An Austin, Texas, jury on Friday found that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay Sandy Hook parents $45.2 million in punitive damages for broadcasting defamatory claims that the 2012 school massacre was a government plot—and that the parents were in on the operation. That was on top of a separate set of compensatory damages issued this week, totaling $4.1 million.

The long-awaited ruling came after Jones, the founder of InfoWars, was found liable last year for defaming the parents, and it represented the first climax of three such hearings to assess how much Jones owes his victims.

But along with the other future hearings, Jones could soon be embroiled in another high-stakes legal drama after his lawyers in the defamation case mistakenly sent an enormous trove of his personal phone data to the legal counsel … for the Sandy Hook parents. This jaw-dropping development produced considerable courtroom drama—as my colleague Abigail Weinberg documented on Wednesday (watch to see Jones’s reaction happen in real-time). It also opened a surprise door for investigators working for the January 6 commission, which is trying to piece together how the Capitol Insurrection was potentially coordinated among a band of far-right operatives and extremists.

News quickly broke that the committee was preparing to issue a subpoena for the data, which apparently consists of two years’ worth of texts. Mark Bankston, a lawyer representing the parents, told the Texas court he was now in the possession of “intimate messages with Roger Stone”—the Trump-aligned operative—and that he was prepared to hand the cache over if the judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, cleared the way. She did just that on Friday. As Mother Jones has previously reported, Stone has multiple connections to a group of Oath Keepers, the far-right militia accused of helping to orchestrate a plot to disrupt the 2020 presidential election. (Both Stone and Jones have maintained they played no role in promoting violence.)

So, what would investigators be looking for exactly? Bankston doesn’t know. “We certainly saw text messages from as far back as 2019,” he said. “In terms of what all is on that phone, it’s going to take a little while to figure that out.”

Senate Democrats’ climate and health care bill is one big step closer to becoming law after the body’s parliamentarian signed off on most of the package on Saturday morning.

The “Inflation Reduction Act,” which Vox called “the biggest thing the US has ever done to tackle climate change,” includes nearly $370 billion of climate spending. It would also allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and reduce the deficit through measures including a new minimum tax on some of the country’s largest corporations. 

Less than two weeks ago, there seemed to be little chance of Democrats passing major legislation before the midterm elections in November. But in late July, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin, who’d helped tank President Joe Biden’s more ambitious Build Back Better package, shocked Washington by reaching a deal that they said would lead to hundreds of billions in climate spending while also raising revenue.

The key question then became what Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the other major Democratic obstacle to Senate action, would do. Late Thursday, Sinema said she was largely behind the bill aside from a provision that would have removed a tax break used by private equity billionaires that even Donald Trump has said allows plutocrats to get “away with murder”. Sinema added, however, that her overall support was still “subject to the parliamentarian’s review.”

On Saturday, Democrats cleared that hurdle when they announced that Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough—the nonpartisan expert in charge of determining whether legislation conforms with Senate rules—concluded that most of the bill can be passed through reconciliation. It means that Democrats only need a bare majority—not the 60 votes required to overcome a Republican filibuster—to pass the bill. The votes in favor are expected to be 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker.

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

The plastics had only been submerged in the ocean off Falmouth, England, for a week, but in that time a thin layer of biofilm, a slimy mix of mucus and microbes, had already developed on their surfaces. Michiel Vos, a microbiologist at the University of Exeter in England, had sunk five different types of plastic as a test. He and his colleagues wanted to know which of the myriad microbes living in the ocean would glom on to these introduced materials.

Vos and his colleagues’ chief concern was pathogenic bacteria. To understand the extent to which plastic can be colonized by potentially deadly bacteria, the scientists injected wax moth larvae with the biofilm. After a week, four percent of the larvae died. But four weeks later, after Vos and his team had let the plastics stew in the ocean for a bit longer, they repeated the test. This time, 65 percent of the wax moths died.

The scientists analyzed the biofilm: the plastics were covered in bacteria, including some known to make us sick. They found pathogenic bacteria responsible for causing urinary tract, skin, and stomach infections, pneumonia, and other illnesses. To make matters worse, these bacteria were also carrying a wide range of genes for antimicrobial resistance. “Plastics that you find in the water are rapidly colonized by bacteria, including pathogens,” says Vos. “And it doesn’t really matter what plastic it is.”

It’s not just bacteria that are hitching a ride on plastics. Biofilms on marine plastics can also harbor parasites, viruses, and toxic algae. With marine plastic pollution so ubiquitous—it’s been found everywhere from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to Arctic beaches—scientists are concerned that plastics are transporting these human pathogens around the oceans.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a crucial vote in an evenly divided Senate, announced last night that she would support a key piece of Biden’s legislative agenda—with some caveats.

Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a longtime holdout, stunned his colleagues when he announced that he had struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which “includes roughly $370 billion in energy and climate spending, $300 billion in deficit reduction, three years of subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, prescription drug reform and significant tax changes,” per Politico.

But the bill was not going to move forward without the support of Sinema, who demanded that Democrats drop a provision that would place new limitations on the carried interest loophole—which many of her donors happen to benefit from—and garner roughly $14 billion in funding. Instead, the bill will reportedly include a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks—the practice of corporations repurchasing their own stock to drive up share prices—that’s set to garner $73 billion in federal revenue. Sinema also reportedly managed to win $5 billion in drought resiliency funding, a boon to Arizona.

NEW: DEMOCRATS REACH DEAL WITH SINEMA ON TAXES.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate's budget reconciliation legislation." She will move forward after parl review.

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

The US is, following decades of political rancor and fossil fuel industry obfuscation, on the verge of its first significant attempt to tackle the climate crisis. Experts say it will help rewire the American economy and act as an important step in averting disastrous global heating.

Independent analysis of the proposed legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, shows it should slash America’s planet-heating emissions by about 40 percent by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels.

This cut would bring the US within striking distance of a goal set by Joe Biden to cut emissions in half by 2030, a target that scientists say must be achieved by the whole world if catastrophic global heating, triggering escalating heatwaves, droughts and floods, is to be avoided.

“This is a massive turning point,” said Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This bill includes so much, it comprises nearly $370bn in climate and clean energy investments. That’s truly historic. Overall, the IRA is a huge opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.”

After spreading baseless claims of election fraud in the Arizona gubernatorial primary, Republican Kari Lake has won her party’s nomination. The Donald Trump-backed candidate and former FOX 10 Phoenix anchor defeated real estate developer Karrin Taylor Robson, who received endorsements from former Vice President Mike Pence and current Gov. Doug Ducey and invested $15 million of her own money in the campaign. Lake, a steadfast proponent of the Big Lie, had been the frontrunner, building her campaign around Trump’s stamp of approval—and the support of election deniers like Rep. Paul Gosar, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and My Pillow’s Mike Lindell. Lake campaigned on election conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant and pro-border enforcement rhetoric, and her repudiation of the very media that gave her a platform. 

Lake announced she was running for governor three months after ending her 22-year career with the Fox affiliate. In a video making her resignation public, Lake said she no longer approved of the direction journalism was going and that media needed more balanced and diverse viewpoints. “Not everyone is dedicated to telling the truth, but thankfully many of you have figured that out,” she said. “I promise you: If you hear it from my lips, it will be truthful.” She has continued to call the media the “enemy of the people” and appeared in a campaign video smashing televisions while vowing to take a “sledgehammer to leftist lies and propaganda.” Her conversion from TV personality to media-basher seemed to be a strategy intended to turn a “potential liability with Republican voters to an asset,” as Melanie Mason writes in the Los Angeles Times. 

Kari Lake has been contending for weeks now their is fraud & irregularities in her *primary* election — yet, below, she’s unable to offer a single specific allegation & refuses to answer why she wouldn’t take such intel to authorities. https://t.co/wxi4z0X2Ha

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) August 2, 2022

On various occasions during the campaign, Lake has hinted at supposed attempts to steal the primary election, but she has refused to provide any evidence to support her claims. “I’m not going to clarify it,” she recently said on a radio show. “We are on to some things that are very suspicious and possibly illegal. We’re working on it. I don’t want to ruin the investigation.” The chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections in the state’s largest county, called her allegations “beyond irresponsible.” As part of her election integrity platform, Lake has proposed a ban on ballot-counting machines. 

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

Phoenix is America’s hottest city, and it’s getting hotter. The global climate crisis and decades of sprawling urban growth have turned this desert city into a hazardous heat island with dwindling water supplies and inadequate shade.

An assortment of programs to cool down Phoenix and help people survive the heat have not been working: in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, record high temperatures contributed to at least 662 deaths between 2020 and 2021, while thousands more people needed emergency medical treatment.

That’s where the city’s new Office of Heat Response and Mitigation comes in. The pioneering heat team was created last September amid pressure from activists, researchers, faith groups, and health experts for a dedicated team responsible—and accountable—for making Phoenix more livable.

David Hondula, a climate and health researcher at Arizona State University, was hired to lead the four-person team and coordinate the city’s immediate efforts to cut heat deaths and illness, and come up with ways to cool the city and make it more comfortable in the long term. It’s the first local government-funded heat team in North America, possibly the world. “It’s a long game—we’re fighting for small wins that we hope will accumulate into larger wins,” said Hondula. “We need to prepare for and recover from every summer, not occasional heatwaves.”

Before Celsius filed for bankruptcy last month, the company seemed optimistic about its future. In a June 7 blog post titled “Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead,” the crypto-lending firm took aim at the “vocal actors” who were “spreading misinformation and confusion.” It assured its customers that it was “online 24–7” and said it was continuing to “process withdrawals without delay.”

Celsius—which offers bank-like services for crypto enthusiasts, including the chance to earn eye-popping interest rates by depositing digital assets and the ability to borrow using crypto as collateral—boasted that it had “one of the best risk management teams in the world.” 

“We have made it through crypto downturns before (this is our fourth!),” the company assured consumers. “Celsius is prepared.”

Five days later, Celsius paused all customer withdrawals—a move that essentially froze the assets of its hundreds of thousands of users. A month after that, Celsius filed for bankruptcy. During the bankruptcy proceedings, it became evident that the company did not offer the same protections that traditional banks do. Since 2019, “the Company has been clear” that it may have to temporarily or permanently pause withdrawals due to a variety of potential circumstances, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky wrote in a legal declaration. When customers deposit their savings with Celsius, they “transfer ‘all right and title’ of their crypto assets to Celsius,” he stated.

According to a presentation filed in court, Celsius now hopes to offer its customers a choice: accept a cash payment worth just a fraction of their investments, or opt to “remain ‘long’ crypto”—that is, continue to hold their digital currency on Celsius’ books in the hopes of eventually being able to recover their money.

In 2018, two years before YouTube de-platformed “Dark Web philosopher” and alt-right star Stefan Molyneux for violating its hate speech policies, he was one of the big names featured at the first American Priority Conference in DC. The event was marketed as a free speech extravaganza of Trump-supporting activists and influencers not welcome at more traditional Republican confabs like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the oldest, largest, and most influential right-wing gathering in the country. But when Molyneux showed up, he discovered conference rooms mostly full of empty chairs. So he bailed.

Embarrassing turnout might have put an end to this event. Instead, AMPFest, as it’s now known, relocated to the Trump National Doral Miami hotel in 2019, added a golf tournament and a $75,000 sponsorship package, and scored appearances by Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). Suddenly it became a top destination in the right-wing convention circuit, providing yet another platform for disgraced MAGA-world politicos like former national security adviser Lt. General Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, campaign operative George Papadopoulos, and right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, all of whom were pardoned by President Donald Trump for various crimes.

AMPFest is just one new entry on a right-wing event scene that has exploded in recent years. When I first started covering conservative conferences, in 2009, the options consisted mainly of the annual Values Voter Summit, sponsored by the evangelical Family Research Council, and the then-annual CPAC. Now there are dozens of events, and they reflect how the GOP marketplace incentivizes and rewards the worst actors the party has on offer, and distills it to a roux of disinformation and commercial opportunity for all who participate.

Just a small sampling of the summer ’22 offerings: In June, AMPFest held a new extravaganza in California, branded as a MAGA Coachella. That same weekend, former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Lara Trump were lighting up 2,500 conservative students in Dallas at the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit. Two weeks later, Ralph Reed, one of the original whiz kids of the religious right, hosted his Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference at the Opryland Resort in Nashville, starring Donald Trump, with a roster of special guests that commingled Republican members of Congress with anti-vaccine activists such as Stella Immanuel (the Texas doctor who believes some gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons), and, yet again, McEnany. In late July, Trump appeared at TPUSA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa, with Don Jr., Gaetz, and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). McEnany was there too.

The September lineup offers the Truth & Liberty Coalition Conference in Colorado, starring Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and the Family Research Council’s new Pray Vote Stand event. Taking into account the various anti-vaccine conventions, Trump’s American Freedom Tour, and Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour—held at megachurches and showcasing conspiracy theorists, QAnon devotees, and MyPillow’s Mike Lindell—a partisan could attend a spectacle every other weekend.

The first time Loretta Chou drilled a hole in a bone, as a medical student in the mid-80’s, she thought it was the most fun thing she had ever done.

“I liked that you could actually make people better—almost immediately better—by operating on a fracture,” she recalls.

When she decided to specialize in orthopedic surgery, the branch of medicine that treats the musculoskeletal system, she knew that her chosen profession was a boys’ club. Just six percent of orthopedic surgeons are women. But it didn’t dawn on her that her job could be a health risk until the mid-2000s, when Chou, by then the chief of foot and ankle surgery at Stanford University, noticed that an alarming number of female colleagues were being diagnosed with breast cancer.

She got to wondering: Was this a fluke, or did female orthopedic surgeons have high rates of cancer? On some level, it wouldn’t be surprising if they did. Radiation exposure is a known carcinogen—the closer you are to the radiation source, the higher the risk—and orthopedic surgeons are often the closest in the operating room to x-ray beams. The surgeries typically involve the use of a technology called fluoroscopy, which shines an x-ray beam onto the patient during operations, providing the surgeon with real-time images over the course of the operation. The procedures can be lengthy, exposing surgeons to radiation over several hours. Yet surgeons aren’t always diligent about wearing the lead shields aimed at protecting from radiation, and, critically, the shields often leave the outer edges of the breast uncovered.

In the summer of 2007, Chou and her colleagues at Stanford mailed surveys to the women in the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the field’s main professional association, asking if the surgeons had had cancer. More than eighty percent of the recipients, or 499 women, responded; 29 of them had a history of cancer. While the sample size was small, the results, published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, were startling, suggesting that female orthopedic surgeons were nearly twice as likely to have cancer as women in the general population, and nearly three times as likely to have breast cancer. A follow-up study of similar sample size in 2012 had nearly identical findings. Another, in 2015, found significantly higher rates of breast cancer among orthopedic surgeons than plastic surgeons or urologists, both of whom generally use fluoroscopy less frequently than orthopedic surgeons. Chou’s latest study, a survey of nearly 700 female orthopedic surgeons published earlier this year, found that the surgeons have rates of breast cancer nearly four times higher than the general population.

In his decision to help gut Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell”—cases that enshrined Americans’ right to contraception, to intimate same-sex relationships, and to marriage equality. In the past week, Democrats have raced to codify same-sex marriage, culminating in Tuesday’s passage of the Respect for Marriage Act in the House.

Now, the bill rests in the hands of the Senate, where it’s not yet clear if enough Republicans will support the bill and help it avoid a 60-vote filibuster. What would happen if it doesn’t pass? Currently, there are at least 32 states—Arizona, Louisiana, and Ohio among them—that have either constitutional amendments, state laws, or both that prohibit same-sex marriage. The Obergefell v. Hodges ruling rendered these defunct in 2015, but if the Supreme Court were to overturn that decision, same-sex marriage would be instantly banned in at least 25 of those states—putting thousands of couples at risk.

Marriages, of course, are more than just white cakes and wedding rings. Everything from child custody to property rights can depend on whether a couple is married. In fact, a 2004 study from the US Government Accountability Office found that there are 1,138 statutes and provisions where marriage status is a factor in receiving benefits, rights, or privileges. Before the legalization of same-sex marriage, gay couples often would face discrimination and have their rights denied by various legal bodies.

“From taxes to Social Security benefits to retirement benefits,” said Mary Bauer, the executive director of the Virginia ACLU. “(There are) all sorts of things that are built into our kind of structure of laws and systems. Spouses have a legal privilege that is incredibly important in many practical and moral ways. We’ve heard all sorts of all sorts of stories about families that are treated as though they are not families. ” 

“There’s kind of a million ways that this plays out…people have to fight for the right to be recognized as their child’s parent,” she added. “That is, as we all regard now, nonsensical, discriminatory, bigoted, and unacceptable.” 

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

A quarter of Europe’s breeding seabirds spend spring in the UK, turning our coastline into a giant maternity unit. These noisy outcrops usually stink of bird poo. However, this year has been different. “Instead of the smell of guano, it’s the smell of death,” says Gwen Potter, a National Trust countryside manager working on the Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland. “It’s completely horrendous.”

This annual congregation of life has turned into a super-spreader event, as a highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1—also known as bird flu—sweeps through populations of breeding birds, causing devastating losses. More than 300 outbreaks have been reported in UK seabird colonies, and dozens of coastal sites have closed to the public.

The Farne Islands are home to 200,000 seabirds, including Arctic terns, Atlantic puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, and razorbills. Potter is one of many conservationists swapping binoculars for a hazmat suit, picking up the bodies of birds she has spent her career trying to protect. Birds will sit on the ground, unable to move, twisting into unnatural positions, before dying. It is happening with chicks, too, still gently trying to flap as they die. “It sweeps through, takes everything in its path. It doesn’t seem to spare anything, really…We’ve collected thousands of dead birds, and that’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s just the scale of it which is hard to grasp,” she says.

Early observations suggest that how closely the bird’s nest is a key factor in how quickly the virus is transmitted. Guillemots nest quite densely, and kittiwakes are often next to them, which makes them vulnerable, although there is more space between them. Terns also nest densely and already 25 percent of the 350 sandwich terns on the Farne Islands are thought to have died, according to Potter. Some seabird chicks jump into the sea prematurely if their parents have died, while others starve in the nest.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted Friday of defying a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. For all the sound and fury from Bannon about Justice Department overreach, the case wrapped with an almost inhuman speed. A jury in Washington, DC only had to deliberate for less than three hours before finding him guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress.

For months, Bannon had refused to provide documents to the committee or submit for a deposition despite being central to many of the key events prior to the insurrection.

As Mother Jones reported last week, Bannon was recorded prior to Election Day predicting that former President Donald Trump would falsely declare victory. On his podcast, War Room, he has also repeatedly accused Joe Biden of being an illegitimate president and said “stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.” 

Yep, that was our scoop you just heard as Liz Cheney closes the #January6thHearings.

Reporter @dfriedman33 got ahold of leaked audio of Steve Bannon confirming Trump had a plan to declare electoral victory, even if he was losing. Listen here:pic.twitter.com/ARr3M4qAjH

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill Thursday to legalize weed on the federal level, finally opening the floodgates to a conversation that activists (and stoners) have been working toward for decades. 

The Senate bill goes further than just pure legalization too. It “expunges federal cannabis-related records and creates funding for law enforcement departments to fight illegal cannabis cultivation,” Politico reported. 

But the chances of any of this becoming law are still slim. The bill is not expected to clear the 60-vote threshold for most legislation in the Senate. A minority of Democrats, including some from states that have already legalized weed, are not on board with changing federal law. Politico has the details:

Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, for example, represents a state where weed is legal—Montana—and says he does not support federal decriminalization. A handful of other Democrats told POLITICO that they are against legalization or are undecided, including Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.). 

That’s a huge bummer, but not entirely unexpected when you consider the demographics of Congress. As my colleague Abigail Weinberg so succinctly put it earlier this year: old people are much less inclined to support weed legalization and the Senate is really old…”11 senators over the age of 75″ levels of old.

In February, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced his plan to buy a badly needed new United States Postal Service delivery fleet. There was just one problem: Ninety percent of the trucks would be gas-powered, with fuel efficiency ratings less than half a mile per gallon better than those of the existing fleet.

Environmental groups sued. Lawmakers tried to step in. And then, earlier this week, the USPS announced a breakthrough: The agency said that 40 percent of its new fleet would be electric. That’s a smaller proportion of electric mail trucks than environmentalists wanted—a House bill called for 75 percent—but it’s more than double what anyone expected under DeJoy’s plan.

In March, the USPS said that its initial procurement of 50,000 trucks from manufacturer Oshkosh Defense would include 10,019 battery electric vehicles. Now, the agency is aiming to buy 25,000 electric trucks. It also will supplement its fleet with 34,500 commercially available trucks—trucks that aren’t made-to-order for the USPS—”including as many [battery electric vehicles] as are commercially available and satisfy operational needs.”

The announcement is a big step toward fulfilling President Biden’s goal of phasing out federal agencies’ use of gas-powered trucks. But proponents of an electric fleet argue that 40 percent emissions free vehicles is not enough. 

“Investing in an outdated technology never made sense, and I am glad the Postmaster General is belatedly coming to that commonsense realization,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who introduced the House bill calling for an electric fleet, said in a statement. “We still have more work to do, and Congress will continue to help push the USPS to a modern, green fleet.”

When Donald Trump won in 2016, after fully not expecting to upon announcing his run, the transition period was a chaotic mess, leaving hundreds of government positions unfilled. This time around, Trump’s allies won’t be asleep at the wheel, according to a new Axios report. But the result might be the same.

Trump’s team is planning on “purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his ‘America First’ ideology,” Axios‘ Jonathan Swan reported in a lengthy piece Friday morning. 

Using an executive order that would make it easier for Trump to fire federal employees, his White House would proceed to remake the Executive Branch in his image, ultimately turning over “thousands of mid-level staff jobs.” Here’s Axios on the plan (bolding in original):

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department—including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.

The result would be a fully-politicized civil service that, in effect, proves Trump’s own conspiracy theory correct. Once a MAGA Corps is installed, there would be a “Deep State,” just one loyal to Trump. Then his successor has the choice, as the report lays out, of “whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.”

In mid-July, Sri Lanka’s government fell, with former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa bolting the country on a pre-dawn flight while protesters frolicked in the pool of his lavish mansion. The island nation of 22 million people, once one of the most prosperous in South Asia, had plunged into a severe economic crisis, characterized by empty grocery shelves, days’ long lines for gasoline, planned electricity outages lasting up to seven hours, and mass protests against the government. What happened? According to one prominent theory, it was all the result of a fateful decree Rajapaksa made in April 2021 to ban synthetic fertilizers and force the nation’s farmers—prodigious producers of rice and tea, among other crops—to embrace organic agriculture. 

Writing in The Wall Street Journal opinion page on July 14, Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society, summarized the case like this: “In an uprising that has its roots in Mr. Rajapaksa’s imperious decision to impose organic farming on the entire country—which led to widespread hunger after the agricultural economy collapsed—Sri Lanka’s people have wrought the first contra-organic national uprising in history.” 

Similar takes have emerged from Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who characterized Rajapaksa’s push for organic agriculture as a disaster-inducing “green new deal,” equating it to the stalled, never-implemented proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) (even though their GND never included a fertilizer ban or an organic mandate); and from members of the “ecomodernist” movement—a crew, centered around the Breakthrough Institute think-tank, that favors technology-centered, nuclear-powered responses to environmental crises. In a July 9 post on his Substack blog, Michael Shellenberger, the Breakthrough Institute’s co-founder and former president, opined that the “underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture.” 

Back in March, months before Rajapaksa’s inglorious exit, the prestigious magazine Foreign Policy ran a similar take on Sri Lanka’s then-already-mounting crisis. Co-authored by BTI executive director Ted Nordhaus, the article suggested that the “ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture” had triggered a range of ills—everything from a tumbling currency to rising inflation and poverty rates. 

Did that piece foretell the sequence of events that brought down Rajapaksa? And does the situation prove that any push to slash reliance in agrichemicals anywhere will produce “only misery,” as Nordhaus insisted? Unlike the Fox News and Wall Street Journal commentators, Nordhaus and Shellenberger both acknowledged that factors apart from organic agriculture played roles in Sri Lanka’s meltdown. But the two deans of ecomodernism also took pains to place the blame squarely on the removal of agrichemicals. Spoiler: Things on the ground in Sri Lanka were quite a bit more complicated than what these tirades suggest. 

When it comes to one of the most—or perhaps the most—important elements of the January 6 tragedy, the House select committee investigating the matter was largely not needed. The whole world already knows what Donald Trump did while the armed mob that he summoned and directed to the Capitol was savagely assaulting law enforcement officers, ransacking Congress, and trying to defeat the constitutional order: nothing.

Usually an investigation needs to determine who did what and when, but in this instance the basic story is already established. For a long stretch of the insurrectionist attack, Trump took no steps to halt it or to protect the police battling the fight-for-Trump terrorists or the elected officials inside the building, including his own vice president. Perhaps Trump’s worst action throughout his whole effort to overturn the election, this profound dereliction of duty is undeniable. We all saw what didn’t happen. In full public view, Trump did not abide by his oath of office and failed to defend the Constitution and the US government. No subpoena nor any testimony is necessary to prove this fundamental truth. 

Yet, the January 6 committee on Thursday night disclosed new details that rendered the picture of Trump’s worst day as president even worse. It revealed that from the time he returned to the White House after spreading his Big Lie at a rally—and being prevented by the Secret Service from joining the armed mob heading to the Capitol—he ensconced himself in his West Wing dining room for hours. There he watched the riot on Fox News and made not a single call to the military, law enforcement, or Washington, DC, government officials. He rejected numerous pleas from aides, advisers, Republican members of Congress, and family members (Ivanka and Donald Jr.) to intervene and call off the insurrectionists rampaging in the Capitol. Instead, he phoned Republican senators, as part of his scheme to forestall certification of the electoral count. And he spoke at least twice with Rudy Giuliani, his consigliere.

About what? That’s not known. But it’s a good guess that it was about how the riot could be exploited to halt or delay the certification. The committee also noted that there are no official records of what Trump did during these hours and no call records document who else he spoke to. (The committee learned about the Giuliani calls from the lawyer’s own phone records.) 

Through assorted testimony and evidence, the committee made it plain: Trump purposefully did nothing to end the raid. He wanted the violence at the Capitol to continue. As Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) put it, “President Trump did not fail to act [on January 6]… He chose not to act.” Kinzinger and other committee members noted there can be no greater indictment of a president than that he refused to defend America’s own government.

About one hour into Thursday’s primetime hearing on the January 6 insurrection, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) drew viewers’ attention to one of the most infamous images from January 6—a photo of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, pumping his fist at a crowd of soon-to-be rioters before he entered the Capitol that morning. 

Hawley was a significant player in the events of that day. As I reported in a profile of Hawley for the magazine, the ultra-ambitious Hawley had deceived conservative audiences about the outcome of the election over the preceding weeks (refusing, for instance, to say whether Biden actually would be the next president), and egged on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election by signaling his intention to object to the certification of the Electoral College results. The fist pump became a symbol for how Republicans brought the nation to that point.

But then Luria showed a previously unseen image of Hawley that day—a clip of the young senator running through a corridor to escape the mob he’d cheered on hours earlier.

The story of #January6th in two Josh Hawley moments. pic.twitter.com/mQJq3cUy6z

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 22, 2022

Late last month, shortly after the US Supreme Court stripped away federal protection for abortion rights, Dr. Christina Francis, an OB/GYN based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, took to Instagram with an urgent message: She wanted her followers to know that even in states where abortion will soon be illegal, doctors still would be able to terminate pregnancies to save the life of the mother. “Treating ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages or other life-threatening conditions in pregnancy is not the same thing as an abortion,” she said in a video she took of herself from inside a car. “This is very important to clear up because I know that many women are feeling fearful that they might not be able to receive life-saving care if they need it.” Commenters thanked Dr. Francis for her clarification. “The amount of people that don’t know the difference is disturbing,” said one. “So many people spreading false information. Thank you for sharing and educating!”

It’s not hard to see why the post took off: It came across as authoritative and reassuring during a period of great uncertainty. After the repeal of Roe v. Wade, many women and OBYGNs are very worried that they soon won’t be allowed to treat serious complications of pregnancy—like ectopic pregnancy, where a fertilized egg grows outside the womb. If left unattended because of concerns that removing it would be against laws prohibiting abortions, an ectopic pregnancy can potentially kill the mother if the pregnancy’s growth splits the fallopian tube in which it is most commonly housed. The calm clarity from Dr. Francis gave the impression of offering a clear path forward. In the days after she posted her video, it went viral on Instagram and TikTok.

But Dr. Francis left out a few key pieces of information about herself: She is a member of the anti-choice organization American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), as well as the anti-choice think tank Charlotte Lozier Institute. Her video was part of an all-out disinformation campaign by the anti-abortion movement to minimize the impact of the ruling on Roe—with an assist from powerful social media influencers who built their brand by spreading disinformation about Covid.

In addition to claiming that the law won’t affect pregnant women whose life is in danger, some influencers promote other false narratives downplaying the potential ramifications of the decision, assuring their followers that their access to contraceptives will be untouched, and their own lives won’t change. But that’s misleading, says Dr. Marta Perez, a board-certified OBGYN based in Austin, Texas. Now that Roe has been repealed, she explains, “even normal reproductive health care is going to have an extra layer of complexity and barriers.” People dealing with unexpectedly thorny pregnancies will have a harder time finding the care and treatment they need, no matter what their views on abortion might be. And there is some indication that not everyone would support abortions for conditions that endanger mothers: On July 16, three weeks after the Dobbs decision, Idaho Republicans at their annual convention voted to reject an amendment to their platform that would have made an exception to allow abortions that would save the life of the mother. The margins weren’t even close: 412 delegates voted no to the amendment, while just 164 voted yes.

But even in places that do favor such exemptions, the difference between an abortion and a lifesaving pregnancy termination is not as stark as anti-abortion crusaders claim, Dr. Perez says. “Anyone who has worked in reproductive healthcare,” she says, “has had a patient who has told the doctor, ‘I’m anti-abortion,’ and has [later] needed or wanted an abortion.”