This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

In December, Popular Information reported that Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLF), a new venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family. Sun’s purchase resulted in a cash windfall for Trump. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Sun sent a joint letter to a federal judge, asking for a stay of Sun’s case. Today, the judge granted the SEC’s request.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.

A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF’s largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.”

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

In the open grasslands of South Dakota, not far from the dramatic rock formations of Badlands National Park, lives one of the continent’s cutest, fiercest, and rarest animals: the black-footed ferret.

Black-footed ferrets, weasel-like animals with distinctive dark bands around their eyes and black feet, are ruthless little hunters. At night, they dive into burrows in pursuit of juicy prairie dogs, their primary food source. Without prairie dogs, these ferrets would not survive.

From as many as a million ferrets in the 19th century, today there are only a few hundred of these furry predators roaming the Great Plains, the only place on Earth they live. That there are any black-footed ferrets at all is something of a miracle. In the 1970s, scientists thought black-footed ferrets were extinct, but a twist of fate, and an unprecedented breeding effort led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brought this critical piece of the prairie ecosystem back from the brink.

In the fall of 1984, when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, the protests at the South African Embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador of South Africa on Thanksgiving Eve. Timed for maximum press coverage, that meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were protests at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest.

Area high school kids like me got in on protesting the embassy too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Specials in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was rolling into a boil. The DC music scene was pretty wild then—a bouillabaisse of go-go, R&B, punk, New Wave; there was breakdancing in the hallways during lunch hour—and for some of us, ska was sort of a unified field theory. Musically but also culturally. (If you have a racist friend / now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.)

But it wasn’t just kids who cosplayed in checked socks or porkpie hats. In 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt’s “(I Ain’t Going to Play) Sun City”—essentially the music world launching its own boycott on South Africa. The song was not (like, at all) great, but the wild cross-genre supergroup—DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis to name but a very, very few—guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.

We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who’d been directly resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So, suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions on South Africa and banned direct flights to it. Coca-Cola became the first major company to pull out of South Africa. Sports teams joined the musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and boardrooms for the rest of the ’80s. And they worked. South Africa’s economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to wind down apartheid began. By 1994, free elections were held and Mandela became president.

On Friday, a federal judge partly blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to root out programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, within the government.

That includes at least one far-reaching executive order titled, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” in which the president claimed DEI programs are illegal. As my colleague Alex Nguyen reported at the time:

[The order] argues that DEI programs violate civil rights laws by illegally enforcing “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” The White House also claimed that these policies are discriminatory because they select based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”  

As the New York Times has reported in detail, Maryland District Judge Adam B. Abelson barred the Trump administration from any effort to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations” related to diversity and inclusion, noting that such programs have been seen as “uncontroversially legal for decades.”

On Tuesday, leaders at the National Science Foundation reportedly laid off about 170 employees, many via Zoom—an estimated 10 percent of the agency’s workers. One of those workers spoke to Mother Jones, requesting anonymity, about the chaotic and emotional meeting, and what the job losses mean for the $9 billion agency, which is tasked with funding and supporting the country’s academic research. Here’s their account in their own words.

At 9 a.m., we got an email from HR calling us for a meeting at 10 am. There was no agenda offered. But many of us suspected what it was.

Initially, the Zoom invitation listed all of the people who were going to be fired as co-hosts of the meeting, so they sent a second invite. Because of the confusion about which invitation was the correct one, a lot of people joined late. And so, at first, people who came late didn’t hear what the meeting was about.

They told us we were being terminated. People were angry. People were crying. It was just confusing, too. We were told, you could resign or you could be terminated. How do I know what to do? Some people had thought, I had finished my one-year probation. I am not a probationary employee. We were told the agency had made a mistake—it should have been two years, and they’d corrected that.

President Donald Trump is taking aim at the US Postal Service. 

According to a Thursday report from the Washington Post‘s Jacob Bogage, the president plans to fire the members of USPS’ board and hand the keys to the agency over to the Department of Commerce.

Trump plans to make the move through executive order as early as this week, the Post reports. The board reportedly intends to take the administration to court if Trump carries out the firings or tries to take control, with postal experts telling the Washington Post that absorbing the independent agency would likely violate federal law. A White House spokesperson later denied the report.

After his re-election, Trump discussed privatizing the Postal Service with Howard Lutnick—later confirmed as Commerce Secretary—at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a separate Post article from December.

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

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced last week that he had uncovered evidence of a massive fraud perpetrated by the Biden administration. In a video posted to social media, the former Republican congressman from New York said that Biden’s EPA had “parked” roughly $20 billion at a private bank, “rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.” 

The Biden administration’s plan, Zeldin said, was for the bank to distribute the money to a handful of nonprofits, which would then send it out to “NGOs and others” for climate-related spending. But he vowed to stop that plan. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said. 

But the scheme Zeldin described is not novel or a secret. The $20 billion he is trying to recover is money that Congress passed in 2022 for a program known as the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” also known as the “green bank” initiative. This kind of program once enjoyed bipartisan support in states like Nevada, which opened a clean energy fund under a Republican governor in 2017, and Connecticut, where green bank legislation passed in 2011 with unanimous support from both parties. At least two centrist Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Don Young of Alaska, endorsed a national green bank bill in 2021. 

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a new group pushed for President Donald Trump to serve an unconstitutional third term.  

The effort, called the Third Term Project, is being led by Shane Trejo, who once co-hosted a neo-Nazi adjacent podcast called “Blood Soil and Liberty.” An episode of the now-deleted show was titled “Tanner Flake for Fuhrer,” an homage to a senator’s son who’d posted racist and anti-gay comments under the screen name “n1–erkiller.”

The imagery and language being used by the Third Term Project is transparently authoritarian. The group’s poster at CPAC features Trump in the style of Julius Caesar. Trejo told the independent journalist Ford Fischer on Thursday that the group did so because “Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed.” 

“We’re putting that out there, Trump as Caesar,” Trejo continued. “We think it’s great optics. We love the idea of Trump as our Julius Caesar-type figure.” He also argued that Trump is the “Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness.”

It’s hard to imagine a better opportunity to oust an incumbent than the one currently before the Democratic primary candidates challenging New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In the last few weeks, Adams has been engulfed in a growing scandal surrounding the Trump Justice Department’s decision to dismiss his federal corruption charges and the mayor’s corresponding willingness to cooperate with the administration’s mass deportation agenda. Though Adams has denied any quid pro quo, the administration’s border czar Tom Homan did threaten—on national television—to be “up [Adams’] butt” if the mayor doesn’t allow immigration enforcement officers on Rikers Island.  

Adams—who is battling a crowded field of challengers in June’s mayoral primary—now faces escalating calls to resign or be removed from office. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has decided against removing the mayor for now, but he could also be ousted by an “inability committee” made up of top city officials. Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor, has floated convening it. Adams, meanwhile, shows no sign of retreat, writing on X over the weekend, “I’m not stepping down, I’m stepping UP.”

If Adams does leave office before his term is up—voluntarily or not—he’d be replaced by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. According to the city charter, if that happens before March 27 (90 days before the primary), the city would hold a nonpartisan special election to replace Adams. If it happens afterward, Williams would remain acting mayor until the general election in November. Either way, both the primary and general election would proceed as normal. But the process is untested, and it’s not clear if Adams could run again if removed. 

So where does that leave New York City’s sizeable but scattered progressive wing? They’re hoping to capitalize on Adams’ increasing vulnerability and what they see as a resurgence in anti-Trump momentum to elect one of several left-leaning candidates for mayor. But no definite frontrunner has appeared in the pack of progressive challengers. Instead, New Yorkers could see a familiar name atop the ballot in November: Andrew Cuomo. 

The Trump administration has snuffed out a plan to ban menthol cigarettes, handing a victory to the tobacco industry after it waged a massive and at times deceptive lobbying campaign.

The FDA proposed banning menthol cigarettes in 2022, amid pressure from groups including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Lung Association, and the NAACP, which noted that menthol cigarettes, long aggressively marketed to Black Americans, have a disproportionate and deadly effect on their health.

Tobacco allies argued banning menthol would be racist.

To fight the proposal, tobacco companies—in particular Reynolds American, which earns a big chunk of revenue from its mentholated Newport cigarette brand—turned that argument on its head, asserting that banning menthols would be racist because Black people tend to smoke them.

On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to restrict immigration, titled “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” It has been described as a revival of his first-term Muslim “travel ban,” making good on a campaign promise to bring back the controversial rule.

Buried in the executive order is the fulfillment of another vow from the campaign: an attempt to find a way to easily deport pro-Palestine demonstrators. 

While much of the new order mimics the old Muslim “travel ban” Trump signed on the first day of his first term in 2017, this order is more neutral on its face. This time, Trump is not explicitly naming specific countries to target, but asking agencies to submit a report within 60 days outlining countries from which to suspend immigration. 

“Students are afraid of being labeled as terrorists, and now there’s more ammunition from this executive order to actually carry that out.” 

The anti-abortion movement has launched a pressure campaign urging President Donald Trump’s administration to take steps toward a nationwide ban on medication abortion, the method used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions nationwide.

On Wednesday, 30 leading anti-abortion activists sent a pair of letters to the acting heads of the Department of Justice and FDA, urging a multifaceted crackdown on abortion pills.

The letter to the Department of Justice takes aim at the distribution of mifepristone by mail. The FDA has allowed providers to mail mifepristone to patients since 2021, and the mail, of course, has been an important part of the supply chain for the medication for decades. But the letter, addressed to acting Attorney General James McHenry, asks him to take “immediate action” to implement the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-obscenity law that made it a crime to mail “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” The Biden administration interpreted the law to apply only to illegal abortions. And the Comstock Act has not been enforced for many decades, as I reported in 2023, when lawyers in the anti-abortion movement were increasingly raising the act in proposed local laws and legal filings:

In the past, the act was enforced by an army of postal inspectors who regularly peeked into people’s mail, screening letters and packages en masse for mentions of sex and contraception, [historian Lauren MacIvor] Thompson says. Today, though the statute is still on the books, a century of court decisions about privacy, freedom, and the First Amendment have rendered it dormant.

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a top White House official during Trump’s first term. After exiting the White House in 2021, Kushner launched a new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and announced he was seeking to raise $7 billion. Kushner had no experience in private equity, and his most significant business experience was nearly bankrupting his family’s real estate company.

Who would be interested in giving Kushner billions of dollars? Kushner raised $2 billion from the government of Saudi Arabia through its Public Investment Fund (PIF). The PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management” and “excessive” fees.

The committee’s recommendation, however, was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), with whom Kushner formed a friendship during his time in the White House. Kushner helped MBS manage the fallout after United States intelligence agencies determined that MBS had ordered the brutal murder of the US-based journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. To date, Kushner has raised $4.6 billion, including additional funds from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Chrystal Starbird, a cancer researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, had been preparing to serve on her first National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant review panel at the end of January. On Wednesday, to her surprise, that meeting was abruptly canceled.

These NIH panels, or “study sections,” typically involve a group of about 20 to 30 scientists who meet to assess research grant proposals within their areas of expertise. Most of the grants, Starbird says, range from about $2 million to $10 million. Once the group reviews and scores the projects, a separate NIH “advisory council” decides which ones to fund.

The email Starbird received was vague. It came from her study section contact at NIH, within the Trump administration, and it said the multiday meeting, set for January 30 and 31, would not take place as planned. The message instructed her to save her files about the projects for the time being and thanked her for her service to the NIH. “I’ve never seen a complete pause like this as part of a transition,” she told me.

The “pause” goes beyond grant reviews. It appears to be part of a larger blackout on research at NIH and across the federal government. On Tuesday, as the Washington Post first reported, the Trump administration paused all external communications—”health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts” at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As President Donald Trump’s first week in office comes to a close, his biggest accomplishments are things many of us anticipated: chaos and confusion.

Some of the many executive orders the president has signed do threaten democracy and others endanger the planet. But others simply endorse hypothetical policies with more spectacle than is necessary, like printing out tweets on paper, signing them with a black Sharpie, and holding them up for the world to see.

The challenge there, of course, is that only legal scholars know at first glance which of Trump’s executive orders will affect policy — and which will get stuck in court for years to come. Nevertheless, the pieces of paper scare and confuse people. And that confusion will hang around, holding up actual progress for a meaningful amount of time. Trump’s first assault on the fictional electric vehicle “mandate” serves as a perfect example of this strategy.

Hours after taking the oath of office, Trump signed an executive order with the cinematic title “Unleashing American Energy.” In it, he outlines several new policies to, as the title implies, “unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.” This is code for: Promote fossil fuel and hobble the renewable energy transition.

In a sweeping move, President Donald Trump ousted at least a dozen inspectors general on Friday night, purging major federal agencies of independent watchdogs tasked with identifying fraud and abuse. A federal law enacted in 2022 stipulates that the president must give Congress at least 30 days notice before firing an inspector general, as well as reasons for the firing—none of which occurred.

“It’s a purge of independent watchdogs in the middle of the night,” posted Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on X. “Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse, and preventing misconduct. President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

The inspectors general received an email from the White House saying their positions had been terminated “due to changing priorities.” The number of ousted inspectors is yet unclear, with reports ranging from at least 12 to about 17. The Washington Post and New York Times report that agencies whose watchdogs were removed include the departments of defense, state, transportation, labor, health, commerce, interior, and veterans affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration. Some of those ousted include Trump appointees from the president’s first term.

The system of inspectors general dates back to 1978, after the Watergate scandal, when Congress enacted legislation to install independent watchdogs within federal agencies to conduct investigations and audits and report their findings to the public. Today, there are 74 inspectors general, 36 of whom are presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed.

Pete Hegseth was sworn in as defense secretary on Saturday morning after a confirmation process mired in allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness, and the financial mismanagement of two veterans’ advocacy groups.

Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on Friday night after three Republicans—former GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—voted against the nomination. It was the second time in history that the vice president has cast the tie-breaking vote for a Cabinet nominee.

Hegseth, a former Fox News host and military veteran, promised to overhaul the “woke” policies of the department and restore a “warrior culture.” The Department of Defense operates an $850 billion budget and employs more than 3 million military and civilian personnel.

In a blistering statement, McConnell said, “The restoration of ‘warrior culture’ will not come from trading one set of culture warriors for another.” He added, “By all accounts, brave young men and women join the military with the understanding that it is a meritocracy. This precious trust endures only as long as lawful civilian leadership upholds what must be a firewall between service members and politics.” His vote marks one of the first times since the January 6 insurrection that the former majority leader has been so outspoken in his opposition to Trump’s agenda.

In 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team.

That November, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn was killed in a police car chase that resulted in a head-on collision with a train. Desperate for details about the accident, she went to the police station, only to find it had shut down without any notice.  

“The doors were locked. It looked like it wasn’t in operation anymore—like they just upped and left,” Old Bull said. “It’s, like, there was a life taken, and you guys just closed everything down without giving the family any answers?”

This kicks off a yearslong search to find out what happened to Glenn and how a police force could disappear overnight without explanation. This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels’ investigation into the crash is at once an examination of a mother’s journey to uncover the details of her son’s final moments and a sweeping look at a broken system of tribal policing. 

Pop culture is full of lovable orphans. There’s Annie, of course, and Harry Potter, and the Boxcar Children, and James (with the Giant Peach), and Cinderella—the list goes on and on. They have familiar stories: The protagonist loses parents and finds themselves in dire straits, typically under the supervision of evil caretakers. But through grit, wit, and, often, the help of a wealthy, generous benefactor—think Daddy Warbucks—they’re able to succeed.

When author Kristen Martin lost her own parents to cancer as a child, her experience as an orphan was nothing like that. There were no evil stepparents to outsmart before going on epic adventures. Relatives stepped in; the grief was consuming. The “utter disconnect,” she says, between her experience and those of pop culture protagonists was part of the inspiration for her book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. 

Martin explores the history of orphanhood in America since the 1800s and its harsh reality today, coming to a striking conclusion: It is poverty—rather than the death of both parents—that has often led children to be deemed orphans. “The fact is,” Martin writes, “most of the children we’re talking about when we’re talking about orphans had one or two living parents but were separated from them, either voluntarily or involuntarily,” she writes. 

Despite the narrative that “we are a nation that values the nuclear family, rallies around children in need, and believes all young people have promising future,” in reality, “only some are deserving of strong familial ties.”

With Donald Trump less than two weeks away from taking office and promising an agenda of mass deportations, Democrats are poised to hand Republicans major new powers over immigration policy. Why? Still shell-shocked from the November results, they apparently fear their reelection prospects if they don’t.

The Laken Riley Act—named for the 22-year-old Georgia woman who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan migrant who was in the country illegally—passed the House with support from 48 Democrats earlier this week. Senators voted overwhelmingly in favor of advancing the bill on Thursday before potentially considering amendments and voting on the bill itself. The legislation would both mandate the detention of certain undocumented immigrants and make it easier for Republican attorneys general to sue the federal government over immigration matters—legal challenges that could then lead to sweeping decisions by right-wing judges.

Republicans do not have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster in Senate on their own. But they may attract enough Democratic support to pass the bill. Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) have already signaled they will support the bill. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) told The Hill that she was “inclined” to support the bill as well.

The willingness of Democrats, particularly those in swing districts and states, to support the bill is a sign of how vulnerable many in the party now understand themselves to be on immigration. Instead of fighting Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, as they did during his first term, Democrats are increasingly willing to cave to it in the hopes of insulating themselves from future Republican attacks.