out leafy plants and shrubs that might compete with replanted conifers, whose needles allow them to tolerate the chemical.

Introduced in 1974 by agri-giant Monsanto, glyphosate is among the world’s most controversial herbicides, one the World Health Organization’s cancer agency calls a probable carcinogen. In the late 1990s, widespread spraying on US crops genetically engineered to withstand it helped propel the organics movement and led scientists and activists to decry the chemical’s potential to wreak environmental havoc, from decimating monarch butterfly populations to killing wild frogs.

Bayer, the multinational conglomerate that acquired Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer or other ailments. (Bayer says its herbicide is safe when used as directed.) But the company, which has hired lobbyists with deep ties to the Trump administration, may have notched a win in February, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order deeming glyphosate critical to national security. He even invoked the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic production of the herb­icide and extend some immunity from lawsuits to its manufacturers.

The Forest Service and private loggers say they use glyphosate because it helps commercially attractive conifers like pine and Douglas fir rebound faster after fires and timber harvests. It does so by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. In short, a key rationale for spraying a disputed chemical in natural settings boils down to executives and regulators treating forests, including our national forests, as tree farms.

To learn more about how widely glyphosate was being used and the risks of using it in places where people camp, forage, hike, hunt, and swim, I began by requesting all California spraying reports going back to 1990. My colleague Melissa Lewis and I analyzed more than 5 million records, and what we found was eye opening: Forest spraying, which practically nobody knows about, is happening at record levels. The amount applied annually in state forests—266,000 pounds of pure glyphosate in 2023, the latest year for which data was available—is nearly five times what it was two decades ago. And though far more glyphosate is sprayed on state croplands overall, forest uses have become the herbicide’s fastest-growing market in California.

My Lassen neighbors had a mixture of reactions to the Forest Service letter. Some of them are reflexively averse to environmental concerns. They remember back before the timber wars of the 1990s, when logging boomed and so did good jobs. Classrooms were packed. Families fished, hunted, and called these forests home. Their prosperity was upended by a “tree-hugger” movement to save what remained of California’s old-growth forests. Logging communities were hit hard, and locals paid an economic and emotional price they haven’t forgotten.

Others, upset about the proposed spraying, wrote to the agency to register their opposition. They knew of the health concerns—studies suggesting glyphosate might contribute to ailments ranging from non-Hodgkin lymphoma to brain inflammation and metabolic and liver problems in children. There’s a growing body of evidence, too, suggesting it disrupts the gut microbiome, with implications for chronic disease. (Bayer disputes these findings and says glyphosate safety is “supported by one of the most extensive bodies of research.”)

How, I wondered, given the myriad health and environmental concerns, had regulators come to approve so much forest use of glyphosate—especially at a time when bad press around the chemical had left many a farmer and landscaper searching for alternatives? At least part of the answer lies within the thousands of pages of additional public records, court filings, and internal Monsanto emails I obtained.

The collected documents detail a secret campaign the company hatched in the late 1990s—not unlike the ones used by Big Tobacco decades earlier—to counter public health concerns and convince government agencies to keep approving its multibillion-­dollar product. They show how Monsanto orchestrated, financed, and even ghostwrote studies that were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals under the names of supposedly independent researchers—papers that state and federal agencies have relied upon to justify copious spraying of Roundup.

As my reporting proceeded, the questions kept piling up: Is glyphosate as safe for humans as Bayer insists? Does it really help forests bounce back after fires or, conversely, might it leave them more susceptible? And finally, what would come of the Trump administration setting two key parts of its coalition—Big Agriculture, which embraces glyphosate, and the Make America Healthy Again crowd, which loathes it—on a collision course?

This hillside, burned in the 2024 Park Fire, has not yet been treated with glyphosate. Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson stands in the scar of the 2024 Park Fire, where baby trees and other plants are reemerging from the ashes, and where the Forest Service plans to spray glyphosate this spring. Scott Anger

Back in the burn zone, a sudden movement catches my eye; not a rabbit this time but a dust devil forming. It swirls and dances over the sunbaked terrain, taking on the color of the rust-colored dirt. The vortex grows ever larger, now towering hundreds of feet in the air, where an overhead wind, like an unseen paintbrush, streaks the ­reddish dirt off into the distance, a miles-long trail of impressionistic art.

This can’t be good. That topsoil was drenched with chemicals not so long ago. Now it’s airborne and presumably traveling well beyond the intended spraying boundaries. Joe Van Meter, owner of the Mill Creek Resort about 15 miles away, mentions the dust devils when I visit him. He’s seen them, too, on his drive to Chester.

Van Meter is a charming and earthy forty­something who in 2017 bought the nearly century-old, 12-acre resort with his wife, Jillian. They are raising their three young daughters here, having revitalized the old cabins, RV sites, and campground, adding retro trailers and glamping tents to attract the hip Bay Area crowd. “As you see, we’ve got a little slice of heaven,” he tells me.

The resort, as its name suggests, sits alongside Mill Creek, which originates in nearby Lassen Volcanic National Park and meanders through the area. The fast-­flowing mountain creek has long been hallowed ground for Native Americans and anglers because it remains undammed and is a spawning ground for some of the state’s last remaining spring-run Chinook salmon. Recent studies have found that glyphosate-based herbicides caused “deleterious effects” on fish development and reproduction, which is one reason Van Meter has helped lead local pushback to the Forest Service’s plan. Having perused the science—and lawsuits—he also fears that spraying Roundup on local hillsides, whose feeder streams empty into the creek, could taint his community’s primary water source.

 
“It seems like it’s poison that they’re putting into the woods,” Van Meter says.
“This is our backyard. This is where my children play.”
 

Scott Anger

He gets the need for fire mitigation. The 2024 Park Fire burned right up to the edge of his property and sent him fleeing for his life on highways lapped by flames. “We came to a couple points where we had to stop because of how intense it was ahead of us,” he recalls. But the family got out and the resort was spared. The ­earlier Dixie Fire had also come close, forcing him and Jillian to shut down at the peak of the busy summer season. As such, he’s on board with the thinning and replanting and supports logging in the area, but Van Meter and others oppose the use of Roundup and related herbicides. “We need work to be done, and so I want to see that work done,” he says. “But I want it done without the use of toxic chemicals.”

Roundup has been on the market for half a century, but sales exploded in the late 1990s after Monsanto introduced “Roundup-­ready” GMO soybeans and corn, crops genetically modified to withstand a direct hit with glyphosate. This allowed farmers to kill everything else in their fields, increasing crop yields and giving struggling growers hope that they might eke out more money. Monsanto cashed in doubly by selling them both Roundup and the seeds that could survive it.

But after a series of studies in the late 1990s indicated glyphosate might be harmful to people, Monsanto executives and scientists concocted a plan to convince regulators otherwise. Internal emails obtained through discovery in various lawsuits against the company show how Monsanto personnel sought out researchers who would “get up and shout Glyphosate is non-toxic,” as William Heydens, one of the company’s scientists, told colleagues in a May 1999 email. Their testimonials, he wrote, could “be referenced and used to counter-balance the negative stuff.”

In the emails, Heydens, who helped spearhead the strategy, and whom we tried to contact without success, emphasized that his team would work with “outside scientific experts who are influential at driving science, regulators, public opinion, etc.” They turned first to a British scientist, James Parry, a globally recognized expert on genetic mutations. But Parry’s internal report to Monsanto concluded that glyphosate potentially caused clastogenicity—chromosome damage—which can lead to cancer. He recommended more tests.

Monsanto executives were not thrilled. Heydens informed his crew that the company had no intention of doing “the studies Parry suggests”—the goal, rather, was to identify scientists willing to declare Roundup safe. “Let’s step back and look at what we are really trying to achieve here. We want to find/develop someone who is comfortable with the genetox profile”­—an assessment of cancer risk—“of glyphosate/Roundup and who can be influential with regulators,” he wrote. “My read is that Parry is not currently such a person.”

The border between unsprayed parcels and those where glyphosate has been applied is hard to miss.Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson visits a site burned by the 2024 Park Fire where dead trees are being cleared and harvested for sale.Scott Anger

The team turned instead to Dr. Gary Williams, a physician who taught at the New York Medical College. Williams and two co-authors then published an April 2000 review article in the peer-reviewed journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. Unlike the Parry report, which included independent research in its ­analysis, the Williams paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal lab tests to evaluate whether glyphosate causes cancer. Its conclusions were unequivocal: “There is no potential for Roundup herbicide to pose a health risk to humans.” (Williams could not be reached for comment.)

In another email, this one from a trove of trial records dubbed the Monsanto Papers, Heydens reminded his team they’d ghostwritten the Williams paper, a claim he would later deny under oath. “Apparently I didn’t have good recollection, because that’s not what happened,” he said in a 2017 deposition. But the emails make clear that ghostwriting was widely discussed at Monsanto. Michael Koch, an executive who oversaw teams responsible for Roundup and glyphosate’s safety and regulatory approval, emailed subordinates at one point to ask them to orchestrate a study with a “manuscript to be initiated by MON ghostwriters” and published by one of their go-to scientists—Williams and four others were listed as options. Heydens, one of the recipients, noted in a separate message that “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and [the outside scientists] would just edit and sign their names, so to speak.” Their imprimatur would make the articles more credible to regulators and the public, he added.

Monsanto would orchestrate several influential studies over the years. In 2016, Williams was the lead author on another paper secretly overseen by the company and published at a crucial moment. WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had made headlines the year before by concluding that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Monsanto responded with a PR onslaught that included a ghostwritten Forbes op-ed under the byline of former FDA official Henry Miller, a Stanford Hoover Institution fellow and regular contributor to the magazine. “The reality is that glyphosate is not a human health risk,” it concluded. (When Forbes editors learned Monsanto had ghostwritten the piece, they cut ties with Miller, who did not respond to requests for comment.)

Heydens and other insiders, meanwhile, were busy preparing a series of five new papers involving Williams and 15 named co-authors. The package ran in the September 2016 issue of Critical Reviews in Toxicology, with a title suggesting it was written by “four independent expert panels.” Critical Reviews, like most academic journals, requires authors to disclose any ethical conflicts in a declaration of interest section, in which Williams et al. wrote: “Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.”

That was a lie.

The declaration also said the authors “were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company,” which wasn’t true, either. Monsanto employees had exchanged emails with at least some of them, provided comments and edits on drafts, and in some cases agreed to pay authors tens of thousands of dollars. Heydens himself contributed to the 2016 package: “Here is my 1st shot at starting the Manuscript for the Panel report,” he wrote in an email to colleagues more than a year before it was published. Entire paragraphs from his draft ran verbatim, or nearly so, in the published version, such as: “A molecule with these characteristics would be expected to exhibit, if any, only a low order of toxicity. The results from toxicity studies and regulatory risk assessments have been consistent with that expectation.” Emails and court records show that at least some of the authors were aware of Monsanto’s involvement in editing the package, which, like Williams’ earlier article, was cited in the glyphosate safety assessments of regulators worldwide. “Plaintiff lawyers have cherry-picked isolated emails out of millions of pages of documents,” Bayer said in a statement, and Monsanto’s involvement “did not rise to the level of authorship.”

“We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous. We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”

The Forest Service’s 2011 risk assessment, which broadly depicts glyphosate as posing no significant threat to people and the environment, references Williams’ 2000 article 27 times—more than any other peer-reviewed paper, often to refute studies that raised health concerns. In fact, five of the seven most-cited journal articles in the report were either directly orchestrated by Monsanto or written by authors with financial ties to the company.

The only potential human risk acknow­ledged in the Forest Service’s assessment has to do with people unknowingly ingesting glyphosate after foraging for mushrooms and plants in recently sprayed areas. That’s a problem not just for foragers like me, but for anyone who has ever eaten a chanterelle, morel, or porcini mushroom, none of which can be farmed. Stores and restaurants purchase them from permitted commercial foragers who collect them in wild places, including the Lassen National Forest.

One warm day last August, I drive out to Chester to meet biologist Russell Nickerson, the district ranger in charge of the Lassen spraying. Bespectacled, mustachioed, and clad in the light tan uniform of the Forest Service, he ambles into the district office’s visitor center to greet me. We’re surrounded by taxidermied forest critters, including falcons and owls, a river otter, and a mountain lion set to pounce. Nickerson helped create the October 2024 fire recovery plan, and so, after shaking hands, we head to a little outbuilding to discuss it. The Forest Service has a complex portfolio. On one hand, it manages recreation and conservation in the nation’s woodlands. But as a division of the Department of Agriculture, it also oversees timber production on public land. In the wake of a March 2025 Trump executive order calling for more logging, the agency is more focused than ever on the commercial side of its mission.

That includes reviving areas recently logged or damaged in wildfires so as to regrow the trees as profitably as possible. In Lassen, the agency will deploy workers with portable backpack sprayers to hike through the massive burn zone and apply up to 8 pounds of glyphosate per acre—enough to kill every leafy plant. A first round of spraying is tentatively planned for spring or early summer 2026, followed by another round in the fall. Once new baby conifers are planted, workers will reapply glyphosate one or more times to terminate anything growing too close to them.

Above and below: Timber harvesting operations in the scar of the 2024 Park Fire.Scott Anger Scott Anger

Nickerson concedes that the Forest Service still relies on its 15-year-old risk assessment—the one that cites Williams 27 times. When I ask him point-blank whether Roundup is safe, he fidgets in his chair and laughs uncomfortably. “It’s probably our Washington office that you would talk to on that,” he says. The chemical is approved, so he uses it.

I show him what I’ve learned about Monsanto’s efforts to sway agencies like his. He shrugs. “Something you’d have to talk about with our national office.”

I then show him a 2020 EPA report that concluded glyphosate harms 93 percent of endangered species and 96 percent of the critical habitat they rely on—creatures including the Sierra Nevada red fox, gray wolf, and spotted owl, all protected in Lassen. Nickerson says he’s never seen the report. Fair enough, but do its findings make him think twice about using Roundup? “Still gotta talk to our national office on that one, sorry,” he says.

As I’m getting ready to leave, he makes a casual comment that sticks with me: It’s his understanding that the agency’s risk assessment says glyphosate is so safe “you could bathe in it.” I looked, and it doesn’t say that exactly. It does say that if you were fully immersed in undiluted glyphosate, there would be no cancer risk. One of the sources it cites for skin contact being safe? Williams et al., 2000. Nickerson later disputes using that language. His point, he says, was that given the quantities of glyphosate used by the Forest Service, it “did not rise to a level of concern.”

In December, four months after we spoke in person, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology announced it was retracting the 2000 Williams article. The journal had “lost confidence in the results and conclusions,” Co-Editor-in-Chief Martin van den Berg wrote, after learning that the paper’s named authors, Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian Munro, “were not solely responsible for writing its content” and had relied entirely on Monsanto data, disregarding other evidence.

The retraction was prompted by a critical analysis shared with the editors by scientists Naomi Oreskes and Alexander Kaurov. Oreskes is co-author of Merchants of Doubt, a 2010 book showing how corporations deliberately distort science to influence policy. “We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous,” Oreskes tells me. “We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”

It also nullifies the Forest Service’s most-cited journal article in support of glyphosate safety. The agency, which had previously declined me an interview with its chief, Tom Schultz, provided a statement noting that the USDA supports the EPA’s “use of gold-standard science to assess pesticide safety.”

Oreskes doesn’t fault the regulators. They “are making a good-faith assumption that because this paper was published in a respectable, peer-reviewed journal that it was a legitimate paper and that its findings were valid,” she says. But “what we’ve shown is that it was not a legitimate paper.” Rather, it was a ploy by Monsanto “to manipulate the scientific conversation and thereby the regulatory conversation, and to persuade people of the safety of a product [when], in fact, there is significant scientific evidence to raise concern.”

“As a person who studies scientific integrity, that profoundly offends me,” Oreskes says. “But also, it’s crucial because it means we can’t trust what they say.”

A 2020 EPA report determined that glyphosate harms a wide range of wild animals and their habitats. This artistic rendition shows a gray fox photographed in California’s Bodie Mountains.Billie Carter-Rankin; Ken Hickman/Forest Service Research Data Archive

The Forest Service intends to keep using Roundup, and far more heavily than in years past, per our analysis of California pesticide reports, which include herbicides. It approved a plan that could spray more glyphosate on those 10,000 Lassen acres than it sprayed in an average year two decades ago across its entire portfolio of 193 million acres. It also plans to spray up to 75,000 acres affected by the 2021 Caldor Fire, including spots near Lake Tahoe’s famed ski resorts—such as the base and parking lot at Sierra-at-Tahoe and in forests close to Kirkwood and Heavenly. The plan includes spraying in campgrounds, around trailheads, and close to homes in Meyers. These applications alone will amount to more spraying in California’s woodlands than happened in all of 2023.

It is difficult to say whether the Golden State is an outlier, because most states, unlike California, don’t have a mandatory and comprehensive reporting system for commercial pesticide and herbicide users. But a 2020 EPA study largely based on private industry data suggests that glyphosate use may be even more prevalent elsewhere: Sixteen Southern states accounted for about 90 percent of the nation’s overall forest spraying in 2016, the authors estimated.

The Forest Service acknowledges it can get similar timber yields by reforesting without chemicals, using workers and machines, but at triple the cost—expense is a “major factor” in the decision to spray, according to a 2024 agency report. The same report cites a 40-year-old study that claims injuries are more likely when vegetation is culled by hand, but it doesn’t address potential health risks for crews hired to spray the chemical.

Oversight of spraying is lax, even here in California. When I asked state regulators for records of all site inspections for forest spraying from 2020 through 2022, they returned only 11 reports, despite more than 8,000 reported sprayings covering a quarter-­million acres during those three years. In one report, from El Dorado County, an inspector witnessed contract workers handling Roundup with their gloves off. They’d been hired to spray on Forest Service land but had neither the protective equipment nor the safety training mandated by the state. The inspector snapped a photo in which one of the workers’ hands is bright purple—covered in Roundup.

Skin exposure was central to the first-ever glyphosate cancer lawsuit against Monsanto. In 2018, a jury awarded $289 million to Bay Area groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, concluding that occupational exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The 1st District Court of Appeal reduced the award to $20.5 million but ruled that the jurors were entitled to declare Roundup dangerous based on WHO’s review, expert witnesses, and evidence that Monsanto had behaved unethically to sway regulators and research findings. “Even if the evidence did not require an inference that Monsanto was more concerned about defending and promoting its product than public health, it supported such an inference,” the presiding judge wrote.

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Craig Thomas, a fire reduction expert who in 2021 served on a congressional wildfire recovery commission with then–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, raised similar concerns with the Forest Service, he says, and was told the agency wasn’t aware of anyone harmed by spraying Roundup on the job. “And I’m like, ‘No, they die of non-Hodgkin lymphoma 15 years later,’” Thomas tells me when we meet up not far from my cabin to survey land where the agency plans to spray.

I show him some of what I’ve found. “Oh god, that’s totally corrupt,” he says. “Do we care about human beings or our natural landscapes? Doesn’t sound like it.”

Forest Service mascot Smokey Bear, he declares, has become a glyphosate junkie. “It’s a chemical addiction that’s been fostered inside the agency with the help of Bayer and Monsanto,” he says. “The system operated for thousands of years without it.”

 
You don’t need herb­icides for fire recovery, Thomas says. That’s about cost cutting.
The forests, he says, can be adequately managed using just machines, laborers, and tools such as prescribed burns.
 

Consider that Quebec, the largest timber-producing region in North America, has eliminated glyphosate and other herbicides in 90 percent of its forests. Back in 1994, the province put in place a “forest protection strategy” designed to balance jobs and profits with healthy forests. Glyphosate, once widely used, was banned in 2001, and logging companies switched to manual and mechanical methods to stifle plant competition with minimal effects on yields, according to a 2010 government study. Now, instead of enriching a German chemical company, the money goes to pay local workers.

Quebec’s experience has gone unheeded by California officials, who aim to expand glyphosate spraying in state-run forests as part of their own fire prevention strategy. Gov. Gavin Newsom even signed an emergency executive order last year allowing the state ­Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and other agencies to bypass normal safety procedures when spraying the herbicide.

The state’s plans rely on Cal Fire’s 2015 glyphosate safety report, which also leaned on Monsanto’s ghostwritten studies. The report’s author, contractor Bill Williams, who is unrelated to the physician Monsanto recruited as the lead author for its papers, has a long history working for the chemical industry. He once, for instance, argued that dioxin, a highly toxic chemical known to cause cancer and other health problems, doesn’t hurt bald eagles. (It does.) At a 2003 chemical industry event, he gave a presentation titled “A Little Pesticide Is Good For You,” arguing that the EPA should loosen regulations around pesticide exposure. (Williams did not respond to my outreach attempts.)

While working on the Cal Fire report, according to his own résumé, Williams was also working for a consulting company, Cardno, that helps firms like Monsanto recruit scientists to conduct and write studies for them. That same year, court records show, a Cardno scientist pitched Monsanto executives, offering to help manage Roundup’s PR problem in the wake of WHO’s carcinogenicity declaration.

California already sprays glyphosate in state parks, such as Jackson Demonstration State Forest, where it issues permits for people to forage for mushrooms and where the Mycological Society of San Francisco hosts an annual gathering. Last year’s attendees were unaware of the spraying, several members told me. And that’s problematic, because many foragers and chefs recommend not rinsing wild mushrooms in order to maintain their flavor. But eating unwashed food recently sprayed with glyphosate is a problem—even the Forest Service’s outdated risk assessment says so.

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High on the list of California’s biggest overall glyphosate users is the state Department of Transportation, which sprays along roads and highways to keep flammable grasses and brush in check. Caltrans also sprays in counties, including Los Angeles, that won’t let their own workers use the herbicide. The spraying isn’t just in rural areas. Records show Caltrans has been applying herbicides in downtown Hollywood, right along Santa Monica Boulevard.

The state’s No. 1 forest sprayer in 2023, records show, was Sierra Pacific Industries, a timber company owned by billionaire Trump supporter Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson. Sierra Pacific is the largest landowner in the state and the second-largest in the country, controlling more acreage than Ted Turner and Bill Gates put together. It was responsible for 70 percent of reported glyphosate spraying in California’s wooded areas that year, including the lands near my cabin. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment—ditto the timber company Collins, another major user.

The irony of firms and government agencies spraying replanted burn zones is that they may be setting us up for more trouble down the road. Deciduous hardwoods such as oak, aspen, and birch can slow a fire’s progression, studies show, whereas resin-filled conifers are more flammable than other trees. A densely packed commercial conifer forest like the one I saw taking shape near Chester is, according to a growing scientific consensus, a megafire waiting to happen.

An artistic rendition. The US Forest Service is now gearing up for more woodland spraying in California—including in campgrounds, around trailheads, and near ski resorts—than ever before recorded.Billie Carter-Rankin; Randy Pench/Sacramento Bee/Getty

Given everything we’ve learned, it’s worth asking: Just how bad is glyphosate for human health?

The science on cancer is mixed. Even successful lawsuits like Johnson’s found it to be only a weak or modest carcinogen. But that’s not the only worry. Brenda ­Eskenazi, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied glyphosate for decades. For a 2023 article, she followed 480 mothers and their children in California’s Salinas Valley for more than 18 years, testing their urine periodically. She found statistically significant increases in the prevalence of liver inflammation (14 percent) and metabolic syndrome (55 percent)—which can result in liver cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease later in life—among young adults exposed to glyphosate in the womb or during early childhood. “Everyone was focused on cancer, and they weren’t looking elsewhere,” Eskenazi tells me. “There are other health effects that have long-term impacts.”

Given the heated rhetoric around glyphosate, Eskenazi speaks with restraint. “We need more research,” she says. Yet much of her funding has been in limbo since the Trump administration hit the brakes on grants from the National Institutes of Health. Without those funds, her lab may have to shut down and destroy some 400,000 biological samples. But she is unwilling as yet to pass final judgment on the safety of the world’s most widely used herbicide. “There are a lot of little pieces that make us concerned,” she says, but “I’m not one of these people who say we shouldn’t use pesticides at all. I think we should use it discretionarily and carefully. That means when nothing else works.”

Bayer asserts in its 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.” The EPA’s glyphosate assessment relied heavily on a 2018 analysis based on the Agricultural Health Study. The researchers asked 57,310 people who had applied for pesticide licenses in North Carolina or Iowa whether they used glyphosate and then followed up with a series of health-related questions. The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found no statistically significant correlation between glyphosate exposure and cancers such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But the paper had its critics. Lianne Sheppard, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington who served on the EPA’s scientific advisory panel on glyphosate, published a critique in the same journal arguing that the authors’ approach was likely to underestimate cancer risk. The authors responded, explaining why they believed their results were valid.

And so it goes. “I have friends who are good scientists and think it causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” David Eastmond, a professor of toxicology at UC Riverside, tells me. “And I have others who think it doesn’t.”

Eastmond is in the latter camp. About 10 years ago, a joint task force assembled by WHO and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization asked him and other scientists to conduct a new review of glyphosate studies in light of the 2015 probable-­carcinogen determination. Whereas that determination had relied exclusively on published research, Eastmond and his colleagues were given full access to Monsanto’s internal glyphosate data as well. “This industry dataset was almost entirely negative for cancer and genotoxicity,” he recalls. With this data in the mix, he and his colleagues concluded glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer. But his work preceded revelations that Monsanto was tampering with the scientific process—the lies and the ghostwriting. “Yeah, that’s totally dishonest,” Eastmond says. “A lot of this is very sleazy.”

Can Monsanto’s data still be trusted? “I think it’s fair to be skeptical,” he says. “When someone is putting pressure to manipulate things, then I become more skeptical, too.”

While the jury may still be out on the extent of Roundup’s harms, we know for certain that it’s in our bodies and environment. A 2020 study by the US Geological Survey found glyphosate in 74 percent of American streams tested. A study published two years later by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found glyphosate residues in more than 80 percent of the 2,000-plus urine samples it collected from US adults and children.

Such findings concern Ramon Velazquez, a researcher at Arizona State University whose team’s glyphosate study appeared in the Journal of Neuroinflammation in 2024. They fed glyphosate to mice at levels comparable to what the EPA considers safe in human food. The mice developed brain inflammation that persisted for months after the chemical was removed from their diets. The exposure, the authors wrote, also resulted in premature death of the rodents and Alzheimer’s-like damage to their brains. “I am very cautious about how I eat now,” Velazquez tells me. “I eat an organic diet.”

In 2020, after more than a decade of planning and review, the EPA released an updated glyphosate assessment. It said the herbicide is safe to use and does not cause cancer. Oreskes and Kaurov’s ­analysis points out that, whereas WHO’s cancer agency looked mainly at peer-reviewed studies, 70 percent of which indicated genotoxic effects, the EPA relied largely on industry-funded studies, 99 percent of which found no cancer links.

The EPA’s approval process was not without scandal. In 2013, Marion Copley, a veterinarian recently retired from the agency, wrote to her former colleague Jess Rowland, who was leading the EPA’s glyphosate cancer assessment. In her letter, now part of the Monsanto Papers, Copley, then dying of breast cancer, implored Rowland to follow the science on glyphosate, which she “strongly believed” triggered tumors.

“For once in your life, listen to me and don’t play your political conniving games with the science to favor the registrants. For once do the right thing,” she wrote. “I have cancer and I don’t want these serious issues in [the Health Effects Division] to go unaddressed before I go to my grave.” (She died nine months later.)

Above and below: Post-fire growth emerges in as-yet-untreated areas near Mt. Lassen in the scar of the 2021 Dixie Fire. Scott Anger Scott Anger

Rowland later came under scrutiny for his cozy relationship with Monsanto. While conducting the assessment, he’d spoken regularly with its employees, assuring them he could help, internal emails show. When insiders worried that CDC toxicologists might conduct an independent analysis and conclude that glyphosate was harmful, Rowland said he would try to intervene. One employee quoted him as saying, “If I can kill this I should get a medal.”

Rowland, who could not be reached for comment, left the EPA soon after someone leaked an unauthorized draft of the agency’s preliminary conclusion that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, according to court records. Monsanto immediately filed the document in court as evidence to refute claims that Roundup caused cancer.

The EPA inspector general’s office concluded in 2019 that Rowland had done nothing wrong and that there was no evidence the process lacked “scientific rigor.” But the EPA’s official assessment in favor of glyphosate was promptly challenged in court by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network North America, which accused the agency of ignoring its own cancer guidelines and glyphosate’s impacts on endangered species. In 2022, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. It overturned the assessment, noting that the “EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act.” The ruling pointed to serious “errors in assessing human-­health risk” and noted that most of the studies the EPA examined had “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”

A fresh EPA determination is expected this year. During Trump’s first term, according to one internal email, Monsanto executives were assured they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration.” Last June, Bayer’s CEO met personally with EPA Adm­inistrator Lee Zeldin to discuss glyphosate’s “legal/judicial issues,” per an agency memo obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. Six months later, Trump’s solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to take a case that would help shield Bayer from further Roundup lawsuits. The court agreed, and oral arguments were set for April 27. (Bayer shares soared 14 percent on the news.) North Dakota and Georgia have passed laws that would give Bayer legal immunity, and more such bills are expected at the state and federal level.

Then came Trump’s executive order saying America must ensure, even boost, production of glyphosate and white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon also manufactured by Bayer. “Lack of access to glyphosate-based herb­icides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system,” it read.

The MAHA contingent saw the order and went ballistic. “There is a level of anger and frustration like I’ve never witnessed before,” a conservative wellness influencer with millions of Instagram followers told the New York Times. “Where is RFK JR?” asked a commenter. MAHA wants crop chemicals reduced, if not banned entirely, but that could prove a tough sell. Mexico’s leaders ran into heavy resistance in 2024 when they tried to ban glyphosate in their agriculture sector. Farmers were hooked on it and the government ultimately concluded that cutting them off might prove as dangerous to a farm operation as quitting heroin or alcohol cold turkey might to an addict. The ban was rescinded. “It is known to be harmful to health,” then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador explained, “but there is no substitute.”

And now, as the global food industry grapples with glyphosate addiction, America’s forestry sector is headed down the same path—though, in a small concession to my neighbors, the Forest Service has agreed not to apply glyphosate so close to people’s homes or near certain waterways in the Lassen area, a roughly 2 percent reduction in spraying.

To sum up, the US government botched its safety review of glyphosate, thanks in part to Monsanto’s gaming of the system. Concerned researchers say we need additional data to fully understand the chemical’s harms. But the Trump administration has slashed research funding, and politicians are waiving safety reviews and working to ensure that people who say glyphosate made them sick cannot sue its manufacturer. The Forest Service, meanwhile, plans to spray even more of the herb­icide, despite knowing that it hurts nearly all endangered species, that nonchemical options are available, and that its own assessment of human safety hinges on an industry-driven review paper, since retracted.

If all of these revelations are spiking your anxiety levels, you also should probably know that that’s one of the symptoms those Arizona State researchers observed in the mice they’d injected with supposedly safe levels of glyphosate.