This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump and his administration have spent much of the past two days signaling a desire to deescalate the trade war with China that they started. But every time investors get excited a breakthrough might be imminent, Trump officials have thrown some cold water on their enthusiasm — likely because they’re afraid of looking like they’re climbing down.What did they say, exactly? On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told investors at a closed-door event that the current status quo of 145 percent tariffs on China is “unsustainable.” He added: “I would posit that over the very near future, there will be a deescalation.”Later that day, Trump signaled he agreed. “145 percent is very high and it won’t be that high,” he told reporters, adding: “It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.” Then, today, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s team “is considering” slashing his China tariff levels by more than half “in a bid to deescalate tensions with Beijing” — though their sources stressed that Trump had not yet made a final decision.Stocks initially soared this morning, but gave back some of their gains after Bessent and other White House aides cautioned that no change in the tariffs was imminent, and that Trump was not making a “unilateral” offer.So what’s going on here? Trump started this trade war impulsively, slapping ridiculously large tariffs on China because they’d dared to retaliate against new tariffs he’d placed on them. He did this without any larger strategic planning or advance notice for businesses — and it’s becoming undeniable that without change, the US economy is going to start facing very serious problems quite soon.Chinese leaders have so far refused to give into Trump’s threats, deeming them disrespectful bullying. Per the Wall Street Journal’s sources, Trump’s comments “were viewed as a sign of him folding” in China’s policymaking circles. The hashtag “Trump chickened out” trended on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.Now, facing imminent economic disaster, Trump appears to be looking for a way to climb down, without looking too much like he’s climbing down. Will he actually go through with it? We don’t yet know, but no rush — it’s only the global economy hanging on his decision.And with that, it’s time to log off…A big change is coming to the Oscars — voters will now be required to actually watch all the films that have been nominated, if they want to vote in a category. Imagine that! Variety has details on exactly how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences plans to enforce this new requirement — and what the loophole might be.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change. The US invasion of Iraq had sent gasoline prices skyward. Solar and wind power provided a tiny fraction of overall electricity, showing moderate growth every year. With domestic natural gas running short, coastal states were preparing to build import terminals to bring gas from abroad. Americans were beginning to rethink their love of giant cars as the 7,000-pound Ford Excursion SUV entered its final year of production. In short, the US was preparing for a world with a rising demand for ever scarcer, more expensive fossil fuels, most of which would have to come from abroad. That was then. Today, the energy picture couldn’t be more different. In the mid-2000s, the fracking revolution took off, making the US the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world. But clean energy began surging as well. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which created new incentives to deploy wind and solar power. Batteries became better and cheaper. Just about every carmaker now has an electric vehicle for sale. These weren’t just the product of steady advances but breakthroughs — new inventions, policies, and expanding economies of scale that aligned prices and performance to push energy technologies to unexpected heights. So what will come next? That’s the challenge for those charged with building tomorrow’s energy infrastructure. And right now, the world is especially uncertain about what’s to come, with overall energy demand experiencing major growth for the first time in decades, in part due to power-hungry data centers behind AI. The policy chaos from the Trump administration and looming threats of tariffs are making it even harder for the global energy sector to invest and build for the future.If you’re running a utility, building a factory, or designing power transmission routes, how do you even begin to plan? To think through this conundrum, I spoke to Erin Baker. She is a professor of engineering and the faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has studied technology and policy changes in the energy sector for decades, with an eye toward how to make big decisions under uncertain circumstances. I asked her about whether there are any other big step changes on the horizon for technologies that can help us contain climate change, and what we can do to stack the deck in their favor. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Can you define “breakthrough” or explain how it’s different from an incremental advance? A lot of really important innovation has been incremental. We’ve had amazing “breakthroughs” in a way with batteries, with wind energy, but it has happened over time. An example of a kind of a breakthrough was fracking, because that was a revolution, but for a long time, everybody ignored the importance of all the various technologies horizontal drilling, shale fracture fluid, subsurface mapping] developing in the background, or didn’t think it was going to happen. That one was a big step change when the price, performance, and shale gas field discoveries converged. Whereas with solar, it just kept getting cheaper consistently faster than we expected. One way you can define “breakthrough” is you can look at what everyone’s expecting and see when you do better than that. So breakthroughs are kind of surprises. So perhaps it’s better to think of a breakthrough not necessarily as an invention, but rather a point at which a technology becomes viable?Right. Then can you put the recent clean tech advances we’ve seen into context? Have we seen anything like this before? I think that we’ve always had a lot of technological change. I don’t think it’s just around clean energy. If there is some kind of incentive, then energy developers will be very clever at finding solutions. As we realize that renewable energy has a lot of benefits to it, the more we focused on it, the more we were like, “Whoa, this is 10 times better than anybody thought it was going to be.” With clean energy, a big part of the rationale is its environmental and climate benefits, rather than simply profit. There’s sort of a moral motivation baked in. Does that motivation matter? For many technologies, there are always true believers. Most people who get really excited about an invention are not just trying to make a profit. I think they’re almost always really into the technology itself. So with renewable energy, people have been excited for a very, very long time. That excitement tided people over for many years when those sources weren’t all that profitable. Solar took a long time for it to become great. The reason people focused on it was because of their vision that this has such potential for energy and the environment. So I think that the moral dimension does play a role.With a trade war kicking off, a lot of the raw materials and finished products in clean energy are likely to get more expensive. Is there a chance of backsliding in clean energy progress? I don’t think we’re going to lose the technology advances. [Development] can slow down. We saw that for offshore wind, with the COVID-induced inflation and higher interest rates slowing the industry down. We’re not losing any benefits of the technology though, and in fact it will probably induce new technological change. To me those kinds of things are temporary. Trade wars and stuff like that, they’re bad. They will slow things down, but they won’t stop innovation.There’s also competition against clean energy. You talked about fracking and how that was an unexpected breakthrough. I remember in the 1990s people were talking about peak oil, and then that discussion went away because we just kept finding more oil and more exploitable resources. It seems like those same price and performance pressures on clean tech to improve also apply on the fossil side, and there’s still a ton of money and innovation there.Are there any breakthroughs in fossil energy that could counteract progress in clean tech?That is a good point. Yeah, that peak oil thing used to drive me crazy. When it was a big thing, what I kept trying to explain to people that the industry will just innovate. The higher the price of oil gets, the more we’re going to figure out how to get oil out of the ground. There could be more innovations in fossil fuels, but where we are in the US, climate change is a very real problem and it’s hitting people today. It’s not going away. I think that the majority of focus on innovation is going to be things that can help us deal with climate change while living high-quality lives. Being at a university, I see that the young bright students are not dying to get into fossil fuels. Most of them want to build a world that’s going to be liveable for them, for their children. That gets back to what you were saying: Does it matter what the underlying reason is for innovating? And I guess when I think of it that way, it does matter. Young people want to make a better world. And so they are excited to go into clean energy, not into dirty energy.How do we start planning for another step change in clean energy? How do we prepare for stuff that we haven’t invented yet?Investing in science and engineering is obviously a good idea if we want to have more kinds of scientific breakthroughs. But yeah, given that we don’t know what the technology of tomorrow is going to look like, we really want to focus on flexibility and adaptability in the near term. Something that I think is important but not always very sexy or appealing is to streamline the grid interconnection process. Every time a new energy project wants to connect to the power grid they have to get into this interconnection queue. The grid operators have to do a study and see how it’s going to affect the rest of the grid. That process is really slow and inefficient; it can take years and years for things to get on the grid. Speeding that up is something that’s going to be useful broadly. You don’t need to predict if it’s going to be enhanced geothermal or if it’s going to be new versions of solar that will win out to get that queue working better. Similarly, we need to build new transmission where and when it’s needed. It would be independent of where we end up on the energy supply side. Some of these battery technologies are facilitating distributed resources like rooftop solar and microgrids. Thinking about just how to integrate them on the main power grid would be useful. What do you see as the government’s role in facilitating this?Certainly investing in science and engineering. A lot of it is also setting goals for specific technologies. It’s important because it coordinates the supply chain. That’s something that state or federal governments could do if they really have a vision. It doesn’t even cost very much money. A lot of it is reviewing and streamlining regulatory processes to make sure that regulation is doing what it should do. What about things like investing in companies or offering financing to startups? One thing that I think is really interesting is the idea of green bonds so that you can borrow money at a lower interest rate when what you’re doing is good for the environment. I don’t think that involves the government exactly picking companies; it just means you’re making this money available if you follow certain guidelines. Permitting risk is a kind of a bureaucratic risk, and the government could reduce that by understanding if there’s going to be a huge public pushback in building a certain area rather than every developer going out to do all their own individual work. One example is offshore wind in Europe. There, the state does a lot of work before the developers get there in understanding the specific sites. By the time they allocate the regions to build, they’ve done a lot of the work that takes a lot of the risk out of it, and then they put it up for bids to private companies. Mechanisms like that can be really useful.For energy project developers, how do you decide whether to use what you can get off the shelf now versus waiting a few years, maybe another decade, for something better?A friend of mine many years ago did some research on that, and basically she found that if things are improving at a pretty fast rate, it’s almost always worth it to go ahead and invest in what you have now because you’re going to get a lot of value out of it. Yes, it’s possible that 10 years from now, it’ll be something even better, but you’re already getting a lot of value from what you’re doing.I don’t see many developers waiting around for a better technology. I think we have a lot of good options.See More:

History has been disappearing from government websites. First, it was Stonewall. The word “transgender” was removed from the National Park Service page commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, at which trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a central role. The acronym LGBTQ was also changed to just “LGB.” Then, Harriet Tubman was erased from a page about the Underground Railroad, and the language changed to highlight “Black/white cooperation.” A page about Jackie Robinson’s Army service was taken down from the Pentagon’s website. (Both pages were later restored after public criticism.) A Washington Post investigation also found that at least half a dozen pages referencing the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who integrated an Arkansas high school in the 1950s, previously said the students had “opened doors” for those seeking “equality and education.” Now, the pages say the students were just seeking “education.” The edits come amid the Trump administration’s push to end DEI and “restore truth and sanity” to American history, an effort causing alarm among historians like Yale professor David W. Blight. In an interview with Noel King on Today, Explained, Blight says the changes amount to a brazen attempt to rewrite our past — but that America is no stranger to revisionist history. The country has rewritten and re-saved and re-pushed its narrative of events so many times that it might as well look like the filename of a high schooler’s final project. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.Reporters will often say, “Donald Trump is unprecedented. The things that he does are unprecedented.” But I imagine you would tell me that the United States has tried to rewrite its own history, at certain points. Many times, yes. Give me some examples of the times we’ve tried to do this. During World War II, the United States created a massive propaganda machine called the Office of War Information. That’s what governments do during wartime. That organization did indeed engage in a lot of propaganda, selling stories to keep Americans patriotic. Moving ahead from that to McCarthyism: Anti-communism was a very deep phenomenon in America — and not without some reason in the ’30s and ’40s. But McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts of trying to control what writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything. Let’s take the Civil War. In 1865 to 1870, there was an organization in the South called the Southern Historical Society. That was originally made up mostly of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had been about, what they had actually fought for, what their crusade meant, what the Confederacy actually was.What was the story they were trying to sell? They told a story that we’ve come to know as the “Confederate Lost Cause.” Namely, they were arguing early on that they did not really lose the war on the battlefield, they only lost to superior numbers and resources. They said they lost only to “the leviathan of northern industrialization.” There’s some truth in that, but that’s not the full explanation. They also argued that the war was not really about slavery. It was really about state sovereignty and states’ rights. It was really about resisting the federal interference with their lives and their civilization and their morays and folkways…Can I jump in and tell you something?Sure. I’m from central New York. I went to public school. That was what I learned. Wow. Why did I learn something that wasn’t true in public school? Because over time, in culture, schooling, politics, and rituals from the 1870s and ’80s well on into the 20th century — and still surviving in a textbook you were learning from in the 1990s, I am sorry to hear — was this idea that the United States divided had this all-out horrific war. But it had to put itself back together again. How do you put back together something so horrifically divided? You’re going to have to find mutuality. You’re going to have to find some kind of unified narrative. Well, one of the unified narratives they did develop in the 19th century — and there’s reality to this — is that you unify around the valor of soldiers. But if we admire valor without ever looking at the cause for which they fought, it’s of course limited. “Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.”Now, the typical and powerful belief was that everybody in that war fought for the cause they believed in. And if you fought for the cause you believed in with great valor, you fought for the right [reasons]. Everybody was equal in valor. The causes had to be muted, put aside. Well, you know, that’s a part of human relations as well: How do you keep a family together? Well, there’s some things you don’t talk about.But for nations and whole peoples and cultures, the danger in this is that the stories you take on, the stories that you develop that define the identity of your nation — the identity of your past and now your future — is going to leave somebody out. In fact, it may end up allowing you to reconcile on the backs of those who most suffered from the conflict you are trying to reconcile. Obviously, in America, that meant Black Americans. It meant their civil and political rights, which were created and then slowly but surely abandoned and then crushed in the Jim Crow system of the South. Now, the point of all of this is that the Confederate Lost Cause, which said the South fought for noble ends, they fought for their homes, they fought for their sovereignty, they fought for their integrity. … It eventually becomes, though, not a story of loss at all. It becomes, by the 1890s and into the 20th century, a victory narrative. This was an age of a lot of sentimental literature. Americans came to love stories of the Old South. Of course, it’s there in Gone With the Wind, still, maybe the most famous movie ever made. So the Lost Cause was both a political movement and it was a literary movement. But it was at its core a racial ideology, and it lasted a very long time. Let’s compare to what we’re seeing today. What you’re talking about with these popular books and Gone With the Wind, that seems to me more subtle than the president saying, “You delete that information about Jackie Robinson’s military service from the website.” Will what Trump is doing succeed because it is so unsubtle? That’s a very good question and my instinctive answer — and it’s partly my wishful answer — is that no he won’t. It is not subtle, you’re right: They’re wiping out websites. They are explicitly saying, “Professional history, whether it’s in our greatest museums or our greatest university, has been teaching us all the wrong ways. They’ve been dividing us.” This is the word they love to use: The history we write has been divisive, divisive, divisive. Well, no, it’s not. It’s simply informative. Sometimes it gets people riled up and sometimes it gets them arguing and sometimes fighting. But what the Trumpists are doing is telling us that they know better — policy people at the Heritage Foundation or pseudo-historians who think that studying all this stuff about race, gender, all the ethnicities that make us up, all this pluralism, is just taking away from “American greatness.” They use that term a lot: “We’re no longer teaching our youth about American greatness.” Yes we are! We’re teaching our youth that our greatness is in the pluralism. Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power. What will you know about World War I if you try to find nothing but greatness? What will you know about the history of imperialism and expansion if all you wanna know is about greatness? What will you actually know about Native American history if all you look for is greatness? It defies the intelligence of anyone with an education, and a whole lot of people who don’t have a lot of formal education. I’m not very optimistic right now about what’s going on, but I do have a certain faith that people just aren’t going to buy this.See More:

If anything is safe from the economic chaos caused by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, it’s probably gold — or at least that’s what investors seem to think.The price of gold has increased rapidly in the months since Trump took office, surging particularly since his March 2 announcement of a baseline 10 percent tariff on all US imports. This week, it briefly climbed to a record high of more than $3,500 per ounce during day trading, before closing slightly lower than that.The uncertainty and projected losses caused by those tariffs have sent the stock market spiraling downward, with the S&P 500 falling more than 8 percent in the last month. The tariffs have also scrambled the markets for other traditionally safe investments linked to the US, like Treasury bonds and the US dollar.US Treasury bonds have seen a major selloff in recent weeks, with yields climbing to alarmingly high levels. (High yields are typically a sign that investors are losing confidence in the US economy.) They spiked again after Trump called Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell a “major loser” in a Truth Social post on Monday. The president has been threatening to fire Powell if he does not lower interest rates, something Powell’s Federal Reserve can’t do without risking higher inflation. Investors who once stocked up on cash are rethinking that as well. The value of the US dollar hit a three-year low on Monday after Trump’s Truth Social post about Powell, as international fears begin to mount that the president’s haphazard tariff policies could force banks to choose something other than the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. (Since the post-World War II era, central banks around the world have stashed their financial reserves in US dollars, seeing it as a safe, dependable asset.)All of that has meant that investors are now flocking to gold, the value of which is not tied to the US economy, because it is a tangible, scarce resource that has value in and of itself. It has historically retained that value, even amid economic crises or periods of high inflation, making it more reliable than bonds, stocks, or dollars. And because the supply of gold is limited, increased demand has meant skyrocketing prices. The price did come down somewhat to under $3,400 on Tuesday afternoon after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a closed-door investor meeting that the US would have to de-escalate its trade war with China. But it’s still higher than it was even a few weeks ago.The price doesn’t seem likely to come down significantly further in the near future. Goldman Sachs projects that by the end of 2025, the price will increase to $3,700 or even higher if central banks worldwide purchase an average of 100 tons of gold per month. Central banks had already been on a gold-buying spree coming into 2025, buying more than 1,000 tons of gold annually in recent years, and that pace is expected to pick up in light of recent economic uncertainty. This isn’t the first time gold prices have seen a major spike. Throughout periods of economic turbulence in recent history, gold has been seen as a tangible safe haven investment that maintains its value. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the price of gold jumped from $1,575 in January 2020 to over $2,000 by that summer. Amid concerns about the stability of the European economy from 2010 to 2012, the price reached a new high of $1,825.The Great Recession saw the price rise from about $730 in October 2008 to $1,300 two years later.This time, we’ve seen an even starker increase. And unless Trump and Bessent articulate a drastic shift in their economic vision, gold seems unlikely to lose its luster anytime soon. See More:

In his free time, while working as a clerk at a local Australian railway, James Harrison saved millions of lives — with his blood.Harrison had particularly special plasma: It had a rare antibody that doctors used to make a medication for pregnant mothers with different blood types from their newborns. When this happens, it can lead to the mother’s immune system attacking the still-developing red blood cells of the fetus.But it’s not like the doctors drew blood one time, found this special antibody, and made a cure that they could end up reusing. Harrison had to keep donating his blood. Almost 1,200 times. He was terrified of needles, he had to travel an hour each way to the lab, and still, he kept donating over and over, every two weeks or so. For 64 consecutive years, until he died in his sleep in March, having saved almost 2.5 million babies in Australia.But the reason he had to do all this in the first place is because scientists still don’t really understand blood.Nicola Twilley, the host of Vox Media’s Gastropod podcast, wrote a piece for the New Yorker earlier this year about blood and the scientists trying to understand how it does what it does. On the latest episode of the Unexplainable podcast, she spoke with host Noam Hassenfeld about the quest for artificial blood on the latest. Listen to their conversation below, or in the feed of your favorite podcast app. This podcast is presented by Roomba. Roomba doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make episodes like this possibleYou’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

On Tuesday, a pair of documentaries landed on Amazon Prime that put forth a rather bold claim: By simply making a few tweaks to how we farm, humanity can reverse climate change and all but eliminate a host of other problems stemming from our modern food system. The two films — Kiss the Ground, which first came out on Netflix in 2020, and its follow-up, Common Ground, which premiered on streaming this week — are the most high-profile documentaries advocating for a widespread shift to “regenerative agriculture.” This organic-adjacent approach to agriculture focuses on using a few farming methods to improve soil health, which has been degraded over the last century in large part due to the industrialization of agriculture, with its bevy of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Deployed at scale, the films argue, regenerative agriculture would improve soil health so greatly that farmers around the globe could draw down massive amounts of climate-warming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them in soil, largely solving the climate crisis.“By converting our farmland to regenerative agriculture, the soil could sequester all of the carbon dioxide that humanity emits each year,” actor Jason Momoa claims in Common Ground. “That would bring our carbon emissions to net zero. In other words, our planet’s soil could help stabilize our climate.” Regenerative agriculture, according to the films, could also boost biodiversity, enrich struggling farmers, clean up polluted waterways, and end the “human health crisis.” (It’s unclear which human health crisis they mean.)Common Ground director (left) poses with two of the documentary’s actor-narrators — Ian Somerhalder and Jason Momoa — at a Los Angeles screening in early 2024. Gregg DeGuire/Variety via Getty ImagesThis straightforward, all-encompassing plan to fix some of the world’s most wicked problems has been embraced by an eclectic set of US policymakers, A-list actors, celebrity doctors, and leading environmental organizations. (The films collectively also feature Rosario Dawson, Tom Brady, Laura Dern, and Donald Glover, among others.)When Kiss the Ground was released, its sweeping claims drew criticism as overly simplistic and scientifically dubious — a kind of “magical thinking,” as one environmental scientist put it in a review of Kiss the Ground in the journal Biogeochemistry. The films feature no critics or skeptics, only fervent supporters.Regenerative agriculture practices certainly have some environmental and social benefits. But the films engage in a kind of nostalgic utopianism, asserting that if it weren’t for greedy corporations and subservient lawmakers, we could go back to the old ways of farming, which would heal our broken relationship with nature and usher in a healthier future with a stable climate. In Kiss the Ground, actor-narrator Ian Somerhalder goes so far as to say that regenerative agriculture would “get the Earth back to the Garden of Eden that it once was.” Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. The benefits — and limits — of regenerative agricultureOur food and farming system is, no doubt, in need of significant reform. It’s America’s largest source of water pollution and animal suffering and accounts for more than 10 percent of our carbon footprint. Many farmers overapply synthetic fertilizer to their crops, and federal regulators have been captured by corporations that wield enormous power in politics. Many large farmers turn a handsome profit thanks to nonsensical subsidies while small and midsized operations struggle to stay afloat in US agriculture’s “get big or get out” model. Farmworkers are treated as invisible cogs in a machine that pumps out unhealthy food.The documentaries do a fine enough job cataloguing these problems, though at times they can be misleading and alarmist. For example, there’s no proof that the world has only 60 harvests remaining, as actor Woody Harrelson narrates in Kiss the Ground. Interview subjects, including supermodel Gisele Bündchen, repeatedly claim that healthier soils lead to healthier food, and thus healthier humans, though the science isn’t clear on how much soil health affects food’s nutrient content.So, what exactly is regenerative agriculture? There’s no universal definition, but it boils down to a few key practices and goals:Drastically reduce or eliminate synthetic chemicals: Modern farmers routinely douse crops in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Significantly reducing or eliminating these chemicals can improve soil health, boost biodiversity, and reduce water pollution.Eliminate tillage: Most farmers till, or disturb, their soil to get rid of weeds and make the soil more porous, among other things. But tillage can also release carbon dioxide stored in the soil and harm overall soil health, so regenerative farmers swear against it.Plant cover crops: Regenerative farmers plant “cover crops,” like clover and rye, around fall harvest time, which improves soil health in a number of ways.Rotational grazing: “When cattle are left to their own devices on pasture, they overgraze — trampling on and eroding the soil, and destroying vegetation,” as I wrote last year. “But regenerative ranchers use rotational grazing…which entails periodically moving cattle between plots of land. This can help prevent overgrazing because vegetation is given time to regrow, resulting in healthier soil that [regenerative] advocates say can sequester large amounts of carbon.”All of these practices have proven ecological benefits, and US regulators would be wise to incentivize more farmers to take them up. But agriculture, like other environmentally sensitive industries, is rife with tradeoffs, which Kiss the Ground and Common Ground entirely ignore.For example, while chemical-laden agriculture has many drawbacks, it typically produces more food per acre, which means it requires less land. The same goes for conventionally raised cattle: grass-finished, regeneratively raised cattle require between two and two-and-a-half times more land than those finished on feedlots.A nationwide shift to regenerative agriculture would massively increase demand for land — a critical downside to this style of farming. Agriculture is already extremely land-intensive, using up some 40 percent of US land, and each acre that can be spared from farming is an acre that can remain as habitat for wildlife.Then there is the claim that healthier soil can draw down enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in farmland. Done on a large scale, the films say, regenerative agriculture could even draw down all the carbon dioxide humans emit each year. But this is highly improbable, as scientists don’t even have accurate and affordable tools to measure how much carbon regenerative farms can sequester. No-till farming likely doesn’t sequester much carbon, and if a farmer decides to eventually till that soil, a lot of the carbon they’d stored up would be released. The rate at which farmland can sequester carbon also diminishes over time. Ranchers at a regenerative cattle grazing training event in New Mexico. Mario Tama/Getty ImagesAnd while rotationally grazing cattle has the potential to sequester some of the enormous amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cattle, it’s far from all of a beef cattle’s emissions, as one source in Kiss the Ground suggests. Beef, whether produced regeneratively or not, is still the world’s most carbon-intensive food.Meanwhile, the films fail to acknowledge the most effective approach to slashing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, which accounts for up to one-third of global emissions. According to a survey of more than 200 climate and agriculture experts, the best way to do that is to reduce meat and dairy production. (These same experts rated carbon sequestration as one of the least effective approaches.) Reducing meat and milk intake in rich countries like the US would also reduce land demand, water pollution, and animal suffering, and likely improve human health. Despite the undisputed benefits of regenerative agriculture, Kiss the Ground and Common Ground misleadingly promote it as one weird trick that farmers everywhere can deploy to heal the planet and humanity. It uses a cast of celebrities, advocate-experts, and farmers who employ simplistic arguments and visuals to avoid the nuanced and difficult tradeoffs of agricultural production. Yet the grandiose claims made in these films have managed to gain serious traction in environmental and agricultural policy circles, often crowding out more evidence-based solutions.You’ll find a decent analysis of what’s wrong with our food system, and plenty of hope on how to fix it, in these films. But when the solution to problems as complex as climate change, diet-related chronic disease, farmer debt, mass pollution, and biodiversity collapse is as simple as a few changes to how we farm, whoever’s promoting it is probably standing on shaky ground.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More: Future Perfect

Consider the transistor, the basic unit of computer processors. Transistors can be tiny, down to single-digit nanometers in size. Billions can fit on a computer chip. Though they have no moving parts, they devour electricity as they store and modify bits of information. “Ones and zeros are encoded as these high and low voltages,” said Timothy Sherwood, a computer science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. “When you do any computation, what’s happening inside the microprocessor is that there’s some one that transitions to a zero, or a zero that transitions to one. Every time that happens, a little bit of energy is used.”This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.When you add that up — across the billions of transistors on chips and then the billions of these chips in computers and server farms — they form a significant and growing share of humanity’s energy appetite.According to the International Energy Agency, computing and storing data accounts for somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of global electricity demand at the moment.With the growth of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies that rely on industrial-scale data centers, that share is poised to grow. For instance, a typical Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours while a ChatGPT query consumes 2.9 watt-hours. In 2024, the amount of data center capacity under construction in the US jumped 70 percent compared to 2023. Some of the tech companies leaning into AI have seen their greenhouse gas emissions surge and are finding it harder to meet their own environmental goals.How much more electricity will this computation need in the years ahead, and will it put our climate change goals out of reach?AI is injecting chaos into energy demand forecastsThe IEA estimates that data center energy demand will double by 2030. McKinsey estimates somewhere between a tripling and a quintupling. As a result, major tech players are desperately trying to shore up their power supplies. Over the past year, they’ve been some of the largest purchasers of energy sources that produce few greenhouse gas emissions. Amazon is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. Companies like Microsoft are even reviving old nuclear plants while also investing in the next generation of nuclear technology.But some of these companies aren’t picky about where their power is coming from. “What we need from you,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the House Energy and Commerce committee earlier this month, is “energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.”Already, energy demand from data centers is extending a lifeline to old coal power plants and is creating a market for new natural gas plants. The IEA estimates that over the next five years, renewables will meet half of the additional electricity demand from data centers, followed by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power.However, a lot of these energy demand forecasts are projections based on current trends, and well, a lot of things are changing very quickly. “The first thing I’ll say is that there’s just a lot of uncertainty about how data center energy demand will grow,” said Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the tech sector and energy. Here is some context to keep in mind: Remember that data centers are less than 2 percent of overall electricity demand now and even doubling, tripling, or quintupling would still keep their share in the single digits. A larger portion of global electricity demand growth is poised to come from developing countries industrializing and climbing up the income ladder. Energy use is also linked to the economy; in a recession, for example, power demand tends to fall. Climate change could play a role as well. One of the biggest drivers of electricity demand last year was simply that it was so hot out, leading more people to switch on air conditioners. So while AI is an important, growing energy user, it’s not the only thing altering the future of energy demand. We’re also in the Cambrian explosion era of crypto and AI companies, meaning there are a lot of different firms trying out a variety of approaches. All of this experimentation is spiking energy use in the near term, but not all of these approaches are going to make it. As these sectors mature and their players consolidate, that could drive down energy demand too. How to do more with lessThe good news is that computers are getting more efficient. AI and crypto harness graphical processing units, chips optimized for the kinds of calculations behind these technologies. GPUs have made massive performance leaps, particularly when it comes to the ability of AI to take in new information and generate conclusions. “In the past 10 years, our platform has become 100,000 times more energy efficient for the exact same inference workload,” said Joshua Parker, who leads corporate sustainability efforts at Nvidia, one of the largest GPU producers in the world. “In the past two years — one generation of our product — we’ve become 25 times more energy efficient.”Nvidia has now established a commanding lead in the AI race, making it one of the most valuable companies in history. However, as computer processors get more efficient, they cost less to run, which can lead people to use them more, offsetting some of the energy savings. “It’s easier to make the business case to deploy AI, which means that the footprint is growing, so it’s a real paradox,” Parker said. “Ultimately, that kind of exponential growth only continues if you actually reach zero incremental costs. There’s still costs to the energy and there’s still cost to the computation. As much as we’re driving towards efficiency, there will be a balance in the end because it’s not free.”Another factor to consider is that AI tools can have their own environmental benefits. Using AI to perform simulations can avoid some of the need for expensive, slow, energy-intensive real-world testing when designing aircraft, for example. Grid operators are using AI to optimize electricity distribution to integrate renewables, increase reliability, and reduce waste. AI has already helped design better batteries and better solar cells. Amid all this uncertainty about the future, there are still paths that could keep AI’s expansion aligned with efforts to limit climate change. Tech companies need to continue pulling on the efficiency lever. These sectors also have big opportunities to reduce carbon emissions in the supply chains for these devices, and in the infrastructure for data centers. Deploying vastly more clean energy is essential. We’ve already seen a number of countries grow their economies while cutting greenhouse gases. While AI is slowing some of that progress right now, it doesn’t have to worsen climate change over the long term, and it could accelerate efforts to keep it in check. But it won’t happen by chance, and will require deliberate action to get on track. “It’s easy to write the headline that says AI is going to break the grid, it’s going to lead to more emissions,” Parker said. “I’m personally very optimistic — I think this is credible optimism — that AI over time will be the best tool for sustainability the world has ever seen.”You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

There’s a bodega on the corner where I live in Brooklyn with a massive TikTok following and a thick cable almost always stretched out the front door and plugged into a Tesla. In a tiny parking lot around the corner, the local grocery store has a fast charger that looks like a mini gas pump. The parking garage down the hill has a line of public chargers.Brooklyn looks different than the rest of America, but this mix of solutions for fueling up our battery-powered cars highlights an increasingly obvious fact about the future. As we continue to transition to electric vehicles, the gas station of the future won’t just be those big pavilions on the roadside with 20-foot-tall signs bearing an oil company’s logo. You’ll probably be able to buy fossil fuels at gas stations for decades, but you’ll also be able to charge your EV very quickly. And those familiar fueling destinations won’t be the only place you can charge.The future of EV charging is already here. It’s everywhere and sometimes not where you’d expect it. There are already hundreds of thousands of chargers in people’s garages, in supermarket parking lots, in national parks, and yes, even in old-fashioned gas stations. In the near future, if you drive an EV, you won’t worry about finding a place to charge your car. You’ll get to choose between multiple experiences, based on your needs and desires, and you won’t even need to open an app or get out a credit card to charge up and get on your way.This forecast probably sounds a little bit fantastic in light of recent developments. The Trump administration suspended the rollout of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, which was established by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and apportioned $5 billion for states to build public EV chargers. The goal was to ensure there were charging stations at least every 50 miles on certain corridors, especially those in rural or low-income areas. It’s unclear how long Trump’s NEVI halt will last. Democrats in Congress were quick to call the administration’s actions illegal, and some states were allowed to keep spending the program’s previously approved dollars to build chargers. The Trump administration has asked states to submit new plans for approval, although it’s not clear if or when they will be approved. Meanwhile, the funding freeze is being challenged in court. So for now, the future of that massive federally funded EV infrastructure project is in chaos. Several people in the EV charging industry told me that, with or without federal funds, progress in the charger space can’t be stopped. That should be good news to EV owners or potential EV owners who worry that they might end up stranded on the side of the road because they couldn’t find a charger before their battery dies — a condition commonly known as “range anxiety.”“Every single day that goes by, there’s more and more public charging infrastructure that goes in the ground, literally every single day,” Mike Battaglia, CEO of Blink Charging, told me. “So each day that goes by, there is less and less range anxiety.”There are currently over 210,000 EV charging stations in the United States, and that number was growing by about 1,000 per week towards the end of the Biden administration. (Those numbers still pale in comparison to the 1 million-plus gas pumps currently in operation.) The NEVI program aimed to get 500,000 public chargers online by 2030. Of course, exactly where those chargers are and how easy it is to use them matter a lot. The infrastructure buildout has historically focused on getting EV chargers built in affluent suburbs and along highways, leaving city centers and rural areas largely unserved. This inequality is worsening over time, according to a recent study led by the Department of Energy. That said, the vast majority of EV owners — 80 percent — have the ability to charge their vehicles at home, which complicates the question of how to build out America’s EV charging infrastructure.If you own an EV or are thinking about getting one, the main thing you need to know is that you’ll probably do most of your charging at home. The gas station of the future is effectively your garage or your driveway. The cost per mile of range will vary depending on your local utility rates, but it’s safe to say charging at home is cheaper than charging on the go and, for most people, much cheaper than buying gas. EV chargers fall into three categories: level 1, level 2, and level 3. A level 1 charger plugs into a regular 120-volt wall outlet and charges slowly, like two to five miles of range per hour. A level 2 charger requires a 240-volt outlet, like the kind a washer-dryer uses, and provides 20 to 30 miles of range per hour. On average, a one-vehicle household drives about 50 miles per day, so charging overnight with either a level 1 or level 2 charger is probably sufficient.“It’s way easier than actually going to a gas station,” said Ingrid Malmgren, senior policy director at Plug In America, an EV advocacy group. “People who charge it at home very rarely charge publicly, usually just on road trips.”When you do go on road trips, you’ll probably encounter level 3 chargers, also known as DC fast chargers. These beasts use higher voltages, usually 400 or 800 volts, to pump EV batteries from a 10 percent charge up to 90 percent in about half an hour. This is as close as it gets to the present-day gas station solution, where you can pull off the road, plug in your car, grab a sandwich, and then get on your way with plenty of charge. Fully charging an EV with a DC fast-charger should still be a fraction of the cost of filling a car with gasoline — although you might end up spending more in the convenience store while you wait.There are a couple of other variables you’ll encounter when venturing out into the world to charge an EV. First of all, not all EVs use the same kind of plug. The North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug, originally designed by Tesla, is quickly becoming, as the name suggests, the standard in North America as more and more carmakers adopt the style. Otherwise, most non-Teslas in the US will use Combined Charging System (CCS) plugs that can be made compatible with NACS charging stations thanks to an adapter. This standardization is simplifying the search for a compatible charging station. With NACS becoming the primary plug-in use, more and more drivers can use not only Tesla Superchargers but also growing networks of chargers made by companies like ChargePoint, Blink, Electrify America, and EV Connect. Even paying for a charge is getting streamlined thanks to software updates that are popularizing an international encrypted communication standard colloquially known as Plug and Charge. As the name implies, at stations with this feature, you simply plug in your EV, and the station recognizes your car and charges your payment option of choice. There’s no need to download an app or tap a credit card.It’s very likely you will have this fast charging experience at a place that also sells gas and diesel. Many fossil fuel companies see the writing on the wall and are investing in EV charging infrastructure for all your energy needs. Shell has its Shell Recharge Brand, BP has BP Pulse, Pilot and Flying J have GM Energy co-branded stations. This is just good business sense. If people are already used to going to the gas station, why not provide their fuel of choice when they switch to an EV? And this year, EVs will account for 10 percent of all new vehicles sold in the US this year, according to Cox Automotive. Things could get even more interesting as the EV market grows and the need to keep giant tanks of explosive fossil fuels underground fades away. Those big holes in the ground could be filled with battery storage, and those familiar pavilions that keep drivers dry as they fill up their vehicles could be covered in solar panels. This type of design could turn EV charging stations into their own little power plants, where solar energy fills up those batteries, which contribute to grid stability as EVs draw large amounts of power. Electrify America has already opened one hub with this concept in mind and has ambitious plans to deploy more than 150 onsite battery systems nationwide.As exciting as these futuristic gas stations sound, however, your best bet is almost certainly to find a way to charge your car at home and probably overnight. Then try to remember that you’re probably going to drive less than you thought the next day. Range anxiety is real, but it’s also irrational. “The mindset of ‘I need a vehicle that can do 400 miles and be recharged in 10 minutes.’ That has to change,” John Eichberger, executive director of the Transportation Energy Institute, told me. After all, most people don’t drive 400 miles in a week, much less a day. And once you start driving an EV, you’ll also start spotting charging stations everywhere. The parking garage down the hill, the local grocery store, the bodega on the corner — everywhere I turn in my Brooklyn neighborhood, there’s a place to plug in. Now if I only had an EV.See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.Less than a week after becoming vice president, JD Vance, only the second Catholic to hold the office, had a very public break with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Without evidence, the second-in-command accused the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of settling “illegal immigrants” in order to access federal funds. Though largely used as fodder for internet “gotchas,” the scuffle pointed to a wider trend — one that could remake the country’s religious landscape and the fundamental way Americans think about how they believe and where they belong.Vance is not just a Catholic. He’s a very specific type of Catholic, part of a group of young white men who, over the past decade, have found their way (often online) into both increasingly conservative politics and traditional religion — primarily Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, rather than the Protestantism that has been a common cultural feature in America. (For the uninitiated, Eastern Orthodoxy, sometimes called “Greek Orthodox” or “Russian Orthodoxy,” is essentially the Eastern equivalent of the Catholic Church, though significant differences have arisen). One recent study from the Orthodox Studies Institute suggests that conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy has increased 24 percent since 2021. These recent converts tend to be under 40 and single, and the majority are men. There is not a similarly comprehensive study of Catholic conversions, but dioceses are reporting increases in the number of converts anywhere between 30 percent to 70 percent since 2020. The absolute number of converts isn’t large, but as Vance shows, they can be influential. These people are entering religious communities that have not had many converts in the United States and have historically been associated with specific immigrant ethnic groups, the Irish in the case of Catholicism and the Greeks in the case of Orthodoxy. In fact, American anti-Catholicism has historically been buoyed not only by the centuries-old prejudice of a Protestant society, but also by a bias against foreignness. And — in part because of this “foreignness” and the ways it has insulated these groups — these ethnic and religious communities have remained politically moderate, or, more accurately, largely defiant of the usual political categorizations. For example, the majority of American Catholics now vote Republican, but a majority also support abortion rights in all or nearly all cases. Similarly, only a slight minority of American Orthodox Christians are Democrats, but a majority support marriage equality and access to legal abortions.To understand this, consider that the conventional understanding of America’s contemporary religious and political landscape centers two other demographic groups for whom religion and politics are more neatly aligned. White evangelical Protestants are reliably conservative across a broad range of issues, both social and economic, and loyally Republican. Meanwhile, white secular atheists/agnostics are reliably progressive and loyally Democrats. This alignment is (at least in part) because they are both the descendants (ideologically and in some cases quite literally) of America’s English, Dutch, and German Protestant founding stock. These traditions are about believing correctly more than they are about belonging. And, in fact, fundamentally committed to separating out the elect from the community. On the other hand, traditionally Catholic and Orthodox communities represent different strands of American history, histories that sideline political identity in the name of big-tent community belonging. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are simply more embedded in their cultural contexts — part and parcel with an ethnic identity — and less ideologically driven than the Enlightenment era-born faith traditions of the US. Within these communities, belonging has been more important than believing correctly. This is not to say that the Pope doesn’t care about theological concerns. It means that your average Catholic grandmother in Spain is less likely to be a Catholic because she feels strongly about the Treasury of Merit than because Catholicism is simply part of who she is.So how did someone like Vance, previously most famous for being “an Appalachian,” find his way into a tradition like that?The online-to-convert pipelineThese converts are characterized by a simultaneous search for community and for answers. Nearly everyone recognizes that young men are in crisis. There is widespread disagreement as to why this crisis is happening, but it is difficult not to suspect that a lack of belonging, or rather a pervasive sense of loneliness, is at least part of the problem. Loneliness, and the desire to solve it, seems likely to be part of what drives these men into communities defined by nearly unconditional belonging. But belonging is clearly not enough. A lot of young men are looking for answers as well as community. And like lost generations before them, they are finding it in “ideology.” The new converts want their community and their ideology to fit.What does this ideology look like? Many are disillusioned with what they see as the products of “modernity,” specifically the fruits of feminism and, in many cases, the civil rights movement. To their minds, feminism and racial equality have rendered white men — particularly working- and lower-middle-class white men — less socially and economically powerful. As a result, they have turned to “traditionalism,” a worldview that combines conservative views of gender and sexuality with fear of immigration and increasing multiculturalism, often overlaid with back-to-the-land living and large families. Their ideal is a white, English-speaking, Christian, American straight couple living on a homestead, raising a dozen children. Its public face online is largely female: the “trad wife” influencers. But make no mistake: Despite its TikTok and Instagram aesthetics, this is primarily a men’s movement. It frames the personal and social crises facing white American men as part of an imagined broader crisis of “Western civilization,” a crisis that, in their view, inevitably includes a “crisis of Christianity” — an idea pushed by no less than the likes of right-wing celebrity Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist turned media pundit. But not a crisis of just any Christianity. For many of these young men, the perceived crisis of Christianity and of Western civilization itself has led them to question Protestantism as a whole, from far-right evangelicals to liberal mainline beliefs. If Christendom is in decline, they reason, how can its dominant tradition in American society not be to blame? This is shown by the fact that a lot of “trad” content is dedicated to how masculine the respective traditions are. For instance, the Russian Orthodox Church website ran (on its English channel, notably) a piece titled “Why Orthodox Men Love Church.” The piece makes liberal use of the work of Leon Podles, whose work includes The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity. And even the relatively liberal, Jesuit-run Catholic magazine America has run an article titled “Men and boys are lost. The Catholic Church can give them a better model of manliness.”The “crisis of Protestantism” is a reality that evangelicals themselves have been most apt to acknowledge. There is also the example of Rod Dreher, the Protestant-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox convert and American Conservative editor whose book The Benedict Option is premised on the idea that society has devolved so completely that the only choice Christians have is to flee from it. This reasoning, combined with what one must imagine is not a little bit of video game and fantasy movie-inspired nostalgia for an imagined Middle Ages, has led many of these young men to Catholicism and others to Eastern Orthodoxy. By converting to these faith traditions, they wrongly think they are converting not only to a liturgically and theologically conservative tradition, but also to an explicitly politically conservative one in the American tradition.And like the rest of the culture surrounding the Lost Young Men of Postmodernity, this religious dimension has taken place largely online, with many of these converts encountering the academic theology of these faith traditions on YouTube, TikTok, and forums, long before they become connected to any living communities. This is very evident this time of year in online Orthodox circles, as converts gather on Facebook and Reddit to discuss the nuances of how to apply medieval fasting rules in a way that would never occur to those from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds. There is also Matt Fradd’s YouTube series Pints With Aquinas that regularly brings obscure Catholic theology to upward of half a million viewers or Rev. Chad Ripperger’s channel Sensus Fidelium, where medieval theology meets anti-vax modernity. The mix of obscure academic theology and very modern politics doesn’t stay online. Vance, for example, has cited the influence of the French Catholic philosopher René Girard as an impetus for his own conversion. Vance has also referenced St. Augustine as a major source of his personal theology. And it was to Augustine that he turned to in his spat with the bishops, telling his X followers to “google ‘ordo amoris.’” A request one can only imagine most cradle Catholics (ones born into the faith) responded to with a resounding, “Huh?”To save you the internet search, “ordo amoris” is a concept first attributed to Augustine and picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas, who laid out a list of the order in which we should love people and things, starting with God. But Aquinas doesn’t stop there. As the Pope — I know how absurd this sounds — explained in a letter to the American bishops following the clash with Vance, while there is an order in which we should direct our affections, any person’s pressing need should take precedence, so it is not a violation of Catholic teaching to help refugees and the poor. This is the way most cradle Catholics probably learned this (perhaps these days sans Latin). Whether Vance was personally aware of the normal way the ordo amoris is taught is irrelevant, because the entire incident demonstrates an important point about these new ideological converts: They have encountered largely medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities, made up of people for whom community is usually much more important than the medieval theology, they are frequently surprised. The converts have encountered medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities […] they are frequently surprised. And when this happens the response has not been to change their views — Vance expressed “surprise” at the pushback from the Pope and then doubled down on his position. This is not the “done” thing. It is, in fact, a very Protestant way of viewing church hierarchy, whereas one might argue that since the Reformation, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been defined by a refusal to break from the powers that be. The vice president of the United States and many of his fellow new converts have nonetheless sought to change the views of the hierarchs of institutions they have joined in no small part because of their hierarchical nature — and in doing so remake these organic communities in their own idealized, ideological image.This dynamic won’t stay in the churchWhile many are not yet ready to put it in this stark of terms, the “cradle” vs. “convert” divide in Catholicism and Orthodoxy is very real and it can become a problem for those outside the traditions as well as inside. These emerging, highly politicized conflicts inside what were once communities largely bound together by family and cultural ties are only accelerating the political division of American religion. This is not a good development for civil society, because houses of worship were places where people once regularly and peacefully encountered those with different political views. Slavery and prohibition did cause schisms but, for the most part, until the middle of the 20th century, American churches were politically diverse. (While Protestantism was about believing correctly, the beliefs in question were nearly always about one’s theological beliefs. Over time, the requirement extended to political beliefs too.) This possibility has already largely vanished within most Protestant circles as evangelicals moved ever more right and mainline Protestants more left over the past 50 years, simply breaking apart (as in the case of the United Methodist Church) when their culture war differences became too grave. Now, largely as a result of these new converts, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are also becoming more polarized.Laypeople attacking their hierarchs is about the least “trad” thing one can do. It reveals just how little these conversions have to do with anything organic to these traditions, but are instead an act of rebellion against the American mainstream, with a dose of cultural appropriation thrown in.But perhaps even more important is the dangerous lesson these converts are learning from their challenges to the hierarchy and cultural traditions of their new faiths: Namely, that even some of the most ancient existent authorities do not have real control over them and that, with enough noise and obfuscation and with enough requests to “Google that,” they can create a version of reality where a recent convert’s opinion of Catholic theology is as valuable as the Pope’s. Thus, when the Pope declares a more kind approach to LGBTQ Catholics, online influencers like Taylor Marshall feel comfortable simply saying the Pope is wrong, that the successor of St. Peter “persecutes the good and promotes evildoers.” Or the pseudo-anonymous writers of the Orthodox Reflections blog can attack the decision of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America to march with Black Lives Matter. It’s why Michael Warren Davis, another Orthodox convert at the American Conservative, could directly call the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America a CIA asset without any evidence. Laypeople attacking their hierarchs is about the least “trad” thing one can do. It reveals just how little these conversions have to do with anything organic to these traditions, but are instead an act of rebellion against the American mainstream, with a dose of cultural appropriation thrown in.This is not just a challenge to the institutional power of the Catholic Church but a reminder of the ways this milieu of young men seeks to challenge authority and to remake our institutions in the image of their ideological aims — the ecclesiastical wing of DOGE’s engineers if you will. It is not a great jump between Vance challenging the Pope on the meaning of St. Augustine to Vance challenging the Constitution on the meaning of citizenship. It can be difficult for many secular progressives to care much about the inner workings of religious — particularly Christian — institutions. “It’s all bad,” is a common refrain. But considering the central role religion continues to play in our politics, wishing it would just not is not a helpful way to approach the problem. This religious conflict between “cradle” and “convert” is shaping America’s political institutional authority, as religious identity becomes yet another front in the battle over America’s political future — at a moment when that war could probably do without another front.See More:

Three years ago, Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters for use in public school classrooms. Not much else is known about these books, how they have been used, when they were used in lessons, or how teachers plan to use them in the future.These questions have come before lower courts, but the Supreme Court decided to hear a case — Mahmoud v. Taylor, brought by conservative Muslim and Christian parents who find these books objectionable — before these lower courts had a chance to sort out whether anyone’s constitutional rights have actually been violated.Despite all this uncertainty, all six of the Supreme Court’s Republicans appeared absolutely convinced, during an oral argument on Tuesday, that the Montgomery County school district violated the Constitution, and that it must do more to protect parents who object to these books on religious grounds. Based on Tuesday’s argument in Mahmoud, it seems all but certain the Court will rule that parents who object to these books must be allowed to remove their children from any classes where the books are featured. What is less clear is whether the Court will do so in a way that could endanger every public school in the country’s ability to function.Eric Baxter, the lawyer representing the parents who oppose these books, seemed quite emboldened during Tuesday’s argument, and advocated for a result that would be extraordinarily disruptive. In his brief, Baxter suggested that parents who object to any form of classroom instruction on religious grounds must be notified in advance about that instruction and be permitted to opt their child out of the class. The implications of this argument are breathtaking. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, past cases involve parents who object to lessons touching on topics like divorce, interfaith couples, and “immodest dress.” Parents have brought federal lawsuits objecting, on religious grounds, to the government using unique numbers to identify people in its own internal records. They’ve objected to lessons exposing children to ideas about evolution, pacifism, magic, women achieving things outside of the home, and “false views of death” — among other things. Under Baxter’s proposed rule, to avoid these lawsuits, school districts would have an obligation to notify parents in advance if they will teach any book where magic exists, any book where divorce exists, any book where women have accomplishments, or any book about famous pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. — among many other things. It is hard to imagine how any public school could comply with such an obligation.That said, while all six of the Republican justices appeared highly likely to rule against the school district in Mahmoud, some of them did appear to be looking for a way to decide this case more narrowly than Baxter suggested. Justice Samuel Alito, for example, suggested at one point that Baxter’s rule might only apply to very young students, or to lessons that touch upon sexuality. Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed to an alleged statement by a school board member, which Gorsuch claims showed animus against certain religious beliefs. Following Gorsuch’s line of thinking to its conclusion would allow the Court to rule that Montgomery County’s policies must be changed because they are rooted in animus, but that another school district might be allowed to enact similar policies so long as they did not display similar hostility toward religion.So, while there seems to be little doubt that the school district will lose the Mahmoud case, it is possible that it will lose in a way that doesn’t endanger public school instruction throughout the United States.The Court appeared to divide into four campsBroadly speaking, the justices floated four different approaches to this case.All three of the Court’s Democrats — Sotomayor, and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — focused on the “line-drawing” problems presented by this case. Kagan said she understood how even non-religious parents might object to “young kids” being taught “on matters concerning sexuality,” but she added that there wasn’t anything in Baxter’s argument that would allow the Court to limit claims by parents who want to micromanage a school’s lessons.Similarly, Jackson was troubled that Baxter’s arguments seemed so broad that they could prevent a gay teacher from displaying a picture of their own wedding, or even prevent a teacher from referring to a transgender child by that child’s preferred pronouns in the presence of another student whose parents object to trans people on religious grounds.But these concerns were largely limited to the Court’s Democratic minority. The other six justices appeared to be hunting for a way to rule against the school district.The most extreme of these six Republicans was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who at one point said that he is “mystified, as a longtime resident” of Montgomery County, that this case exists. As the Supreme Court said in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery (1988), the First Amendment only prohibits government action that tends “to coerce individuals into acting contrary to their religious beliefs.” But Kavanaugh at one point seemed to propose overruling Lyng and holding that a parent with religious objections to a lesson must only show a “burden” on their faith — however Kavanaugh would define that term.Both Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, appeared to think that there is something particularly noxious about exposing young people to books with gay characters. Alito, for example, argued that older students will understand that their teacher isn’t always correct — so it’s okay if those students are exposed to lessons that are in tension with their parents’ religious beliefs. But a different rule should apply to younger students.Similarly, Roberts argued that it would be “dangerous” to expose kindergarten-age children to lessons their parents might object to, because that might cause those children to question whether they should obey their teacher.Gorsuch, meanwhile, latched onto several lines in Baxter’s brief, which claim that a school board member compared parents who object to LGBTQ-inclusive literature to “white supremacists” and “xenophobes.” This matters because, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Court ruled in favor of a baker who refused to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples because a state civil rights commissioner made similarly disparaging comments about the baker.Under Gorsuch’s approach, in other words, the Court could decide the Mahmoud case very narrowly, ruling in favor of the parents because of this school board member’s alleged comments, without handing down a broader rule that would impose unworkable disclosure rules on every public school in the country.So it is possible that the Court will hand down a good-for-this-ride-only decision that gives these specific Montgomery County parents the result they want, without harming public education elsewhere. It is also possible that the Court will impose a kind of “Don’t Say Gay” rule on elementary school teachers, while allowing high school teachers to reveal that some people form romantic attachments to people of the same sex.One surprising omission in Tuesday’s argument is that no one mentioned the Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), a free speech case brought by students who wore black armbands to class in order to protest the Vietnam War.In Tinker, the Court held that these students had a right to wear the black armbands, but it did so because the students merely engaged in a “silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners.” Tinker held that public school students retain free speech rights, but not when their speech “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”The Court, in other words, recognized that public schools could not function if students could engage in speech that disrupts lessons, and it crafted a careful rule which respects those students’ First Amendment rights without undercutting the school’s ability to educate them and their classmates.The Court could take a similar approach in Mahmoud. Because the full facts of this case are not yet known, it may, in fact, turn out that a teacher tried to coerce a student into rejecting their religious beliefs, or otherwise behaved in a manner that violates the Constitution’s protections for religious people. If that turns out to be true, then the courts absolutely should provide appropriate relief to that student and their parents.But, instead of waiting until they know all the facts of the Mahmoud case and crafting an appropriately tailored rule like the one announced in Tinker, many of the justices seemed inclined to a more ham-handed approach. Based on Tuesday’s argument, it is difficult to guess whether Kavanaugh’s, Alito’s, Gorsuch’s, or some other approach will prevail. But, if the justices choose to accept Baxter’s arguments in full, they could easily impose unworkable obligations on public schools that will prevent them from functioning.See More:

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: Today I’m focusing on the controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as reports of mismanagement and dysfunction in his office suggest he’s unfit for one of the administration’s most important jobs.What’s going on with Hegseth? He has been under scrutiny since before his confirmation, when Senators and others raised concerns about his treatment of women and issues with alcohol. Last month, Hegseth shared sensitive information about an upcoming military strike on a non-secure group chat. (The world found out about it because a staffer accidentally included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in the chat.)Things haven’t gotten any better over the past week, in which:Multiple outlets reported that Hegseth had shared sensitive information about the strike in a second chat, one that included his brother and lawyer (who both have Pentagon jobs) and his wife (who does not).Three top officials Hegseth brought to the Defense Department have been suspended in connection with a Pentagon investigation into leaks.A fourth member of his team quit and wrote an op-ed for Politico accusing Hegseth of presiding over dysfunction, calling on Donald Trump to fire him.The New York Times this morning reported that Hegseth “had been unable to establish a process to ensure that basic, but essential, matters move swiftly” through his office.Is Hegseth going to get fired? NPR reported yesterday that the White House had begun the process of looking for Hegseth’s replacement, but White House officials, including Trump, have repeatedly denied any plans to oust him.Why does this matter outside the Pentagon? The defense secretary is the civilian official tasked with overseeing the world’s most powerful military and with reacting quickly to major geopolitical crises. If Hegseth isn’t up to the task of managing his own office — and if he’s continually sloppy with sensitive information — his presence in the role poses a risk to national security.And with that, it’s time to log off…It’s Earth Day, and I have more good news today from Vox’s Escape Velocity project, a package of stories demonstrating how progress on climate change can and will continue under the current administration. One of today’s pieces is about developments in home battery technology, and how it can help avoid blackouts and diminish demand for dirty energy. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

If you drive across Iowa, you’ll probably notice two things aside from the many farms: Trump signs and wind turbines.Iowa is Trump country. While the state was once considered politically purple, it decisively supported President Donald Trump in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024, when Trump won in 94 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Iowa’s governor and two senators are also Republicans, and, after some early friction, have fallen in line with Trump. Iowa is also a wind energy powerhouse. A remarkable 59 percent of the state’s energy in 2023 came from wind turbines, a larger share than any other state in the country. Texas is the only state that produces more wind energy than Iowa, though wind power makes up a much smaller portion of the Lone Star State’s energy mix. Wind turbines are now so common in Iowa that they appear on the state’s regular license plates. Related404 Not Found | VoxAt face value, wind energy and Trump don’t mix. Many of his supporters downplay or disregard climate science showing that fossil fuels are warming the planet far faster than it would naturally — a key fact underlying the value of wind energy and other power sources that don’t have significant carbon emissions. In some cases, Trump supporters, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also help elevate unproven claims that offshore wind turbines are killing whales.Annick Sjobakken for VoxTrump himself, meanwhile, is the most anti-wind-energy president in history. He’s been bad-mouthing wind power for over a decade, often relying on similarly spurious claims. “We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said in a speech on Inauguration Day. “Big, ugly wind mills. They ruin your neighborhood.” And Trump has already made policy moves intended to slow growth in the sector — causing some developers to halt or totally abandon projects.On one hand, Iowa is a test case for the staying power of renewable energy. Wind farms have expanded in the state not because of climate concerns but because of economics. Wind energy is cheap in Iowa.But Iowa also highlights an important disconnect that exists across the country — between the anti-climate, “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric that helped get Trump elected and the reality facing much of his base living in states that benefit from renewable energy. The economics of wind energy are incredibly strong, experts told me, so the industry won’t just disappear. But Trump’s energy policies, if successful, could have harmful consequences for Republican strongholds like Iowa. A question now is if conservatives who rely on wind energy push back, will Trump soften his anti-wind stance? How wind took over Iowa, a Republican strongholdIf you want to learn about wind energy in Iowa, the person to talk to is Tom Wind. (Yes, his name is literally Tom Wind, and yes, people point it out a lot to him.) He’s a crop farmer and electrical engineer in Iowa who’s been working in the sector — first at a utility, then as a consultant, and now as a wind-farm manager — for decades.There are several reasons for Iowa’s ascendency to wind dominance, Wind told me. The simplest reason is that Iowa is windy. And while some Great Plains states like Nebraska and Kansas are technically windier, Iowa is closer to big population centers, like Chicago, that need lots of power.Annick Sjobakken for VoxIowa was also quick to adopt policies that benefited wind and other renewables. In fact, Iowa was the first state in the country to establish what’s called a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), in 1983. It required the state’s investor-owned utilities to contract out or own at least 105 megawatts of renewable energy, which is enough to power tens of thousands of homes. Iowa reached that goal by 1999, Wind said. When the RPS was enacted, the state legislature was run by Democrats, though it still wasn’t that controversial: Iowa lawmakers, including Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, saw an opportunity to make Iowa more energy independent in the wake of the 1970s energy crisis (an actual crisis, by the way, not the manufactured energy emergency Trump has conjured). The state has also never had a large fossil-fuel industry to lobby against pro-renewable legislation, Wind said.Later, state and especially federal tax incentives for renewable energy further propelled wind to dominance in Iowa. In the ’90s, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican, helped establish a federal tax credit for building wind farms. That ultimately helped earn Grassley the title of “father” of Iowa wind energy.MidAmerican Energy Company, the largest electric utility in Iowa and a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, was especially hungry for tax credits, Wind said, and has since built out an enormous amount of wind energy. (In reporting this story, Vox reached out to several Republican politicians and energy authorities in the state. Branstad, Grassley’s office, MidAmerican, and Berkshire Hathaway Energy all declined interview requests. Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds did not respond to interview requests.)The state’s many farmers — a core section of Iowa’s economy that maintains a lot of political power — have also helped the wind industry take off. Farmers across Iowa have put turbines on their land as a way to earn more income. While crop prices and yields are volatile and at the whims of natural disasters, wind turbines offer a relatively stable source of revenue, on the scale of thousands of dollars per year, per turbine.Dave Johnson, a farmer who earns money from the turbine located on his property in Riceville, Iowa. Annick Sjobakken for Vox“It’s a real blessing for us,” said Dave Johnson, a livestock farmer in northern Iowa who leases his land to a utility that installed four turbines on his property. He earns about $30,000 a year from the four turbines combined, he told Vox. Johnson’s son also has turbines on his farm. Johnson, a Republican who says he voted for Trump, had the turbines installed primarily because he wanted his farm — where he raises cattle and hogs — to generate more value. “I never had a 401(k),” he said. “I farmed and stuck everything back into the farm. This is the 401(k) that I never had.” Fred Koschmeder, a corn and soybean farmer near Johnson’s farm, also has turbines on his land. “I don’t even look at it as a political thing,” Koschmeder, who also says he voted for Trump, said of wind energy. “It is economic development. If you’ve got a chance to participate in something that brings value, I think you’re kind of foolish not to do it. … It adds a lot of value to your farm and extra income, too.”Farming in Iowa has become more economically challenging in recent years, as the price of some crops like soybeans have dipped, and farm costs, such as tractor repairs, have spiked due to inflation. Climate change is also raising the risk of drought and flooding, according to government and academic researchers. Wind energy “is allowing farmers to stay on the farm,” Johnson said. “That helps rural America.”Annick Sjobakken for VoxAnnick Sjobakken for VoxBut even if you’re not a farmer, you likely benefit from wind turbines if you live in Iowa, said Steve Guyer, senior energy policy counsel at Iowa Environmental Council, a nonprofit green group. The state has stable energy bills that tend to be well below the national average in cost. Onshore wind is the cheapest source of energy with or without tax credits, as of 2024, according to the financial firm Lazard.“All customers benefit from it,” said Guyer, who formerly worked for utilities in Iowa. “Although other costs may rise over time, the cost of the wind actually remains stable or lowers. When we factor that into the overall utility bill, it at least stabilizes the bill.”The wind industry also employs roughly 4,000 people across the state and draws billions of dollars in capital investments. Plus, it’s the No. 1 taxpayer in a third of Iowa counties, according to Mak Heddens, who runs a group called Power Up Iowa, a coalition of clean energy companies in Iowa.While wind energy projects have faced fierce opposition in several counties — anti-wind advocates often rely on misinformation to argue that turbines harm wildlife and threaten human health — the industry is popular on the whole. This likely has little to do with politics or concerns about climate change. People across the political spectrum like wind energy because it’s cheap, local, and generates money for the state’s economy. These are things Republicans really care about, said James McCalley, an electrical engineer and wind energy expert at Iowa State University. (McCalley identifies as Republican.)“We’re a red state, and we’ve embraced it, and I’m proud of that,” said Brent Siegrist, a Republican state representative in the western Iowa’s Pottawattamie County, where a large wind farm produces enough electricity to power up to 122,000 homes. “Maybe it’s the commonsense approach of Iowans: We need energy, and if we can do it renewably — and it’s not costing us a fortune — why wouldn’t we do it?”Are Iowa Republicans worried?There’s no doubt that wind energy is a massive part of Iowa’s economy — powering the bulk of homes and businesses in the state — and a boon to residents. Yet people who support Trump often don’t see his anti-wind position as much of a threat or expect it to shift. Johnson, the livestock farmer, says he doesn’t pay close attention to Trump’s comments on wind energy. “I know he just shoots his mouth off,” Johnson said. When asked about real policies Trump has put in place, including an executive order that pauses new approvals for wind projects, Johnson said he’s not worried because wind energy has a lot of support, even among Republicans. Siegrist, meanwhile, downplayed how much Iowa depends on wind energy, mentioning that the state still uses coal. And while Siegrist doesn’t think the federal government should be controlling what happens to wind development within states, he’s not worried about Trump’s anti-wind statements. “I’ve got enough things to do in Iowa to worry about Washington, DC,” he told me. Annick Sjobakken for VoxPaul Roeder, a Republican who owns a handful of wind turbines in Iowa, is similarly untroubled by the administration’s position. “I’m not so much worried about politics as I am about some of the other external factors that drive the price of energy,” Roeder told me. “The president doesn’t drive the price of energy.” Roeder says he voted for Trump but not because of the president’s stance on renewable energy. This raises a key point: Many Republicans support renewable energy, and they may even worry about carbon emissions, but energy simply isn’t as salient for them as other issues, such as immigration. That helps explain how someone like Grassley — the father of Iowa wind energy, remember — is a Trump ally, even though he’s previously called Trump’s comments about wind energy “idiotic.” Annick Sjobakken for VoxIt’s also worth pointing out that, more generally, people don’t often think about where their energy comes, as long as their lights turn on and their bills aren’t surging. I grew up in Iowa and have visited at least once a year since. But it wasn’t until recently — through my environmental reporting — that I realized how important wind energy is to the state. So it’s not shocking that Iowan’s don’t connect their energy to Trump. “They don’t necessarily make the connection to what the president is saying,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, an association of business leaders, many of whom work in the clean energy industry.But there is real cause for concern. The strong economics of wind energy — what allowed turbines to proliferate in a conservative state — persist today, and so it’s reasonable to expect that the sector will still grow. Yet policies from the Trump administration could seriously dent the industry across the country, including in Iowa. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that aimed to curtail growth of the wind-energy industry. Among other things, it directed agencies to pause new and renewed federal approvals and leases for both onshore and offshore wind projects. Since Trump’s executive order from January 20, the administration has put in place or threatened additional tariffs on countries, such as China, that would substantially raise the cost of onshore turbines, some of which are manufactured in Iowa. Even turbines that are manufactured locally are typically built with at least some foreign parts.“There is a certain level of nervousness in the market,” Manav Sharma, North America division CEO for Nordex Group, a wind turbine manufacturer that has a production facility in Iowa, told KCRG.In a statement, Alliant Energy, the third-largest utility owner and operator of regulated wind energy in the US, according to the company, said it will “continue to monitor the Trump Administration executive orders on national energy policy.” TPI Composites, a global company that manufactures wind turbine blades in Iowa, declined an interview request. Some wind advocates and lawmakers — including some conservatives — are also worried that the Republican-controlled Congress may stamp out tax incentives for clean energy that are part of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Those incentives have largely benefitted Republican districts but are at risk of getting cut as Trump has vowed to repeal the IRA. “I think the subsidies are the biggest issue,” Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University who specializes in the Midwest, told Vox. “If they are reduced, will wind energy survive?” Annick Sjobakken for VoxAnnick Sjobakken for VoxEven if tax credits remain, the Trump administration may still weaken incentives, such as through efforts to shrink the IRS. “What could also happen is they cut the IRS workforce,” Wind said, adding that applications to get tax credits have to go through the agency. “If you start losing employees, things start slowing down. It just gets harder to do business with the IRS.”These concerns are especially pressing today as Iowa becomes a hot spot for energy-intensive data centers in step with the AI boom. It will need more energy quickly. Google, Meta, and Microsoft are all building out or operating data centers in the state, in part, because the state has affordable energy.Policies from the administration that harm renewable energy stand to harm Iowa, said Keefe of E2. This is true whether or not you care about climate change. “You don’t do this kind of damage to an industry, you don’t spin off this kind of market uncertainty, and things will be okay,” Keefe said. “The only way they’re going to be okay is if businesses and consumers stand up and demand that their lawmakers not take an energy source away from them that happens to be the cheapest energy we can develop right now.”“If I was one of those thousands of Iowans that work in the wind industry, or if I had family that worked in the industry, I would be calling my lawmaker today and saying, ‘Hey, recognize the risks that you are putting my community at — my family, these jobs, our economy,’” he said.See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.When Michelle Obama announced in March that she and her brother were starting a podcast, it dug up a familiar feeling for Democrats: yearning.If only the uber-popular former first lady would just return to politics. She could just run for president, if she wanted.It’s a recurring wish, for an Obama to save the Democratic Party. And like every time that chatter comes up, the dreamers were quickly let down. The podcast has avoided the political, and Obama herself has remained mostly out of the public eye, skipping high-profile public events and not commenting on news. She’s not alone. The party’s leaders of the past have also mostly remained silent as Donald Trump and Elon Musk challenge the law, remake the federal government, and implement the Trump 2.0 agenda.This pining for Obama’s return isn’t new, but particularly during the second Trump term, it reflects something special about this moment: The Democratic Party still doesn’t have a clear leader, doesn’t have a clear direction of where to go, and keeps looking to the past for leadership.RelatedSome of that identity crisis is being fought out in public. Various governors are vying for the attention of voters pissed off at Trump and Republicans. They’re on podcasts and TV shows, at town halls and listening sessions. In Congress, they’re slowly figuring out how their constituents want them to resist Trump. And most notably, Sen. Bernie Sanders is wrapping up a multistate run of rallies against “oligarchy,” essentially anointing US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York his movement’s successor in front of huge crowds.Still, none of these individuals seem to be uniting the party in the way the most loyal Democrats might wish for.But that might be okay. If history can show us anything about what Democrats do now, it’s that opposition parties need this time without a clear leader to debate their identities, rebuild grassroots energy, and prepare for midterm elections. The Democrats’ savior isn’t coming any time soon. But that may be a feature, not a bug, of losing elections.Democrats keep looking to the past for saviorsThe hope for a great savior — either a veteran voice who can right the ship or an outsider who can rock it — might actually be an impediment as the Democrats figure themselves out. While a new guard of politicians and voices are still getting their footing or pushing for more influence, the “hero” they’re looking for won’t come around for a while — meaning the party should be using this time to rebuild and have these debates.“The very fact that Democrats are looking for a savior, seeking the man or woman on the white or black horse, is a sign that they’re not really doing what good political parties do, which is work at the grassroots, recruit people to run and make the case about why what Trump and Musk are doing is horrible,” Michael Kazin, the Georgetown University political historian who’s written an extensive history of the Democratic Party, told me.Asking for a Biden or Harris return is probably not the answer.There are some trying to make this case. Some of the loudest remaining voices on the Democratic side remain members of the old guard — Sanders, for example, or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who led many protests against Trump and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize the federal government in the first few weeks of the Trump presidency. Neither are positioning themselves as the next leaders of the party, but Sanders, at least, seems to be setting the stage for a younger voice. He remains the most popular national figure, but the younger voices who could succeed him or chart out a new chapter for the party are not nearly as popular.Those younger voices — like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, or Ocasio-Cortez — are polarizing or still relatively unknown. They all represent different paths forward for the party. And they’re all trying out different approaches to tap into the anger that the average Democratic voter is feeling. And these divisions may actually end up being helpful: They’re setting the ground for a lively Democratic presidential primary contest in two to three years, they’re offering voters an idea of what the party could still become, and all represent a new vision for the party — even if the noise right now is about the party’s disunity. They also serve a midterm purpose as well: There not being a unified Democratic leader or agenda allows individual candidates to run their own, localized races without being pegged to one figure, as they tend to be during presidential election years, like when Biden was running. So embracing that chaos and disunity might actually be a good thing.“It’s a mistake to think you just have your preexisting set of people who’ve done it before, that one of them must be a savior. And frankly, right now, as opposed to in four years, the savior isn’t going to come from one single person. I’m not convinced that’s really how it works,” Julian Zelizer, a political history professor at Princeton University, told me. “The savior might be the congressional caucuses in the House and Senate acting effectively. The saviors might be independent groups, ACLU-type groups challenging [Trump] in court. But I think it’s more an organizational moment, and in a few years, you turn to the single individual. But I don’t think there’s a superhero who’s gonna fly in right now and just totally stop this. And thinking that way is probably not constructive for Democrats.”Of course, Democrats will still be pining for a hero, a new JFK or Obama to take on the mantle of the new Democratic Party. But there’s no easy way out of the current moment of crisis. The Obamas certainly won’t be the ones to resolve it. And wanting the figures of the past to return might actually be counterproductive.This clamor has apparently made its way to the Bidens, who reportedly have offered to fundraise, campaign, and boost Democratic candidates this year and next. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has remained quiet, while her more popular former running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has instead embarked on an “I told you so” tour as he tests the waters for a third term as governor.But asking for a Biden or Harris return is probably not the answer. “What good is it going to do? Is it going to convince anybody [for a former president or vice president to speak up]?” Kazin said. “It’s pretty common after the party who loses the election and obviously has no clear leader, for there to be a period where it’s not clear who the leaders are going to be. That happened in some ways, after 2004 as well. Going back in history, it happened in the 1920s a lot with Democrats not winning elections, it happened after losses in 1980 and 1984 and 1988 as well. So it takes a while for that to shake out. That’s not surprising.”See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.In just a few hours, the world I’m walking into will disappear beneath the waves. I’m at Pillar Point Harbor, a 40-minute drive from San Francisco, near low tide. And because this is one of the lowest tides this August, the water has drawn back like a curtain to expose an ecosystem that’s normally hidden away — a place called the rocky intertidal, or, because the receding water leaves little pools behind in the rocks, “the tidepools.”Dawn has just broken, pods of pelicans fly overhead, and sea lions bark from the nearby harbor. But I’m more focused on following my guide, a zoologist named Rebecca Johnson, as she picks her way out into these seaweed-covered rocks, pointing out species as she goes. These smooth green strands are surfgrass. Those fat bladders of air that look kind of like puffed-up gloves are called “seasack.” This dark brown frond Johnson is draping over her shoulders is the aptly named “feather boa kelp.” “ They’re like wildflowers,” Johnson says, “But it’s seaweed.”Rebecca Johnson wears a feather boa kelp like a feather boa. Byrd Pinkerton/VoxAs we make our way deeper, she points out odd creatures that only the ocean could dream up. A boring clam (which is far from boring, but does bore into rock) puffs itself up like a fierce fleshy ball before squirting a jet of water directly into the air to fend off our threatening vibes. A pale white brittle star, like a flexible daddy longlegs, dances for us across some algae. And rows of fat green anemones wear bits of shells like tiny hats. “ The theory is that…they’re protecting themselves from the sun, like a sunscreen,” Johnson tells me.We crouch together at the edge of a deep pool and see first one, then two — then three, four, five, six! — species of nudibranchs, the sea slugs that Johnson specializes in. One is hot pink and spiky. Another is an aggressive shade of orange. There’s a pale lemon one, a ghostly white one. Johnson even finds one covered in orange polka dots, like a marine clown. Some of these species, she tells me, bubbling with enthusiasm, eat anemones and steal their stinging cells, repurposing them as their own defenses.An orange polka-dotted nudibranch, known as a “sea clown.” Byrd Pinkerton/VoxThis kind of diversity is wild to witness, but it isn’t unusual for these tidepools. “It’s one of the places in the world that you can see species of invertebrates all really, really concentrated,” Johnson told me.We wander farther out, exploring this alien landscape together, until the tide begins to come back in and cover it over, bit by bit, hiding this weird world away again in a slow disappearing act.“ It’s extra magical that you can only see it at certain times,” Johnson told me before we came out here. “You get this little peek, this little window. And that’s one of the things I love the most about it.”Johnson has been coming to this exact spot off Pillar Point for almost three decades now, and in her role as director for the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science for the California Academy of Sciences, she spends time with volunteers monitoring tidepools up and down the California coasts. But she’s still enchanted with them. I’m not surprised. I fell in love with tidepools myself 20 years ago, when I first got to explore them as a kid at a summer camp in Mendocino. The odd, colorful creatures in them made me feel like magic was a little bit real, that science could feel like fantasy. It’s part of the reason I’m a science reporter today. But Johnson is worried about the future of these tidepools she loves so much. She’s worried that, like so many ecosystems around the world, they may be heading toward a much more dramatic, much more permanent disappearing act. So she, along with many, many collaborators all across the state of California and beyond, is doing what many scientists are trying to do for the ecosystems they study: to figure out — first, what’s actually happening to them, and second, what, if anything, we can do to save them. The sun rises over tide pools in Fort Bragg, California. Byrd Pinkerton/VoxHow did we get here? For Rebecca Johnson, the troubles really began around the arrival of “The Blob”: a marine heatwave. By 2014, it had warmed waters significantly along the West Coast of the United States. Johnson was hearing concerning things from participants in the programs she organized through Cal Academy to get people to go into the tidepools and make observations.“They started seeing an increase in this really beautiful pink nudibranch called the Hopkins Rose nudibranch,” she says. Ruby Ash for VoxHistorically, the Hopkins Rose nudibranch has lived in Southern California — and ventured up to Johnson’s more northern tidepools mostly during El Niño years. But as the temperatures shifted for the Blob, the spiky pink balls were showing up in huge numbers.“It became the most common thing,” Johnson remembers. She was also hearing disturbing reports about another animal — the sea star, known more colloquially as the starfish.As early as 2013, before The Blob really hit, divers and researchers had started noticing that sea stars were, quite literally, wasting away. “They were seeing white lesions on starfishes. And they were seeing the starfish kind of disintegrate in front of them,” she says. “[They would] see it one day with these lesions. They’d come back the next day and it was like almost dissolved and then almost gone.” Sea star wasting also isn’t unheard of, but in this instance, the wasting hit species after species of sea stars — at least 20 species in all. Also, as an evolutionary ecologist who studied this outbreak, Lauren Schiebelhut, told me, wasting normally happens on a more local scale — isolated to a single bay, for example.“For it to spread across the entire West Coast here, that was something we had not seen before,” Schiebelhut says. Scientists have been trying to work out what caused this massive shift for over a decade. Some theorized that it was a virus, and people have investigated the possibility of a bacterial issue. One researcher told me that her team is close to publishing a paper that should provide some more answers about an infectious agent here. But whatever the exact cause — and even though the wasting started before The Blob set in — scientists studying one species of sea star found that the biggest declines coincided with the warmer temperatures. Huge numbers of sea stars wasted away — with some locations losing over 90 percent of their stars. The Blob “certainly seemed to exacerbate it,” Schiebelhut says.At one point, Johnson went down to her favorite tidepooling spot, Pillar Point, with a colleague, just to “see what they could see,” and they saw almost no sea stars. “It was just like the most bizarre feeling,” she says. “I was still at this place that was spectacularly beautiful, covered with algae. All these other invertebrates are there. But there’s just something kind of off about it.”Byrd Pinkerton/VoxShe says it was like going into your room, only to realize that someone has moved all your stuff very slightly. “And you’re like, ‘What’s wrong with this room?’ It had that disconcerting, unsettling feeling.”This place Johnson knew so well — had been documenting and sharing with people for decades — suddenly felt unfamiliar. And at that moment, she felt a deep, deep uncertainty about its future. “Like, there might not be starfish, like ever,” she remembers thinking, “What does that mean?”What it would mean to lose so many sea starsThe reason that Johnson was so worried about sea stars was not just that the tidepools at Pillar Point looked different. She was worried about the role sea stars play in the tidepools ecosystem. To us, they might seem like pretty creatures that come in a fun shape, but to many of the ocean animals they interact with, they are voracious predators that help keep their ecosystems in balance — chowing down on everything from mussels and barnacles to snails. To understand why this is so important, let’s journey a little beyond the tidepools, a little farther offshore, into the California kelp forests. These are underwater forests of algae that are home to a huge diversity of animals, from fish and octopi to abalone. Kelp forests also provide a buffer for the coast against erosion, and they absorb and store large amounts of carbon dioxide, which benefits all of us as we try to stave off climate change. So they’re amazing ecosystems.But, like any forest, California’s coastal kelp forest has grazers — basically the marine equivalent of deer. In this case, these are animals like the purple sea urchin, a spiky purple pincushion that chows down enthusiastically on kelp. Ruby Ash for VoxNormally, Peter Roopnarine, a paleontologist at the California Academy of Sciences who has studied kelp forests tells me, sea urchins are content to eat the bits of detritus that the kelp shed naturally. But if there isn’t enough kelp detritus to go around, urchins can start feeding on the living kelp itself. “ That will happen if, for example, there are not enough predators around to keep their population in control, to keep them hiding,” Roopnarine says. “ Pretty soon they kill the kelp, and what you’re left with is what we call an urchin barren, which are these stretches of seafloor that are covered with urchins. And nothing else.” Sea otters are one of the predators — one of the wolves, to continue the metaphor, to our urchin deer — keeping urchins in check along some parts of the coast. Sea otters were hunted aggressively by European settlers, and have not returned along the northern part of the coast, but have made a comeback in central California. Another important wolf for these kelp forests, though, is a sea star known as pycnopodia helianthoides, or the “sunflower sea star.” Sunflower sea stars are beautiful, often purple or pink, and kind of squishy. But they are also, at least as sea stars go, big. They can have 20 arms, and grow to the size of a dinner plate or larger. (As a kid, when we found them in the tidepools, we used to have to hold them in two hands.) And researchers have increasingly found that they, too, did a lot of work to keep urchins in check. This is why it was such a big deal when the sea star wasting syndrome hit and wiped out so many sea stars, sunflower sea stars very much included. After the sickness, a lot of sea star species did start to come back. You can find sea stars like ochre stars, leather stars, and bat stars in California tidepools, for example. But while sunflower sea stars can still be found in the wild further north, in places like Washington state, they have not bounced back along the coast of California. And that, scientists suggest, may have contributed to the issues they’re now seeing in kelp forests. Satellite surveys from a few years ago showed that the kelp forests off of Northern California have shrunk by 95 percent. Once again, this is probably due to a combination of factors. High water temperatures may have weakened the kelp, for example. But another factor was the explosion of urchin populations. “This lack of the sunflower star in the kelp forest, especially in Northern California,” Johnson says, “led to the increase of urchins. And the urchins then ate all the kelp.”What does this mean for the future of these tidepools? The tidepools haven’t been hit as hard as the kelp forests. Clearly, as our visit in August showed, a place like Pillar Point has not turned into the equivalent of an urchin barren and is instead still home to a diversity of creatures. Still, Johnson says, they have been affected. She has, anecdotally, noticed grazing species like abalone that normally spend more of their time in the kelp forests moving over to tidepools, probably in search of kelp to eat. And as temperatures continue warming over time, tidepool ecosystems are changing in other ways. A recent paper showed that a species of nudibranch range has moved northward. Another study showed that a whole bunch of different marine species, including nudibranchs, but also species of snail, lobster, and crab were spotted farther north than their usual range during a heat wave. Some of these species are predators that might shake up the dynamics and the ecosystems they’re coming into. “We don’t actually know what happens when they move north,” Johnson says. “ We don’t really know the impact.” And then, as Schiebelhut, the geneticist who studies sea stars, told me, there are other stressors like pollution and runoff from wildfires. In January, more than 57,000 acres burned from a series of wildfires in Greater Los Angeles — a disaster whose scope of damage on intertidal ecosystems is not yet clear, researchers told me. “The disturbances are becoming more frequent, more intense,” Schiebelhut says. “It is a challenge to the system.” Johnson admits that it’s hard to know exactly how to interpret all these changes and stressors and use them to predict the future of the tidepools. After all, the California coastal ecosystems have survived the loss of important species before, and survived big natural disasters too. A brittle star dances across the algae. Byrd PinkertonByrd PinkertonMy favorite sea slug: an opalescent nudibranch. Byrd Pinkerton/VoxSo I turned to Roopnarine, the paleontologist. He studies how ancient ecosystems weathered — or didn’t weather — things like climate change, and what we might learn from them to apply to ecosystems facing challenges today. I hoped he would have a sense of how the current moment fits into the bigger patterns of history. “If you look in the fossil record,” he told me, “one of the things that’s really remarkable is that ecosystems can last a very long time. Millions of years. Species will come and go in those ecosystems, but what they do, who they do it to, and so on? That doesn’t change.”Ecosystems are a little like, say, a baseball team. You’ll always need certain players in certain roles — pitchers and catchers and shortstops and outfielders. Different players can retire and be replaced by other players — if one predator disappears, another predator might be able to take over some of the role that it plays, for example. But Roopnarine’s research into the fossil record also shows that no ecosystem baseball team is endlessly flexible.“They do eventually come to an end,” he says. Usually, that’s when really extreme changes occur. And when he looks at the moments in the past when the climate changed dramatically, and he looks at forecasts for our future, he’s very worried. “We have to be realistic that if we do nothing, the future is extremely grim,” he tells me, “There is no sugarcoating it.”What can we do? When it comes to safeguarding the future health of California’s coastal ecosystems, there are lots of people doing lots of things.Johnson is working with colleagues on a system that uses the community science app iNaturalist to better monitor the health of coastal tidepools. The Steinhart Aquarium is one of several institutions where researchers are raising and studying baby sunflower stars. This tiny star has two new arms growing. Byrd PinkertonAnyone who goes to the tide pools can upload photos of all the species that they see. Those photos, geotagged with locations and timestamps, will hopefully help researchers figure out how populations are changing, to model the future of this ecosystem. They could also potentially serve as a warning system if there are big die-offs again, so scientists can try and intervene earlier. Schiebelhut has studied the genomes of sea stars that did recover, to see what can be learned about what made them so resilient to wasting. The California state government has partnered with nonprofits and commercial fishermen to clear urchins and restore kelp. And then there’s the consortium of institutions up and down the coast, all working on an initiative to try to breed sunflower sea stars in captivity so that they might, eventually, be released back into the wild and resume their role as key predators.“ There is no one person that can do all the things,” says Ashley Kidd, a project manager at the Sunflower Star Lab, one of the many groups working together to bring sunflower sea stars back. What gives her hope is that so many different people, from so many institutions, are working together toward solutions. “ You can’t have all the knowledge of disease ecology, behavioral ecology, aquaculture by yourself,” Kidd says. “It is a much bigger, wonderful group of people that you get to work with and then be connected with. … You’re not alone.”When I first heard that these tidepools might be in trouble, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. This ecosystem made me believe that the real world had its own magic — because sure, fairies might not be real, but opalescent nudibranchs come pretty close. It hurts to think that that magic might dim, or even disappear. But walking through these pools with Johnson and watching her walk over to a mother and her daughter to show them nudibranchs, eagerly sharing this world with strangers, I felt delight, and a wonderful sense of present-ness. I felt part of that community. A sense that, whatever the future of these tidepools might look like, they were here, now, and as magical as ever. “In the midst of climate change and a future that is going to be hotter and harder and more difficult for people, you have to have joy,” Johnson says. “I struggle with it. I feel like marine systems especially are pretty complicated to think about restoring. What do you actually do out here? How do you protect things?…But you can’t stop doing it, because then you’ve kind of lost everything.”See More:

Over the last few months, the Trump administration has intensified its attacks on elite, Ivy League institutions like Columbia and Harvard, enacting sweeping funding cuts and even threatening to revoke their tax-exempt status.But what’s happening on the campuses of state schools is much less covered. Take for example the public university system in Florida. For years, Gov. Ron DeSantis has used public schools at all levels as the battleground for what he calls a war on “woke” — and punched his ticket to national prominence.And it’s Florida where journalist Josh Moody found his most recent exposé for Inside Higher Ed. Though elite universities in the Northeast have largely fought deportation efforts spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DeSantis has openly cooperated with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even appointing university presidents who are friendly to this mission.Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Moody about his findings, which uncovered formal cooperation agreements between many of Florida’s public universities and ICE that has led to revoked visas, alarmed faculties, and student protests.Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.What’s going on here with the Florida state schools? Is this a rebrand to ICE-U? What are they doing here? You’ve probably not heard of some of these schools because it’s the Florida State University system, which has 12 members, ranging from large schools with tens of thousands of students to New College of Florida, which has about 800 students. At least 10 of those institutions have signed agreements with ICE, which essentially would give their campus police departments immigration enforcement powers, allowing them to question, arrest, and prepare charges for those they suspect of immigration violations.These agreements, as one expert explained to me, are “force multipliers for ICE.”And basically these agreements, as one expert explained to me, are “force multipliers for ICE.” So if you wanted to have more immigration enforcement, you would sign an agreement with ICE to delegate that power locally. This is just a way for Florida to expand its immigration enforcement capabilities. The governor, as I mentioned before, has taken a hard line on immigration. He ran for president previously. I wouldn’t be surprised if he does so again, and that could be part of his long-term strategy. In this way, he’s sort of outflanking Trump on immigration. And this is just a fun question I love to ask while we’re talking about this stuff. Where did Ron DeSantis go to school again? Yale, right? Or was it Harvard? It was both! Anyway, have any students been detained or deported yet at these Florida state schools like we’ve seen at Columbia? Eighteen students at Florida International University and eight students at the University of Florida have had their visas revoked.What does that mean? Were they deported?They would have to leave the country. It doesn’t necessarily mean that ICE is going to come scoop them up in a van and facilitate that process, but they would essentially have to begin the process of leaving the country. And do we know what specifically these students have had their visas revoked for? We do not, but that is not uncommon. That has been the case across the US. Some students have been targeted for their speech. You look at the situation at Tufts and Columbia where students were active in pro-Palestinian protests and the Trump administration has claimed they’re antisemitic and pro-Hamas, but has not provided any evidence that they have done anything illegal. In other cases, they’ve had visas revoked for crimes committed years ago.And these institutions themselves have often been given no explanation when student statuses were changed — and sometimes they’ve discovered it by looking in their own systems and seeing that those statuses had been revoked.We don’t know how many international students have been caught up in this, but one of my fellow reporters at Inside Higher Ed is keeping a nationwide database and we have counted at least 1,680 students at 250 colleges who have lost visas. [Editor’s note: These figures reflect the latest numbers and have been updated since this Today, Explained episode first aired.] Does that mean there are other university systems around the country that are signing these kinds of agreements with ICE, that are cooperating with ICE at this level? Florida institutions are the only ones to have signed agreements with ICE. The professors that I spoke with, the legal experts for this piece, believe this is unprecedented. Neither were aware of another university ever signing into what is known as a 287(g) agreement with ICE. It’s sort of a new frontier in immigration enforcement on college campuses.Are students on the campuses of these universities upset to hear that they’re signing into agreements with ICE? Yes. There were protests at Florida International University today, which had a board meeting. The students that I hear from are often upset about what is happening in the state, not just around immigration, but what has been a broader effort by Florida Republicans to control all aspects of the university, whether that is hiring politicians and lawmakers into the presidencies or overhauling general education requirements to minimize certain disciplines — like sociology — that Florida state officials have deemed liberal.How do you feel what’s going on at ICE-U down in Florida fits into this other fight that we’re seeing in the Northeast, with Trump going to war with the elite universities?In Florida, this is being done by the state dictating to these universities: “You need to do this to basically carry out state goals around immigration enforcement.” Whereas the other examples at places like Harvard and Columbia is the Trump administration more or less trying to bring higher education to heel, by making an example of some of the most visible universities, where there have been the most visible pro-Palestinian campus protests over the last year.If they crumble, it seems only likely that your local institution is going to crumble when faced with the same threats.People are really freaked out. Professors are worried about academic freedom. But also nationally, people are worried too. They see Harvard and Columbia being at the forefront of this fight, and even though they’re not at all representative of higher education broadly, these are very visible universities that everyone pays attention to. If they crumble, it seems only likely that your local institution is going to crumble when faced with the same threats.On the show today, we’ve been talking about these two extremes in this culture war right now. On one end, you’ve got the oldest and most prestigious universities in the country. Then, over here, we’ve got this pocket of Florida state schools that are just throwing up their hands and complying with ICE. Where does that leave in your estimation, everyone in between those two extremes?A lot of that comes down to public or private control. If you are a public university in a dark red state, you should expect that this is coming. If you are at a public university in Texas, you might not be that far behind Florida in terms of an action like this and that’s what I’m hearing from experts too. If you’re in a blue state, you are a little bit more isolated if you’re a public institution there. Private institutions in both will have a lot more latitude.I don’t like to speculate, but I think it is entirely possible that the Trump administration looks at something like this and says, “Why don’t we do this nationwide?”What a time.Absolutely.See More:

It’s not just the stock market.In the few weeks since President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs, a series of indicators from across the economy suggest anxiety — or even outright panic — is in the economic driver’s seat.Consumer confidence is at a near-record low. People are panic-buying products that are likely to see major price hikes soon, from cars to consumer electronics. Businesses are also already predicting a slowdown in production, suggesting that Trump’s tariffs are actually working against his stated — and likely impossible — goal of reviving American manufacturing. This has a real impact on the health of the US economy. Confident consumers spend and support confident businesses, which fuel economic growth and hire workers. Trump can’t achieve his goals of onshoring manufacturing and ushering in a golden era of American prosperity when both consumers and businesses are spooked. It might be too early to tell whether Trump’s tariffs will lead to a recession, but it’s clear that they are already shifting economic activity in the US. Here’s what the data show.The leading metric of consumer confidence is the University of Michigan’s consumer confidence index, which measures how favorable Americans feel about the economy based on their responses to a series of survey questions.That index plunged immediately after Trump’s tariffs, down to 50.9 — lower than during the Great Recession and close to the historic low in the period following the Covid-19 pandemic.This suggests that Trump’s tariffs are not just sending shockwaves through the stock market, but also the pocketbooks of everyday Americans, who were already struggling with the aftermath of high inflation.Economists expect that consumers will eventually pull back on spending as a result. But in the short term, they appear to be stocking up. But economists say the spike in certain spending is neither sustainable nor evidence of a healthy economy.“When you announce you’re doing tariffs in two weeks, that’s going to lead to a big decline in spending in two weeks, but it may lead to a really big increase in spending in the short term,” said Michael Madowitz, principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive economic think tank. “I bought a bunch of parts to fix my really old car.”He’s not the only one: In March, motor vehicle and parts dealers saw a 5.3 percent increase in sales from the previous month and an 8.8 percent rise from the same month last year. Trump had, at that point, announced 25 percent tariffs on fully assembled automobiles, scheduled to take effect by May 3.In March, electronics and appliance stores also saw a 0.8 percent increase from February and a 1.8 percent increase from the same month last year. China is one of the world’s largest producers of consumer electronics, and Trump had been talking about hitting it with tariffs for months at that point. Trump has since offered a limited exception for consumer electronics from his baseline 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports, but it’s not clear how much that will insulate those products from price hikes. Trump has also said that consumer electronics could face additional, yet-to-be-announced tariffs on products that contain semiconductors.American manufacturing is in troubleTrump has promised that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country” as a result of his tariffs. His hope is that, in making it more expensive to import foreign goods, companies will seek to invest in bringing their production to the US, therefore bringing prices down for American consumers in the long run. He also claims that the tariffs will stop other countries from “cheating” America with trade imbalances.However, economists were skeptical of those claims from the outset. The Economist called the tariffs the “most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era,” based on an “utterly deluded” understanding of economics and history.Now, the data shows that Trump’s tariffs are having the opposite of their intended effect: US manufacturing has slowed in the weeks since he made the announcement, and economists expect that trend to continue. Surveys of American manufacturers conducted by the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Philadelphia revealed a pessimistic outlook. Both expectations for general business activity and for new product orders declined sharply in April.The New York Fed’s future general business conditions index dropped from 12.7 in March to 7.4 this month, its second-lowest reading in more than two decades. The Philadelphia Fed’s new order index dropped from 8.7 in March to -34.2 this month, its lowest reading since April 2020, just after the pandemic began. That’s bad news for the businesses that Trump said would benefit from his tariff policies, but are now struggling to plan for the months and years ahead in an environment of such uncertainty. In an effort to convince him to abandon the tariffs, some American manufacturers have avoided criticizing them directly and instead sought to promote how much they are already investing heavily in their US factories. But it’s not clear that even overtures from American manufacturing leaders and panic among consumers will persuade Trump to give up his decades-long obsession with tariffs as a solution to what he perceives as foreign trade barriers. See More:

If you wrote a novel in which the first Latin American pope died on Easter Monday — which happened to fall on April 21, the traditional anniversary of the founding of the city of Rome — it would be rejected by any decent editor. But that is precisely what has happened. Pope Francis, a symbol for many of the possibility of a more compassionate Christianity, has died. The apostolic throne of St. Peter is now empty. The period between the death of one pope and the election of his successor by the College of Cardinals is known rather ominously as a “sede vacante” (the vacant seat). It ordinarily lasts about 15 to 20 days, nine of which are the official mourning period known as the novendiale. Shortly after the nine-day period, after funeral rites for the recently deceased pope have been concluded, the Catholic Church’s leading cardinals will meet privately to elect a new pope in a conclave.The word conclave, from the Latin “with key,” comes from the 13th century when, following the death of Pope Clement IV, the cardinals were unable to agree on a new pope for almost three years. As frustration grew, it was decided to lock the cardinals away, providing them with only bread and water until they came to a decision. This practice of secluding the cardinals while they name their choice is now a matter of canon law. Even though the conclave has not begun, in our anxious times many are already starting to consider who might be the next Bishop of Rome. The election of a new pope has always been as much political balancing act as spiritual exercise. Most of the current conversation has focused on the “progressive” versus “traditionalist” strands of the global culture wars. Broadly speaking, this refers to the growing divide in the Catholic Church between the so-called “progressives” who favor reforms to the church’s attitude toward cultural and social issues (particularly those related to gender and sexuality) and the “traditionalists” who oppose such reforms, often advocating for creating even stricter norms in light of liberalization in the wider society. (Francis was considered progressive, whereas his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI was a traditionalist.) This divide is not unique to the Catholic Church and can now be seen in nearly every religious tradition. But while this conflict will likely dominate the conclave and coverage of it, there are also other factors at play. In trying to forecast the next papacy, it is also crucial to focus on the question of national — or more accurately, regional — origin. This has always been a factor in choosing a pope, the vast majority of whom have been Italians. The election of Polish Pope John Paul II in 1978, the first non-Italian in over 500 years, was considered an important show of support to the Catholics still living behind the Iron Curtain. So where might the next pope come from — and who might he be, and what might that signal about the future of the church? The fact is that what the average Christian looks like and where the average Christian lives is changing faster now than ever before, which will inevitably shape the next papacy. Christianity is on the decline in North America and western Europe, even if that decline seems to have slowed in the United States, at least recently. But in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (a region some call the “Global South,” though the term hits a colonialist note), Christianity is growing, both because of higher birth rates and conversions. Some estimates suggest that by 2050, 78 percent of the world’s Christians will live in the Global South. African Christianity, in particular, has experienced tremendous growth, with data suggesting that by 2050, 40 percent of the world’s Christians will live in Africa. For Catholicism in particular, these numbers are even more stark, and the Vatican’s own reports suggest that the future of the Catholic Church is undeniably in Africa.While the demographic center of the Christian world has been shifting, the power centers have stayed firmly in the West. No African or Asian leader has been elected head of a major global Christian denomination since Late Antiquity. (The last pope born in Africa was Pope Gelasius I, who died in 496.) And though Pope Francis was indeed the first pope from Latin America, as the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, he came firmly within the cultural framework and historical trajectory of southern European Catholicism. It is difficult to see him entirely as a “Pope from the Global South.”One might assume that progressives within the Catholic Church would be championing the rise of leaders from outside Europe. Yet an uncomfortable truth for many of these progressives is that the Global South, and particularly Africa, has become a significant power center for traditionalists in the fierce cultural debates that have rocked Christianity over the past four decades. This has been true not just for Catholics, but Anglicans, Methodists, and others. Of course, it is important to note that millions of dollars have been spent pushing a conservative social agenda in Africa and that African Christians are far from a monolith. But in broad demographic terms, a betting progressive Catholic would likely prefer a European pope over an African one.There are only a few realistic African contenders at the moment, both deeply traditionalist. There is Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, 76. Brought to the Vatican by Pope Francis’s conservative predecessor, Turkson is best known outside of Vatican circles for his anti-gay attitudes, including endorsing Ghana’s draconian anti-homosexuality law. He is joined by Cardinal Robert Sarah, 79, from Guinea, who once positioned himself as a “parallel authority” to Pope Francis. He has defended clerical celibacy, denounced “gender ideology,” and argued that there can be “no theological dialogue” with Islam. These men are among the most conservative potential candidates to be the next pope. Meanwhile, the majority of the progressive candidates, including the most progressive, are nearly all from Europe. There is Cardinal José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça from Portugal. His relatively liberal views on same-sex relationships as well as his sympathies with a pro-choice Benedictine nun who favors women’s ordination put him firmly in the progressive camp. However, at 59, he is the youngest among the candidates and thus unlikely to get the job on those grounds. More likely would be the Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi (and what is more conventional than an Italian pope?) Largely in the theological and pastoral image of Pope Francis, Zuppi would in some ways be the most “Eurocentric” choice, having spent time as the Vatican’s peace envoy to Ukraine and Russia and seen as largely focused on the European church.Given the demographic realities facing the Catholic Church, a progressive European cardinal seems highly unlikely, even though a progressive, at least on issues of gender and sexuality, is likely needed to stem the bleeding in Europe in particular. Even a traditionalist European cardinal, of which there are many, might be seen as out of step with where Catholicism is headed. All this puts the coming conclave in a seemingly impossible situation.The man who might offer a way around this impasse comes from the traditionally Catholic, Asian country of the Philippines, a progressive candidate from outside Europe (and this time with no European immigrant parents): Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle. Cardinal Tagle has been dubbed the “Asian Francis” in some circles because of his commitment to social justice. Yet, he is still not a European and would be the first Asian pope, and the first non-white pope since the early Middle Ages. (It is possible, even likely, that the three African-born popes of Late Antiquity were Black.)His election would pacify Western progressives, who have proven all too ready to jump ship should the church maintain too conservative of a position on key social issues, while offering the Global South — and the new Christian majority — a leader who looks and has lived more like his flock. It seems a clear way forward for a church increasingly divided not just along ideological lines, but geographic ones as well. And, for what it’s worth, Tagle currently leads the Vegas betting odds — as good an indication as any about who will step out onto the balcony in St. Peter’s Square after the white smoke rises. Whoever appears before the crowd that day will be a compromise, a man who in his life and theology must satisfy, to some degree, the varying factions of a changing Catholic Church that is increasingly divided by geography and politics — a reflection of the wider world. He will have just been handed the world’s loudest pulpit and what he does with it will affect not only the faithful, but the world.See More:

If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.”Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change church doctrine, didn’t dramatically alter the Church’s teachings, and didn’t fundamentally disrupt the bedrock of Catholic belief.Catholics still believe there is one God who exists as three divine persons, that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that sin is still a thing. Only men can serve in the priesthood, life still begins at conception, and faith is lived through both prayer and good works.And yet it still feels like Pope Francis transformed the Church — breathing life into a 2,000-year-old institution by making it a player in current events, updating some of its bureaucracy to better respond to earthly affairs, and recentering the Church’s focus on the principle that it is open to all, but especially concerned with the least well off and marginalized in society.With Francis gone, how should we think of his legacy? Was he really the radical progressive revolutionary some on the American political right cast him as? And will his successor follow in his footsteps? To try to neatly place Francis on the US political spectrum is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s precisely because Francis and his potential successors defy our ability to categorize their legacies within our worldly, partisan, and tribalistic categories that it’s not very useful to use labels like “liberal” and “conservative.” Those things mean very different things within the Church versus outside of it.Instead, it’s more helpful to realize just how much Francis changed the Church’s tone and posturing toward openness and care for the least well off — and how he set up to Church to continue in that direction after he’s gone. He was neither liberal nor conservative: He was a bridge to the future who made the Church more relevant, without betraying its core teachings.That starting point will be critical for reading and understanding the next few weeks of papal news and speculation — especially as poorly sourced viral charts and infographics that lack context spread on social media in an attempt to explain what comes next.Revisiting Francis’s papacyFrancis’s papacy is a prime example of how unhelpful it is to try to think of popes, and the Church, along the right-left political spectrum we’re used to thinking of in Western democracies. When he was elected in 2013, Francis was a bit of an enigma. Progressives cautioned each other not to get too hopeful, while conservatives were wary about how open he would be to changing the Church’s public presence and social teachings.Before being elected pope, he was described as more traditional — not as activist as some of his Latin American peers who embraced progressive, socialist-adjacent liberation theology and intervened in political developments in Argentina, for example.He was orthodox and “uncompromising” on issues related to the right to life (euthanasia, the death penalty, and abortion) and on the role of women in the church, and advocated for clergy to embrace austerity and humility. And yet he was known to take unorthodox approaches to his ministry: advocating for the poor and the oppressed, and expressing openness to other religions in Argentina. He would bring that mix of views to his papacy.The following decade would see the Church undergo few changes in theological or doctrinal teachings, and yet it still appeared as though it was dramatically breaking with the past. That duality was in part because Francis was essentially both a conservative and a liberal, by American standards, at the same time, as Catholic writer James T. Keane argued in 2021.Francis was anti-abortion, critical of gender theory, opposed to ordaining women, and opposed to marriage for same-sex couples, while also welcoming the LGBTQ community, fiercely criticizing capitalism, unabashedly defending immigrants, opposing the death penalty, and advocating for environmentalism and care for the planet. That was how Francis functioned as a bridge between the traditionalism of his predecessors and a Church able to embrace modernity. And that’s also why he had so many critics: He was both too liberal and radical, and not progressive or bold enough.Francis used the Church’s unchanging foundational teachings and beliefs to respond to the crises of the 21st century and to consistently push for a “both-and” approach to social issues, endorsing “conservative”-coded teachings while adding on more focus to social justice issues that hadn’t been the traditionally associated with the church. That’s the approach he took when critiquing consumerism, modern capitalism, and “throwaway culture,” for example, employing the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life to attack abortion rights, promote environmentalism, and criticize neo-liberal economics.None of those issues required dramatic changes to the Church’s religious or theological teachings. But they did involve moving the church beyond older debates — such as abortion, contraception, and marriage — and into other moral quandaries: economics, immigration, war, and climate change. And he spoke plainly about these debates in public, as when he responded, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about LGBTQ Catholics or said he wishes that hell is “empty.”Still, he reinforced that softer, more inquisitive and humble church tone with restructuring and reforms within the church bureaucracy — essentially setting the church up for a continued march along this path. Nearly 80 percent of the cardinals who are eligible to vote in a papal conclave were appointed by Francis — some 108 of 135 members of the College of Cardinals who can vote, per the Vatican itself.Most don’t align on any consistent ideological spectrum, having vastly different beliefs about the role of the Church, how the Church’s internal workings should operate, and what the Church’s social stances should be — that’s partially why it’s risky to read into and interpret projections about “wings” or ideological “factions” among the cardinal-electors as if they are a parliament or house of Congress.There will naturally be speculation, given who Francis appointed as cardinals, that his successor will be non-European and less traditional. But as Francis himself showed through his papacy, the church has the benefit of time and taking the long view on social issues. He reminded Catholics that concern for the poor and oppressed must be just as central to the Church’s presence in the world as any age-old culture war issue. And to try to apply to popes and the Church the political labels and sets of beliefs we use in America is pointless.See More:

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could lead health insurance plans to offer narrower coverage. The case, known as Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, challenges the authority of a group within the US Department of Health and Human Services tasked with requiring insurers to cover some forms of preventative care.This body, known as the US Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF), has exercised its authority to mandate coverage of a wide range of treatments — from cancer screenings, to drugs that prevent transmission of the HIV virus, to eye ointments that prevent infections that cause blindness in infants. Notably, the PSTF was given this power by the Affordable Care Act, the landmark legislation signed by President Barack Obama, which Republican litigants frequently ask the courts to undermine.The plaintiffs, represented by former Donald Trump lawyer Jonathan Mitchell, want the justices to strip the PSTF of this authority — thus permitting health plans to deny coverage for treatments they are currently required to pay for.Based on Monday’s argument, it does not appear likely that Mitchell has the votes for that outcome. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito came out swinging against the PSTF, and Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared likely to join them in attempting to sabotage Obamacare. But they were the only three justices who clearly telegraphed sympathy to Mitchell’s arguments.Notably, Republican Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett both seemed inclined to vote against Mitchell, although their questions did leave some uncertainty about how they would ultimately rule in this case. All three of the Court’s Democrats appeared all but certain to uphold the PSTF, so that means there may be at least five votes to preserve health insurers’ obligations under Obamacare.What is the legal issue in Braidwood Management?This case turns on a somewhat arcane issue involving the government’s hiring and firing practices. The Constitution says that certain officials — under the Supreme Court’s precedents, officials who wield significant authority — are “officers of the United States.” Officers that answer only to the president and who make final decisions on behalf of the government are considered “principal officers,” and must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Meanwhile, lesser-ranking officials known as “inferior officers” may be appointed by an agency leader such as a Cabinet secretary.Members of the PSTF were appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, so they do not qualify as principal officers. So the question in this case is whether they are validly classified as inferior officers. To qualify as such an official, their work must be supervised by a principal officer confirmed by the Senate. As the Supreme Court said in Edmond v. United States (1997), “‘inferior officers’ are officers whose work is directed and supervised at some level by others who were appointed by Presidential nomination with the advice and consent of the Senate.”The government’s argument that PSTF members count as inferior officers is pretty straightforward. Every judge who has looked at this case so far has concluded that the health secretary may remove PSTF members at will. A statute permits the secretary to delay implementation of the PSTF’s recommendations indefinitely. And the PSTF is part of the Public Health Service, which by statute is controlled by the assistant secretary for health (who is also a Senate-confirmed official), and by the secretary himself.Mitchell, meanwhile, primarily relies on a provision of federal law which states that PSTF members “shall be independent and, to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.” Task force members, he claims, cannot simultaneously be “independent” and also subject to secretarial supervision.But most of the justices appeared skeptical of Mitchell’s reading of the word “independent.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that she sometimes asks her law clerks for their “independent judgment” regarding a legal question she needs to decide, but that does not mean that she has to take the law clerk’s recommendation, or that she can’t fire the clerk.Significantly, Barrett — who repeatedly described Mitchell’s interpretation of the word “independent” as “maximalist” — seemed persuaded by Sotomayor’s argument. As Barrett said at one point during the argument, she sometimes asks her law clerks to provide recommendations that are “independent” of outside influence, but not “independent” of Barrett’s own approach to how cases should be decided.Even more significantly, Barrett pointed to the doctrine of “constitutional avoidance,” which says that if there are multiple ways of construing a statute, courts should avoid reading it in ways that raise constitutional problems. Thus, if the word “independent” can be read in more than one way, the Court should pick an interpretation that doesn’t render the PSTF unconstitutional.Kavanaugh, meanwhile, asked some questions that suggest he might be sympathetic to Mitchell’s approach; early in the argument, for example, he told Justice Department lawyer Hashim Mooppan that he thought the government’s interpretation of the word “independent” was “odd.” But he seemed to shift gears once Mitchell took the podium.Among other things, Kavanaugh noted that his Court is normally reluctant to read the law to create federal bodies that are independent of the government’s normal organizational chart, where agency leaders answer to the president and nearly everyone else answers to an agency leader. Indeed, the Supreme Court is currently considering a case that could eliminate Congress’s ability to create such independent agencies. So Kavanaugh appeared to believe that this statute should not be construed to make the PSTF independent from the secretary if it is possible to read it in another way.Again, Kavanaugh and Barrett did hedge enough in their questions that it is not entirely clear how they will vote in this case. And Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican who also sometimes breaks with the Court’s right flank, was silent for most of the argument. So it is not at all clear where Roberts will come down in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management.Still, based on Monday’s argument, it appears possible, perhaps even likely, that the PSTF will survive.The Court may send this back down to the lower courtGorsuch, at one point, floated an alternative way of resolving this case. While every judge who has heard the case so far agreed that the secretary has the power to appoint and remove task force members, there’s no statute which directly states that he can do so. Instead, that power is likely implicit in other provisions of law, such as the provision giving the secretary control over the Public Health Service.Gorsuch suggested that the Court may send the case back down to the lower court to decide whether the secretary actually has the power to appoint and remove task force members. And Barrett, at one point, also signaled that she is open to sending the case back down in a procedure known as a “remand.”If that happens, that would be bad news for the PSTF in the short term, because the case was previously heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most right-wing court in the federal appellate system, and one, based on its past behavior, that is likely to be hostile to any statute associated with a Democratic president.Still, even if the case is sent back down to the Fifth Circuit, and even if the Fifth Circuit does read federal law to undercut the PSTF, the Supreme Court can still review that decision once it is handed down. So a remand does not necessarily mean that health insurers will gain the power to deny coverage for cancer screenings or anti-HIV medication.Again, given the course of Barrett and Kavanaugh’s questioning, it’s difficult to say with certainty how this case will end up. For the moment, however, one of two outcomes seem most likely: Either the Supreme Court holds off on deciding the PSTF’s fate for now, or it votes to permanently rescue this body from Mitchell’s attack.See More:

At every light switch, power socket, and on the road, an unstoppable revolution is already underway. Technologies that can power our lives and jobs while doing less harm to the global climate — wind, solar, batteries, etc. — are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant. The pace of progress on price, scale, and performance has been so extraordinary that even the most optimistic forecasts about green tech in the past have turned out to be too pessimistic. Clean energy isn’t just powering our devices, tools, and luxuries — it’s growing the global economy, creating a whole suite of new jobs, and reshaping trade.And despite what headlines may say, there’s no sign these trends will reverse. Political and economic turmoil may slow down clean energy, but the sector has built up so much momentum that it’s become nigh unstoppable. Take a look at Texas: The largest oil- and gas-producing state in the US is also the largest in wind energy, and it’s installing more solar than any other. Texas utilities have come to realize that investing in clean energy is not just good for the environment; it’s good business. And even without subsidies and preferential treatment, the benefits of clean technologies — in clean air, scalability, distribution, and cost — have become impossible to ignore.And there’s only more room to grow. The world is still in the early stages of this revolution as market forces become the driver rather than environmental worries. In some US markets, installing new renewable energy is cheaper than running existing coal plants. Last year, the US produced more electricity from wind and solar power than from coal for the first time. If these energy trends persist, the US economy will see its greenhouse gas emissions diminish faster, reducing its contribution to climate change. The US needs to effectively zero out its carbon dioxide emissions by the middle of the century in order to keep the worst damages of climate change in check. Now, just a few months into Trump’s second presidency, it’s still an open question just how fragile the country’s progress on clean energy and climate will be. But the data is clear: There is tremendous potential for economic growth and environmental benefits if the country makes the right moves at this key inflection point. Certainly incentives like tax credits, business loans, and research and development funding could accelerate decarbonization. On the other hand, pulling back — as the Trump administration wants to do — would slow down clean energy in the US, though it wouldn’t stop it. But the rest of the world isn’t sitting idle, and if the US decides to slow its head start, its competitors may take the lead in a massive, rocketing industry. —Umair Irfan, Vox climate correspondentWindPresident Donald Trump does not like wind energy — apparently, in part, because he thinks turbines are ugly. “We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said after his inauguration during a rally. “Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.” He’s put some power behind those feelings. Within mere hours of stepping into office, Trump signed an executive order that hamstrung both onshore and offshore wind energy developments, even as he has claimed that the US faces an energy crisis. The order directed federal agencies to temporarily stop issuing approvals for both onshore and offshore wind projects and pause leasing for offshore projects in federal waters.Policies like this will harm the wind industry, analysts say, as will existing and potential future tariffs, which will likely make turbines more expensive. Those policies could also pose a serious threat to offshore developments. But the sector overall simply has too much inertia to be derailed, according to Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton University who studies clean energy. “Because costs have been coming down so dramatically in the last decade, there is a certain momentum there that’s going to carry through,” Larson said.Since 2010, US wind capacity has more than tripled, spurred by federal tax incentives. But even without those incentives — which Congress may eventually try to cut — onshore wind turbines are the cheapest source of new energy, according to the research firm Lazard. In 2023, the average cost of new onshore wind projects was two-thirds lower than a typical fossil fuel alternative, per a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency.Gabrielle Merite for VoxIn fact, wind energy might be the best example of how politics have had little bearing on the growth of renewable energy. Texas, which overwhelmingly supported Trump in the recent election, generates more wind energy than any other state, by far. The next three top states for wind energy production — Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — all swung for Trump in the last election, too. These states are particularly windy, but they’ve also adopted policies, including tax incentives, that have helped build out their wind-energy sectors. Gabrielle Merite for Vox“It’s just a way to make money,” Larson said of wind. “It has nothing to do with the political position on whether climate change is real or not. People continue to get paid to put up wind turbines, and that’s enough for them to do it.” In Iowa, for example, wind energy has drawn at least $22 billion in capital investment and has helped lower the cost of electricity. In 2023, wind generated about 60 percent of the state’s energy — more than double any other source, like coal or natural gas.Related404 Not Found | VoxThe wind sector is not without its challenges. In the last two years the cost of wind energy has gone up, due in part to inflation and permitting delays — which raised the costs of other energy sources, too. Construction of new wind farms had begun slowing even before Trump took office. Dozens of counties across the US, in places like Ohio and Virginia, have also successfully blocked or delayed wind projects, citing a range of concerns like noise and impact on property values. Offshore wind, which is far costlier, faces even more opposition. Opponents similarly worry that they’ll affect coastal property values and harm marine life. Yet ultimately these hurdles will only delay what is likely inevitable, analysts say: a future powered in large part by wind. —Benji Jones, Vox environmental correspondentSolarIt’s hard to think of a natural wonder more unstoppable than the sun, and harnessing its energy has proven just as formidable. The United States last year saw a record amount of clean energy power up, with solar leading the way. Over the past decade, solar power capacity in the US has risen eightfold. Why? Solar has just gotten way, way, way cheaper, even more than wind. Gabrielle Merite for VoxThe main technology for turning sunlight into electricity, the single-junction photovoltaic panel, has drastically increased the efficiency by which it turns a ray of sunlight into a moving electron. This lets the same-size panel convert more light into electricity. Since the device itself is a printed semiconductor, it has benefited from many of the manufacturing improvements that have come with recent advances in computer chip production. Solar has also benefited from economies of scale, particularly as China has invested heavily in its production. This has translated into cheaper solar panels around the world, including the US. And since solar panels are modular, small gains in efficiency and cost reduction quickly add up, boosting the business case.Gabrielle Merite for VoxThere are some clouds on the horizon, however. The single-junction PV panel may be closing in on its practical efficiency limit. Solar energy is variable, and some power grid operators have struggled to manage the spike in solar production midday and sudden drop-off in the evening, creating the infamous “duck curve” graph of energy demand that shows how fast other generators have to ramp up. Still, solar energy provides less than 4 percent of electricity in the US, so there is immense room to grow. Overall costs continue to decline, and new technologies are emerging that can get around the constraints imposed by conventional panels. Across the US and around the world, the sun has a long way to rise. —Umair IrfanOur energy gridWhile wind and solar energy have soared upward for more than a decade, storing electricity on the grid with batteries is just taking off. Grid-scale battery capacity suddenly launched upward around 2020 and has about doubled every year since. That’s good news for intermittent power sources, such as wind and solar: Energy storage is the booster rocket for renewables and one of the key tools for addressing the stubborn duck curve that plagues solar power. Batteries for the grid aren’t that far removed from those that power phones and computers, so they’ve benefited from cost and performance improvements in consumer batteries. And they still have room to get cheaper.Gabrielle Merite for VoxOn the power grid, batteries do a number of jobs that help improve efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions. The obvious one is compensating for the capriciousness of wind and solar power: As the sun sets and the wind calms, demand rises, and grid operators can tap into their power reserves to keep the lights on. The specific combination of solar-plus-storage is still a small share of utility-scale projects, but it’s gaining ground in the residential market as these systems get cheaper.Batteries also help grid operators cope with demand peaks: They can bank power when it’s cheap and sell those electrons when electricity is more expensive. They also maintain grid stability and provide the juice to restart power generators after outages or maintenance. That means there’s a huge demand for grid batteries beyond backing up renewables. Right now, the main way the US saves electricity on the grid is pumped hydropower, which currently provides about 96 percent of utility-scale storage. Water is pumped uphill into a reservoir when power is cheap and then runs downhill through turbines when it’s needed. This method tends to lose a lot of energy in the process and is limited to landscapes with the ideal terrain to move water up and down. Batteries get around these hurdles with higher efficiencies, scalability, and modularity. And since they stay parked in one place, energy density and portability don’t matter as much on the grid as they would in a car or a phone. That opens up several more options. Car batteries that have lost too much capacity to be worthwhile in a vehicle can get a second life on the power grid. Designs like flow batteries that store energy by the megawatt-hour and molten salt batteries that stash power for months could outperform the reigning lithium-ion battery. —Umair IrfanThe electric vehicle transition Transportation is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Fossil fuels currently account for nearly 90 percent of the energy consumption in the transportation sector, which makes it an obvious target for decarbonization. And while it will take some time to figure out how to electrify planes, trains, and container ships, the growth of EVs, including passenger cars and trucks, has reached a tipping point.The price of a new EV is nearly equivalent to a new gas-powered car, when you include state and federal subsidies.is growing. Even though the Trump administration has effectively waged war on the EV transition by pulling funding for charging infrastructure expansion and threatening to end subsidies for new EV purchases, at best those moves may slow a largely unstoppable EV transition in the long term. The automotive industry is all in on the electric transition. Buoyed by strong and growing EV sales trends in China and increasing EV offerings, global demand is growing.There are signs, however, that the number of people buying EVs in the US and Europe is slowing, even as subsidies remain available. Experts say this is likely due, in part, to more consumer choice, as the number of EV offerings, including off-road trucks and minivans, continues to grow. But even here we see encouraging signs: As more EVs have come to market, more plug-in hybrid models have also appeared. And plug-in hybrids tend to be slightly cheaper and help people deal with range anxiety, the umbrella term for the fear of not being able to find a charger, while still reducing emissions.Gabrielle Merite for Vox“The early adopters who are just all in on that EV tech, they’ve adopted it,” Nicole Wakelin, editor at large of CarBuzz, told Vox in January. “So now it’s up to everybody else to dip their toes in that water.”Around the world, cheap EVs are surging in popularity. Prices of EV batteries, the most expensive component of the vehicle, are dropping globally even as their capacity grows. That trend is leading to more and more inexpensive EV models hitting the market. China, once again, is leading the charge here. The cheapest model from Chinese front-runner BYD now costs less than $10,000, and by 2027, Volkswagen promises it will sell a cheap EV in Europe for about $20,000. Meanwhile, in the US, the average price for a used EV in mid-2024 was $33,000, compared to $27,000 for an internal combustion engine vehicle. Those Chinese EVs aren’t currently available in the US.Gabrielle Merite for VoxIt remains to be seen how far Trump will go to keep America hooked on fossil fuels. It’s clear, however, that more and more people want EVs and are buying them, charging them, and quite frankly, loving them. —Adam Clark Estes, Vox senior technology correspondentJobsFor any of these clean energy sectors to reach their highest potential, there’s an essential requirement they all share: a robust, skilled workforce. The good news for the clean energy industry is that data show the jobs are rolling in.Gabrielle Merite for VoxThe 2024 Clean Jobs America report by E2, a national group focused on climate solutions across industries, paints a positive picture for clean jobs. Renewable energy jobs increased by 14 percent from 2020 to 2023 — a surge boosted by the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate-focused policies. Jobs in the solar sector have grown by 15 percent in that same period, with 12 percent growth for wind and 11 percent growth for geothermal. In just 2023 alone, 150,000 jobs in the clean energy industry were added. All together, clean energy outpaced economy-wide employment growth for the last five years.And while the Trump administration has targeted the wind industry, rolled back some climate-friendly policies, and griped about solar, the administration’s policies have yet to put a dent on positive job growth in clean jobs.“I expect [the administration] will go after some provisions, but there is quite a bit in the IRA that will be very difficult to repeal since large-scale clean energy investments have been made, and a majority of those in red states whose politicians will not want to give them up,” one former US official told Heatmap News. Republican districts have benefited far more than progressive ones from clean tech manufacturing investments to the tune of over $161 billion, Bloomberg reported. Going after clean jobs would mean stalling economic growth in communities that helped deliver Trump a second term — a move that most would call politically unwise.Gabrielle Merite for VoxThe clean industry is growing beyond the United States. Globally, clean energy sectors added over 4.7 million jobs to a total of 35 million from 2019 to 2022 — exceeding the amount of fossil fuel jobs internationally.While the data bodes well for the industry, there are concerns from workers, unions, and communities that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy may leave many skilled employees behind. One paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that fewer than 1 percent of fossil fuel workers have transitioned to green jobs, citing a lack of translatable skills — operating an oil derrick isn’t as applicable to installing solar panels, for example. Another paper from Nature found that while some fossil fuel workers might have the right skills for clean energy jobs, the location of green jobs often aren’t where fossil fuel workers are based. Several policy routes can be taken to create a more equitable transition for these workers, such as funding early retirement programs for fossil fuel workers who lose their jobs or heavily investing in fossil fuel communities where there is potential for creating renewable energy hubs. Clean energy jobs are growing, and it doesn’t have to be at the cost of the 1.7 million workers in the US with fossil fuel occupations. —Sam DelgadoGeothermalWhile President Trump has largely been hostile to renewable energy, there’s one clean energy source that the administration actually supports: geothermal. Geothermal has long lived in the shadows of other renewables — especially as wind and solar have surged. But geothermal’s potential may be greater than any of those, and ironically, being in Trump’s good graces may give this sector the final boost it needs. If you know President Trump’s motto of “drill, baby, drill,” this might not come as a surprise. Geothermal energy is tapped by drilling into the ground and extracting heat from the earth, and it uses similar technology to the oil and gas industry. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has long praised geothermal, and the fracking company he oversaw prior to joining the Trump administration invested in Fervo Energy, a company that specializes in geothermal technologies. Despite the fact that the first geothermal plant was built in 1904 in Italy, the energy source is still in its infancy. In 2023, geothermal energy produced less than half a percent of total US utility-scale electricity generation, far behind other renewables like solar and wind. Historically, developing geothermal energy has been constrained by geography and relatively few have been built. Most geothermal production happens in the western United States because of the region’s access to underground hot water that can drive turbines isn’t too far from the surface. California dominates the geothermal landscape, with 67 percent of US geothermal electricity generation coming from the state — the outcome of state policy priorities and the right geologic conditions. The regional specificity has been a big barrier to geothermal taking off more broadly.Then there’s the issue of cost. Compared to solar and wind development and operations, building geothermal plants and drilling is much more expensive. And it currently costs more per megawatt hour than solar and wind. But these geographic and financial barriers could be broken down. Geothermal companies have been exploring enhanced geothermal, a method that could make it possible to drill for geothermal energy everywhere. Coupling enhanced geothermal with drilling technology and techniques from the oil and gas industry can also help with efficiency and bring down costs — a parallel to how advances in fracking in the early 2000s helped supercharge the US oil and gas industry.What geothermal lacks in current scale, it makes up for in future potential. Because it’s not intermittent and doesn’t rely on specific weather conditions (the way that solar, wind, and hydropower do) geothermal has a capacity advantage over other renewables. In 2023, geothermal had a capacity factor, or how often an energy source is running at maximum power, of 69 percent, compared to 33 percent and 23 percent for wind and solar, respectively — meaning it’s more capable of producing reliable power. Gabrielle Merite for VoxThat advantage could be critical for US decarbonization goals. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), enhanced geothermal has the potential to power more than 65 million homes and businesses in the US. Right now, stakeholders from energy policymakers to climate scientists to geothermal company executives, are determined to turn potential into reality. In March 2024, the DOE released a lengthy report on the necessary steps to unlocking enhanced geothermal’s full potential on a commercial scale. In October of last year, the federal government approved a massive geothermal project in Utah that plans to provide power for more than 2 million homes and aims to be operational by 2026. The company behind the project and one of the leading enhanced geothermal startups, Fervo Energy, secured $255 million in funding from investors just before the year came to a close.Geothermal also has bipartisan support (and is perhaps one of the few issues that the Biden and Trump administration would share similar views on). And because it’s borrowing technology from the gas and oil industry, it can tap into former fossil fuel workers to staff these plants. But it’s key to note that getting to take off will be really, really expensive — the DOE projects that it will take $20 billion to $25 billion to get geothermal ready for a commercial breakout by 2030. Geothermal’s breakthrough isn’t assured, but it’s on the cusp of takeoff. If the necessary financial investments are made, and companies can show that advances in technology can be scaled up beyond the western US, it could usher in the age of a geothermal energy revolution. —Sam Delgado, former Future Perfect fellowSee More:

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President Donald Trump ran on a promise of more fossil fuels, fewer environmental regulations, and outright climate denial — and now he’s following through. His administration is gutting clean energy policy, fast-tracking oil and gas projects, and reshaping environmental policy with sweeping consequences.At the same time, though, there’s another force pulling hard in the opposite direction. A global clean tech revolution — one that powers our homes, our cars, and our lives without wrecking the climate — is already well underway.The new generation of wind and solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles are on the verge of, or have already achieved, escape velocity, breaking free from the gravity of political capriciousness. In a lot of places, especially in power generation, the cleanest option is also the fastest, the cheapest, and the one most likely to turn a profit. That’s true whether or not you care about the climate.The world is building momentum around clean energy, unlocking ways to grow economies and raise living standards without cranking up the planet’s temperature. And every fraction of a degree we avoid means more lives saved, fewer disasters, more stability, and more of the future left intact.It’s 2025 — halfway between now and 2050, the year stamped on basically every major climate target. That puts us closer to those deadlines than we are to Gladiator, Kid A, iMacs, and frosted tips. So it’s a good moment to pause and ask: How did we get here? Are we moving fast enough? And what’s standing in the way?In this special project, Escape Velocity, Vox’s climate team set out to answer those questions. We looked at the places where climate progress is still speeding up, the breakthroughs changing everything behind the scenes, and the moments where clean tech might overcome political resistance entirely.The US has played a key role in getting the world to this point. But now, other countries are eyeing the lead. Right now, we’re holding a strong hand, but our government is actively sabotaging it. What’s at stake isn’t just a cleaner future — it’s whether the US stays in the race at all. —Paige Vega, climate editorCREDITS:Editorial lead: Paige VegaEditors: Carla Javier, Miranda Kennedy, Naureen Khan, Paige Vega, Elbert Ventura, Bryan Walsh | Reporters: Avishay Artsy, Sam Delgado, Adam Clark Estes, Jonquilyn Hill, Melissa Hirsch, Umair Irfan, Benji Jones, Paige Vega | Copy editors and fact-checkers: Colleen Barrett, Esther Gim, Melissa Hirsch, Sarah Schweppe, Kim Slotterback | Art director: Paige Vickers | Data visualization: Gabrielle Merite | Photo illustration: Gabrielle Merite | Original photography: Annick Sjobakken | Data fact-checking: Melissa Hirsch | Podcast engineering: Matthew Billy | Audience: Bill Carey, Gabby Fernandez, Shira Tarlo | Editorial directors: Elbert Ventura and Bryan Walsh | Special thanks: Nisha Chittal and Lauren Katz

Back in 2021, far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who supports abolishing American democracy and replacing it with a dictatorship, went on a podcast to discuss how a hypothetical “American Caesar” might successfully carry out a power grab if elected president.His interlocutor, then-former (and now, current) Trump official Michael Anton, argued that any such effort would fail because “the real power centers” in the US — the elite media and academic institutions exemplified by “Harvard and the New York Times” — would fight back.“That’s right,” Yarvin agreed. “That’s why, basically, you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April.”It’s now April — and Harvard is suddenly facing an unprecedented assault from the Trump administration.President Donald Trump has already revoked $2.2 billion in federal research funding for the university. He and his aides have suggested they may use more weapons of state power soon — revoking Harvard’s nonprofit status through the IRS, taking away its certification to host international students, and scrutinizing its disclosures of foreign donations.The assault on Harvard is part of a broader Trumpian assault on elite universities, which is itself part of a yet broader federal assault on progressive institutions and groups deemed enemies of the president (from Big Law firms to liberal nonprofits to mainstream media outlets). The attacks have various pretexts, but they fit a larger strategy that right-wing activists advocate. They believe that the best way of strengthening the right’s cultural power is to force liberal and left-leaning institutions to bend the knee — or be destroyed. And though destroying Harvard will be a tall order, tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences, forever transforming the relationship between the federal government and academia.Harvard became Trump’s top target because it stood up to him in a high-profile way, announcing last Monday it would not give in to his demands. The school has won praise from Trump critics for resisting where Columbia University didn’t last month. But really, Harvard had no choice but to fight back, because Trump officials’ demands had become far more extreme.Most notably, Trump officials demanded that every single department and teaching unit at Harvard, as well as the student body, face federal government-approved audits for “viewpoint diversity” every year through 2028. This essentially meant that the punishment would continue until Trump allies determined every component of Harvard had sufficiently moved to the right — a stunning federal intrusion on a private university.Much of this seems plainly illegal, and Harvard is sure to fight back in court. But this may just be the start. Aides to Trump, the New York Times recently reported, “have spoken privately of toppling a high-profile university to signal their seriousness.” That is: They may not just want to change Harvard’s ways — they may want to destroy it.That’s easier said than done. Harvard is well-positioned to fight back, both in court and via fundraising among its wealthy alumni network, and the school has an enormous endowment. But the longer-term trajectory for the relationship between universities and the federal government seems bleak. Now that Trump has pioneered the tactic of pulling funds to coerce and try to control universities, it seems hard to put that genie back in the bottle: The threat will loom during any future Republican presidency. Universities will likely have to either figure out how to live without the federal government, or make themselves more acceptable to the right.Trump vs. “the Cathedral”Trump’s stunning weaponization of government power against universities is happening partly because of his own vindictiveness. But it’s also a strategy that certain thinkers and activists on the right have long advocated.Conservatives have long complained that elite colleges and universities are poisoning the minds of America’s youth with their far-left ways. But over the past decade — the decade of the Great Awokening — this has become increasingly central to the right’s narrative of what ails America. Influential voices on the right, such as activist Christopher Rufo, argued “wokeness” was in large part created by elite universities. Yarvin, meanwhile, started focusing on this long before the wokeness wars. He’s long asserted that progressives dominate US culture because of what he calls “the Cathedral” — elite academic and media institutions that, in his telling, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to fit their preferred ideological frames.To people persuaded by this account, like Vice President JD Vance, the response seemed obvious: Vance said in 2021 that conservatives should “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”Several developments in the 2020s made universities more vulnerable to these right-wing attacks. The Covid-19 pandemic turned many on the right against the medical establishment, making them more open to threatening scientific and medical research funding (which is most of the direct federal funding for universities). The Supreme Court declared Harvard’s race-based affirmative action practices illegal in 2023, opening the door to future federal scrutiny over whether Harvard or other universities complied with the ruling. Above all, there was the eruption of the Israel-Gaza war and the pro-Palestinian protests that caused controversy on many campuses. Though many students and faculty members supported the protests, others — including major donors — opposed them, arguing Jewish students had become newly unsafe on campus. Protest supporters have argued this was a blatant effort to chill criticism of Israel. But the issue was bitterly divisive, Congress joined the fray, and Ivy League presidents (including Harvard’s) were soon forced out.The Trump administration cited those protests in creating a “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism,” which has taken on the leading role in threatening funding for Harvard and other universities. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies have been similarly aggressive in taking a wrecking ball to the medical research status quo involving grants to universities. And recent reporting suggests Trump himself is personally involved in and excited about the effort.Will Trump’s tactics actually work — against Harvard specifically, or “the Cathedral” generally?Trump can clearly hurt Harvard. Layoffs are already beginning at the Harvard School of Public Health. The school can make up for some grant losses with new fundraising, but it will be quite hard to conjure up $2 billion — or much more, if the IRS revokes Harvard’s nonprofit status, forcing it to pay taxes and removing the tax-deductibility of its donations.But Harvard seems to have good prospects in court. Law professors have argued that Trump’s rapid revocations of funding may well be illegal, and a politicized use of any IRS will likely bring court scrutiny too. The conservatives on the Supreme Court certainly have their gripes about elite universities, but they may blanche at Trump’s apparently illegal attempts to burn them to the ground. (For what it’s worth, four of the nine Supreme Court justices went to Harvard Law School, and four others went to Yale Law.)Furthermore, Harvard’s influence doesn’t stem primarily from its federal funding — it comes from its prestige. And that prestige won’t go away because of crude political assaults; indeed, it may be enhanced by the university’s vow to stand up to Trump. While Harvard’s reputation has been somewhat hurt amid the controversies of recent years, a principled stand against an unpopular and undemocratic president could in some ways prove rejuvenating.Advocates like Rufo fixate on universities as the enemy who must be attacked or overhauled to smash progressives’ cultural power. But in doing so, they overestimate the power of intimidation tactics and underestimate the importance of persuasion. If Trump’s attacks on Harvard are widely viewed as an illegal abuse of power, they won’t work. Put another way: University power brokers were deeply divided over Israel and Gaza, but now they’re united against Donald Trump.And while elite universities are clearly important and influential, the right-wing worldview in which they conceptualized and imposed wokeness on America seems to me extremely oversimplified. Was it that Harvard radicalized its students into becoming woke? Or did a new generation of Harvard students consuming lots of social media simply find left-wing views newly appealing, and act accordingly? Did Harvard change the kids, or did the kids change Harvard?There may be no going back to the previous eraBeyond Harvard, though, other universities may well be in a tougher spot. It does seem clear that the federal government is no longer a partner that can be relied on for federal funding. If Trump can yank away billions of dollars in grants for political reasons, future Republican presidents — potentially, for instance, Vance — should be expected to do the same.The previous status quo was that elite universities didn’t particularly have to care whatsoever about what conservatives thought of them. The spectrum of relevant opinion that they took into account ranged from far-left activists to centrist socially liberal donors. Trump has changed that, and now everyone hoping for federal funding will have to look over their shoulder.Of course, though Harvard’s critics are most fired up about wokeness and Israel, the ultimate victims of all this will be scientific and medical researchers — as well as anyone who would have benefited from their findings. Funding for Harvard studies on tuberculosis, cancer treatment, and ALS has already been clawed back. The ultimate upshot of this agenda is to smash US scientific and medical expertise to own the libs. See More:

Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of brazenly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson turned celebrated vigilante, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday.The federal charges include stalking, a firearms offense, and murder through use of a firearm, according to NPR. If convicted, the murder charge makes Mangione eligible for the death penalty. Mangione is also facing additional charges from state prosecutors in New York and in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently directed prosecutors at the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for Mangione. “If there was ever a death case, this is one,” Bondi told Fox News. “This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him.” In the months since Thompson’s murder in December, Mangione has become a lightning rod of controversy. For many, he represents the resentment and disappointment many Americans harbor about the US health care system. Mangione’s online activity has also become the subject of intense scrutiny, from his banner photos on X to his more than 200 Goodreads reviews. His review of the so-called “Unabomber Manifesto” has attracted particular attention. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless [to] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” he wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham who studies ant-tech radicalism, has been trying to better understand that essay’s author, Ted Kaczynski, who he’s currently writing a book about. Although Fleming is cautious about saying Mangione was inspired by Kaczynksi, it’s hard not to notice a few parallels in their cases. “Assassinating corporate executives to create a media spectacle is straight out of the Unabomber’s playbook. The assassin of Brian Thompson also left some engravings on the shell casings, which reminds me of the engraving that Kaczynski left on the components of his bombs,” Fleming says. “And more generally, Kaczynski and Mangione are both disaffected overachievers with backgrounds in STEM fields.”Fleming shared some of his insights about the Unabomber with the host of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Sean Rameswaram. Read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below. And listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.What stood out most to you when you first read the manifesto? What struck me is how unconspiratorial it was. Kaczynski doesn’t think there’s an evil cabal of technocrats plotting to oppress us all. His entire worldview is evolutionary. And so I thought: This is interesting as political theory. It’s extremely radical and there’s a lot I disagree with, but as a historian of political ideas, I thought it would make an interesting side project. And then it took on a life of its own. For those who don’t remember, who was he, what did he do, and how did people come to know him? Ted Kaczynski was born in Chicago in 1942, and he started out as a child prodigy in mathematics. He went to Harvard on a scholarship at the age of 16, and then he went on to do a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. And he was then hired as an assistant professor in math at Berkeley, and at that time he was the youngest in the institution’s history.The reason we’re still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings.But after two years at Berkeley he abruptly resigned, and after a little while, he bought himself a piece of land outside Lincoln, Montana, where he built himself a one-room cabin that was 10 feet by 12 feet with no electricity or running water. And from there, he launched his one-man war against modern technology. He began sending bombs to corporate executives and scientists in 1978. And his bombs killed three people and injured 23 others by the time he was arrested in 1996. Why are we still talking about the Unabomber all these years later? The reason we’re still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings. In April 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times promising that he would stop bombing if his 35,000-word essay titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” were published in the Times or some other major newspaper. The Manifesto was published in the Washington Post on September 19th, 1995. Which is, I think, hard to imagine today, but hundreds of thousands of people in this country were mailed this dude’s manifesto. Yes, that’s right. Without exaggeration, it might be one of the most read manifestos since The Communist Manifesto. Soon after that, it was published in paperback. It also was uploaded to Time Warner’s Pathfinder platform. It became what might be the first ever internet manifesto, and set the template for the manifestos that have become all too common in the aftermath of violent attacks. Not long ago, the Unabomber Manifesto was still a bestseller on Amazon. In the philosophy category, it was ahead of classics by Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine. Kaczynski writes that “There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.” I think a lot of people could find some truth in that statement. What was he trying to get across with this manifesto?In the passage, you’ve just quoted, what he’s arguing is basically that human beings are biologically maladapted to the modern world. This is a big claim from evolutionary psychology. The argument is that, biologically speaking, we’re still Stone Age hunter-gatherers. We evolved hunting large animals on the savannah and in the span of just 10,000 years — the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms — we’ve constructed this world of concrete, steel, and screens. So Kaczynski argues that because of this, we suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and so many other psychological pathologies that so-called primitive human beings do not. And what’s his solution? His solution is to destroy all modern technology and return ourselves to a more primitive condition, to crash out of the modern world. What he envisions is a group of anti-tech revolutionaries sabotaging the electric grid, blowing up the gas pipelines, and attacking the nervous system, so to speak, of modern society. He wanted to plunge us back into, if not the Stone Age, then something like small-scale agriculture and a shepherd society. How was this manifesto received in the ’90s when it was published by the Washington Post and delivered to front porches around the country? And how has his reputation changed over time? Well, there was a lot of debate about it. Many journalists treated Kaczynski as a serious intellectual, and many members of the public, in letters to the editor and on talk radio shows, hailed him as a folk hero. He was often described as a modern-day Thoreau. His warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people.Kaczynski fell out of fashion from the late ’90s until the early 2010s. But then he was rediscovered as concerns about climate change, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of digital immersion became so much more salient. And his warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people. So there’s been a Unabomber revival. Who are the types of people who are glomming on to this manifesto? During the Unabomber mania of the mid-1990s, Kaczynski gained a following on the radical left, especially among green anarchists. But he’s returned to cultural prominence with the opposite political valence. Today he’s seen more as a figure of the right. As you may have noticed, he spends the first 3,000 words of his manifesto railing against leftism.And in the context of the culture war in the 2010s, conservatives rediscovered and rehabilitated him and co-opted him onto their side in the culture war. So Kaczynski has now been appropriated by neo-Nazis, eco-fascists, far-right accelerationists, a rag bag of people on the right who are drawn to his critique of leftism. Which is so interesting because Luigi Mangione has been hailed as something of a hero on the left, right? How is it that Kaczynski appeals to a figure like Mangione but also neo-Nazis? What makes Kaczynski appealing to so many different sorts of radicals is that he defies easy categorization. And this makes his ideology like an à la carte menu of ideas. For instance, green anarchists were enthralled with his critique of technology while neo-Nazis, generally speaking, ignore the critique of technology and focus solely on the critique of leftism. Does Kaczynski ever show any remorse for murder?No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t show any remorse for the people he killed and his bombings. He says they’re not innocent. At one point, he says the people who are responsible for the advancement of technology are worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler. What they’re doing to humanity is even more grotesque, he says. But he does acknowledge that his anti-tech revolution would kill millions if not billions of people. This is an extremely apocalyptic vision.Many people accept his argument up until the point where he suggests that we should blow up the electric grid and knock ourselves back to the Stone Age. In other words, many people accept parts of his diagnosis of the problems with the modern world. But they’re completely unwilling to take his prescription seriously.Do you think the ideas in Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto will stand the test of time?I think the points about evolutionary mismatch will stand the test of time and will become increasingly appealing to a new generation of radicals. The parts about intelligent machines look especially prophetic in our current moment. In the ’90s, he looked like a one-off. He could easily be dismissed as an isolated crank, with a sort of idiosyncratic ideology. But in the 2020s, it looks like the world’s caught up with him. As concerns about the negative consequences of modern technology become especially acute, I think it will become increasingly likely that others will follow in Kaczynski’s footsteps. See More:

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:Lately, in order to help with my mental health, I’ve been avoiding news about the current political situation, and it’s been really helping. I haven’t totally buried my head in the sand; I still get some info from others and the stuff that leaks into my social media (which I’ve also been using less) and stuff like John Oliver, but overall, I haven’t been giving it all much thought, and focusing on my hobbies and the people around me have seriously helped. But obviously I do feel a bit guilty about it. I see people constantly talking about how everyone needs to help as much as they can, about how apathy and resulting inaction is exactly what people in power want. I guess my dilemma is that question: By choosing to take a break, am I giving them exactly what they want? Part of me knows that I probably can’t help very effectively if my mental health is terrible, but another part of me knows that the world won’t pause with me.Dear Attention Overload,I think your question is fundamentally about attention. We usually think of attention as a cognitive resource, but it’s an ethical resource, too. In fact, you could say it’s the prerequisite for all ethical action. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil wrote. She argued that it’s only by deeply paying attention to others that we can develop the capacity to understand what it’s really like to be them. That allows us to feel compassion, and compassion drives us to action.Truly paying attention is incredibly hard, Weil says, because it requires you to see a suffering person not just as “a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.” In other words, you don’t get “the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself” — you have to recognize that you’re a vulnerable creature, too, and tragedy could befall you just as easily as it’s befallen the suffering person in front of you.So, when you “pay attention,” you really are paying something. You pay with your own sense of invulnerability. Engaging this way costs you dearly — that’s why it’s the “purest form of generosity.” Doing this is hard enough even in the best of circumstances. But nowadays, we live in an era when our capacity for attention is under attack. Modern technology has given us a glut of information, constantly streaming in from all over the world. There’s too much to pay attention to, so we live in an exhausted state of information overload. That’s even truer at a time when politicians intentionally “flood the zone” with a ceaseless flow of new initiatives.Plus, as I’ve written before, digital tech is designed to fragment our focus, which degrades our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately. Just think of all the times you’ve seen an article in your Facebook feed about anguished people desperate for help — starving children in Yemen, say — only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it.Have a question for this advice column?Fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com.The problem isn’t just that our attention is limited and fragmented — it’s also that we don’t know how to manage the attention we do have. As the tech ethicist James Williams writes, “the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information…but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.” Consider a game of Tetris, he says. The abundance of blocks raining down on your screen is not the problem — given enough time, you could figure out how to stack them. The problem is that they fall at an increasing speed. And at extreme speeds, your brain just can’t process very well. You start to panic. You lose control. It’s the same with a constant firehose of news. Being subjected to that torrent can leave you confused, disoriented, and ultimately just desperate to get away from the flood. So, more information isn’t always better. Instead of trying to take in as much info as possible, we should try to take in info in a way that serves the real goal: enhancing, or at least preserving, our capacity for moral attention. That’s why some thinkers nowadays talk about the importance of reclaiming “attentional sovereignty.” You need to be able to direct your attentional resources deliberately. If you strategically withdraw from an overwhelming information environment, that’s not necessarily a failure of civic duty. It can be an exercise of your agency that ultimately helps you engage with the news more meaningfully. But you’ve got to be intentional about how you do this. I’m all for limiting your news intake, but I’d encourage you to come up with a strategy and stick to it. Instead of a slightly haphazard approach — you mention “the stuff that leaks into my social media” — consider identifying one or two major news sites that you’ll check for ten minutes each day while having your morning coffee. You can also subscribe to a newsletter, like Vox’s The Logoff, that’s specifically designed to update you on the most important news of the day so you can tune out all the extra noise. It’s also important to consider not only how you’re going to withdraw attention from the news, but also what you’ll invest it in instead. You mention spending more time on hobbies and the people around you, which is great. But be careful not to cocoon yourself exclusively in the realm of the personal — a privilege many people don’t have. Though you shouldn’t engage with the political realm 24/7, you’re not totally exempt from it either. One valuable thing you can do is devote some time to training your moral attention. There are lots of ways to do that, from reading literature (as philosopher Martha Nussbaum recommends) to meditating (as the Buddhists recommend). I’ve personally benefited from both those techniques, but one thing I like about meditation is that you can do it in real time even while you’re reading the news. In other words, it doesn’t have to be only a thing you do instead of news consumption — it can be a practice that changes how you pay attention to the news.Even as a journalist, I find it hard to read the news because it’s painful to see stories of people suffering — I end up feeling what’s usually called “compassion fatigue.” But I’ve learned that’s actually a misnomer. It should really be called “empathy fatigue.” Compassion and empathy are not the same thing, even though we often conflate the concepts. Empathy is when you share the feelings of other people. If other people are feeling pain, you feel pain, too — literally.Not so with compassion, which is more about feeling warmth toward a suffering person and being motivated to help them. Practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier. In a study published in 2013 at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, researchers put volunteers in a brain scanner, showed them gruesome videos of people suffering, and asked them to empathize with the sufferers. The fMRI showed activated neural circuits centered around the insula in our cerebral cortex — exactly the circuits that get activated when we’re in pain ourselves.Compare that with what happened when the researchers took a different group of volunteers and gave them eight hours of training in compassion, then showed them the graphic videos. A totally different set of brain circuits lit up: those for love and warmth, the sort a parent feels for a child.When we feel empathy, we feel like we’re suffering, and that’s upsetting. Though empathy is useful for getting us to notice other people’s pain, it can ultimately cause us to tune out to help alleviate our own feelings of distress, and can even cause serious burnout.Amazingly, compassion — because it fosters positive feelings — actually attenuates the empathetic distress that can cause burnout, as neuroscientist Tania Singer has demonstrated in her lab. In other words, practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier. In fact, one fMRI study showed that in very experienced practitioners — think Tibetan yogis — compassion meditation that involves wishing for people to be free from suffering actually triggers activity in the brain’s motor centers, preparing the practitioners’ bodies to physically move in order to help whoever is suffering, even as they’re still lying in the brain scanner.So, how can you practice compassion while reading the news? A simple Tibetan Buddhist technique called Tonglen meditation trains you to be present with suffering instead of turning away from it. It’s a multistep process when done as a formal sitting meditation, but if you’re doing it after reading a news story, you can take just a few seconds to do the core practice. First, you let yourself come into contact with the pain of someone you see in the news. As you breathe in, imagine that you’re breathing in their pain. And as you breathe out, imagine that you’re sending them relief, warmth, compassion. That’s it. It doesn’t sound like much — and, on its own, it won’t help the suffering people you read about. But it’s a dress rehearsal for the mind. By doing this mental exercise, we’re training ourselves to stay present with someone’s suffering instead of resorting to “the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself,” as Weil put it. And we’re training our capacity for moral attention, so that we can then help others in real life.I hope you consume the news in moderation, and that when you do consume it, you try to do so while practicing compassion. With any luck, you’ll leave feeling like those Tibetan yogis in the brain scanner: energized to help others out in the world. Bonus: What I’m readingThere’s a poem that recently gave me some relief from my own news-induced anxiety. It’s this poem by Wendell Berry, and it’s about how to “come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”I enjoyed this piece in Psyche on “Why it’s possible to be optimistic in a world of bad news.” It explains Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s view that while ours is not a perfect world — it’s so full of suffering — it still might be the optimal world.This week’s question about news consumption prompted me to revisit the work of the 20th-century French philosophers Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, by listening to episodes about them on the Philosophy Bites podcast. They argued that the media feeds us simulations of reality, and actually makes us more disconnected from the world because we forget that we’re getting an imitation and not the real thing. Have a listen! You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Shortly after midnight early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court handed down a brief order forbidding the Trump administration from removing a group of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States without due process. The facts of this case, known as A.A.R.P. v. Trump, are uncertain and rapidly developing. Much of what we do know about the A.A.R.P. case comes from an emergency application filed by immigration lawyers at the ACLU late Friday night. According to that application, the government started moving Venezuelan immigrants around the United States to a detention facility in Texas, without offering much of an explanation about why it was doing so.Sometime on Friday, an unknown number of these immigrants — the ACLU claims “dozens or hundreds” — were allegedly given an English-language document, despite the fact that many of them only speak Spanish, indicating that they’ve been designated for removal from the country under the Alien Enemies Act. That law only permits the government to deport people during a time of war or military invasion, but President Donald Trump has claimed that it gives him the power to remove Venezuelans who, he alleges, are members of a criminal gang.Immigrants who were previously deported under this dubious legal justification were sent to a prison in El Salvador, which is known for widespread human rights abuses. Following those deportations, the Supreme Court ruled the government must give any immigrant whom Trump attempts to deport under this wartime statute “notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.” The ACLU lawyers argue the government is attempting to defy this order, claiming that the immigrants at the Texas facility were told that their “removals are imminent and will happen today” — a timeline that did not provide a real opportunity to challenge their removal. In a Friday hearing on the matter, the government did not give an exact timeline for deportations, but said it “reserve[d] the right” to deport the immigrants as soon as Saturday, and that the government was in compliance with the Supreme Court’s first order. Assuming that the facts in the ACLU’s application are correct, this rushed process, where immigrants are moved to a facility without explanation, given a last-minute notice that many of them do not understand, and then potentially sent to El Salvador before they have a meaningful opportunity to challenge that removal, does seem to violate the Supreme Court’s April 7 decision in Trump v. J.G.G. The Court’s late-night order in A.A.R.P. appears to be crafted to ensure that this notice and opportunity for a hearing mandated by J.G.G. actually takes place. It is just one paragraph and states that “the Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.” It also invites the Justice Department to respond to the ACLU’s application “as soon as possible.”Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the A.A.R.P. order. Though neither has explained why yet, the order says that a statement from Alito will come soon.Thus far, the Supreme Court has been extraordinarily tolerant of Trump’s efforts to evade judicial review through hypertechnical procedural arguments. Though the J.G.G. decision required the Trump administration to give these Venezuelan immigrants a hearing, for example, it also guaranteed that many — likely most — of those hearings would take place in Texas, which has some of the most right-wing federal judges in the country. Though it is just one order, Saturday’s post-midnight order suggests that the Court may no longer tolerate procedural shenanigans intended to evade meaningful judicial review. If the ACLU’s application is accurate, the Trump administration appears to have believed that it could comply with the Court’s decision in J.G.G. by giving men who are about to be deported a last-minute notice that many of them cannot even understand. Whether most of the justices choose to tolerate this kind of malicious half-compliance with their decisions will likely become clear in the coming days. The Court’s A.A.R.P. order suggests that they will not.Still, it remains to be seen how this case will play out once it is fully litigated. The post-midnight order is only temporary. And it leaves open all of the most important issues in this case, including whether Trump can rely on a wartime statute to deport people during peacetime.See More:

What should America’s immigration policy be? This might seem like an absurd question to ask in a year when our current immigration agenda involves sending hundreds of people — including some who came here legally and many with no criminal record — to a Salvadoran maximum security prison known for human rights abuses, revoking the visas of PhD candidates and researchers in the country over speeding tickets or missing customs forms, and killing our tourism industry with random imprisonments and harassment at the border. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.All the while, Vice President JD Vance posts on X that we cannot afford to worry about “due process.” Yes, he put a foundational constitutional right in scare quotes because of the necessity of deporting the alleged 20 million people who came to the US illegally under Joe Biden. Although these claims that Biden let in tens of millions of people are popular on the right, there are literally no credible estimates to suggest that 20 million immigrants, legal or not, entered under his tenure. Most credible estimates are that between 4 million and 6 million people entered the US illegally during the Biden administration, and 8 million total. In the face of all that, it feels futile to try to outline what our approach to immigration should be. Any immigration policy at all that obeys the Constitution would be an improvement over the current situation. Every single one of the things I mentioned above is wildly underwater in the polls, but voters still tend to support Trump’s handling of immigration overall. That suggests Democrats have a serious challenge: They need to communicate immigration policies to voters that are a clear break from Biden’s approach. His expansion of temporary protected status and the increase in asylum seekers didn’t move the needle in favor of the party.Now, the Trump administration has chosen to pursue a lawless, vindictive, court-defying campaign against every immigrant in the country — and it’s essential that the Democratic Party develop a coherent alternative that can actually win elections. While I can’t, of course, speak for the party, I wanted to take a shot over the next few weeks at articulating some of the policies I want to see on immigration. That way when the public turns on this administration’s campaign of destruction, there are some compelling alternatives on offer.What Biden got wrong on immigrationI am strongly in favor of immigration. Immigrants make America stronger — high-skilled immigrants working in tech and science and medicine as well as immigrants working in agriculture and construction, who serve essential roles in the US economy. Immigration is good for the people who come here, but it’s also good for the people already here. It benefits America to be more populous — a bigger country has more power on the world stage, which benefits Americans in trade agreements, consumer goods access, international policy, and much more. Immigrants to the US tend to assimilate effectively, immigrant crime rates are strikingly low, and immigrant kids overperform academically, all of which enriches us as a country. But immigration policy in a democracy requires a careful balance. The public is generally supportive of immigration under some circumstances but fiercely opposed to it under others. Most legal immigration programs are individually popular, as are some paths to legal status for people who have been here illegally for a long time. But public opinion ricochets back and forth on immigration far more than on other contentious issues like abortion. When Biden’s term started, only 28 percent of Americans wanted immigration to decrease. By mid-2024, 55 percent did. And they cared a lot about it: Immigration routinely appeared near the top of reasons people voted Republican and is still the issue where Trump’s polling is best. Biden adopted policies that resulted in a lot more people coming to the US illegally or with temporary status than any previous governments. There were, of course, factors outside his control; the economy and conditions in Central America dramatically affected immigrant flows. But policy mattered, too.And the way the Biden administration responded to the surge of people at the border rapidly turned Americans against immigration and against Biden and Democrats. It even contributed to Trump’s return to power. Biden realized this and cracked down at the border in 2024, but belatedly. Neither his initial expansion of immigration nor the subsequent crackdown involved much in the way of making the case to Americans for the policies he was pursuing or explaining to skeptical voters why they would benefit. The Biden administration’s unilateral, executive order-driven approach to immigration turned out to be a terrible mistake. For one thing, immigrants need stability and long-term assurance that they’ll be allowed to stay in the country, and any policy implemented by executive order can later be reversed by executive order, throwing lives into chaos. “Failure to secure the border is a gift to immigration restrictionists,” Derek Thompson at The Atlantic warned last year. Immigration is crucial to our country, and voters are open to it — but they have to believe it’s being done well.It’s not entirely Biden’s fault that he couldn’t get a process through Congress. Both parties have called for comprehensive immigration reform for decades but are happy enough to kick the can down the road, and Trump opposed the bipartisan bill that did come up during Biden’s term. Congress isn’t doing its job, but the president still shouldn’t have tried to route around them.There’s at long last a chance that the absurd abuses of the present moment will persuade Congress to stop putting it off and genuinely reform immigration. If that happens, what should we hope it will look like?My hopes for a post-Trump policyThe first thing we need is a full re-embrace of international students. It is a very good thing that people from all over the world want to come to America to learn. It’s a source of income for American universities, businesses, and communities; it is a chance for Americans to meet, learn from, learn with, and share our culture with people from very different backgrounds than our own. And many of them stay and go on to become very successful in America and innovate crucial technologies, as my colleague Bryan Walsh explained earlier this month. As part of embracing students, Congress should pass explicit free speech protections for visa holders, taking away the secretary of state’s power to kick a student out of the country for writing an op-ed. (I think those deportations are likely to be found unconstitutional, but a new set of formal legal protections for student visa holders will be a good way to shut the door on that chapter.) While we’re at it, we should also reinforce existing laws and, where necessary, add new ones to protect against other Trump abuses: The government should not have the right to send anyone to prison indefinitely without trial — whether the person is a US citizen or not and whether the prison is in the US or not — and Border Patrol should need a warrant to seize and read our phones. The second component of a better immigration policy is to expand and improve our pipeline of workers. There’s a deep shelf of good proposals to improve the H-1B visa program, which brings talented people who are crucial hires for the US. Right now, the program works by a lottery, so that everyone who is eligible submits an application for an H-1B and only some get one — with no relationship between who we need most and who we get. Advocates for better immigration processes have been begging us to fix this for a long time. We should also modestly expand the number of H-1Bs we offer, which would be a win for applicants, the companies that want to hire them, and taxpayers who benefit from the taxes that people pay and the value they create when they move here. It should also be easier for the spouses of people on H-1B visas to work in the US, and we should end the country-specific green card process rules that force immigrants from India and China to wait much longer to become permanent residents and citizens than immigrants from anywhere else. And while skilled workers are the most clear-cut win, we should improve the pipelines for all workers. People do not only make America wealthier and better off by coming here if they are going to be a software engineer. We also benefit from the hard work of immigrants in manual labor. The reliance on illegal immigrants in our construction and agriculture industries is, frankly, something to be ashamed of. If we want someone’s labor, we should provide a legal pathway for it. (Again, none of these are new ideas or even partisan ideas. They’re just ideas I think are worth spotlighting as we try to offer a positive vision on immigration.) Historically, the grand bargain imagined in an immigration deal would be a marriage of these proposals to welcome more people to America (which Democrats support) with a step up in border security and enforcement (which Republicans support). In a future newsletter, I’ll argue that whether or not there’s bipartisan compromise on the table, we have to pursue immigration policy with an eye to both parts of that picture — or we get neither.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Top officials within the Justice Department, the State Department, and possibly even the White House may be barrelling toward a criminal conviction for contempt of court. It is far from clear, however, whether anything will happen to them even if they are convicted.On Wednesday, Chief Judge James Boasberg determined that he has “probable cause” to conclude that the Trump administration officials who defied one of his orders — which required the administration to halt deportations under an illegal order invoking a wartime statute — should be held in contempt of court. (Contempt is a process used to punish people who violate court orders, sometimes with imprisonment.)Boasberg’s order concludes that, unless the government provides due process to the people who were deported by allowing them to challenge their deportation in federal court, he will identify the officials responsible for this defiance and subject them to a criminal trial.Boasberg’s original order halting these deportations was eventually vacated by five of the Supreme Court’s Republican justices, who argued that the plaintiffs in that case brought their lawsuit in the wrong court. But, as the Supreme Court said in United States v. United Mine Workers (1947), “a defendant may be punished for criminal contempt for disobedience of an order later set aside on appeal.”As Boasberg lays out in his Wednesday opinion, the Trump administration defied his original order by flying many individuals to El Salvador and turning them over to Salvadorian officials, who placed them in a notorious prison, even after Boasberg ordered these deportations to be halted and any planes that were still on their way to El Salvador to be turned around.It’s unlikely that Boasberg will be the last judge to consider contempt charges against this administration. Judge Paula Xinis, the judge overseeing the high-profile case about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador in defiance of a court order, appears to be laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against Trump officials.But even if Boasberg or Xinis are able to identify who is responsible for the government’s defiance of court orders -- itself an uncertain proposition because the Trump administration is unlikely to cooperate with any investigation into its internal decision-making -- it is not at all certain that any Trump official will face any consequences for their actions, at least so long as Trump is president.In a famous essay on the courts, Alexander Hamilton argued that the judiciary “will always be the least dangerous” of the three branches of the federal government, because it “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” When someone violates a federal court order, that order is typically enforced by the US Marshals Service, which is a law enforcement agency housed in the Justice Department. Trump could potentially order the DOJ not to enforce any decision handed down by Boasberg or Xinis.Similarly, while federal law provides that federal courts have the “power to punish by fine or imprisonment” anyone who disobeys their orders, fines are collected by Executive Branch officials and paid to the US Treasury, which is also part of the Executive Branch. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is part of the Justice Department, which, again, is part of the Executive Branch. The head of the Executive Branch of the federal government is Donald Trump.Significantly, Boasberg points to a provision of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which requires him to “appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt” if the Trump administration refuses to prosecute its own officials. Even if Trump’s Justice Department tries to sabotage this proceeding by refusing to prosecute, the trial could still happen with a court-appointed lawyer sitting in the prosecutor’s chair. However, any enforcement of a verdict would likely be impossible.Indeed, a federal appeals court just signaled that it is very much aware of the danger that Trump will thwart any attempt by the judiciary to bring his administration into compliance with the law. On Thursday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected the Trump administration’s request to cut off many of the proceedings in Xinis’s courtroom. “We shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” a decision that mostly favored Abrego Garcia, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in that opinion.But Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee who Republican President George W. Bush considered appointing to the Supreme Court, also ended his opinion with a warning that the Executive and the Judiciary “come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.” In a battle between the Executive and Judicial branches, Trump, Wilkinson admitted, “may succeed for a time in weakening the courts.”Ultimately, if Trump or his subordinates are held accountable for their defiance of court orders, it will be because the courts -- or maybe Congress -- exercise their authority in ways that Trump cannot stop.The Constitution contemplates a pretty straightforward remedy against a lawless president: impeachment and removal from office. Realistically, however, it takes 67 votes in the Senate to remove Trump, and the Senate wasn’t even able to find 67 votes to disqualify Trump from office after he incited a violent mob to attack the US Capitol in 2021. So the likelihood of a successful impeachment seems vanishingly small.Another possibility is that, if Trump administration officials are convicted of contempt, they may be fined or imprisoned after Trump leaves office. The next president could potentially order law enforcement to carry out court orders that Trump defied, although it remains to be seen whether the possibility of future fines or imprisonment has any impact on Trump officials’ behavior.Additionally, federal courts have full authority over which lawyers are admitted to practice before them. So, to the extent that the lawyers representing the Trump administration in Boasberg or Xinis’s courtrooms were involved in the decisions to defy court orders, they could be disbarred in Boasberg or Xinis’s courts. The judges could also refer them to their state bar, which could strip them of their license to practice law altogether.This sanction has been used effectively against some lawyers who enabled wrongdoing by Trump. A California State Bar Court, for example, recommended that John Eastman, a former Trump lawyer who assisted Trump’s failed efforts to overturn former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, be disbarred. Because of that recommendation, Eastman cannot practice law in California while the state supreme court decides whether to permanently disbar him.That said, it’s not yet clear whether any of the officials responsible for the illegal deportations are lawyers, much less lawyers who have appeared in Boasberg or Xinis’s courtrooms. Some of the lawyers representing the government in these cases, moreover, appear to have acted honorably. In an early proceeding in Abrego Garcia’s case, for example, Xinis asked the government’s lawyer why the government cannot return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States. The lawyer’s response was “the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question. I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory.”So, while disbarment might allow the courts to reach some officials who may have played some role in the Trump administration’s defiance of court orders, it’s unlikely to provide a complete remedy.One other chaos factor hanging over Boasberg and Xinis is the Supreme Court itself. This is, after all, the same Supreme Court that recently held that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. So there’s no guarantee that the justices won’t sabotage any contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials.See More:

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: Today I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s escalating fight with the judicial branch over a wrongful deportation, after appellate judges — the last stop before the Supreme Court — issued a stark warning about the peril of defying court orders.What’s the context? Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was sent to a Salvadorian prison last month despite a court order barring his deportation, a move the Trump administration concedes was an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court last week unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that the administration must “facilitate” his return to the US.The administration has not complied, instead arguing that the courts can’t compel President Donald Trump to ask El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia. (El Salvador’s president said this week that he won’t send him back unsolicited.) But a lower court judge rejected that rationale and ordered officials to provide answers on what’s being done to comply with the court — an order the administration appealed.What’s the latest? An appeals court on Thursday slapped down the administration’s attempt to get out of providing more information about its efforts to bring back Abrego Garcia. The administration’s claims in the case, the judges wrote, “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”What’s next? The administration could appeal the case again, this time to the Supreme Court, which could clarify what exactly the administration is compelled to do for Abrego Garcia. What’s the big picture? The latest ruling makes clear that, absent the Supreme Court changing course, the administration has two choices: It can do more to bring Abrego Garcia back, or it can continue to defy court orders. It’s pretty clear where we’re headed: The White House posted on X today that Abrego Garcia is “never coming back.”And with that, it’s time to log off…Just a quick reminder that “logging off” doesn’t mean tuning out the world or giving up on it. It means being intentional about where you put your focus, time, and energy — and not surrendering all of those to an eye-glazing doomscroll. I’ve been doing too much of the latter lately, so here’s a short poem, “Hummingbirds,” that I hope can help us all make the best of our time. Thanks for reading. See you back here next week.See More:

J.K. Rowling’s supporters frequently claim the author has never actually said or done anything transphobic. It’s a position you can see on social media, in the pages of the New York Times, and even on a 2023 podcast with Rowling herself.It’s also an easily debunked lie.Some of this confusion around Rowling’s opinions can be cleared up with a definition of transphobia, which doesn’t — despite the “phobia” — solely mean fear of trans people, but, per Merriam-Webster, also an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against transgender people.” (In fact, Merriam-Webster’s own examples list cites multiple articles related to Rowling.) Rowling can say she likes everyone, but she has displayed that prejudice time and again. She’s also peddled explicit fear of trans people, particularly trans women, insisting they’re an inherently dangerous threat to cisgender women. Although some in the media distort the anger directed at Rowling from trans activists, trans people, and allies, the truth is those feelings — not just anger, but betrayal and grief — are justified. Rowling has made her antagonistic position on trans issues clear through tweets, sound bites, actions, and even a 3,600-word blog post. By 2025, her transphobia has become so rampant and constant that it’s difficult to build a completely comprehensive timeline of it. For those attuned to it, she doesn’t have to spell it out every single time; it’s a huge part of her identity.These dog whistles only lead to more confusion, allowing people to point to the absence of immediately obvious bigotry to claim she’s being unfairly maligned. Over time, however, that bigotry has not only grown more pronounced but also broader in scope, leading her to recently target not only trans people but also asexual people. Additionally, she increasingly threatens detractors with legal action, which contributes to critics of her behavior falling silent. Conspicuously, many of her legal threats appear to be directed at individuals identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community.Since Rowling began airing her views, her community, especially online where many of these conversations are had, is now stacked with similarly minded people who share her transphobic beliefs. For instance, Rowling is friends with numerous anti-trans activists, including Helen Joyce, who’s made alarmingly transphobic statements calling for a “reduction” in the number of trans people. She’s tweeted public support for anti-gay, anti-trans activist Caroline Farrow. These connections are part of a social network echo chamber of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs (sometimes called “radfems” or the “gender-critical” movement). In Rowling’s native UK, TERFism has gained a unique stronghold over some particularly vocal, ostensibly liberal feminists like Rowling. Her strident transphobia has also led her to align herself with far-right extremists.The facts we can easily point to suggest that Rowling has been turning toward an anti-trans stance over a long period, beginning mostly with simple engagement on social media and leading to fiery and extremist statements. While labeling something transphobic is a serious accusation, and not something we do lightly, it’s important to recognize Rowling’s bigotry for what it is. The rundown that follows shows her growing embrace of transphobic, even extremist rhetoric.2014: Rowling writes The Silkworm, the second novel in the Cormoran Strike mystery series, which involves a trans woman who is portrayed as conspicuous and unable to pass. The book includes a scene where the main character gleefully threatens this character with prison rape.October 2017: Rowling “likes” a tweet linking to a controversial, since-deleted Medium article referring to a theoretical trans woman in a female space as “a stranger with a penis.” While liking a tweet might seem small, this is notable because the piece made the basic argument Rowling continues to make today, namely that trans women are by default part of a “male-bodied” group who are dangerous to women and who should not have access to women’s bathrooms. In the public sphere, this kicks off questions about whether Rowling is anti-trans, which are followed by the author entrenching further.​​2018: In March, Rowling “likes” (and then unlikes) a tweet referring to trans women as “men in dresses” and implying that trans rights are “misogyny.” A JKR spokesperson later claims that this “like” was an accident and that Rowling was having “a middle-aged moment.” In September, Rowling “likes” a tweet linking to an opinion column by known TERF Janice Turner, which argues yet again that trans women are inherently sexual predators, referring to them as “fox[es] in a henhouse ... identify[ing] as [hens].” The myth that trans women are a danger to cis women is a grossly transphobic stereotype with almost no real-world justification, but Rowling pins most of her anti-trans arguments on it, using her experience as a survivor of domestic abuse to justify her prejudice. December 2019: In a shift toward openly voicing her anti-trans sentiments, Rowling vocally supports the plaintiff of an employment discrimination suit in the UK. Maya Forstater became a cause célèbre in the TERF community after suing the company that chose not to renew her contract. In 2018, Forstater posted numerous anti-trans tweets, both generalizing about trans people and directly targeting one nonbinary person. The tweets made staff members at her company uncomfortable, and ultimately, in March 2019, the organization declined to renew Forstater’s contract. Rowling’s tweet, in which she distorts trans identity and the facts of the case, marks the first time many people become aware of her growing transphobic tendencies. June 2020: In a tweet, Rowling mocks the trans-inclusive phrase “people who menstruate” in an article about pandemic menstrual health, implying that the phrase, meant to encompass trans men and nonbinary people, erases, overrides, or obscures the word “women.”In a follow-up to the previous tweet and the backlash it spawned, Rowling posts a thread implying that trans activists are “erasing the concept of [biological] sex” and along with it “the lived reality of women.” She also states, “I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans.” (To date, she has not.)Days later, Rowling produces her most overt and lengthy discussion of her views, a 3,600-word manifesto published on her website responding to “the new trans activism.” The post is replete with myths and false transphobic stereotypes, particularly revolving around the narratives that gender and biology are inextricable and that trans women are dangerous. Rowling states the movement offers “cover to predators”. She also repeatedly amplifies the alarmist, false idea that teens are transitioning as part of a social media trend, a claim based on a handful of inaccurate and shady scientific studies claiming that an outsize number of trans teens will detransition later, studies that have since been widely debunked. August 2020: After the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization issues a statement repudiating her transphobia, Rowling doubles down on her position and returns an award given to her by the org in 2019.September 2020: Rowling releases the Cormoran Strike book Troubled Blood and is widely criticized after she creates a villain who preys on women by wearing women’s clothes. This is exactly the specter of a sexual predator that Rowling believes hides behind the label of “trans woman.” Trans rights banners call out J.K. Rowling during anti-government protests in Bangkok, Thailand. Lauren DeCicca/Getty ImagesDecember 2020: In an interview with Good Housekeeping, Rowling claims that “90 percent” of Harry Potter fans secretly agree with her anti-trans views, but that “many are afraid to speak up because they fear for their jobs and even for their personal safety.” This once again stereotypes trans activists as an angry, entitled, and vicious mob.July 2021: Rowling tweets a screenshot of a tiny account — reportedly with around 200 followers at the time — of a self-identified trans user who mentions her in a tweet discussing gender identity. Since Rowling did not remove the trans user’s information in the screenshot that went out to her 14 million followers, that user is subsequently inundated with transphobic harassment and ultimately deletes their Twitter account. November 2021: Rowling publicizes that a group of three trans people shared a photo of themselves holding protest signs outside of her house, saying that she had called the police out of alarm (a fact Scottish police also verified). Rowling claims that these protesters had “doxxed” her, and the media runs with this report, which plays into the larger evolving media narrative of Rowling as a victim of trans harassment. But as many people have pointed out, Rowling’s address is publicly known — so well-known, in fact, that it is a frequent fan tour stop. Police later officially state there is “no criminality” in what the trans protesters had done. As trans culture vlogger Jessie Earl points out, trans people themselves are at much higher risk of experiencing doxxing, bullying, and harassment than cisgender people. Earl also notes that Rowling has supported and platformed (through Twitter likes, follows, and retweets) multiple TERFs who had themselves doxxed other people, including Marion Millar, who faced criminal charges for homophobically doxxing a police officer (though those charges were dropped pending review); Rosie Duffield, an MP who drew criticism for “publicly outing” a staff member who resigned over her transphobia; and Rosa Freedman, a professor who doxxed a student who emailed her requesting a chat about her views on trans equality. “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”December 2021: Rowling shares a Sunday Times article that mocks the Scottish police for recognizing transgender identity. In her tweet, she parodies 1984, writing, “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”Later that month, in the middle of a thread ostensibly attempting to support trans equality, Rowling tweets, “The question at the heart of this debate is whether sex or gender identity should form the basis of decisions on safeguarding, provision of services, sporting categories and other areas where women and girls currently have legal rights and protections.” The idea behind what Rowling is saying is that allowing trans women equal access to those spaces will erode current legal rights for cisgender women and girls. This is a position that only makes sense if you are denying that trans women and girls are women and girls. Rowling then adds an insistence on separating “sex” from “gender,” an essentialist idea that contradicts current medical practice and scientific research, which advocates for treating gender identity as linked primarily to the brain, not anatomy. March 2022: In response to a since-deleted tweet (which was itself a reply to a tweet in which Rowling implied trans women were “predators”), Rowling tweets about a sexual assault committed by a trans woman, using this single incident to imply that all trans women should be denied access to public spaces designated for women.The next day, on International Women’s Day, Rowling posts a series of tweets maligning gender-inclusive language and mockingly referencing Voldemort by sarcastically opining that the day in future would be known as “She Who Must Not Be Named Day.” She also explicitly criticizes gender-inclusive legislation.Later that month, British lawyer Alison Bailey partially wins an employment discrimination lawsuit in which she claimed that she was discriminated against because of her gender-essentialist views. While the lawsuit was in progress, Rowling posted a tweet urging her followers to financially support Bailey. August 2022: Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike book, The Ink Black Heart, once again comes under fire for transphobia because of its depiction of a character broadly viewable as a satirical stand-in for Rowling herself — an anti-trans public figure who is “canceled” by the internet on trumped-up charges of transphobia and then killed.December 2022: Rowling screencaps a thread about the controversial new Hogwarts Legacy video game by the aforementioned popular transgender YouTuber Jessie Earl, aka Jessie Gender. Earl points out that supporting the franchise would “justify her continued targeting of trans people”; Rowling, in response, sarcastically accuses Earl of practicing “purethink,” implying trans advocacy is a type of religious dogma. An onslaught of transphobic social media harassment targeting Earl follows.This month, Rowling also personally funds a new domestic violence support center in Edinburgh, Scotland, which explicitly excludes trans women; Rowling frames this new center as offering “women-centered and women-delivered care.” Edinburgh’s longstanding domestic violence support center has had a trans woman as its director since 2021. Trans women, in particular women of color, are at a vastly higher risk of experiencing domestic violence and sexual assault than cisgender women.January 2023: Rowling posts that she is “Deeply amused by those telling me I’ve lost their admiration due to the disrespect I show violent, duplicitous rapists.” The most immediate context for this comment is presumably both the backlash to Hogwarts Legacy and the ongoing backlash over Rowling’s views writ large regarding trans women being dangerous predators. So a reasonable implication of Rowling’s words seems to be that she considers trans women, by default, to be “violent, duplicitous rapists.”March 2023: A new podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, produced by Bari Weiss’s the Free Press and hosted by prominent former Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper, featured interviews with Rowling. In its fifth episode, Rowling begins discussing the modern trans rights movement, calling it “a cultural movement that was illiberal in its methods and questionable in its ideas” and insisting, “I believe, absolutely, that there is something dangerous about this movement and that it must be challenged.”She then compares the movement to Death Eaters — the villainous supremacists in her books, analogous to Nazis:[S]ome of you have not understood the books. The Death Eaters claimed, “We have been made to live in secret, and now is our time, and any who stand in our way must be destroyed. If you disagree with us, you must die.” They demonized and dehumanized those who were not like them.I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement, that has gained huge purchase in very influential areas of society. I do not see this particular movement as either benign or powerless, so I’m afraid I stand with the women who are fighting to be heard against threats of loss of livelihood and threats to their safety.While Rowling can say she only intends to target the specific trans activists who are angry at her, that’s an impossible distinction. She does not mention any formal group or entity that represents trans rights that has acted against her. The only context we have for what she is responding to are non-affiliated individuals on Twitter sending angry messages in response to her transphobic comments. Indeed, the episode is titled “The Tweets” and features Phelps-Roper reading angry and sad tweets from former fans of Rowling. This generalization doesn’t distinguish “the movement” from people who are simply angry and upset with Rowling. Instead, it seems to imply that “good” trans people are the ones who accept Rowling’s version of their identity and allow her viewpoint — that they aren’t who they say they are — to dominate their fight for social acceptance.Trans people are estimated to comprise about half a percent of populations in both the US and the UK. A 2018 study from UCLA found no evidence to support that anti-trans legislation makes designated public spaces safer, but did find that “reports of privacy and safety violations in these places are exceedingly rare.” In essence, there was no danger to begin with.February 2024: Rowling donated 70,000 pounds (about $90,000) to an anti-trans Scottish political lobby campaigning to restrict the Scottish government’s definition of “women” to cisgender women only.March 2024: On March 13, Rowling appears to deny on X (formerly Twitter) that trans people were targeted during the Holocaust. This all started when Rowling reposted a post by James Esses about having been “canceled.” Esses is a blogger and former student who was fired from his counseling job and expelled from his therapy degree program for his anti-trans campaigning.Esses’s post claimed he was fired for opposing the use of puberty blockers for trans children. In the threads of Esses’s post, in response to one of his supporters but also copying both Esses and Rowling, a user responded with, “The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research, why are you so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender?”Rowling then takes this post and screencaps it, asking, “I just… how? How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?”The literal burning by Nazis of books and research from Berlin’s pioneering Institute for Sexual Research, which conducted the world’s first gender-affirming surgeries for trans people, was captured in German newsreels at the time and has been well-documented since, including by the UK’s own Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Calling this very well-sourced history a “fever dream” quickly drew significant backlash from X users, with many framing it as a form of Holocaust denial. When challenged on her claim with multiple sources by Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo, Rowling first responds that the original post had made claims it didn’t say: that the Nazis burnt all research on trans health care, and that trans people were the first victims of the Nazis.Rowling then doubles down on X by quote tweeting another tweet claiming trans people were not targets of the Nazis during the Holocaust. In her quote, Rowling frames the verified history of Nazi violence toward trans people as “persistent claims.” She then, again in response to Caraballo’s pushback in reply, attempts to separate “trans-identifying people” from “gay people, who were indeed victims of heinous treatment by the Nazis.”Caraballo’s reply, which cited sources including Scientific American, and a thorough accounting by a historian about the ways trans people faced persecution under Nazi Germany, did not receive a rejoinder from Rowling. April 2024: On April 1, 2024, Rowling posted a thread on X pegged to the implementation of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which added “threatening or abusive behaviour which is intended to stir up hatred” around a number of identities, including age, religion, and transgender identity to the hate crimes statute; the law does not, somewhat controversially, include hatred of women. In her posts, Rowling spotlit a number of women, from a handful of convicted or reported sex offenders to UN appointees Katie Neeves and Munroe Bergdorf as well as Mridul Wadhwa, head of a Scottish rape crisis center. All of the women Rowling listed are reportedly trans — leading the author to write, “Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.” Rowling ended the thread with the hashtag #ArrestMe.May 2024: As part of an X discussion that began with Rowling deliberately misgendering a trans soccer manager, she doubled down in response to criticism, both by claiming that trans women are “crossdressing straight men” and by comparing trans identity to cultural appropriation.“Do I get to be black if I like Motown and fancy myself in cornrows?” she wrote. “What if I claim the authentic me has always been black and that you’re being racist to me? Would that be OK, or would you find it ludicrous and deeply offensive?” She did not respond to the many platform users who replied to address her use of racist stereotypes or to point out that race, unlike gender, is a genetic identity.August 2024: Rowling contributed to ongoing harassment of and attacks on Olympics boxer Imane Khelif, who was one of two female boxers disqualified by the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA) from the 2023 World Championships after an unspecified biochemical test. The test detected elevated levels of testosterone in Khelif’s system; while the specific reason for this result is unconfirmed, cis women can have elevated testosterone levels due to natural differences in sex characteristics. Although Khelif is a woman and was assigned female at birth, many extremists have used this vague test result to attack her with transphobic rhetoric, accusing her of being a man in disguise.Both Khelif and the other IBA-disqualified athlete, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, qualified under the International Olympic Committee guidelines and were approved to compete in the Olympics. But following a dramatic match on August 1, in which Khelif’s opponent Angela Carini of Italy forfeited in under a minute after exchanging just a few hits, Khelif once again came under scrutiny from transphobes on the suspicion of secretly being a man. Among the transphobic commentary she faced was vitriol from J.K. Rowling, who tweeted a photo of Khelif looking at Carini after Carini abruptly retired.Carini, shown in tears in the photo after withdrawing as Khelif looks on, refused to shake Khelif’s hand after the match, which may have contributed to the belief she had been unfairly treated in the ring. She later said to the BBC, however, that she wished to apologize to Khelif for not shaking her hand — an act Carini explained came from anger at herself, not Khelif.Rowling, however, saw things much differently. In her tweet, she framed the photo as a misogynistic assault, writing, “The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered. #Paris2024”Again, Khelif was born female and has always been a cisgender woman. Rowling seems to be arguing that any hormone-related variance at all among women — despite the millions of women who have hormone imbalances — is enough to render them inauthentic or not “real” women. It’s an alarming development in her ongoing shift into extreme transphobic views.It’s also deeply ironic. One of the points Rowling first made in her lengthy 2020 manifesto was about the need for cisgender women not to feel limited by the confines of normative gender expression. “In spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head,” she wrote, and later: “Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now.” Yet Rowling’s transphobia has progressed to such an extent that she has herself become a denigrator of a cisgender woman and a reinforcer of “compliant” femininity against Khelif.Khelif, who went on to win Olympic gold despite the harassment, reportedly filed a lawsuit alleging cyberbullying against Rowling (Elon Musk is also named in the suit). Shortly after the lawsuit became public on August 13, Rowling went silent on X, leading to speculation from many onlookers that she had pushed her transphobic narrative too far. On August 23, though, she again appeared on the platform, spreading more false and misleading commentary on Khelif. Her first post was a quote from a transphobic hit piece against Khelif by Colin Wright, the former managing editor of the far-right website Quillette. She then went on to repost another transphobic statement, this time criticizing a recent Australian court ruling that upheld the legal rights of trans women.April 2025: On April 16, 2025, the UK supreme court delivered a major ruling that explicitly denied trans women protection from discrimination on the basis of gender. The decision was prompted by a lawsuit brought by For Women Scotland; the transphobic group received a 70,000-pound ($93,000) donation from Rowling in 2024 to aid them in funding the suit. Two Scottish courts had rejected their arguments before the case was appealed to the highest court in the UK.The five-judge court ruled unanimously that the definition of “women” in the UK’s Equality Act applies only to “biological” women and does not include trans women, even if they have had their gender legally recognized. The ruling effectively sanctions the banning of trans women from many public spaces reserved for women, such as women’s locker rooms, hospitals, domestic violence shelters, and bathrooms; it could also lead other services intended for women to deny access to trans women. After the news broke, Rowling posted on X a picture of herself smoking a cigar outdoors and wrote, “I love it when a plan comes together.” The clear influence Rowling has had on the conversation around trans rights in the UK, as well as her direct monetary support of the lawsuit, has intensified calls from former fans to stop supporting Harry Potter-related projects.Clarification, March 3, 2023, 12:15 pm ET: Updated to clarify details of the character who is “canceled” in The Ink Black Heart.Clarification, March 16, 2023, 3:20 pm ET: Updated to clarify that Rowling’s remarks drew a comparison between the Death Eaters and the trans rights “movement,” rather than trans people.Update, April 18, 2025, 3:40 pm ET: This story, originally published March 3, 2023, has been updated several times, most recently with Rowling’s successful funding of a transphobic lawsuit to strip trans women of protection from gender-based discrimination under UK law.See More: