In the aftermath of the fall of Roe, Democrats dispensed a familiar rejoinder. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned that come November, our rights were “on the ballot.” President Biden, in a somber press conference, informed Americans, “Roe is on the ballot.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said she hopes it is clear that the right to end a pregnancy “is the issue on the ballot.” In conclusion: “There is one answer,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) declared on Twitter, “VOTE.”

Meanwhile, members of the House took to the steps of the Capitol to sing “God Bless America” over the screams of protesters. 

Let’s attempt to cast aside the goofy and the strange. The leaders of the Democratic party—in between firing off donation emails—want you to vote for them. They believe, as Pelosi and everyone said today, that “the rights of women and all Americans are on the ballot this November.”

I keep wondering though: Are they?

After all, many did vote, securing control of Congress and the White House, and the doom cycle has yet to relent. Roe has fallen, mass shootings continue apace, and the current administration has failed to protect voting rights, leaving the elections they warn about in the hands of the minority. Even after it was clear that Roe would fall, national Democrats backed the famously anti-abortion candidate Rep. Henry Cuellar in Texas. His primary opponent, Jessica Cisneros, lost by only a few hundred votes in a runoff.

Roe is dead. In the coming weeks, abortion will be banned in 13 states with trigger laws, and 13 more are likely to severely restrict or end abortion access. As my colleague Becca Andrews said earlier this week, it’s not an exaggeration to say “the sky is falling.”

While a post-Roe world is now the reality nationwide, it’s already been reality in Oklahoma; in May, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill that bans abortion at fertilization and the bill went into effect immediately. Even before the bill, access in Oklahoma was dire, impacted drastically by patients fleeing Texas’ SB 8, which banned abortion at six weeks. When the Texas bill went into effect, the University of Texas at Austin found that 45 percent of patients unable to get abortions in the state traveled to Oklahoma. But now, those Texans and Oklahomans are traveling to other states, including Kansas. In fact, Kansas shares three borders with states likely or certain to ban abortion since Roe has been overturned. It didn’t take long Friday for the new Supreme Court ruling to further stresses the already-precarious system there:

Patients immediately started calling Kansas from all surrounding states saying their abortion appointments were canceled and hoping we can make room for them….

— Christina Bourne, MD, MPH (@xtina_bourne) June 24, 2022

Dr. Christina Bourne is the medical director at Trust Women, an abortion provider with clinics in Oklahoma City and Wichita, Kansas. In the last several months, they’ve dealt with the end of access in Oklahoma and seen how that ban impacts their ability to provide care in Kansas, where there is no trigger law or current legislative proposal to immediately end access. Earlier this month, before the Supreme Court ruling was made official, I spoke with Bourne about what she has learned from operating in a post-Roe reality, and what she wants providers everywhere to know about how to care for the patients who are now more anxious, more weary, and often more pregnant than before. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Since early May, when Politico published the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that today overturned Roe v. Wade and rolled back a half-century of reproductive rights, there has been a lot of analysis on how we got here. The easiest points of reference have been the obvious inflection points in recent Supreme Court history. The failure of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire during Obama’s first term, for instance, and the Republican obstruction of President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the court after the death of Justice Anton Scalia in 2016. Looming large, of course, was the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, who appointed three of the conservatives who voted in favor of wiping out Roe, including Justice Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat that should have gone to Garland, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced Ginsburg.

But there’s one other critical turning point in the road to Roe’s demise that often gets overlooked: the failure of President George W. Bush to put his friend and White House counsel, Harriet Miers, on the high court in 2005. That debacle prompted Bush to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, the court’s first female justice, with Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Dobbs decision overturning Roe and declared that the real-life implications of the decision on actual humans were beyond the court’s concern. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision,” he wrote. “And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law.”

After the Dobbs leak, Jamie Lynn Crofts, a writer with Wonkette, a publication that had happily mocked Miers in 2005,  tweeted “HARRIET MIERS, I’M SO, SO SORRY.” 

HARRIET MIERS, I AM SO, SO SORRY. https://t.co/NtpIMO2DDa

— Jamie Lynn Kitten (@jamielynncrofts) May 3, 2022

Thousands of people joined hundreds of protests across the country on Saturday to demand that lawmakers take action against the epidemic of gun violence in the United States.

After a series of mass shootings, including in Uvalde, Texas, and in Buffalo, New York, demonstrators staged more than 450 protests nationwide. The largest, in Washington, DC, was organized by March for Our Lives, the group founded by student survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. President Biden expressed his support for their cause. “I join them by repeating my call to Congress: do something,” he tweeted.

The second March for Our Lives on the National Mall, standing against gun violence four years since the original, with thousands in attendance under the Washington Monument. David Hogg speaking: "All Americans have a right to not be shot, a right to safety." pic.twitter.com/MHirplU49l

— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) June 11, 2022

There is a lot to examine in the 10-minute video compilation of the Capitol insurrection produced by the congressional committee investigating the attack. Some of the footage, which aired during Thursday’s primetime hearing, had never been broadcast before. Other clips are now receiving fresh attention. You can watch a MAGA protester read President Donald Trump’s tweet condemning Mike Pence through a megaphone to an angry mob. You can see another clip in which the mob chants about executing the vice president. Elsewhere, the video lingers painfully as Trump supporters beat police officers attempting to stop them from entering the Capitol.

pic.twitter.com/Po7qA3xecf

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022

But to me, one of the most visually striking things about watching the video—and about watching the events unfold in real time last year—is the incredible assemblage of flags. There are so many flags, in more varieties than I can properly identify. There are regular American flags of course, but also: blue Trump flags, red Trump flags, American flags with Trump’s face on them, three-percenter flags, a Christian flag, Gadsden flags, a Confederate flag with an assault rifle on it, a Colorado flag, and various other niche symbols that people more familiar with the various court filings might have a better chance at deciphering.

One flag in particular stands out. It’s one of the first flags you see, and it also happens to be one you can see just about every day in one form or another: It’s the so-called Thin Blue Line flag.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

The first week after Staff Sgt. Alleria Stanley reported to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, she says, three separate people approached her to offer advice: For her own safety, she should avoid certain areas near base.

“‘Don’t go down these roads.’”

“‘Don’t go here.’”

“‘They’ll kill you,’” Stanley says she was warned by fellow servicemembers who thought she might be at risk—because she is transgender.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Climate policy is being dragged into the culture wars with misinformation and junk science being spread across the internet by a relatively small group of individuals and groups, according to a study. The research, released on Thursday, shows that the climate emergency—and the measures needed to deal with it—are in some cases being conflated with divisive issues such as critical race theory, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion access, and anti-vaccine campaigns.

The study, published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition, found that although outright denials of the facts of the climate crisis were less common, opponents were now likely to focus on “delay, distraction, and misinformation” to hinder the rapid action required.

“Our analysis has shown that climate disinformation has become more complex, evolving from outright denial into identifiable ‘discourses of delay’ to exploit the gap between buy-in and action,” said Jennie King, head of climate disinformation at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

The report looked at social media posts over the past 18 months and particularly around the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow last year. It found that the urgent need for wide-ranging mitigation and adaptation strategies were continually downplayed or condemned as unfeasible, overly expensive, disruptive or hypocritical. And it identified a number of specific “discourses of delay,” including:

The catfish, it turns out, is one hell of a taster. And I don’t mean that they are good-tasting, as in, fried, battered, and served on a baguette. (I’ll leave that distinction up to you.) I mean, catfish are really good at tasting. As science journalist Ed Yong explains in his new book, An Immense World, these fish are basically swimming tongues: Their smooth, slimy bodies are covered in taste buds, giving them the ability to sample the flavor of anything they touch. “If you lick one of them,” he writes, “you’ll both simultaneously taste each other.” Or, as one physiologist told Yong, “If I were a catfish, I’d love to jump into a vat of chocolate. You could taste it with your butt.”

An Immense World is full of delightful and fascinating animal profiles like this. While you may know Yong from his Pulitzer Prize–winning Covid writing for the Atlantic, the book takes him back to the kind of science reporting he did so often before the pandemic, as a self-described “nerdy outsider who writes about quirky nature stuff.” Much of the book, which comes out June 21, focuses on animals’ ability to perceive the world—through smell, taste, sight, touch, sound, surface vibrations, echoes, magnetic fields, and more—from ants to elephants to Yong’s own corgi, Typo. I learned, for instance, that zebras may have evolved to be striped not to ward off lions or hyenas, as I’d heard before, but disease-carrying flies! And that the blue and yellow coloring of a reef fish may stand out to us, but to predators, their colors act as camouflage, blending in with the water and corals. And that some scientists theorize that migratory birds may be able to see the Earth’s magnetic field using magnetoreceptors in their eyes.

But the book isn’t just a gift to science nerds and animal lovers (your girl is guilty on both counts). It’s also a call-to-action, a plea to, as Yong puts it, “preserve the dark” and “save the quiet.” In the final chapter, Yong asks the reader to consider the harms of sensory pollution—an environmental problem that, unlike so many others we face today, can be “immediately and effectively addressed.” Turn off the lights, and we instantly reduce light pollution. Stop the honking, whirling, and beeping—and with it, goes the noise. (We effectively accomplished this in early 2020, Yong notes, when pandemic lockdowns meant the world was much quieter and darker.)

Much like how nature needed a reprieve from us humans, An Immense World was an essential reset for Yong himself. At the end of 2020, when Yong announced via Twitter he was going on book leave, he wrote, “This year has been the most professionally meaningful of my life, but it has also shredded me.” He needed a break.

When I called him last month, Yong told me that this book (his second, after the 2016 bestseller I Contain Multitudes) felt like a “salve for the soul” to write. “I’m feeling pretty burnt out now,” he said. “But I think I would be catastrophically so if I hadn’t taken a break and existed in this much happier, more joyful headspace for a while.” He hopes that the same feeling extends to readers, especially now, after more than two brutal years of Covid. “We could all use a little bit more joy right now,” he said.

A democracy is only as strong as its ability to recognize what threatens it. If a nation cannot comprehend the danger it faces, it is not in a position to adopt measures to protect itself. On Thursday night—in prime time!—the House committee investigating the January 6 riot tried to sound the alarm. But the fact that the committee needed to highlight the obvious—that the constitutional order was jeopardized by a president who schemed to overturn a free and fair election and who incited an insurrectionist attack on the US government—was itself a warning that this threat has not been fully or adequately addressed. 

Opening the first of a series of hearings, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee chair, delivered passionate remarks that noted the assault on the US Capitol placed two centuries of constitutional democracy at risk and that it was part of “sprawling, multi-step conspiracy” orchestrated by Donald Trump to negate the election and overthrow the government to retain power illegally. Thompson asked his audience to try not to view this hearing as a political endeavor. The committee, he said, “will remind you of the reality that happened that day.” And that is the committee’s challenge: to counter Trump’s Big Lie and defend not just constitutional government but reality itself. 

Thompson did that with the first piece of evidence the committee presented. It was a clip from a deposition of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who told the committee’s investigators that he had three post-election conversations with Trump in which he said the election was not stolen and that this assertion was “bullshit.” In her opening statement, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the ranking Republican on the committee, showed testimony from Ivanka Trump in which she said she had accepted Barr’s conclusion that there was no significant election fraud. That is, according to the president’s daughter, Trump was defying reality—either lying about the election or delusional, perhaps both. 

Cheney hammered this point further: Assorted Trump campaign officials, she said, concluded there was no evidence the election was stolen. A top campaign lawyer informed White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that the campaign had uncovered no significant voting wrongdoing. Meadows replied to him, “So there’s no there there.” (My recollection is that this conversation is not in Meadows’ recent book.) Barr also told Trump that the allegations that voting machines had been rigged against him was “complete nonsense” and “crazy stuff.” Yet that didn’t stop Trump. He kept repeating this accusation. He refused to acknowledge reality. 

Cheney also signaled the committee is determined to show that Trump engaged in a profound dereliction of duty on January 6.  She noted that half a dozen witnesses have told the committee that while the violent melee was under way aides and confidantes pressed Trump to take steps to end the riot—and he refused to do so. Worse, he became angry at advisers who asked him to intervene. Cheney also disclosed that in response to reports that the marauders were threatening to kill Vice President Mike Pence, Trump, according to one witness, said maybe Pence “deserves it.” And she said that during the course of the riot, Trump placed no call to any element of the US government to protect the Capitol. 

On January 6, 2021, Caroline Edwards was one of five officers forming the US Capitol Police’s first line of defense against hundreds of advancing rioters. As the frenzied crowd pressed forward into the metal bike racks dividing them from the cops, the 5-foot-4 Edwards was thrust to the ground, sustaining a traumatic brain injury when her head collided with the concrete. 

Edwards, the first officer to be hurt during the riot, was one of two live witnesses that the January 6 committee called to testify during Thursday night’s hearing. At one point, the officer watched video footage of the moment she was injured. 

Video shows the moment that Officer Caroline Edwards suffered injuries outside of the U.S. Capitol. Edwards was thrown to the ground. pic.twitter.com/uMx2uhnCNM

— Norah O'Donnell (@NorahODonnell) June 10, 2022

Even after suffering brain trauma, Edwards continued to beat back the mob with her fellow officers. During the fighting, Edwards testified, she was pepper sprayed beside officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes hours after the Capitol attack and died the next day. The Washington, DC, medical examiner concluded Sicknick died of natural causes but added that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”

Look, who knows what the upshot of the January 6 Committee hearings will be. That Trump and his cronies tried to overthrow election results has been clear for more than a year to those who are paying attention.

But what if you haven’t been?

Well, the January 6 Committee has made a deft play to get your attention, and they’re doing it by deploying all the tricks of a limited-run HBO series or podcast. First, they use structure—a “seven-part plan” to overthrow a free and fair election, as Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told us, and they’re going to devote an episode to each part of that plan. Care to see which members of Congress begged for a presidential pardon for their role in the coup? Tune in to episode 4!

“While the violence was underway, President Trump failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol,” says Rep. Liz Cheney in her opening statement for the Jan. 6 hearing.

More: https://t.co/RSSQwb8trE pic.twitter.com/4pSthhzHt5

While rioters rampaged through the Capitol on January 6, President Donald Trump told staff with him that he approved of the attack, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) revealed on Thursday during the first hearing of the select congressional panel investigating the attack.

“As you will see in the hearings to come, President Trump believed his supporters at the Capitol, and I quote, ‘Were doing what they should be doing,'” Cheney, the vice chair of the panel, said in her opening statement at the hearing.

It was already known that after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6 it took Trump more than three hours to tell the attackers to leave, even as aides, his family members, and frightened members of Congress pressed him to try to call off the mob he had incited. But Cheney revealed new information that Trump had not only rejected those pleas but vocally sided with the mob.

“You will hear testimony that the president did not really want to put anything out, calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave,” Cheney said. “You will hear that Trump was yelling and angry at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more.”

When Trump learned that attackers were calling to “hang Mike Pence,” because the vice president had refused to comply with Trump’s illegal call for Pence to assert his power to block the certification of electoral votes, Trump said he agreed with the mob. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” Trump said, according to Cheney. “Mike Pence deserves it,”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The failure by governments and businesses to accelerate energy efficiency efforts is “inexplicable,” according to the head of the International Energy Agency.

Fatih Birol said saving more energy was “utterly essential” in cutting household’s rocketing bills, ending reliance on fossil fuel regimes such as Russia, and rapidly lowering the CO2 emissions driving the climate crisis.

New analysis by the IEA showed that doubling the rate of energy efficiency improvements seen in the last decade would, by 2030, slash global energy use by the same amount used in China every year, saving households $650 billion. It would also cut oil and gas use by far more than Russia exports to the European Union. Ending these exports is a key EU goal after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The IEA said greater efficiency could be readily achieved with existing technologies and would pay back fully the investment through lower running costs, especially at today’s high energy prices. Important measures include the rollout of electric cars and heat pumps, more efficient household appliances such as fridges and TVs, and people nudging down home thermostats and choosing greener travel.

More details are emerging over just how long law enforcement took to stop the Uvalde school shooting this week, including horrifying descriptions of how children suffered while police waited outside gathering resources and preparing themselves to intervene. As it becomes apparent that law enforcement delayed up to an hour before storming the building, criticism of their performance and their previous account of the event is growing. On Saturday, Texas’ lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, a conservative who has made attacking those who criticize law enforcement a key part of his political brand, said on Fox & Friends that he and others in the Texas government “were not told the truth” following the Uvdale shooting that killed 19 children and two adults.

Initial reports, provided by law enforcement sources immediately after the shooting, described armed school security and local police officers engaging in a gun battle with the shooter, and then working to quickly rescue surviving children. That narrative changed over subsequent hours and days as details began to emerge of the scene both in and outside the school. Parents, who frantically waited outside the school as the shooting continued, fought with law enforcement who tried to prevent them from entering the building, even as they failed to move into the school themselves and confront the shooter. One mother who wanted to gain access said she was handcuffed by US marshals and threatened with arrest. On Friday, transcripts of 911 calls made by children begging for help from the classrooms for as long as an hour were released. 

Investigators now say that the school district’s police department chief ordered officers to hold back from confronting the shooter because he thought it was a siege situation, in which shooter was isolated and could be approached by law enforcement, and not an active shooter continuing to threaten children’s lives. School shooting experts say that was the wrong choice and goes contrary to training in the decades since the Columbine shooting in 1999.

On Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged that he was mistaken in his earlier praise for law enforcement’s response. At a press conference on Wednesday, Abbott had claimed, “As horrible as what happened, it could have been worse. The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do. They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.”

On Friday, Abbott said he was “livid” that he had been given wrong information. 

New York attorney general Letitia James’ civil fraud investigation into Donald Trump’s businesses is one of the few legal cases against the former president that has had real traction. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that the former president’s most serious attempt to stall it has no basis and the case can proceed. James has been investigating Trump’s finances since late 2019 and has recently focused on whether Trump had fraudulently manipulated the value of his business empire in the years before he became president to get favorable terms from banks, insurance agents, and tax assessors. Back in December, Trump sued James, asking New York district court judge Brenda Sannes to stop the AG’s investigation as a “fishing expedition” that amounted to political harassment because James is a Democrat.

But on Friday Sannes rejected Trump’s argument entirely, tossing out the suit, writing that she didn’t have the power to interfere with a state-level case, and that Trump’s claims of political persecution, which might justify her intervention, simply didn’t bear out. In her opinion, Sannes wrote:

“Plaintiffs have not established that Defendant commenced the New York proceeding to otherwise harass them. Such harassment is ‘typically’ done ‘through the unjustified and oppressive use of multiple prosecutions.’ Here, there is a single investigation and state court proceeding. While the New York proceeding has been ongoing since August 2020, Plaintiffs have submitted no evidence that the subpoena enforcement proceeding has been conducted in such a way as to constitute harassment.”

In his lawsuit, Trump’s attorneys listed numerous examples of times when James, who served on the New York City Council before being elected attorney general in 2018, has said critical things about Trump. They noted that in her campaign platform, James had said she would investigate him. As the judge overseeing the investigation has noted, the fact that James has simply said she disagrees politically with the former president doesn’t automatically make the investigation unfair. Sannes wrote that Trump “failed to produce any evidence that the state proceeding has been conducted in bad faith” and wrote that his claims of the investigation being a “baseless fishing expedition” are “wholly unsupported.”

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment, but James took to Twitter to call Trump’s now-dismissed lawsuit “frivolous.”

Former president Donald Trump spoke at the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston, Texas, Friday night, giving a speech laden with falsehoods about gun control and school shootings. He ended with a strange dance, more fitting for one of his elaborate campaign events than a policy speech in the wake of this week’s horrific attack at an elementary school in Uvalde—250 miles east of the NRA event—that left 19 children and two adults dead. 

While other major GOP politicians decided not to show up or canceled their appearances at this year’s convention in light of the school shooting—including Texas governor Greg Abbott who recorded a speech and Texas senator John Cornyn who stayed in Washington, DC, to negotiate with Senate Democrats about possible new legislation—Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz were both on stage at the George R. Brown Convention Center Friday night.

Trump opened his speech by reading the names of the children slain in Uvalde, accompanied by the sound of a recorded bell tolling. 

This is just gross. They have Trump trying to pronounce and read the names of the dead children while the NRA rings a bell. Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/AADaVc4o0s

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 27, 2022

This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last December, a young patient was admitted to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, after several medications had failed to quell the child’s relentless seizures. A hospital pediatrician, Vignesh Doraiswamy, consulted with neurologists and then tried a different drug. The child had fewer seizures, became more interactive, and was ready to go back home, says Doraiswamy. But there was a problem: The patient’s insurance company refused to authorize the new medication for the parents to administer. The family had to remain in the hospital for at least two more days, Doraiswamy recalls, while the decision went through an appeals process.

Doctors have long asserted that prior authorization—the need to get approval from the patient’s insurer before proceeding with treatment—causes delays that can hurt patient care. In an American Medical Association survey conducted in December 2021, one-third of physicians reported that such delays have caused at least one of their patients to experience a serious problem, such as hospitalization, the development of a birth defect, disability, and even death. In that same survey, more than 80 percent of surveyed doctors said patients at least sometimes abandon their recommended treatment because of prior authorization hassles. Just over half of the physicians who treat adult patients in the workforce said prior authorization has interfered with patients’ ability to do their jobs.

Prior authorizations also exact a toll on doctors, who say the paperwork has gotten out of hand. The average physician must now seek approval for dozens of prescriptions and medical services each week, an administrative burden that contributes to burnout and costs physician practices an estimated $26.7 billion in time each year.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, prior authorization is one of several strategies that insurers use to reduce wasteful medical spending. (Other strategies include patient cost-sharing and requiring patients to try low-cost drugs before the insurance company will pay for a more expensive therapy.) These strategies can discourage the use of inappropriate and overpriced medications and promote the use of better options. But, as drug prices rise, insurers are intensifying prior authorization requirements and physician practices have built up a huge infrastructure to fight for the drugs they want to prescribe.

As gun violence ravages communities and the country reels from a string of horrific mass shootings, Americans have been left with an all-too-familiar question: Will our lawmakers finally do something to stop the carnage? We’ve been here before, many times; we’ve watched as Republicans (and some Democrats) bowed to pressure from the National Rifle Association and blocked even the most basic gun control measures.

But as the Trace’s Mike Spies pointed out the day after the Uvalde massacre, there actually has been a seismic shift in the political landscape. The NRA is still a powerful force, but years of scandal and infighting and a failed attempt to declare bankruptcy may have left it substantially weaker than it was in 2013, when pro-gun forces killed a bipartisan background check bill in the wake of the Sandy Hook murders:

2/Its longtime PR firm, which served as the voice of the organization and devised Wayne LaPierre’s persona, is long gone. Its most effective spokespeople are long gone. Its most effective leader, Chris Cox, is long gone. Cox’s team is gone. Oliver North is long gone.

— mike spies (@mikespiesnyc) May 26, 2022

The NRA still spends millions on lobbying, but Chris Cox, its legendary chief lobbyist, stepped down in 2019. The group shelled out more than $29 million on the 2020 elections, according to Open Secrets. But that was barely half of what it spent in 2016.

Once upon a time, Alex Berenson was a New York Times journalist covering major stories, from the Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina to the Bernie Madoff scandal. But over the last several years, he’s increasingly focused on a new pet project: owning the libs. In his Substack newsletter “Unreported Truths” he rails against Joe Biden, derides the pro-choice movement, and complains about inflation to his “tens of thousands of subscribers.”

One of Berenson’s favorite themes has been to downplay the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines—and it’s this work in particular that has made him a star. Before Twitter kicked him off the platform for spreading vaccine disinformation last year, he had hundreds of thousands of followers. Berenson’s Substack newsletters over the last month have mostly been more of the same: He rails against “woke media whoppers about Covid vaccines” and describes Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman as a “fat vaccinated cannabis activist.”

But earlier this week, Berenson took aim at a new target: the growing global outbreak of the monkeypox virus. In a post titled “Is It Monkeypox or Crystalpox?” Berenson writes that public health authorities have “almost got another epidemic on the go—the perfect way to distract the shiny-haired robots in the media from the complete failure of the mRNA vaccines.” He then goes on to argue that monkeypox is strictly a disease of gay men. “Are you a gay man who likes sex with lots of other gay men?” he wrote. “Maybe in a bathhouse? Maybe names optional? Maybe with a meth bump on the side? No? Are you sure?… Okay. Don’t worry about the monkeypox thing then.”

With those two points—a supposedly overblown illness plus some homophobia—Berenson did what anti-vaccine activists do best. He managed to build upon his previous talking points and pivot to the current news cycle, neatly weaving the latest headlines into a grand conspiracy theory with necessary villains and egregious profiteering.

There is seemingly no topic too far afield for these zealots to exploit. Recently, I’ve reported on anti-vaccine influencers’ embrace of pro-Kremlin ideology and their promotion of dangerous disinformation about the baby formula shortage. But the monkeypox outbreak offers especially fertile ground because it allows the purveyors of misinformation to recycle many of the same talking points that they developed for Covid. The addition of homophobic rhetoric is particularly toxic, as it’s likely to unite anti-LGBTQ extremists with Covid denialists. As Yale epidemiologist and AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves put it on Twitter earlier this week, this might be “that moment when homophobia meets far right pandemic politics.”

For many years now, every horrific gun massacre has ricocheted widely with a familiar theme of outrage and surrender. On Wednesday, the day after a heavily armed, suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, Washington Post columnist Brian Broome published one of the more powerful versions of that narrative I’ve ever read. “Nothing happened after innocent children were slaughtered the last time, or the time before that, and nothing is going to be done now,” he wrote, citing Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Parkland.

Broome’s column articulated the enduring shame of our nation’s political stalemate and pathetic inaction on gun policy. It was piercing and poignant—and, in my view, wrong.

It’s not just that we shouldn’t resign ourselves in perpetuity to such outrage, rightful as it is. This narrative has become part of the problem itself—in some cases possibly even fueling the escalating cycle of mass shootings. That’s because it validates the recurring violence, framing it as an indefinite feature of our reality.

And mass shooters pay heed. After nearly a decade of studying these attacks and how to prevent them through the work of behavioral threat assessment, I documented extensive case evidence for my book, Trigger Points. The research shows that many perpetrators are keenly aware of media and political narratives about their actions.

They hope the public will focus on sensational coverage of their rage-filled “manifestos,” their sinister photos uploaded to social media, their ghastly livestreams. They want notoriety, and they seek justification and credibility for their acts of violence. And in the message that America will never stop these mass shootings, they find such affirmation.