Favoring fossil fuels

Farmers in Trump Country Banked on Clean Energy Grants. Then Things Changed.

They remain in limbo as USDA demands grant rewrites favoring fossil fuels over renewables.

Mario Alejandro Ariza, Ames Alexander, Joe Engleman

The US Department of Agriculture announced late Tuesday it will release previously authorized grant funds to farmers and small rural business owners to build renewable energy projects—but only if they rewrite applications to comply with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities.

The move has left some farmers perplexed—and doubtful that they’ll ever get the grant money they were promised, given the Trump administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and hostility toward renewable energy.

Some of the roughly 6,000 grant applicants have already completed the solar, wind, or other energy projects and are awaiting promised repayment from the government. Others say they can’t afford to take on the projects they’d been planning unless the grant money comes through.

A Floodlight analysis shows the overwhelming majority of the intended recipients of this money reside in Trump country—congressional districts represented by Republicans.

After hearing of the USDA’s latest announcement Wednesday, Minnesota strawberry farmer Andy Petran said he suspects many previously approved projects won’t be funded. He’d been approved for a $39,625 grant to install solar panels on his farm. But like many other farmers nationally, Petran got word from the USDA earlier this year that his grant money had been put on hold.

“It’s not like any small farmer who is looking to put solar panels on their farms will be able to put a natural gas refinery or a coal refinery on the farm,” Petran said. “I don’t know what they expect me to switch to.”

Petran was counting on the benefits that solar power would bring to his farm.

After getting word in September that the USDA had approved his grant application, he expected the solar panels would not only reduce his electricity bill but allow him to sell power back to the grid. He and his wife figured the extra income would help expand their Twin Cities Berry Co. and pay down their debt more quickly.

Petran’s optimism was soon extinguished. A USDA representative told him earlier this year that the grant had been frozen.

His 15-acre farm about 40 miles north of Minneapolis operates on a razor-thin margin, Petran said, so without the grant money, he can’t afford to build the $80,000 solar project.

“Winning these grants was a contract between us and the government,” he said. “There was a level of trust there. That trust has been broken.”

In its announcement, issued Tuesday night, the USDA said grant recipients will have 30 days to review and revise their project plans to align with President Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Executive Order, which prioritizes fossil fuel production and cuts federal support for renewable energy projects.

“This process gives rural electric providers and small businesses the opportunity to refocus their projects on expanding American energy production while eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals,” the USDA news release said. “This updated guidance reflects a broader shift away from the Green New Deal.”

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the release that the new directive will give rural energy providers and small businesses a chance to “realign their projects” with Trump’s priorities.

It’s unclear what this will mean for grant recipients who’ve already spent money on renewable energy projects—or those whose planned projects have been stalled by the administration’s funding freeze.

The USDA didn’t directly answer those questions. In an email to Floodlight on Wednesday, a department spokesperson said the agency must approve any proposed changes to plans—but offered no specific guidance on what or whether changes should be made.

“Awardees that do not respond via the website will be considered as not wishing to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after 30 days,” the email said. “For awardees who respond via the website to confirm no changes, processing on their projects will resume immediately.”

The grant funding was put on hold after an executive order issued by President Trump on his first day in office. It froze hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy under President Joe Biden’s massive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The law added more than $1 billion to the USDA’s 17-year-old Rural Energy for America (REAP) program.

About 6,000 REAP grants funded with IRA money have been paused and are being reviewed for compliance with Trump’s executive order, according to a March 5 email from the USDA’s rural development office to the office of Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland).

A lawsuit filed earlier this month challenges the legality of the freeze on IRA funding for REAP projects.

Earthjustice lawyer Hana Vizcarra, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, called the latest USDA announcement a “disingenuous stunt.”

“President Trump and Secretary Rollins can’t change the rules of the game well into the second half,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “This is the definition of an arbitrary and capricious catch-22.”

Under the REAP grant program, farmers pay for renewable and lower carbon energy projects and then submit proof of the completed work to the USDA for reimbursement. The grants were intended to fund solar panels, wind turbines, grain dryers, irrigation upgrades, and other projects, USDA data shows.

At a press conference in Atlanta on March 12, Rollins said, “If our farmers and ranchers, especially, have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole.”

But some contend the administration is unfairly making farmers jump through more hoops.

“This isn’t cutting red tape; it’s adding more,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, a Midwest-based environmental advocacy group. “The USDA claims to deliver on commitments, but these new rules could result in awarded grants being permanently frozen.”

Rep. Chellie Pingree, a longtime farmer and Maine Democrat who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, said she thinks it’s illegal and unconstitutional for the administration to withhold grant money allocated by Congress. Beyond that, she said, it has hurt cash-strapped farmers.

“This is about farmers making ends meet,” she told Floodlight. “It’s not some ideological issue for us.”

Using USDA data, Floodlight identified the top 10 congressional districts that received the most grants. They’re all represented by Republicans who have said little publicly about the funding freezes affecting thousands of their constituents. It’s impossible to tell from the USDA data which REAP grants will get paid out.

The congressional district that received the most REAP grants was Iowa’s 2nd District, in the northeastern part of the state. Farmers and business owners there got more than 300 grants from 2023 through 2025. The district is represented by Rep. Ashley Hinson, who has previously voiced support for “alternative energy strategies.”

“More than half of the energy produced in Iowa is from renewable sources, and that is something for Iowans to be very proud of,” she told the House Appropriations Committee in June 2022.

Hinson’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the matter.

The number 2 spot for REAP grants: Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, represented by Rep. Brad Finstad. In that district, which spans southern Minnesota, more than 260 farmers and rural businesses were approved for REAP grants.

Finstad’s office did not return multiple emails and calls requesting comment. His constituents have been complaining about his silence on funding freezes. They’ve staged at least two demonstrations at his offices in Minnesota. Finstad said he held a February 26 telephone town hall joined by 3,000 people in his district.

In a Feruary 28 letter to a constituent, Finstad said Rollins has announced that the USDA will honor contracts already signed with farmers and that he looks forward to working with the administration “to support the needs of farm country.”

Finstad is no stranger to the REAP program. Before becoming a congressman, he was the USDA’s state director of rural development for Minnesota. In that role, he was a renewable booster.

“By reducing energy costs, renewable energy helps to create opportunities for improvement elsewhere, like creating jobs,” Finstad said in a 2021 USDA press release. That has since been deleted from the agency’s website.

Rollins, meanwhile, called herself “a massive defender of fossil fuels” at her confirmation hearing, and she has expressed skepticism about the findings of climate scientists. “We know the research of CO2 being a pollutant is just not valid,” Rollins said at the Heartland Institute’s 2018 conference on energy.

She has also said that she welcomes the efforts of Elon Musk and his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency team at the USDA.

Jake Rabe, a solar installer in Blairstown, Iowa, said he has put up more than 100,000 solar modules in the state since getting into the business in 2015. More than 30 of his customers have completed their installation but are awaiting frozen grant funding, he said. At least 10 more have signed the paperwork but are hesitant to begin construction. Millions of dollars worth of business is frozen, he said.

On top of that, Rabe said, the state’s net metering policies—in which solar users get credits for any excess power they send back to the grid—are set to expire in 2026.

“I kind of feel like it may be the beginning of the end for the solar industry in Iowa with what’s going on,” said Rabe, who owns Rabe Hardware.

Despite it all, he remains a Trump supporter.

“Under the current administration, I think we’re doing things that are necessary for the betterment of the entire United States,” he said.

On March 13, Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group, filed a federal lawsuit against the USDA on behalf of five farmers and three nonprofits. They’re seeking a court order to compel the Trump administration to honor the government’s grant commitments, saying it violated the Constitution by refusing to disburse funds allocated by Congress.

Vizcarra, the Earthjustice lawyer, said she is disturbed by the lack of concern from Congress, whose powers appear to have been usurped by the administration.

She added, “These are real people, real farmers, and real organizations whose projects have impacts on communities who are left with this horrible situation with no idea of when it will end.”

One of the plaintiffs, Laura Beth Resnick, grows dahlias, zinnias, and other cut flowers on a small farm about 30 miles north of Baltimore.

Florists are her customers, and demand for her flowers blooms during cold-weather holidays like Thanksgiving. Each of her three greenhouses is half the length of a football field, and heating them during those months isn’t cheap, Resnick said. The power bill for Butterbee Farm often exceeds $500 a month.

So a year ago, Resnick applied for a USDA renewable energy grant, hoping to put solar panels on her barn roof—a move that she estimated would save about $5,000 a year. In August, the USDA sent word that her farm had been awarded a grant for $36,450.

The cost of installing solar panels was $72,000, she said. So she paid a solar contractor $36,000 upfront, expecting that she’d pay the rest in January when the federal grant money came in. The solar panels were installed in December.

But the federal government’s check never arrived. A February 4 email from a USDA representative said her request for reimbursement was rejected due to the Trump administration’s recent executive orders. 

Resnick said she sought help from her elected representatives but got “pretty much nowhere.”

After hearing about the USDA’s announcement Wednesday, Resnick said that based on the response she’s previously gotten from the USDA, she’s not confident she will get her grant money.

“I’ve lost my trust in the USDA at this point,” she said. “Our project is complete, so we can’t change the scope of it.”

Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat, said he supports the legal fight against the funding freeze.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are scamming our farmers,” Van Hollen said in a statement to Floodlight. “By illegally withholding these reimbursements for work done under federal grants, they’re breaking a promise to farmers and small businesses in Maryland and across the country.”

Since 2023, when IRA funding became available, the USDA has given or loaned about $21.3 billion through programs to support renewable energy in rural areas, according to a Floodlight analysis of agency data, including the REAP program.

Those grant payments were processed until January 20, when the Trump administration announced its freeze.

Trump’s decision was in line with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint crafted by the Heritage Foundation aimed at reshaping the US government. That document called for repealing the IRA and rescinding “all funds not already spent by these programs.”

Environmental groups have sharply criticized the administration’s move, and several lawsuits are challenging the legality of the freeze of IRA funding.

At a recent public roundtable, Maggie Bruns, CEO of the Prairie Rivers Network which supports Illinois communities’ transition to clean energy, listed REAP grants that have been held up in Illinois, where her multifaceted environmental nonprofit is based. A $390,000 grant for a solar array at the grocery store in Carlinville; $27,000 for solar panels at an auto body shop in Staunton; $51,000 for a solar array for a golf course in Alton.

Since 2023, farmers and businesses in Illinois have been approved for more than 590 REAP grants, making the state the third highest in number of recipients in the United States, Floodlight’s analysis shows. In an interview with Barn Raiser, Bruns said the decision to freeze such grants has caused unneeded stress for farmers. Before the executive order, USDA’s rural development team had worked hard to bring dollars for renewable energy projects to Illinois farmers, she said.

“That’s the thing we should be celebrating right now,” Bruns said, “and instead we have to fight to make sure that money actually does land into the pockets of the people who have gone ahead, jumped through all these hoops, and are attempting to do the right thing for their businesses and their farms.”

In January, Dan Batson’s nursery in Mississippi was approved for a $400,367 REAP grant—money that he planned to use to install four solar arrays. He intended to use that solar energy to power the pumps that irrigate more than 1 million trees, a move that would have saved the company about $25,000 a year in electricity costs.

Seated in a wooded area about 30 miles north of Biloxi, his 42-year-old GreenForest nursery ships potted magnolias, hollies, crepe myrtles, and other trees to southern states. Until a couple of months ago, Batson had been excited about what the grant money would mean for the business.

But when he saw news about the funding being held up earlier this year, he called a local USDA representative who confirmed the funds had been frozen. Batson had already sent the solar contractor $240,000. Now, his plans are on hold.

“I just can’t do the project if I don’t get the money,” he said.

Tuesday’s announcement from the USDA makes him no more confident he’ll get the money, he said.

Batson said he’s a fiscal conservative so he understands the effort to cut costs. “But,” he said, “the way they’ve gone about it has disrupted a lot of business owners’ lives.”

Stalking More and More Students

Trump’s Secret Police Are Stalking More and More Students

Scholars targeted by ICE are suing to fight deportation—and halt Trump’s war on the First Amendment.

Sophie Hurwitz

On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus.

Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students.

At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him.

Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has targeted at least eight foreign academics in America for deportation, often sending officers to snatch them off the street or in their homes, retroactively changing what they’re charged with, and shipping them halfway across the country, far from their families lawyers—increasingly in apparent defiance of court orders against their rendition. Members of the commentariat like venture capitalist Paul Graham have mused that “the students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection.”

But experts and people close to the cases say it’s not random at all. The scholars in question are immigrant academics—Gambian, Palestinian, Korean, and Turkish—targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts, op-eds, and participation in last year’s campus-based opposition to the continuing slaughter in Gaza.

Momodou Taal knew this was coming for months. “Given my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target,” he told Mother Jones in January. But, Taal said in a recent Intercept podcast appearance, his personal stakes pale in comparison to those of Palestinians in Gaza, where the number of known dead has passed 50,000—as the US continues shipping bombs and warplanes to Israel, and as Israeli officials threaten a full-scale military takeover of the territory, “I know it’s a very frightening moment,” Taal said in that Intercept appearance, “but for me, this is the time to double down.”

Taal’s lawsuit, filed with fellow Cornell doctoral student Sriram Parasuram and Mukoma Wa Ngũgĩ, a Cornell literature professor, asserts that Trump’s late January executive orders cracking down on campus speech violate both Taal’s right to political expression and the rights of those around him to hear it. 

“It’s quite calculated and deliberate,” Taal told me on Thursday.

ICE agents, usually plainclothed and sometimes masked, are accosting students in the streets, using what even former House Rep. Ron Paul calls “Gestapo” tactics.

Trump’s executive orders conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, Taal said, have “clearly placed a target upon many people’s backs.” Taal recommends that students in his situation “lawyer up”—because the Trump administration, he said, is not acting alone: right-wing groups such as Canary Mission, an online doxxing platform that collects the personal information of anti-Zionist students and professors, have claimed credit for some students’ detentions.

Suing the president, Taal said, “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.” Yunseo Chung, a Korean undergraduate at Columbia University who has been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was seven years old, filed suit on Monday for a temporary restraining order to prevent her deportation. Her case went to court on the same day as Taal’s, and her order was quickly granted; Taal’s own request for a temporary restraining order was denied by a New Jersey judge a day after it was filed.

“I think the stakes in all these cases are the same,” said Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose lawyers are representing Taal. While each case has its nuances—some students have been detained, others have not; some are on green cards, others on visas—“what we’re seeing is an attack on the First Amendment rights of folks in this country to express themselves,” Ayoub said.

Chung’s suit accuses the Trump administration of a “larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,” and asserts that the federal government aims to “retaliate against and punish noncitizens like Ms. Chung for their participation in protests.” Taal’s asserts that Trump’s executive orders prohibit noncitizens from “engaging in constitutionally protected speech” that the Trump administration “may subjectively interpret as expressing a ‘hostile attitude” to its interests by deploying the threat of deportation.

That threat, Taal says, casts a frighteningly broad net. “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized,” Taal said Thursday.

Chung and Taal are now two of many. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian nationality, and a Columbia graduate student until December of last year, is also suing the president for the right to have his immigration case heard near his home in New York; he was arrested by ICE at his Manhattan residence on March 8 and, after initially being imprisoned in a New Jersey immigration detention facility, was remanded to an ICE “processing center” in Louisiana, where he is still being held. His fellow Columbia graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled the US for India on March 11 after ICE came knocking at her door. International students and professors Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Rasha Alawieh of Brown University in Rhode Island, Alireza Doroudi of the University of Alabama (who has not publicly engaged in pro-Palestine activism), and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University in Massachusetts have also been seized in the past two weeks.

Chilling footage of Ozturk’s arrest swept the internet Thursday: six masked individuals in civilian clothes surrounded the graduate student on a sidewalk in Somerville. 

“Hey ma’am,” one said, and grabbed Ozturk’s wrists. She screamed as several others surrounded her.

“Can I just call the police?” Ozturk asked in the surveillance video. “We are the police,” one masked, hooded person responded. They handcuffed her and dragged her away.

In a Thursday press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk’s abduction. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he told reporters Thursday. Ozturk’s “lunatic” behavior appears to consist only of co-authoring one student newspaper op-ed, exactly one year before she was detained, asking her university to acknowledge a student government resolution calling for divestment from Israel. She has not been charged with any offense, but was painted by Rubio as “a social activist that tears up our university campuses”—and was forcibly disappeared.

Rubio’s State Department, meanwhile, has issued new guidance calling for extensive screening of student visa applicants’ social media for any posts that “demonstrate a degree of approval” of what it calls “terrorist activity.”

Ayoub, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the recent spate of ICE abductions echoes the Nixon era: In 1972, the Nixon White House deployed an extensive surveillance program against Arab communities in the United States—scrutinizing the visa status of anyone who appeared to have an Arabic last name—ostensibly to screen out terrorists.

In practice, Ayoub said, the policy inevitably led to unjust detainments, deportations, and even disappearances: “A number of our community members just disappeared,” he said. “There was no social media, and nobody walked around with a cell phone. So people just disappeared, and you wouldn’t hear from them until six, seven months later.” More than 150,000 people were investigated.

“Before all of this started,” Ayoub said, “I was warning people that we will see the same: people just picked up and moved to a location where we’re not going to hear from them, because this is the practice of what happened before.”

Then, as now, he said, those in power were “banking on not everybody being upset, on people buying into the ‘threat to national security’ type of language.” But it’s no longer as easy for authorities to move in darkness; this time, people are organizing. The same day that footage of Ozturk’s arrest was released, more than one thousand people rallied on her behalf in Somerville, and protests in support of Mahmoud Khalil have been taking place across the country since his arrest almost three weeks ago.

The Trump administration, Ayoub said, is “betting on the idea that not many are going to come out and defend the students, or support the students, or defend their right to express their opinions in this country. But that, I think, is where they’re mistaken.”

Forced into institutional settings.

RFK Jr. Moves to Close Administration For Community Living

The shutdown, part of wider cuts, will mean “more people forced into institutional settings.”

Julia Métraux

On Thursday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services moved, through a department-wide restructuring order, to eliminate the Administration for Community Living (ACL), a subsidiary established in 2012 to support disabled and aging people—part of a broader series of cuts that will see the firing of some 10,000 HHS staff. HHS’ press release on the restructuring claims that ACL’s responsibilities will be redesignated elsewhere within the department, which has yet to issue further details or clarify its plans. An unknown number of the administration’s workers will also be laid off.

Jill Jacobs, a Biden-era commissioner of ACL’s Administration on Disabilities, was shocked to hear the news. “It’s not something that’s been on anyone’s radar, not a conversation that anyone’s been having,” said Jacobs, who is now the executive director of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities.

Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, believes that the move “shows that this administration is not committed to community living and the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

The decision by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s HHS is only the latest Trump administration action to bring harm to disabled people. Disability experts I spoke to expressed that the decision reflected a lack of awareness of the Administration for Community Living’s crucial role for disabled and aging Americans. That may not be surprising given the department’s current leadership; Kennedy mainly talks about disability in the context of conspiracy theories that vaccines cause autism in children. Now, disabled people worried about cuts to their Medicaid coverage will also have to worry whether the assistance they receive through independent living centers will continue.

“There’s nothing in here that explains how they are going to continue implementing these programs,” said Alison Barkoff, ACL’s acting administrator and assistant secretary for aging for most of the Biden administration. “Where exactly are they going to go? Who is the staff that’s going to implement them? Is this the first step in cutting further programs?”

A central part of ACL’s purpose has been oversight of state protection and advocacy agencies for disabled people, providing grants for approved independent living centers, support for employment programs for disabled people, and assistance with adult protective services—all with the goal of helping disabled and aging people live successfully within their communities, rather than in institutions.

“The real concern,” Barkoff says, “is that if ACL and its programs are spread across the [HHS] department, we will see more people forced into institutional settings, out of their own homes, out of their own communities.” A letter from the co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, which consists of 62 member organizations that focus at least in part on disability and aging, cautions that the changes could result in “homelessness and long-lasting economic impacts.”

The Administration for Community Living was designed for “bringing programs together to make sure that there were efficiencies and synergies between aging and disability networks,” said Barkoff, now director of George Washington University’s health law and policy program. To do so, ACL coordinates with other HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in areas like Home and Community-Based Services, and externally, with agencies like the Department of Transportation. ACL’s own workforce, Jacobs said, “is comprised of people with disabilities and older Americans.”

The ACL had not been a notable target of the Republicans before Thursday. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) even cosponsored a bipartisan bill aiming to require ACL “to provide peer support services for children, grandparents, and caregivers impacted by the opioid crisis.”

Even Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for an arch-conservative remaking of the federal government—which the Trump administration has consistently followed—counted on ACL to remain in place: it proposes distributing funds provided by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act through the agency. Now that President Donald Trump has started hollowing out the federal Department of Education with an eye to its abolition, Ives-Rublee and Jacobs want to know how the federal government will continue to serve disabled students. “How are they going to do that,” Ives-Rublee said, “when they basically destroyed ACL?”

But Ives-Rublee isn’t convinced that the Trump administration can necessarily make good on its plan. “It’s going to be very, very important for community members to come together and start filing lawsuits,” she said, “because this is incredibly illegal—to be reducing staff and reducing the ability for individuals with disabilities to receive services.”

While the HHS cuts, and the Trump administration’s wider slashing of federal agencies and services, are nominally about saving money, Jacobs doesn’t believe that eliminating the Administration for Community Living—which helps keep people out of nursing homes—will do so. “Community living costs our taxpayers a third of what it costs for people to live in institutional settings,” Jacobs said. “There are very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

FUCK ELON

Crypto: The Currency of the (Uninhabitable) Future

The crypto booster’s agenda for government is going to cook the planet.

Nitish Pahwa

Once upon a time, not long ago, Elon Musk was worried sick about climate change. Stopping it became an overarching career mission, reflected in both his business decisions and everyday actions. He gave the electric vehicle industry a jolt after taking over Tesla Motors in 2004. He joined President Donald Trump’s first business advisory council in 2017, then resigned in protest when Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He directed Tesla to buy up $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021 and accept the cryptocurrency in formal transactions, only to backtrack when he remembered that Bitcoin mining is, by design, a heavily energy-intensive process that requires masses of fossil fuel­–powered computer servers to run at all times. It was such a notorious moment in the crypto world that one speaker led “FUCK ELON” chants during that year’s Bitcoin conference.

What a remarkable thing, then, for Musk to embrace Trump more closely than ever as the reelected president decorates his administration with oil-industry shills and with crypto insiders, whose energy-intensive mining rigs and data centers make them something of a natural complement to the fossil fuel industry’s expansionist goals.

But of course, it tracks with his general shifts in ideology and mission since the COVID era. Scientific nerdery gave way to virus conspiracies; climate change took a back seat to his longtime A.I. fears as his former nonprofit, OpenAI, achieved staggering successes; Tesla’s dangerous self-driving cars and dubious robotics earned priority over the electrification of transport. Musk has been happy to re-embrace Bitcoin because incorporating the currency into Tesla’s assets and accounting has allowed him to artificially boost the company’s profit reports and keep investors happy. The Earth is one thing, but revenue is another.

The core issue can be boiled down to the fact that Bitcoin mining is—to put it lightly—really, really, really bad for the environment. This is primarily due to a system it relies on called “proof of work.” Take the computer servers with access to online blockchain protocols, set them up with high-efficiency chips (like those highly coveted GPUs) that can transmit more computing power at a faster rate, and run those servers 24/7 to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to unlock new Bitcoins. To replicate this operation at scale requires whole data centers’ worth of GPUs, which produce audible noise and require a lot of water to keep cool. A 2024 paper published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability found that the water usage of US Bitcoin miners alone is as much as the average yearly water consumption of 300,000 US households. On top of that, a single Bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool.

Much of the power used to keep these things running is sourced from fossil fuels, with all the attendant emissions. It’s been estimated that worldwide Bitcoin mining and transactions have consumed more power than countries like Finland each year. It’s worrying enough that even Republican lawmakers in crypto-friendly red states, like Arkansas, have passed bills to regulate the digital-asset industry’s noise and air pollution. (Those efforts might be undercut should Trump carry through with an ill-advised campaign promise to ensure all Bitcoin is mined within US borders only. Ironically, however, his trade war with China has prevented American Bitcoin miners from securing needed equipment.)

The techno-centric vision for Trump 2.0 was laid out in various written screeds from Musk’s Silicon Valley friends at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital hydra (and crypto funder) whose namesake founders became enthusiastic Trump converts and staffers this election cycle. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” insisted upon building out energy “abundance” instead of cutting back on any fossil-fuel use; Ben Horowitz’s “Politics and the Future” blog announcement pledged his support for any political candidate who believed, like he did, that crypto “will create a fairer, more inclusive economy”; the duo’s co-written “Little Tech Agenda” all but declared war against the regulatory state in the wake of Biden administration attempts to impose tighter crypto regulations.

With Andreessen himself having joined Musk in keenly advising Trump throughout the presidential transition, the new administration has gotten to work implementing all facets of the Andreessen Horowitz blueprint—and yes, the crypto and energy policies are not incidental, because top-down climate denial is hardly irrelevant to their goals. The Securities and Exchange Commission, now a far more crypto-friendly agency under Trump, has also scrapped a Biden-era requirement for large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions in depth. The president has once again withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, with no objection from Musk this round. In fact, his already-infamous Department of Governmental Efficiency has been targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for data purges, grant freezes, and mass firings. It’s not a coincidence that Musk is doing this under the aegis of a fake “department” that’s named for the Dogecoin cryptocurrency and was staffed with Marc Andreessen’s help.

(Also not a coincidence: that the primary zero-carbon energy source the new Department of Energy is interested in expanding is nuclear power, a fixation of both Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s. Why is that? Well, it’s a good way to thumb their noses at misguided environmentalists who protested fission plants after the Three Mile Island meltdown. Also, they want more data and mining centers to be powered by nuclear power specifically.)

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Those have been especially useful markers for independent researchers surveying and tracking how America utilizes its electricity, both dirty and clean. There’s Digiconomist, the much-cited project from Dutch economist Alex de Vries, that keeps a public monitor of Bitcoin mining’s environmental and emissions impacts. There’s also the fact that this data affects the pricing and regulation of agricultural commodities—and since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be considered commodities like gold and silver, it will be the agriculture-focused members of Congress who lead legislative oversight. What could go wrong?

Digital-asset evangelists are especially sensitive to the climate critiques, which popped up time and again during the pandemic-era crypto bubble as myriad celebrities—even the nominally environmentalist ones—got in on the grift. Some crypto ventures, like the alternative currency and blockchain Ethereum, shifted to coin-mining methods that were far less energy-intensive.

But Bitcoin truthers and like-minded users are dedicated to their all-systems-go, all-the-time approach. Why should the government make it easier for anyone to scrutinize and call out their electricity needs? And why should banks and other firms express any skepticism over cryptocurrency’s actual value, or take the time to meet their climate and environmental goals, when they could just be forced to mine this stuff instead? Trump himself has been cozying up to the stuff in increasingly concerning ways, from a disastrous meme currency to a coin-hoarding private venture to the establishment of a crypto arm for his Truth Social network, dedicated data centers, and all. No better way to ensure regulatory capture than to grant the president his own funny money.

To that end, why should the government do anything to oppose the “financial innovation” tech in which some powerful VCs just so happen to have staked millions of dollars? If the consequence happens to be a hotter, less-inhabitable Earth, so be it. At least the crypto mavens will have their digital riches to isolate them from the real-world consequences of these decisions.

True believers in crypto have often championed it as the answer to so many of our financial, political, and even cultural woes. It’s decentralized, giving money and power back to the people without having to rely on evil banks or governments. It allows anyone to keep their money safe from inflation and the finicky, unpredictable economy. So what if it takes a few million gallons of water and untold amounts of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year?

This is the currency of the future. It’s just too bad that there might not be a habitable future to spend it in.

Deeper and Deeper

“Spiraling Deeper and Deeper Into Danger”: RFK Jr. Forces Out Top Vaccine Official

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

Arianna Coghill

Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr. war on vaccines just landed another major blow as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services successfully forced one of the nation’s top vaccine officials out of his position.

Dr. Peter Marks, who was given the choice by HHS officials to either be fired or step down as the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced his resignation on Friday.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks reportedly wrote in his letter of resignation. He added that leaving his position was a “weight lifted from me” as working in this environment “was spiraling deeper and deeper into danger.”

For nearly a decade, Marks led the FDA’s regulation of vaccines, including playing an instrumental role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. So it should come as no surprise that his presence would cause conflict with the starkly anti-vaccine head of the HHS.

In response to Marks’ departure, an HHS official said in a statement, “If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of secretary Kennedy.”

This news comes as Kennedy plans to lay off thousands of HHS employees, while hiring his own fleet of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. According to several reports, Kennedy recently tapped David Geier, a discredited vaccine skeptic, to look into the long debunked scientific link between vaccines and autism.

As the New York Times reports, experts said appointing Geier to work on a study of vaccine safety is “like having a basketball referee show up in one team’s jersey.”

A new low...

Elon Musk’s Attempt to Buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court Reaches a New Low

His vote-buying scheme shows how far he’ll go to extend his plan for oligarchy.

Ari Berman

Elon Musk has already spent more money—$20 million and counting—to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court than any individual donor in the history of US judicial races.

His tactics go well beyond the usual campaign spending. First, he offered to pay voters $100 each for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” Even the Musk and Trump-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, said he wouldn’t feel comfortable signing it. Then Musk said he’d awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On Friday, he dramatically escalated this controversial tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin on Sunday to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting.

Legal experts in Wisconsin and nationally quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.” Musk then abruptly backtracked, saying the $2 million prizes would only be offered to those who signed his petition, although the registration page for his town hall on Sunday in Green Bay asked how people planned to vote, which made it seem, once again, like attending the event and winning the money was contingent on voting.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul sued Musk on Friday afternoon, calling his vote-buying scheme “a blatant attempt to violate” Wisconsin law and alleging that “neither Musk nor America PAC have announced that the plan to make two $1 million payments to Wisconsin electors who have voted in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election has been cancelled.” 

Wisconsin Democrats pointed out that Musk’s initial pledge still violated the law, regardless of whether he retracted it. “It’s clear what the intention is,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me in Kenosha on Friday. “He’s trying to bribe voters. He’s trying to buy an election. This is totally out of line. This should not be how American democracy works.”

It’s increasingly clear that Musk will do almost anything to put his preferred justice on the court and extend his plan for oligarchy to the states—at the same time that Tesla is suing Wisconsin over a law preventing the company from selling its cars directly to consumers in the state.

Musk’s money, however, may also have a counter-effect: Wisconsin Democrats hope that Musk’s involvement in the race will motivate Democratic and progressive voters to turn out for the election given the unpopularity of his actions in Washington. “Musk is trying to buy Schimel a seat on the Supreme Court,” said a recent ad from Schimel’s opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, “because he knows Schimel always helps his big campaign donors.”

In the campaign’s final days, the race has become even more of a referendum on Musk. “Voters casting a ballot for Susan Crawford are not only voting for their own freedom and their own democracy in their own state,” Wikler said, “they’re also sending a national message about whether wealth has unchecked power in this country, or whether the people still rule.”

These "people" are fucking crazy....

Susie Wiles Finally Goes Public—and Shares Her Strange Goal for a Trump “Legacy”

The White House chief of staff gave a rare interview to newly minted Fox News host Lara Trump.

Julianne McShane

One of the most powerful people in the White House remained obscure to most Americans since the start of Trump’s second presidency, until Saturday night.

Susie Wiles, the secretive White House chief of staff and former Trump campaign manager, gave what she called her “first and probably only” sit-down television interview to President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Fox News. As I wrote when Lara Trump’s weekly show was announced last month, the programming cements the network’s role as a mouthpiece for the Trump White House, and extends a clear pattern of nepotism from an administration claiming to champion merit-based hiring.

The roughly 17-minute segment consisted of Wiles discussing mostly anodyne topics: her long work hours, her “easy” relationship with the president, her penchant for reading and walking, and her office decor. But at the end of the sit-down, Wiles made a curious assertion: She said she hopes her “legacy” will include strengthening the country’s education system—despite the fact that Trump recently signed an executive order seeking to abolish the Department of Education.

The Trump team claims that ending the DOE is about rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and giving power back to the states. But such a move—also attacking the authority of Congress, which established and funds the DOE—is one that experts say will harm education nationwide, particularly when it comes to under-resourced schools, poor students, and those with disabilities.

“What do you hope your legacy is?” Lara Trump asked Wiles. “What do you hope people remember about your time as White House?”

“That is such a hard question, because I don’t think that way,” Wiles replied. After taking a beat, she continued: “I want a world at peace. I want an America that’s strong. I want a border that’s secure. I want an education system—something we don’t talk about as much, but I’m passionate about—that will position our kids to meet the future, whatever that may be.”

As my colleague Sarah Szilagy reported, Education Secretary and former WWE Executive Linda McMahon has played a key role in Trump’s effort to close the $268 billion agency that administers federal funds to schools and enforces civil rights laws. The policy seems to be motivated in part by right-wing paranoia stoked by groups like Moms for Liberty:

Within hours of her confirmation on March 3, McMahon sent agency employees a memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission.” In it, she commended Trump’s sweeping actions, including his slate of executive orders that promote school choice programs, seek to root out so-called “gender ideology” and end “radical indoctrination” of children through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, while also banning trans girls and women from women’s sports.

After Trump signed the March 20 executive order directing McMahon to “facilitate the closure” of the agency to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, told Szilagy, “It’s just moving the country in such a wrong direction,” adding that closing the DOE will “take us back to those generations where education was deprioritized and really only a privilege for a subset of our children.”

In a statement, the National Education Association said that kneecapping the DOE “will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections.” Subsequent reductions in force to the DOE have resulted in roughly half of the agency’s employees being terminated and seven of its dozen regional offices shuttered.

Wiles’ ostensible passion for boosting education nationally does not seem to come from a history of actually working in the field. As my colleague Dan Friedman wrote last November, Wiles made her name working as a lobbyist and helping to shape Florida’s Republican party:

The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him.

Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist for a tobacco company as recently as this year.

In her sit-down with Lara Trump, Wiles said she had long been “an establishment Republican…and then Donald Trump came along, MAGA came along.” But despite her appearance of being fully MAGA-pilled, Wiles seemed to draw a subtle distinction between her self and her boss when it came to their ability to accept his 2020 election loss.

“Do you remember the toughest thing you’ve ever had to tell him?” Lara Trump asked her.

“Coming to him after the 2020 election, in ’21,” Wiles replied, “and telling him that what he thought was the circumstance, wasn’t.”

This shit is just getting more insane...

“This is a War, and Natalism Is Our Sword and Shield”—My Weekend With the Pronatalists

Is it really just more babies that this movement wants?

Kiera Butler

Last Thursday night, I attended a cocktail party in the penthouse apartment of an Austin, Texas, highrise. Through floor-to-ceiling glass windows, we watched dusk settle over the rainy sweep of the city, from the bars below us to the university campus, to the downtown skyline, studded with construction sites. As the first guests began to trickle in, the conversation turned to the ethics of gene-editing embryos to create custom babies.

“I would actually argue that the ethical questions probably aren’t as big, because kids already don’t choose their genes,” said Malcolm Collins, a slight, bespectacled man in his late thirties who had helped organize the gathering. “I think that we’re really close to a subculture where this is normalized—a right-wing subculture.”

His wife, Simone, busily filling bowls with chips, nodded in agreement. Simone was dressed for the evening in a white, wide-brimmed bonnet, a peasant blouse, and an austere, calf-length black jumper; her daughter, one-year-old Industry Americus, lounged in a carrier on her back. She and her husband, she said, were comfortable with the idea of designer babies; after all, Industry and her three older siblings, all under the age of 7, had been created with the help of a company that said it could analyze their embryos’ genetic makeup to screen for genetic illnesses, depression, and schizophrenia, as well as predict their intelligence. Yet Simone wasn’t convinced that the world needed bespoke babies—the process would be too expensive, and with all the hormone shots, monitoring, and precise timing, too cumbersome. “IVF isn’t going to move the needle on birth rates,” she said.

The Collinses and some 200 others were in Austin that weekend for NatalCon, a conference held at the University of Texas-Austin for pronatalists, people who believe that falling birthrates the world over imperils humanity. The Collinses weren’t the official organizers, but ever since they spoke at the first NatalCon in 2023—before Industry Americus was born—they have emerged as the de facto spokespeople of the movement, enthusiastically appearing for a gauntlet of media interviews.

In their late thirties with chunky glasses and a sort of grad-student intensity, the Collinses are catnip for journalists because of their extreme eagerness to regale us with the sci-fi-esque details of their lives. They’re starting their own religion! They believe in something called the “future police!” Simone told me that the purpose of her unsubtle Handmaid’s Tale getup was at least in part for journalists’ benefit. (“Multiple things can be true at one time,” she explained. “You can both be trolling, but also be like, ‘Man, this is actually pretty comfortable.’”). Because of their media savvy, extreme self-confidence, and eagerness to open up, they have been the subjects of dozens of articles about the pronatalism movement, from the New York Magazine to the Washington Post to the Guardian.

I could go on and on about the Collinses—their backstory as erstwhile leftists who met on Reddit; the time Malcolm slapped his kid in front of a reporter; the fact that 80 percent of the viewers on their YouTube channel are men. But all the media focus on their charismatic quirkiness detracts from the darker corners of the movement. Many of the pronatalists make no secret of the fact that when they talk about saving civilization from birth rate collapse, they have a very specific civilization in mind. At the opening night of the conference, the day after the cocktail party, the keynote speaker, far-right influencer, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, told the crowd exactly that. “Western civilization isn’t just worth preserving. It’s worth fighting for,” he said. “This is a war, and natalism is our sword and shield, and we will not abandon the front line.” The enemies on the left “want us dead, so take them seriously,” he warned. “Think about it, the Luigis, the Tesla terrorists, they would have no problem at all with getting rid of us.”

In this war for the West, many of the natalists have long believed that God is on their side. But a major change has taken place since the first NatalCon because the political winds seem to be at their backs. “JD Vance and the entire Trump administration seem to be bringing their children everywhere with them, including the Oval Office,” enthused Terry Schilling, another opening night speaker who heads the right-wing lobbying group American Principles Project. Right-wing political commentator Steve Turley offered the attendees more specifics. “If Vice President JD Vance has his way,” he said, “our whole electoral process may be recalibrating around this new pronatal biopolitics.”

There are signs that this is not just wishful thinking. Vance and other members of the new administration have begun warning about falling birthrates and using some of the same rhetoric as the pronatalists. Around the same time NatalCon was beginning on Friday evening, Elon Musk appeared on Fox News. The host asked what he worried most about. “The birth rate is very low in almost every country, and unless that changes, civilization will disappear,” Musk responded. “Humanity is dying.”

Meanwhile, at the conference, Posobiec was wrapping up his speech with the same theme. “This is the war for civilization, and we are going to win it one life at a time,” he said. “God bless the West.”

Posobiec’s rhetorical flourishes are distinctly lacking from the NatalCon website, which describes the problem of declining fertility rates in much more neutral terms. “By the end of this century,” it says, “nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse,” and “thousands of unique cultures and populations will be snuffed out.”

First, let’s get a few things straight. There is no consensus among demographers that the world is running out of humans; on the contrary, the world is on track to reach a population of 9 billion by 2037. Yet it’s true that dwindling fertility in developed nations will soon result in overall older populations, with significant portions aging out of the workforce. Today, about 21 percent of EU citizens are over 65; by 2050, according to World Economic Forum projections, more than a third of the populations of Italy, Spain, and Greece will be over the age of 65; in Hong Kong, the percentage of people over-65 will be greater than 40 percent, also compared to about 21 percent today. The trend is slightly less pronounced in the United States, where people over 65 are expected to increase in proportion from just shy of 17 percent in 2021 to 23 percent in 2050.

When so many people approach retirement at the same time, however, governments tend to get nervous about the collapse of the workforce—and in some places, they’re pulling out all the stops to prevent that from happening. Singapore, France, and Canada offer couples tantalizing combinations of long parental leaves, and thousands of dollars in “baby bonuses” and education savings accounts. Hungary implemented a policy that exempts mothers of four or more children from ever paying taxes again.

Jennifer Sciubba, a political demographer with the nonpartisan think tank Population Reference Bureau, notes that birth is not the only aspect of life governments could incentivize in order to address the problems presented by an aging population. The hiring of older workers, for instance, promoting policies to support caregivers of the elderly, and devoting resources to improving the health and quality of life of senior citizens could all be government initiatives. “I think we’re wasting a lot of time that we could be using to have innovative solutions and experiments at municipal levels to see what works,” she said. “And we just aren’t doing it.”

I was looking forward to asking the NatalCon organizers about their thoughts on non-baby-related solutions to the aging population problem, but I never had the opportunity. A few months ago, when I requested a press pass from the conference organizer, Kevin Dolan, who posts on Twitter under the name Bennet’s Phylactery, he tweeted out my email to his 91,000 followers. “The balls on these people lmao,” he wrote. “You want me to buy you dinner & pay for your booze because you can’t afford to come harsh the vibes & slander my friends on your own dime?” When I tried to pay to register, my application was rejected.

A father of six, Dolan runs a men’s society called Exit Group that describes itself as “a fraternity of like-minded men who take a short position in the present system and build for what comes next.” On X, Dolan overdoses on the words “retarded” and “gay,” complains about anti-white bias, and thunders against feminism, which he believes “will not reduce or curtail fertility, it will eliminate it—it is incompatible with human life.”

I hoped once I showed up to the conference, they might just let me in. Surely I, a middle-aged woman fading into irrelevance with my nearing-expiration-date womb, would be easy to ignore in this baby-crazy crowd. On the first evening of the conference, the day after the cocktail party, 200 attendees gathered for the opening dinner in the UT-Austin art museum. As soon as I introduced myself to the keeper of the wristbands, I was banished. “You are not welcome here!” he said and promptly summoned a cadre of security guards to escort me out of the building.

To really understand the pronatalist movement, you first need to be aware of its two main factions. The “trads,” most of whom are religiously motivated, believe that large families are God’s will. Some of the more militant among them also believe in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits the existence of a global conspiracy to replace white Americans with immigrants of color. Then there are the techies, many of whom see pronatalism as an imperative for maximizing the potential of the human race—they are interested in things like gene-editing people, figuring out how to increase the human lifespan, and replacing elementary school teachers with AI tutors.

The penthouse cocktail party was a tech-heavy crowd. In addition to the Collinses, the guest list included the co-founder of Heritage Molecular, which says it “makes customized human embryos using genetic engineering,” and the founder and CEO of Minicircle, a company that focuses on “reversible gene editing.” Another guest I met was Patri Friedman, the head of a Peter Thiel-backed venture firm that funds deregulated economic zones. He told me about his recent trip to one such zone in Honduras, where medical procedures are deregulated. While he was there, he said, he had all the bacteria in his mouth replaced so he would never get another cavity and underwent a gene editing procedure that he felt had substantially increased his cardio performance. He proudly pointed to the spot between the thumb and pointer finger on his right hand. There, he told me, a chip resided “that unlocks my Tesla and has my business card on it.”

For all their blue-sky thinking, when it comes to actual humans now walking the earth, the tech faction can be pessimistic. About halfway through the cocktail party, I dropped in on a conversation between Malcolm Collins and another guest, a woman who didn’t want to be named. Malcolm was holding forth about his observation that young people didn’t seem especially interested in having sex. The other guest agreed. “Everything about the young generation is less sexual,” she said. “People wear clothes that are much more androgynous; they don’t do as much to emphasize their sexuality,” she added. “I think everybody just needs to eat more meat, less hormonal birth control, and wear less polyester, and like anything else that’s disrupting your hormones.”

Malcolm nodded. He had recently been back to his alma mater, St. Andrews University in Scotland, where he had seen a group of students partaking in the annual tradition of running naked into the freezing ocean. Compared to his memories of the event from two decades ago, the current crop of students came up short. “There was no flirting—there wasn’t as much fun,” he said. “Everybody looked like an amorphous blob, but it wasn’t just that—young people were ugly.”

“Right,” said the other guest. “It’s the way that they, like, groom themselves.”

A few hours before the opening evening of the conference the following day, I had my first meeting with someone who was not a techie but a trad. We met at the George Washington statue at the center of the UT-Austin campus, and the students were out in force: sorority girls, kids hawking the campus humor magazine, a big group of kids clutching enormous, multi-hued boba teas. While the students streamed by, I caught up with Scott Yenor, who is a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University, a fellow at the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, and a father of five. In a 2023 piece for the Claremont Institute website, he wrote about the dangers of what he called “anti-natalism.” Progressive values, he argued, had brought about the crash of South Korea’s birth rates, and America was headed in the same direction. “Honoring same-sex attraction above opposite-sex attraction and creating environments in which homosexuals receive special protection and encouragement will cause more people to identify as gay, as current polling indicates,” he wrote. “In these and many other ways, a legal and cultural regime can diminish the desire for children.”

I asked Yenor to tell me about his objections to feminism, and he explained that he saw it as a pernicious enemy of procreation. “When the ideal for womanly achievement is the independent woman, it is necessarily undermining family life,” he said. This problem was hard to fix because the 1964 Civil Rights Act had “made it impossible and in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.”  

Yenor told me that he is a member of a secretive fraternal order, a Christian nationalist group called the Society for American Civic Renewal. The unofficial head of the group is Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate who has said that he aspires to be a “warlord;” he wants to lead armed factions who would wage “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government or some subset or remnant of it.”

At the 2023 NatalCon, Haywood recounted the story of his growing feeling of contempt while watching a neighbor fetch his mail. The guy “was all well-kept and put together, but he was totally beta,” he said. (“Beta” is internet slang for submissive.) “We don’t get any kids unless men are masculine.” For this problem, he blamed schools that “feminize boys” and co-ed social spaces, including workplaces. “You should be able to have a group of men in the workplace who interact with each other, favor each other over women for advancement in the workplace, and just generally, advance the interests of men,” he said in his speech. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Haywood for clarification: Had he really meant that men should be promoted over women because they are men? “Women should not have careers,” he said emphatically. “They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.”

Yenor echoed those sentiments. Most women want to stay home with the kids anyway, he told me. I looked back at the students, many of whom were college girls carrying backpacks, hustling to class or lab or clubs. “It’s much better in society if we have a situation where men are providers, and women prioritize motherhood and being wives and homemakers,” Yenor said. “That should be the life script of about 70 percent of Americans.”

If I expected a kind of battle royale between the trads and the techies, I would have been disappointed. What I discovered instead was that despite what appeared to be their differences, the techies and the trads were much more fundamentally aligned. One arena for this cooperation is in politics, specifically with the Republican party, where the tech bros have begun to overlap with the trads. As Steve Turley, the political commentator, said during his NatalCon speech, there are “kinds of pronatal possibilities that open up” in the “tech-trad alignment.”

 In the GOP, the trads are the conservative Christians, many of whom believe that Trump is God’s chosen leader. Leaders in this group are associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic Christians that was influential in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Representatives from this camp include House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), and Paula White, a longtime Trump spiritual adviser who is now leader of his new White House Faith Office.

The Republican techies are the extremely online leaders who believe that a no-holds-barred approach to technological innovation can usher in a new era of prosperity for the United States. The de-facto leader of this group, of course, is Department of Government Efficiency head and tech multibillionaire Elon Musk. A father of 14, Musk is the staunchest and most highly visible pronatalist in the Trump administration. “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness,” he posted on X in November. Last April, he posted Kevin Dolan’s speech from the 2023 NatalCon, commenting, “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end,” the phrase he would later repeat during his Fox News interview last week. A 2023 Bloomberg News investigation revealed that in 2021, Musk donated $10 million to the Population Wellbeing Initiative, a research group at the University of Texas-Austin that says it conducts “foundational research in economics, demography, and social welfare evaluation.” (Dean Spears, who heads the group, wrote in an email to Mother Jones that Musk’s donation did not influence the center’s work. He said his own work focuses on global health and that he thinks “what Trump has done to USAID is awful.”)

Straddling the trad-tech divide is Vice President JD Vance. A traditional Catholic who is staunchly pro-life, Vance is connected to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial Protestant men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Vance also has deep connections to Silicon Valley, where he worked briefly for Peter Thiel, as well as for Circuit Therapeutics, a biotech firm that focused on gene editing. In addition to his tech sector work experience, Vance is also famously well-connected on social media, plugged into perpetually online right-wing intellectual movements.

The pronatalists recognize Vance for the lynchpin that he is. “Vance is often cited as a symbol of this tech-trad realignment,” Turley said in his speech. “He’s a traditionalist Catholic. Grew up in the hillbilly mountains of Appalachia, and he’s also part of a very successful Silicon Valley Tech company with Peter Thiel.”

In January, addressing the annual March for Life an anti-abortion rally crowd in Washington, DC, shortly after he was sworn in as vice president, Vance said, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” He has also fanboyed over Hungarian President Viktor Orbán’s tax break for big families. Last year, when Vance took heat for a resurfaced video in which he derided “childless cat ladies,” he clarified in an interview with Fox News Megyn Kelly that he hadn’t meant to offend these ladies, only to suggest that their misery over their own choice to remain childless would “make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance has proposed the idea of a weighted voting system, in which the votes cast by parents would be valued more highly than those by the childless. Yenor, the Idaho State professor, told me he liked the sound of that idea; he worried that as nonparents begin to make up a greater share of voters, “there will be less interest in sustaining an environment for children to be raised in.”  

It’s not just Vance and Musk who are bringing pronatalism to the national stage. In February, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (a father of nine) signed a memo recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Last year, the Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, recommended that the government defund higher education, claiming that more educated women tend to have fewer babies. In the same article, the authors suggested that “education policy also suppresses fertility by discouraging parents from choosing religious education in K-12 schools.” The far-right Claremont Institute suggested in 2023 that states could juice birth rates “by building relatively wholesome environments for raising children,” adding that “protecting kids from publicly-sponsored gender wokeness is a great first step.” Part of that wholesome environment, the authors write, could be “pro-family programming” on state public television and a campaign to draw churches with a “family-friendly mission.” If the “lefties” didn’t like these new policies, fine! “Plenty of U-Haul trucks are available! Family-friendly citizens in; other citizens out.”

Trump himself appears ready to listen. At a Maryland campaign event in 2023, he thundered, “I want a baby boom!” In December, Trump named Michael Anton, a conservative writer who spoke at the 2023 NatalCon, to be his director of policy planning for the State Department. (Anton’s speech at the 2023 NatalCon advised viewers to look to Socrates’ Xenophon for examples of how to woo women by making them feel insecure.) Trump said in a February executive order that the reason he believed more Americans should be able to undergo IVF was “because we want more babies, to put it very nicely.” Last week, during a Women’s History Month event at the White House, Trump said, “We’re gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too. The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about, it’s gonna be great. Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s okay.”

Trump also has shown openness to some of the darker sides of pronatalism, repeatedly bragging about his “good genes.” At a 2020 rally in Minnesota, he told the majority-white crowd, “You have good genes. A lot of it’s about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe the racehorse theory? You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” Last October, on the campaign trail, he said, of immigrants who committed crimes, “It’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

I didn’t hear anyone utter the phrase “bad genes” in the speeches at NatalCon. Though I was barred from attending the conference itself, I was able to obtain recordings of the speeches, which were, with the notable exception of Posobiec, milquetoast. Jonathan Keeperman, whose far-right company Passage Publishing was a sponsor of the conference, made a speech in which he argued that one barrier to having children was the culture of frenetically carting kids around to a zillion activities. Peachy Keenan, a Los Angeles mother of five and the pseudonymous author of the 2023 book Domestic Extremist: a Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, said “the natalism movement must be about more than numbers and technology. It has to be about in the simplest terms, maternal love.” Raw Egg Nationalist, the pseudonym for a British writer who opines online about masculinity, opined that the result of our comfortable and coddled modern condition is a decline in sexual desire.

The eminently reasonable people who made those speeches bore little resemblance to their online alter egos. Keeperman, who often uses the pseudonym Lomez, has created a niche in republishing works by fascist thinkers—for example, a Spanish soldier who fought on Francisco Franco’s side, a WWI-era German nationalist, and a Russian czar loyalist who “chronicles the chaos, courage, and tragedy of his struggle against the Bolsheviks.” On X, where Keeperman posts to 106,000 followers under the pseudonym Lomez, he decries immigration (“no, actually we don’t want your huddled masses”), makes liberal use of slurs, and theorizes about “bioleninism,” the idea that the political left exists because “the dregs of society cannot accrue status of their own, and so depend instead on the state and its unofficial organs to give them status in exchange for loyalty.”

Raw Egg Nationalist writes regularly about his belief that immigrants threaten Western civilization; he has referred to immigration as “a hostile act.” And then things can drift towards unapologetic fascism. He has been known to drop the occasional “HH”—short for “Heil Hitler—to his 280,000 followers on X. Keenan, meanwhile, often warns about proselytizing pronatalism to the enemy. “We don’t really want to market natalism to the progressive feminists—the people maxing out their fertility should be people, ideally, who won’t raise their children to be gender-neutral furries who want to join Antifa one day,” she said at the 2023 NatalCon. “The good news is that the fear of climate change will keep liberal women’s birth rates low forever.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine how the common-sense speeches of the online firebrands could appeal to ordinary conference-goers, many of whom were hoping to find community. At a happy hour event before the conference, I spoke to a greying guy who said he had come because he found himself single, without kids, and was the sole caretaker of his elderly parents who were suffering from dementia. With the aging of the population, he worried more people would soon end up in his situation. A woman I talked to was there because she had endured many rounds of IVF and wondered if anyone was trying to make the technology more individualized.

On the second day of the conference, I met a Texas couple, accompanied by a few of their nine children, who had come because they were hoping to meet other large families. What had they thought of the conference so far, I asked. The man, who didn’t want me to use his name, likened what he had heard about the coming fertility crash to the Y2K bug. “People in 1995 didn’t somehow consider that the year 2000 was only a couple years away, right?” he said. “People don’t really think about the future anymore—we knew when the year 2000 was coming, and yet people were not prepared for it.” The conference, the woman said, had helped her see the weight of their responsibility to their children. “You’re leaving a legacy, right? That’s something very important.”

What is legal doesn't matter anymore.....

“I’m Not Joking”: Trump Again Floats Running for Anti-Constitutional Third Term

“There are methods which you could do it,” he reportedly told NBC News.

Julianne McShane

President Donald Trump has repeatedly teased running for a third term in violation of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.

Until now, it has been unclear whether he was making such comments seriously. But in a phone call with Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News on Sunday, Trump gave his clearest indication yet that he is indeed serious. “I’m not joking,” he reportedly said. “But I’m not—it is far too early to think about it.”

“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump continued. NBC reports that when Welker asked about the plausibility of Vice President JD Vance running for office and then passing power to Trump (who would try to run as VP in 2028, and then take over when Vance resigns, according to the theory) Trump replied, “That’s one,” adding, “but there are others too.” He declined to provide specific examples, NBC reported.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung did not respond directly to a question from Mother Jones about what “methods” Trump specifically was referring to; instead Cheung sent a statement claiming: “Americans overwhelmingly approve and support President Trump and his America First policies. As the President said, it’s far too early to think about [a third term] and he is focused on undoing all the hurt Biden has caused and Making America Great Again.” (Polls do not indicate “overwhelming approval” for Trump: The latest CBS/YouGov poll shows Americans split down the middle, and several recent others others show that majorities of Americans disapprove of him.)

When asked by Welker if he would like to serve a third term, Trump replied, “I like working.”

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in a post on X that there may be three ways Trump could attempt to “grab” an illegal 3rd term: 1) Ignore the Constitution and dare anyone to stop him. 2) Have GOP-run states just appoint Trump electors since any state not voting Trump is by definition ‘corrupt’. 3) Military coup and martial law—i.e., a successful January 6.”

NBC reports that Trump also claimed, “A lot of people want me to do it. But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”

Some public figures have indeed voiced sycophantic support for this idea of an illegal power grab. They include longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who has claimed Trump may be able to get around the 22nd Amendment and told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that “Trump will run and win again in 2028.” In January, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a farfetched resolution proposing to amend the 22nd Amendment so that Trump could serve a third term. Additionally, GOP activists behind an initiative called the Third Term Project are advocating for amending the constitution to allow Trump to run again in 2028, or to have Trump run as VP with the understanding that the presidential candidate on the ticket would resign after being elected, to allow Trump to retake power.

Success in amending the Constitution—especially to set up a possible third term for Trump—would be extremely unlikely, as it would require approval from two-thirds of both chambers of Congress, and then ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures.

Slash-and-burn

Trump Wants to Shutter FEMA. Can States Fill Its Shoes?

His slash-and-burn approach to remaking the federal government could backfire with disaster relief.

Jake Bittle

President Donald Trump appears to be serious about getting the federal government out of disaster response. Earlier this week, his secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, said in a Cabinet meeting that she would move to “eliminate” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the beleaguered agency that handles relief and recovery after extreme weather events, and has reportedly conferred with FEMA’s Trump-appointed interim leader about winding down the agency.  

Noem’s announcement was just the latest in a series of Trump administration moves to radically decrease or eliminate the federal government’s role in responding to climate-driven disasters. Just after taking office, the president mused about eliminating FEMA and then convened a council to consider the agency’s future. In recent weeks, he has laid off hundreds of staff who work on resilience and preparedness. And last week, Trump signed an executive order that called for state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness” and directed agencies to “streamline” their disaster resilience efforts.

Trump’s unprecedented efforts to weaken FEMA come at a time when many disasters are intensifying due to climate change. A study of more than 750 recent heat waves, wildfires, and flood events found that around 75 percent of these events had been made significantly worse by human-caused warming. Though experts say there is merit in the idea of beefing up state and local emergency preparedness, they also caution that the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to remaking the federal government could backfire when it comes to FEMA. While they acknowledge that disaster response needs reform, they also argue that a total withdrawal by the federal government would leave many communities in the lurch, especially those that can’t fund disaster recovery on their own.

For much of American history, a state that suffered a disaster had to plead with Congress for a one-off infusion of money, then figure out how to spend that money on its own. In 1980, the Carter administration created FEMA to speed up the government’s response to worsening disasters. The agency got its own multibillion-dollar pot of money to reimburse states for disaster response, including for disasters that are too small to get a special transfer from Congress. Over the past 45 years, it has distributed billions of dollars in grants to help local areas prepare for future disasters, reduce flood risk, and—more recently—address climate change. The agency also coordinates multistate responses to large disasters, summoning search-and-rescue and cleanup teams from across the country after big hurricanes.

In the decades since FEMA’s botched response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the agency has been a frequent target of criticism by politicians and the public. Local officials often complain that federal involvement tends to slow down disaster response, and emergency management experts warn that it disincentivizes state and local authorities from taking action to reduce climate risks. FEMA’s programs to increase disaster resilience come with reams of paperwork, and the agency often pays to rebuild the same areas over and over again without reducing actual risk.

Trump’s recent executive order pushing for a bigger state and local role in disaster response echoes some past criticism of the agency, calling for reforms “to reduce complexity and better protect and serve Americans.” 

“A lot of this stuff in the order, I look at it, and it just sounds like Emergency Management 101,” said W. Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA administrator under then-president Barack Obama. He said emergency managers have long maintained that state and local governments should not rely on federal aid to make them whole after disasters, and need to find their own ways to reduce risk over the long run.

However, other experts fear that what Trump is proposing could leave cities and states unable to pay for much-needed resilience projects—and that a rapid shuttering of FEMA would leave most states and local governments unprepared to fill the gap.

“The Trump administration aims to shift most of the responsibility for disaster preparedness to state and local governments, asking them to make more expensive infrastructure investments without outlining what support the federal government will provide,” said Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization.

Trump’s public statements and executive orders on the issue have been vague — so vague, in fact, that Udvardy called them “baffling.” If Noem and Trump tried to wind down the agency altogether, the move would likely face similar legal challenges as his attempts to destroy the Department of Education—neither agency can lawfully be closed without congressional approval. But in theory, if the administration prevailed in closing FEMA, or moved some of its operations to the Department of Homeland Security, there are a few ways the change could play out. 

One scenario would be a return to the situation that existed before FEMA, when states had to seek direct help from Congress or another federal agency every time they suffered a disaster. Congress works differently now than it did in the decades before FEMA existed—it often takes months or years for lawmakers to send out long-term recovery money after a disaster such as the 2023 Maui wildfires, which can make it hard for local governments to find money to develop replacement housing and restore public infrastructure. Congress is also far more polarized than it used to be, even on the issue of disaster aid—Republican leaders have suggested they might impose political “conditions” on wildfire assistance to California, goading the state to change its policies on immigration or water management.

Without a centralized disaster fund like the one FEMA has, the party in control of Congress would control who gets relief money, which could delay or derail rebuilding efforts in states run by the out-party. 

Another possibility, whether or not FEMA is abolished, would be for Congress to provide a flat amount of preparedness money to each state and let states decide how to spend it, which is how some other big federal programs work. But this scenario could also be subject to political maneuvering: When the Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed its own disaster recovery block grant to Texas after Hurricane Harvey, the state government allegedly favored white and rural areas over Black and Latino residents in Houston, according to a federal probe.

If FEMA shrank or disappeared, it’s unclear who would coordinate lifesaving aid between states during large disasters. But if states continued to receive robust disaster funds from Congress, and if they distributed this money equitably, it could potentially speed up a spending process that is often described as being slow and bureaucratic.

For instance, in Harris County, Texas, which encompasses the massive Houston metro area, floodplain officials said that removing federal oversight could accelerate the process of acquiring and demolishing so-called “repetitive-loss” homes—those that flood multiple times. Officials would no longer be subject to federal paperwork requirements before they bought out homes.

“Currently, every level of government is involved when utilizing federal grant programs for flood mitigation,” said James Wade, who leads the county’s home buyout program. “Removing one level of government may help expedite the process.” Wade’s program could certainly use some paperwork relief. Thanks in large part to federal grant requirements, it can take as long as five years for the county to purchase and destroy a flooded home, during which time flood victims have no choice but to wait or flip their homes to private buyers.

But if Trump’s reforms led to a reduction in overall federal disaster funding—as seems likely, given his focus on cutting spending—the county might not be able to keep up its current pace of adaptation projects. The county flood control district has applied for no fewer than 14 FEMA grants, for stormwater upgrades as well as buyouts, and a shift away from national funding could make it harder to fund these essential projects.

“The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”

The district “relies heavily on federal programs to leverage the local funds for flood mitigation,” said Wade. Under Trump’s new approach, “The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”

A reduction in federal grant money for resilience projects could force local governments to make harder choices. This wouldn’t always be a bad thing. Fugate pointed to the state of Florida, which rolled out strong building codes after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, forcing developers to build houses that could withstand strong winds. The move led to up-front costs for builders, but reduced damage in the long run.

The problem with this tough-love approach is that many states and local governments aren’t ready to handle disaster resilience on their own—they don’t have the expertise to design new building codes or plan for climate change, and they don’t have the money to build infrastructure that can protect against existing flood and fire risk. Past administrations have rolled out a number of reforms to help these communities design and fund such infrastructure projects: In 2020, FEMA began providing “direct technical assistance” to help rural communities and low-income areas figure out their vulnerabilities and design projects. It also changed its scoring for grant applications to privilege rural and disadvantaged communities more. (The direct technical assistance page is now unavailable on FEMA’s website.)

Udvardy, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that taking FEMA out of the resilience equation would leave smaller and poorer communities in the lurch, without either the money or expertise they needed to reduce their risk. This would cost the government and disaster victims more in the long run. 

“Based on the indiscriminate way this administration has laid off staff with deep expertise and upended critical science…I am very concerned that the implications of this order will mean less support for communities to help them prepare for and recover from the disasters to come,” said Udvardy. 

The worst-affected places would be rural areas in poor states like West Virginia, where the federal government is the only entity with the resources to finance even basic adaptation projects like flood retention ponds or home elevations. Many of these areas supported Trump last year by wide margins.

The rural city of Grants Pass, Oregon, is already experiencing the potential consequences of such a federal shift. The city has been working to secure $50 million from a FEMA grant program designed to enhance climate resilience. The city’s water treatment plant is almost 100 old, and it sits right next to the flood-prone Rogue River. In the event of a big storm or earthquake, the plant could flood or collapse, leaving locals without clean drinking water.

Grants Pass has already raised utility rates on its 33,000 customers to fund the construction of a new plant, but it was still falling short of the money it needed for such a large project. In 2023, FEMA advanced the city’s grant application to build a new treatment plant away from the floodplain, which the local public works director called “incredible good fortune.”

But late in February, the state of Oregon informed Grants Pass that FEMA had canceled all coordination meetings around the grant program, and now city officials have no idea if they’ll receive the money they’ve spent years counting on.

“This grant is a critical piece of our funding strategy,” said Jason Canady, the city’s public works director. “We are concerned, but at this point, we are not sure what actions can be taken to ensure an award will be forthcoming.”

Fugate, the former FEMA administrator, said that cuts to federal resilience funding would split the nation into haves and have-nots. States and cities that have the staffing and money to pursue adaptation efforts would do so, and might even be able to complete some projects faster than they can right now. But rural areas would no longer have access to federal money that enables them to even consider reducing climate risk. People living in those places will have less protection from future disasters, exposing them to the risk of death or injury, and will have a harder time recovering after disasters, which could push them into poverty.

“They’ll have more flexibility—with less money,” said Fugate.