House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani.

Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick.

But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.)

As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full statement to the House committee, which recently became public.) 

Dianne Feinstein, the five-time senator from California, has died, according to multiple reports. She was 90.

A towering figure in both California and US politics, Feinstein was the longest-serving female senator in US history. Our 2017 feature on the trailblazing Democrat:

People who know Feinstein say the [2016] election has been transformative for her. “Trump injects an entirely new level of outrage,” Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society and a longtime Feinstein friend, told me. With the president going after institutions that Feinstein has historically been aligned with—chief among them the intelligence establishment—Schell believes she will find a middle-of-the-road position increasingly untenable.

“Dianne is like the canary in the mine shaft,” he says. “The last bastion of bridge building in the Senate may be giving up.”

But burning a few bridges may also be the only way for Feinstein to survive politically. Nearly a quarter century into her Senate career, she has remained popular with voters, who reelected her in 2012 with a 62.5 percent majority. But progressive Democrats have been frustrated with her old-school style and steadfast defense of the security state. 

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

By the time superintendent David Smith decided to close Joshua Tree national park on January 7, 2019, the list of problems was already long. Tire tracks wove through the wilderness mapping a path of destruction where rare plants had been crushed and trees toppled. Charred remains of illegal campfires dotted the desert, and historic cultural artifacts had been plundered. Trash piles were growing, vault toilets were overflowing and park security workers were being pushed to their limits.

It was week three in what would become the longest shutdown of the US government, and the famed California park was feeling the consequences of operating without key staff, services and resources. To protect the park and its workers, it would have to close, Smith thought.

But the Trump administration, which demanded national parks remain accessible throughout the shutdown, wasn’t willing to change course. In a controversial move, David Bernhardt, who had only recently been appointed acting secretary of the interior, called Smith and ordered him to keep the gates open.

By the end of the 35-day shutdown, irreversible damage had been inflicted on Joshua Tree’s ecosystems, its wild, remote landscapes thrust into the political turmoil unfolding thousands of miles away.

When 70 percent of Texas House Republicans voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton in May, commentators expressed hope that the scandal-plagued lawyer would finally be held accountable for a multitude of alleged crimes—and perhaps most importantly, by members of his own party, who hold large majorities in the state legislature and who seem to have no limit of their tolerance for malfeasance commited by Republicans. 

As Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy wrote after the vote in May:

The hearing that preceded the impeachment vote was remarkable—less because of what it uncovered, but because of who was uncovering it. For nearly a decade, Republicans in Texas have been Ken Paxton’s enablers. He has been under indictment for a felony securities fraud-charge since 2015—accused of breaking a law that he himself helped pass. A significant number of Texas Republicans, it’s true, have at times backed primary challengers promising to clean house, but conservatives have ultimately been willing to look the other way—or even gleefully join Paxton’s cause—because he’s ruthless about using his power to advance the conservative agenda. But Wednesday’s hearing was something new: A detailed accounting of his petty corruption, unprofessionalism, and abuses of power, brought to life by the only people in Texas with the clout to rein him in—his fellow Republicans.

Paxton’s impeachment came about after some of his staff members, all conservative Republicans, reported him to the FBI for alleged unethical and unusual behavior towards a real estate developer and major donor. (For a full rundown of the allegations against Paxton, read Murphy’s profile.) When they told Paxton what they’d done, he fired them. They filed a wrongful termination suit. In February this year, Paxton asked the legislature to cover the more than $3 million settlement his office negotiated with the whistleblowers, an ask that legislators rejected. Instead, they decided to investigate in secret, to see whether the complaints had merit. Turns out they did, and in May, after the release of their investigative report, the House voted to impeach Paxton. 

That burst of Republican integrity was short lived, as the Senate on Saturday refused to vote to impeach the AG on any of the 16 counts against him. In a statement released after the vote, Paxton thanked his wife Angela, who serves in the legislature and sat through his trial, which included lengthy testimony about an alleged affair he was having. (His mistress was on hand to testify but was never called.) And he promised to address Texas and the nation on Tucker Carlson’s show next week.

When Sen. Mitt Romney replaced Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in 2018, he was continuing a long tradition of relatively moderate Republican senators from Utah who were able to cross the aisle and get things done. (Utah hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1970.) That tradition is likely to end with him. Now that Romney has announced that he’s not running for reelection, the Utah GOP primary free-for-all is officially underway, with the full craziness of the party’s rightward shift already on display. 

After Hatch retired, 12 candidates jumped in to fill the Senate seat that Romney ultimately won by a large margin. Now, virtually every member of the Utah House delegation, along with Lt. Gov Deidre Henderson, seems to be mulling a campaign to replace Romney. Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson created an exploratory committee for the seat in July, and Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs declared his candidacy in May. 

In an early indication of where the race is headed, Staggs is holding a fundraiser Monday that will be headlined by Kari Lake, the failed Senate candidate from Arizona who tried to overturn both her own election loss and promoted the lie that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. First reported by Bryan Schott at the Salt Lake Tribune, Lake’s planned appearance was fortuitous, coming on the heels of Romney’s retirement news. Her presence will help cement Staggs’ populist bona fides early in a race that promises to be full of candidates trying to out-MAGA each other now that they no longer have Romney to beat up on. 

Also reportedly considering a run for the seat is Tim Ballard, a Mormon former Homeland Security agent and founder of an anti-human trafficking organization whose work inspired the sleeper hit movie Sound of Freedom, which has been popular with the QAnon crowd. Ballard’s campaign to replace Romney, however, may have some trouble getting off the ground. This week, the LDS church officially rebuked him after Vice reported that he had misrepresented his relationship with M. Russell Ballard, the acting president of the faith’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, to help his business ventures—the church called this “morally unacceptable.” Ballard is not related to the LDS church official. 

Utah House Speaker Wilson comes to the race with low numbers—a July poll found him winning the support of just 7 percent of voters in a Senate race without Romney—but he has by far the best fundraising record. Wilson already has more than $2 million in his campaign chest, of which about half came from his own pocket. He has been positioning himself as Romney’s heir apparent, taking the lead on efforts to save the dying Great Salt Lake, a popular cause.

In dueling presidential campaign speeches to Evangelical leaders Friday, former President Donald Trump sounded like the moderate Republican in the room, at least when it came to abortion.

At the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand conference in DC, the former president ticked off a long list of his pro-life accomplishments from his time in the White House, most notably nominating three conservative Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade last year. And he invoked the false trope that Democrats support “post-birth abortion,” claiming that “They’ll kill babies in the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth month, and they’ll even kill babies in some cases after birth. They are the radicals.”

But he also warned the fervently pro-life crowd that Republican extremism on abortion was losing them elections. “Like President Ronald Reagan before me, I support the three exceptions: for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. And again, that’s a decision that you’re going to have to make for yourself, and you have to go by your heart and what you feel,” he said. “But I do, and I will say politically, it’s very tough. It’s a very tough decision for some people. But very, very hard on elections—very, very hard…We had midterms and this was an issue.”

He went on to gently criticize Republican politicians for their extreme anti-abortion rhetoric. “They just don’t know how to talk about this issue,” Trump said. “It’s a complex issue…And if they don’t speak about it correctly, they’re not going to win.…I watch some of these politicians speaking and it’s so bad. They don’t understand what it is that they’re talking about, and they lost a lot of elections, and we can’t let that happen.”

“Now we can win elections on this issue,” Trump continued. “But it’s very delicate, and explaining it properly is extremely important.”

On Tuesday, the Pulitzer Prize Board expanded the eligibility for the books, drama, and music awards by including artists who are not US citizens. The new policy, which begins in the 2025 cycle, will include “permanent residents of the United States and those who have made the United States their longtime primary home.” Over 2,500 entries are submitted to the Pulitzer’s 23 categories every year, and only 8 receive the $15,000 cash award for books, drama, or music. There was some irony in the fact that the prestigious prize established in 1917 in the will of Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer to celebrate American art and journalism would exclude noncitizens. However, this policy has been a defining feature of eligibility for all the Pulitzer categories since their respective inceptions. 

Writers have denounced the Pulitzer’s citizenship requirement in the past but failed to solicit a response. But then, Javier Zamora, poet, and author of Unaccompanied and Solito, petitioned the Pulitzer Prize Board to open its literature awards to noncitizens in a searing Los Angeles Times op-ed in July. His 2022 memoir, which hit the New York Times bestseller list, was nonetheless ineligible to receive one of literature’s highest honors because of Zamora’s citizenship status. “After 19 years here without a green card, then four years with an EB-1 ‘Einstein Visa,’ after earning a master’s degree in writing from New York University and fellowships from Harvard and Stanford, I still wasn’t enough to be equally considered among my literary peers,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

Zamora, who traveled from El Salvador to the US without his parents as a child in the late 90s, was soon joined by a coalition of high-profile authors who publicly petitioned the Pulitzer Prize Board and denounced the use of citizenship requirements. “Whether undocumented writers are writing about the border or not,” they wrote in Literary Hub, “their voices are quintessentially part of what it means to belong and struggle to belong in this and to this nation.” In response, the Board amended the citizenship policy and pledged their commitment to “ensuring that the Prizes are inclusive and accessible to those producing distinguished work in Books, Drama, and Music.” The same week the Pulitzer Prizes changed its policy, a federal judge in Texas declared DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created to protect thousands of undocumented youth from deportation, illegal. To Zamora, the two announcements—and the continued enforcement of restrictive citizenship policies at organizations such as the National Book Awards and PEN Amerca—are linked.

I caught up with Javier via Zoom to talk about Pulitzer’s announcement, nationalism in the literary world, and the work that remains to be done.

When did you first realize you were ineligible for the Pulitzer Prize for literature due to your citizenship status?

Rational 360, a high-powered Washington, DC-based strategic communications firm and digital agency, promises to use “innovative” means and a network that extends “deep into the Halls of Congress, the White House, and Fortune 500 boardrooms across the country” to advance the “mission-critical goals” of its clients, a roster of corporations, trade associations, military contractors, policy advocates, and others. The company—one of the many inside-the-Beltway firms that crafts messaging and peddles influence—promotes itself as a purely bipartisan operation, though its top leaders are mostly Democrats with White House experience earned during the Clinton and Obama years. Yet despite these Democratic roots, Rational 360 plays the field, having recently set up a company to help elect Republicans, while also creating an offshoot to assist Democratic campaigns. Moreover, it has advised No Labels, a dark-money and self-professed centrist group that is preparing to possibly run a third-party presidential candidate in 2024 in an effort that could help Donald Trump.

With these activities, Rational 360 looks as if it is trying to profit from all partisan sides—right, left, and middle.

The company was formed in 2009 when Rational PR and the Stevens and Schriefer Group, an advertising outfit, created a firm to pitch large corporate clients. The eight partners at the time included Patrick Dorton, who had been a top aide in the Clinton White House and the chief spokesman for  Arthur Andersen LLP during the accounting firm’s 2002 collapse, which occurred due to its role in the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals. 

Dorton is now the CEO of Rational 360, and the other top officers of the company include notable Democratic veterans. Brian Kaminski, a managing director and co-founder, notes in his company bio that before he joined the firm he “gained communications experience on Capitol Hill in the Office of [Democratic] Senator Barbara Mikulski, in the Office of the First Lady, and at the Democratic National Committee.” Melissa Green, a managing director and senior counsel for the company, was an aide in the Clinton White House and began her career at the political consulting firm of prominent Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala. Joe Lockhart, another managing director, was a press secretary for President Clinton. The firm, true to its bipartisan pitch, also includes officers and staffers with Republican pedigrees.

According to Federal Election Commission data, Rational 360 has done no work for federal candidates or political action committees, except a modest bit of consulting in 2020 for Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, a Republican super PAC, for which it was paid $5,000. But in 2021, it created an offshoot entity to provide digital media services to Democratic candidates—without identifying this group’s link to Rational 360. 

For the first time in US history, UAW members at the Big Three automakers are on strike at the same time. The walkout began when the union’s contract expired early Friday morning.

UAW President Shawn Fain announced the initial strike targets during a Thursday night speech. The short notice is part of a new strategy under which the union is striking at targeted sites, rather than across a company. The goal is to maximize leverage by keeping automakers guessing about when and where workers will withhold their labor.

The initial targets are the General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, the Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) assembly complex in Toledo, Ohio, and part of a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. Roughly 13,000 UAW members are striking at those facilities. All three make trucks and SUVs, which have been key to US automakers’ profitability.

The UAW has more than 145,000 members across the Big Three. Fain said on Thursday that the union is prepared for everyone to go on strike if needed—stressing that all options remain on the table.

The UAW and the Big Three remain far apart in their negotiations. The union is pushing for a more than 30 percent increase in pay over the course of the four-year contract. Members also have been fighting for guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments, an end to tiered-pay systems that put new hires at a disadvantage, a return to defined-benefit pension plans, a four-day work week without a reduction in pay, and a right to strike over plant closures. The auto companies have offered to increase pay by between 17.5 and 20 percent, but remained opposed to the UAW’s top demands, Fain said earlier this week.

A new bill has reached the desk of California Gov. Gavin Newsom that would bar the state’s public and charter schools from suspending or expelling students in sixth through twelfth grades for “willful defiance,” a largely undefined violation frequently meted out to students of color. The statewide ban, in force until 2029 once signed by Newsom, builds on the state’s efforts to slowly phase out this form of suspension and expulsion. If it’s enacted, California will be the first state to go from using the practice to banning it outright.

Already, in 2014, California became the first state to pass a partial ban on “willful defiance” suspensions—which are permitted in 25 other states, according to research by Temple University’s Policy Surveillance Program. The 2014 ban, which only applied to students in third grade or younger, was followed by a 2019 bill  that covered fourth and fifth graders permanently and middle schoolers through 2025. Newsom signed that bill, and appears poised to sign the new, broader ban, but his office hasn’t confirmed if or when that’ll happen.

ACLU California Action, which supports the ban, has said that the definition of willful defiance is too “subjective and overly broad,” with some students being suspended for “dancing, dress code violations, or not paying attention in class.” School officials’ judgment of whether a student is “talking back,” another common ground for willful defiance suspensions, can also be shaped by biases. The bill, introduced by State Sen. Nancy Skinner, does not limit other types of suspensions, such as those related to violence.

At an April hearing of the California Senate’s education committee, Skinner pointed to the use of willful defiance suspensions for small infractions like not taking a hat off or smirking at a teacher. The bill encourages teachers and administrators to de-escalate conflict with students and emphasizes that suspensions are a punishment of last resort.

“I completely appreciate a teacher could have a particularly bad day…this kid sets them off,” Skinner said in the hearing. “But we have other alternatives. We don’t need to kick the kid out.”

Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged Hunter Biden with lying about his drug use when he bought a gun in 2018.

The three-count indictment is the latest twist in a series of legal issues for Hunter Biden that could impact the reelection campaign of his father, President Joe Biden. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday announced an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that is based largely on Hunter’s past efforts to profit off of his perceived access to his father.

The new charges against Hunter Biden follow the late June collapse of a plea deal that his lawyers had negotiated with the US attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, under which Biden would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes, along with a felony gun charge that could have been wiped off his record if he adhered to the deal’s terms. That agreement fell apart when questions from US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika revealed that prosecutors and Biden’s lawyers had differing understandings of its provisions.

When Attorney General Merrick Garland assumed office in 2021, he left in place Weiss, a Donald Trump appointee, in an effort to avoid the appearance of interference with the ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden. Garland last month gave Weiss special counsel status in an attempt to further ensure his independence. And Weiss has insisted he has faced no pressure from Garland, President Biden, or others to curtail the probe.

Still, congressional Republicans have alleged that Weiss is going easy on the president’s son, and they have touted the disputed accounts of two IRS whistleblowers who claim their investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax evasion was limited by political pressure. The notion that Hunter Biden is receiving special protection is a virtual article of faith on the right. Prosecutors on the case have faced threats and harassment from people convinced they are failing to enforce the law, NBC News reported Thursday.

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

There is an authoritarian danger that threatens American democracy. It is a separate peril from Donald Trump and his tens of millions of rabid supports. It is the right-wing infrastructure that is publicly plotting to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional order and concentrate unprecedented power in the presidency. Its efforts, if successful and coupled with a Trump (or other GOP) victory in 2024, would place the nation on a path to autocracy.

Trump’s desire to be a strongman ruler are no secret. He has repeatedly uttered statements that reveal a craving to be in total control of the US government. As he mounts a second campaign for the White House, his team has openly discussed his plans to consolidate government power in the White House should he win. The New York Times recently reported that his crew aims “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” The Washington Post ran a story in April headlined, “Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term.”

These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that tens of thousands of federal workers—maybe more—would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump—or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives. Say, Trump or an underling orders the IRS to audit the tax returns of a political foe and an IRS career official objects, that person could be pink-slipped.

Yet this effort to reshape the US government extends far beyond the fevered fantasies of one failed casino owner and his henchmen and henchwomen. Much of the right-wing establishment—including its leading think tanks and policy shops—are part of the attempt to concentrate federal power in the hands of Trump or another Republican president.

This piece was originally published by Capital & Main.

In January of 2022, Jacklyn Gabel and her co-workers at the Starbucks Coffee location on Mission Street in Santa Cruz began considering the idea of organizing. Four months later, they voted 15-2 to become part of a labor union, Starbucks Workers United.

The goal, Gabel said, was simple: Come together to more effectively bargain on wages, benefits and working conditions.

So how many negotiating sessions has the union held so far with Starbucks?

“None,” Gabel said. “There has never been a bargaining session.”

It was big news when Rudy Giuliani, once hailed as America’s Mayor, was indicted last month by a district attorney in Atlanta for allegedly being part of a criminal enterprise led by Donald Trump that sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Giuliani was back in headlines this week when he lost a defamation suit filed against him by two Georgia election workers whom he had falsely accused of ballot stuffing. Giuliani’s apparent impoverishment, caused by his massive legal bills, and even his alleged drinking have been fodder for reporters. But another major Giuliani development has drawn less attention: An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign.

That contention is among a host of explosive assertions from Johnathan Buma, an FBI agent who also says that an investigation involving Giuliani’s activities was stymied within the bureau. 

In July, Buma sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 22-page statement full of eye-popping allegations, and the document leaked and was first reported last month by Insider (after a conservative blogger had posted it online). According to Buma’s account, Giuliani was used as an asset by a Ukrainian oligarch tied to Russian intelligence and other Russian operatives for a disinformation operation that aimed to discredit Joe Biden and boost Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Moreover, Buma says he was the target of retaliation within the bureau for digging into this.

The FBI declined to comment on Buma’s claims.

Buma’s revelations may only be the start. A source familiar with his work tells Mother Jones that other potential FBI whistleblowers who participated in the investigation involving Giuliani have consulted the same lawyer as Buma and might meet with congressional investigators in coming weeks. That attorney, Scott Horton, declined to comment.

The 2024 election cycle looks like it will feature not one, but two late-30s contrarians who got their start rapping about libertarianism on elite college campuses. The first is Vivek Ramaswamy, the self-funder now enjoying a “breakout moment” in a presidential primary completely dominated by Donald Trump. The other is Blake Masters, who is reportedly planning another run for US Senate in Arizona after losing to Sen. Mark Kelly by five points in 2022. 

Masters’ reasons for running again are not altogether obvious. His hard-right Senate campaign last year, which was bankrolled by his mentor and former boss Peter Thiel, defined how Republicans squandered the 2022 midterms by nominating candidates far out of step with voters. Masters called abortion “genocide,” repeatedly responded to news about gay people by saying “not everything has to be gay,” and published unsettling clips of himself shooting guns in the desert. The campaign deeply disturbed former close friends from his private day school and Stanford, who didn’t recognize the man they saw in the ominous videos. (Masters said he was inspired by the aesthetics of Terrence Malick, a director best known for a film about a sociopathic killing spree.)

This is not to say Masters had no fans. Last year, I reported that Masters had once written an email to his vegetarian coop at Stanford in which he called democracy “that miserably peculiar American diety [sic].” In another, he recommended an article that advocated for “the abdication of democracy” and replacing it with a world in which the masses accepted a “natural order” led by a “voluntarily acknowledged ‘natural’ elite—a nobilitas naturalis.” 

A poster named Pedro Gonzalez responded to those revelations on Twitter by writing, “This actually makes Blake Masters look great.” Less than a year later, it was reported that Gonzalez, who’d become one of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ biggest boosters online, had sent countless racist and antisemitic text messages. (A representative sample: “whites themselves are too cucked to preserve their own civilizations.”) 

Another Masters fan was Nate Hochman, the twentysomething DeSantis staffer who was fired after it came out that he’d secretly made a pro-DeSantis video featuring the sonnenrad symbol used by Nazis and neo-Nazis. Yet another supporter was Curtis Yarvin, the self-identified absolute monarchist blogger who gave the first and only campaign donation of his life to Masters.

A progressive congressional delegation has just returned from a historic trip to Latin America, where they met with three recently elected left-wing administrations in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Organized by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the group aimed to redefine the United States’ relationship with the region, and begin to repair (many) past wrongs.

Ocasio-Cortez was joined by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) , Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), and Misty Rebik, Senator Bernie Sanders’s chief of staff.

Casar, the son of Mexican immigrants and a former labor organizer who was elected to the house in 2022, spoke with Mother Jones about his experience joining the delegation, and how the US needs to change its engagement with Latin America to address common goals of combating climate change, lifting up working people, and protecting democracy.

This is a different congressional delegation than has been sent to Latin America in the past. Could you talk about how you got involved? And how this group was a change of pace from our past relations with left-wing Latin American movements and governments?

This was a different kind of trip. Not only because it was all Latino members of Congress that went, not only because we were able to have almost all of our meetings in Spanish or Portuguese—but because it was entirely progressive members of Congress meeting with our newly elected progressive counterparts in Latin America. And in almost every meeting, Latin American leaders expressed how different of a delegation this was. Because instead of having conversations based on Cold War militarism—instead of having meetings that ignore past US interventionism in Latin America— our conversations were based on listening and mutual respect. I think that’s what was so important.

Hurricane Idalia struck Florida 190 miles north of Tampa on Wednesday as a Category 3 storm, a classification that causes “devastating” damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With 125-mile-per-hour winds upon landfall, it fell just short of the Category 4 metric.

This region of Florida hasn’t seen such strong wind gusts and storm surges in more than 125 years. Many roads are flooded, with water levels up to at least 8 feet. 

“We have multiple trees down, debris in the roads, do not come,” posted the fire and rescue department of Cedar Key, an island connected to the mainland by bridges. There, water levels are at least 6.5 feet high. “We have propane tanks blowing up all over the island.”

“Our entire downtown is submerged,” one local resident, Michael Bobbitt, wrote on Facebook. “Houses everywhere are submerged.”

Elsewhere in the sunshine state, fallen trees have hit gas lines, and hundreds of thousands of people are without electricity as of Wednesday afternoon.

Yanet Candelario could feel her body grow tense as she remembered some of her experiences during the 13 months she spent at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. A dual citizen of Canada and Cuba, holding a placard that asked, “Why is Biden Siding With a Private Prison Co.?” she had joined dozens of other advocates outside the Clarkson S. Fisher Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey, to demand the closure of the state’s oldest and last remaining immigrant prison. “I remembered the toxicity and the pain I saw in that place,” Candelario says. She had been sent to the detention center after returning from a trip to Panama in 2016, while her application for lawful permanent status was pending. “It’s a place of destruction, really,” she adds. 

Today the facility houses an average of about 160 migrants a day—both men and women—and is run by CoreCivic on a contract with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that was set to expire on August 31. The future of the detention center has been under litigation for several months. On August 14, US District Court Judge Robert Kirsch heard arguments in a case about a 2021 state law signed by Gov. Phil Murphy that barred public and private entities from entering, renewing, or extending contracts with ICE to detain immigrants.

On Tuesday, Judge Kirsch issued a ruling siding with CoreCivic. “The result of any one of New Jersey’s neighboring states passing a comparable law—let alone an ensuing domino effect to other states—would result in nothing short of chaos,” he wrote, adding that “the statute is a dagger aimed at the heart of the federal government’s immigration enforcement mission and operations.” The ruling paves the way for ICE and CoreCivic to renew their contract and for immigrants to continue being detained in the Elizabeth Detention Facility.

We are disappointed with today’s ruling, which we view as interfering with NJ’s right to protect its residents. Private detention facilities threaten the public health and safety of New Jerseyans, including when used for immigration purposes. We will be appealing this decision.

— Attorney General Matt Platkin (@NewJerseyOAG) August 29, 2023

On June 14, 1862, the New York Times published an editorial titled “The Mystery of Negrophilism.” The essay questioned the origins of white Americans’ “extraordinary interest in the negro” and called the “passion for the American negro” an “entirely abnormal…phenomenon.” During the Antebellum period, Southerners pathologized Northern whites’ intolerable friendliness—their “liking negroes”—as “negrophilism.” They chided abolitionists as “negro-maniacs” obsessed with “negro interest.” It was untenable for citizens of a slaveholding nation to harbor human affection toward enslaved descendants of Africa—a continent, the author wrote (purportedly quoting then–Secretary of State William Seward), that “nature had fortified against civilization.” White enslavers positioned enslaved Black people as chattel partly by excluding them from the emotional bonds that facilitate civil society.

“Negrophile” sentiment had the power to make Black suffering legible and, as a result, Black American humanity legible too. In the white South, where Black flesh demarcated a non-human species, negrophilia was a deleterious liberal ideology that reimagined the natural (white) order of the world. For White Americans to espouse sympathy towards un-sympathizable Blacks, and acknowledge their suffering, was to blaspheme against a long-held doctrine that justified chattel slavery by excluding Black people from fellow feeling: Black suffering is permissible because it is deserved. The South’s paranoia around negrophilism spurred violent inquisitions that snuffed out traces of “negrophile” doctrines like abolition from the crevices of Southern life. Negrophiles were prosecuted, flogged, and ostracized. Negrophile educators were exiled from schools, and “negrophile books” were banned throughout the South or sent to the pyre.

Contemporary supporters of so-called “woke” doctrines have endured the same treatment—but referring to white Americans as negrophiles is unacceptable by today’s social standards, which forbid any suggestion of the “N-word.” The right has supplanted the epithet with what it now derides as “wokeness,” reviving the Southern notion of negrophilia as a righteous fixation on race. As a pejorative, “woke” isn’t too distant from its predecessors: race agitator, nigger-lover, negrophile. A “woke” white person—a negrophile—threatens to indoctrinate fellow whites into liberal obsession with racism. The irony was captured in 1962 by a self-proclaimed “negrophile”: “One wonders whether this term in either its genteel or vulgar form would ever be applied to another human being except by somebody who was, perhaps, subconsciously, a negrophobe.”

Frantz Fanon, a psychologist from the French Antilles, described negrophobia in his Black Skin, White Masks as “a neurosis characterized by the anxious fear” of Black people or, by extension, of Blackness at large. “In the phobic, affect has a priority that defies all rational thinking,” Fanon writes, “For the object, naturally, need not be there. It is enough that somewhere it exists: It is a possibility.” As Fanon suggests, negrophobia is irrational; it must be tirelessly manufactured.

Conservatives’ fanaticism around “wokeness” also has no anchor in logic, no real definition, and must also be fabricated ad nauseam. Like the southern phobia around negrophilism, the phobia of wokeness is malicious, yet sensible—for the anti-woke, who are paranoid that a society saturated with racial sympathy would turn on a “negro axis.” The possibility of a Black sociopolitical orientation, as Fanon said, causes “fear and revulsion.”

The state of the legal challenges to laws banning gender-affirming care is, and will continue to be, confusing. The latest example is particularly striking. Last Friday, there were two major rulings. In Texas, a judge blocked a ban on gender-affirming healthcare, then her decision was paused by the state’s attorney general’s office. In Missouri, a judge ruled that a ban on care could go into effect.

These concurrent decisions add to the mounting anxiety for transgender youth and their loved ones across the country as legal battles are fought. While some hope that courts can halt these bans, it has been unclear what will happen next—and state-by-state decisions could vary. The ban on care in Missouri goes into effect today. Texas will soon follow.

“The courts told the transgender community, parents of gender-expansive youth, and the entire LGBTQ+ community that we do not exist, that we do not have the right to make our own medical decisions or the right to bodily autonomy,” Aro Royston, the board secretary for Missouri LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO, said in a statement following the ruling.

More than a third of transgender youth ages 13 to 17 live in states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care. The first three months of 2023 saw more bills introduced that attacked access than the last six years combined. Judges in some states, like Florida, Georgia, and Indiana, have blocked aspects of these laws or halted the whole measure. Several other states have laws that are not yet in effect or have “grandfather” clauses that could wear off soon.  

Last week’s rulings show how confusing things will be as laws are litigated. In Texas, following district court Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel’s decision to halt the ban, the state attorney general’s office filed an appeal with the Texas Supreme Court, a move that automatically pauses the injunction. This means the Texas ban will go into effect in a few days. It will ban care for transgender youth, revoke the licenses of physicians who continue providing care, and cut off access to care for adolescent minors already receiving treatment. According to Judge Hexsel, the law “interferes with Texas families’ private decisions and strips Texas parents…of the right to seek, direct, and provide medical care for their children.”