Not long ago, I was one of 22 authors honored at a fundraising dinner for my local library. It was a swanky affair, with a multicourse meal, a pair of emcees, and a photographer to capture the rare sight of authors in cocktail attire rather than the sweatpants and baggy T-shirts we tend to favor. Midway through the meal, a waiter placed a full bottle of wine in front of me. “Thanks for giving ’em hell,” he said. “Keep up the good fight.”

An emcee had just announced that my Stonewall Award–winning New York Times bestseller, The 57 Bus, was the 10th most frequently challenged book in Texas and the 35th in the United States last year, a fact that caused the entire room to burst into applause. Bottles of wine are a rare response to such news, but high fives and congratulations are common. Having my book banned is a badge of honor, people often tell me.

I appreciate the sentiment, of course, but it does feel a bit like being congratulated for getting kicked in the teeth by the neighborhood bully. I’m not actually giving the book banners hell, much as I’d like to. I’m receiving hell. We all are: readers, writers, teachers—everyone who cares about the freedom to read.

The American Library Association reports that more than 2,500 books were challenged in 2022, a big uptick from the already astonishing 1,858 challenged in 2021, which was already five times the number challenged in 2019. Last year, some 41 percent of challenged books were by or about LGBTQ people, and 40 percent were by or about people of color. The 57 Bus, a nonfiction narrative about two teenagers on either side of a high-profile crime, is a twofer: One main character is Black, the other nonbinary. The Tennessean reported just last month that The 57 Bus is now one of that state’s top five most challenged books.

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

The mother of a 24-year-old worker who died from heatstroke while working for a construction firm in San Antonio, Texas, has filed a lawsuit against his employer.

Gabriel Infante was working for B Comm Constructors in San Antonio, Texas, on June 23 2022, digging in the hot summer sun to move internet fiber optic cable, a job he had recently started with a childhood best friend while they were finishing college.

The lawsuit comes after Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a controversial bill into law on June 14 that prohibits local municipalities from enacting heat protection standards for construction workers. The bill nullifies ordinances previously passed in Austin and Dallas that mandated 10-minute breaks for workers every four hours. A similar ordinance was being considered in San Antonio before the state bill was passed.

According to the lawsuit, Infante began exhibiting heatstroke symptoms, including confusion, altered mental state, dizziness and loss of consciousness. His friend and co-worker Joshua Espinoza began pouring cold water over him, trying to cool him down. A foreman insisted Espinoza call the police, claiming Infante’s bizarre behavior was due to drugs, and the foreman pushed for a drug test when emergency medical services arrived.

In July 2022, the United Nations and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan helped broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative: A deal between Russia and Ukraine that the UN Secretary-General António Guterres called “a beacon of hope.” It allowed food and fertilizer exports from three Ukrainian ports—on the Black Sea, Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi—to be shipped to the rest of the world. Since the agreement was signed last year, 32.8 million tons of Ukrainian grain have been exported; more than half has gone to developing countries, including drought-ridden East African nations like Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. 

This week, that deal ended. And it soon got worse. After pulling out of the deal, Russia attacked storage facilities in the coastal city of Odesa, reportedly destroying 60,000 tons of grain, according to Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskyi. Both nations say that they will now treat each other’s ships traveling across the Black Sea as potential military targets. 

The end of the deal, and the bombings, could be a major blow to the global food supply. As my former colleague Tom Philpott wrote in March 2022, the Russia and Ukraine war is being fought in the world’s breadbasket:

Today, Russia is a global wheat powerhouse, the world’s number-three producer of the staple crop, and its number-one exporter. Just as in 1768, much of its most productive farmland lies east of the Ukraine border, making it largely reliant on the same “black paths” (now covered in paved roads and railroad tracks) to reach markets. Ukraine, too, is a major wheat exporter, and has recently emerged as a corn powerhouse, too, supplying China and its booming meat industry with nearly a third of its feed corn imports.

What does it mean when a war of conquest descends upon one of the globe’s great breadbaskets in the 21st century? With trade routes embattled and markets roiled by Russia’s invasion, wheat prices have already shot up to their highest level in 60 years. This far exceeds the spike of the early 2010s, which led to bread riots in the Middle East that helped bring about the Arab Spring and the still-simmering civil war in Syria. “It’s a core food,” Nelson says, “and when you double its price, it just changes everything.”

There is much to admire in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters on Friday. The directing, script, editing, sound design and acting are all extraordinary. Nolan deserves high praise for tackling this difficult and sprawling subject and raising questions about one of the most sensitive issues in our history, a raw nerve even today: America’s use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed at least 150,000 civilians.

Even in a three-hour movie, Nolan had to leave out a lot of vital material, in part because of his secondary focus on Oppenheimer’s infamous security clearance hearing almost a decade after he left Los Alamos. Still, his film omits or downplays several important—even crucial—aspects of America’s 1945 detonations that continue to haunt us today.

Notably, the new film barely touches on arguments that were expressed back then, not in retrospect, against using the bomb. Ditto the deadly radiation the new weapon produced,  and the secrecy that surrounded it—starting with the Trinity test, when a radioactive cloud drifted over nearby villagers who were not warned, and were then lied to about the fallout effects. This combination of lethality and secrecy would have extensive and tragic results in the decades after Hiroshima.

Nagasaki’s fate is also ignored, save three or four brief and rather forced mentions in the final hour of the picture. But Nolan’s most significant failing lies in not confronting—and in some ways sustaining—the popular narrative around the decision to drop the bombs, one that endures in government and media circles and among many historians, and is thereby reflected in public opinion polls.

That narrative holds that it was the detonation of the two bombs, and only that, which brought the Pacific war to an end. Simple cause-and-effect. The key scene in this regard in Nolan’s film, largely accurate, depicts the late-May 1945 meeting of the Interim Committee, President Harry Truman’s top advisory panel on the matter. One or two advisers question the necessity of deploying such a terrible weapon against Japanese cities, but their doubts are silenced by an officer who insists the Japanese won’t surrender otherwise, and a host of American soldiers will then have to die storming the country’s beaches. The panel is reminded of how savagely the Japanese have fought to the last man in other circumstances.

The Florida Board of Education’s new standards dictating how Black history will be taught in public schools includes a provision implying that enslaved African-Americans learned skills for “their own personal benefit.” The guidelines, approved on Wednesday, have come under fire from civil rights advocates who’ve called them “a sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America.” 

“Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement. “It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history.”

Two of the most contentious inclusions in the Board’s current guidelines include:

State Senator Geraldine Thompson, who worked on legislation to designate scholarships for the descendants Occoee Race massacre, on Wednesday blasted the new standards for blaming the victims, according to the Washington Post.

The policies add to Florida’s ongoing war against educational material Gov. Ron DeSantis and his conservative allies believe are objectionable, including content in courses focusing on African-American studies. Since his gubernatorial campaign, DeSantis has made combatting “wokeness” a large part of his platform and has signed off on several pieces of legislation aiming to control the way racism and history are taught to young Floridians in public schools. Perhaps the most severe form of legislation came in the form of the “Stop the Woke Act” which prohibits schools from teaching anything that implies the existence of systemic racism.

Sometimes, my rage gets the better of me.

To bike into downtown Denver, I need to take a left at a dangerous intersection. Despite being labeled as “cyclist friendly” by Google Maps, the crossing has no discernible bike infrastructure. There is a left turn lane but no signal; at rush hour, turning is impossible.

So, I use the crosswalk.

I was recently doing just that—rolling through the crosswalk with the pedestrian signal—when a car taking a right turn pulled in front of me. The driver rolled down his window, shook his finger at me, and said: “Not where you belong.” I was taken aback. Not where I belong? In the fucking crosswalk? With no pedestrians around, at an otherwise impassable intersection?

When I am zipping through town on a bicycle, my body protected only by a plastic sheath around my skull, I know that it is a bad idea to argue with motorists But, whoops, I yelled back at him.

As a UC Berkeley graduate, I never thought I’d type these words, but okay: Go Wesleyan!

Wesleyan University, a small, elite college in Middletown, Connecticut, costs about $85,000 a year, including room and board and sundries. On Wednesday, it announced that, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action in higher education (and possibly elsewhere), it would finally ditch legacy admissions, the practice of giving a preference to applicants whose parents—and in some cases grandparents, siblings, and other relatives—attended the school in question. It’s a practice that amounts to affirmative action for children of privilege.

Johns Hopkins and Amherst also ended legacy admissions in recent years, and MIT ditched them more than a decade ago. (“If you got into MIT, it’s because you got into MIT. Simple as that,” one admissions staffer noted in a 2012 blog post.) But all of the Ivy League colleges, and the majority of so-called Ivy Plus schools (the traditional Ivies plus the likes of Duke, MIT, and Stanford) still use them. In fact, a 2018 survey of admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed found that 42 percent of private colleges and 6 percent of public ones gave an admissions boost to children of alumni, and sometimes to grandchildren and siblings. Children of faculty may also get special consideration, as they do at Harvard.

Legacy admissions, if it even need be said, are unfair, unpopular, and un-American—or at least run contrary to the ideals of the America we mythologize. I poked that alligator in an earlier piece about how the Ivies are grappling with their slavery ties. And whatever you think of affirmative action, legacy admissions look even less fair when you outlaw preferences for underrepresented minority applicants. That’s because the history of racial exclusion in US higher education ensures that the legacy admits at most elite schools, deserving or not, are dominated by well-off white kids. From that earlier piece:

Why do legacies persist? The optics, after all, are atrocious. “Back in the old days,” Matt Feeney wrote in the New Yorker after Amherst ended legacy admissions in 2021, “the rich kids probably liked having a few smart kids from the lower classes around, or at least conceded that they were necessary. The raw bookishness of the smart kids ratified the larger enterprise that they were all participating in—it was a college, after all. But now that the aristocrats are siphoning status from the meritocrats, the social bargain is starting to look like a bad one.” 

Here is a bit of news involving Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that, unlike his antisemitic remarks and the unfortunate soundtrack during one of his appearances, didn’t exactly go viral. Earlier this week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in a case against a California law that was passed last year to prohibit physicians from spreading misinformation about Covid. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a key figure in the fight against this law. 

It’s not hard to see why this wasn’t exactly headline material. The pandemic officially ended in May, but Covid news fatigue set in long before that. Yet this particular case is worth paying attention to because the people who oppose California’s Covid misinformation law have expanded their areas of interest. Their efforts could lay the groundwork to give contrarian physicians broad authority to go rogue on all kinds of medical issues, from the administration of routine childhood vaccinations to reproductive health, gender-affirming care, and beyond.  

To understand why, you need some context. In early 2022, California state assembly member Evan Low introduced AB 2098, a bill that would allow the state medical board to discipline doctors who promoted false information about Covid—say, by claiming that unproven treatments could cure or prevent the disease, or that the vaccines were dangerous. The bill garnered broad support from the healthcare sector, including from the California Medical Association, the state lobbying group that represents physicians. California governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law last September.

That level of support is remarkable since physicians don’t typically love being told that there are certain things they can’t say. But the law is quite specific in what it does and does not deem to be misinformation, as California physician Nick Sawyer recently pointed out in a MedPage Today op-ed:

In his signing statement, Newsom specified that the bill is “Narrowly tailored to apply only to those egregious instances in which a licensee is acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the required standard of care while interacting directly with a patient under their care.” He further added, “This bill does not apply to any speech outside of discussions directly related to Covid-19 treatment within a direct physician-patient relationship,” and that discussing emerging ideas or treatments, including risks and benefits, “does not constitute misinformation or disinformation under this bill’s criteria.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on Tuesday that charges have been filed against 16 residents of the state for their roles in a fake elector scheme following the 2020 election. All 16 have been charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and election law forgery. 

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Nessel said. The announcement comes just hours after Donald Trump revealed that he has received a target letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

Today, @MIAttyGen @dananessel announced felony charges against 16 Michigan residents for their role in the alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Read more https://t.co/ODhkAQfXNP /1 pic.twitter.com/u5riNpTD5I

— Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (@MIAttyGen) July 18, 2023

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election in Michigan by more than 150,000 votes. Trump and his allies worked to overturn the results of the election in the state, even though they hadn’t requested a recount.

Once upon a time, Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina condemned racism. Now, not so much. What happened?

The presidential hopeful might be finding it difficult to make headlines in an increasingly crowded Republican primary field, but he’s still hauling in crucial campaign cash. The latest figures, unveiled last week, disclosed that his campaign has accumulated $6.1 million from over 53,000 donors in the second quarter of this year—ensuring his eligibility for the debate stage, alongside frontrunner Donald Trump, should the former president show up. Scott is also spending big, hoping to sway early-voting Iowans with a recent $6 million ad campaign titled “Winning.” 

“The radical left is indoctrinating our children, teaching CRT instead of ABC,” Scott says in the video, a phrase that has become something of a campaign catchphrase.

As Scott burnishes his anti-woke credentials on the campaign trail to compete with the more established culture warriors of the far right, I decided to scrutinize his views on race and how they’ve evolved over the years. In this video, I juxtapose Scott’s responses to two racially fueled tragedies: the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the 2022 Buffalo Massacre. These events elicited two completely different responses from the only Black senator in the Republican caucus, which prompted me to ask: What the hell happened in between?

My analysis begins in 2010 when Scott clinched a resounding victory in the US House of Representatives election against Paul Thurmond, whose father, Strom, was a notorious racist figure in the 20th century. Scott’s ability to win in a majority-white district set his political career on an upward trajectory, making him, in some respects, the Republicans’ primary spokesperson on race, or what I describe as the party’s “default DEI Guy”. After the Charlottesville rally, Scott was explicit in acknowledging America’s racial issues. But I quickly noticed a striking shift in Scott’s narrative following the racial tensions triggered by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020. In an email newsletter following the 2022 Buffalo Massacre, Scott stated, “America isn’t a racist country.”

Ron DeSantis is failing when it comes to grassroots fundraising. The situation has gotten so bad that it’s possible the Florida governor might actually be losing money when it comes to courting small-dollar donors.

DeSantis’ team has tried to spin the situation as a positive. In a New York Times piece last week, his advisers argued that the campaign was making a strategic decision to avoid alienating rank-and-file supporters with the sorts of fake promises and alarmist or misleading email blasts that have become hallmarks of political fundraising. That strategy may be commendable, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

It’s hard to say exactly how many small donors DeSantis has—the definition of “small donor” is generally someone who gives less than $200, and campaigns aren’t required to say how many donors of that size they have or how much each of those donors gave. Campaigns simply have to report to the Federal Election Commission the total amount raised from all those small donors, combined. According to filings from DeSantis’ campaign on Saturday, the answer is: not much.

To be precise, it was $2,867,814.98, or about 15 percent of DeSantis’ overall fundraising haul for the second quarter of 2023. It’s hard to draw a comparison directly to Donald Trump’s second quarter numbers, because the former president utilized several complex fundraising vehicles. But Trump has previously broken records for a presidential candidate’s small-dollar fundraising—GOP small donors like him. Even Joe Biden, who has made little effort with grassroots contributors so far, raised $5.3 million from small donors.

While DeSantis’ grand total from all donations, including large ones—$19.7 million—isn’t terrible, the roughly $2.9 million he raised specifically from small donors comes with some red flags. First, it appears to be costing DeSantis a lot to raise that rather paltry sum. According to the same federal filings, his campaign spent:

Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors can go into effect—at least for the time being.

In late June, a district court had halted a ban on minors receiving care such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy on the grounds that the restrictions in the bill, which Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee signed in March, were unconstitutional because they discriminated on the basis of sex.

But on Saturday, the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily reversed the lower court’s ruling until the appeals court can complete its full review of the ban and the appeal, filed by the state’s GOP attorney general. The higher court said it hopes to finish this review by the end of September. 

In the meantime, the ban will take immediate effect. Medical providers caught providing gender affirming hormones, puberty blockers, or gender-affirming surgery to minors in the state face $25,000 fines per violation. The law also allows lawsuits to be brought against a minor’s parents “if the parent of the minor consented to the conduct that constituted the violation on behalf of the minor.” (Children who already received prescriptions before the law went into effect must stop treatment before March 2024.)

“This ruling is beyond disappointing and a heartbreaking development for thousands of transgender youth, their doctors, and their families,” said the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, one of the advocacy groups challenging the ruling on behalf of several individuals, including a family with a trans child. “As we and our clients consider our next steps, we want all the transgender youth of Tennessee to know this fight is far from over and we will continue to challenge this law until it is permanently defeated and Tennessee is made a safer place to raise every family.”

Two and a half years after January 6, lawyers who helped former president Donald Trump use lies about election fraud to try to retain power are finally starting to face sanctions for their actions.

On Friday, a legal ethics committee recommended that Rudy Giuliani, who helped Trump’s legal efforts following election day in 2020, be disbarred in Washington. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the three-member panel said in a 38-page ruling. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”

The three-member panel noted that Giuliani had a record of public service during his stints as mayor of New York and as a US Attorney. But “the misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments,” they said. “It was unparalleled in its destructive purpose and effect. He sought to disrupt a presidential election and persists in his refusal to acknowledge the wrong he has done.”

The DC case focused on Giuliani’s role in the legal effort to contest Trump’s defeat in Pennsylvania during the 2020 presidential election. “His hyperbolic claims of election fraud and the core thesis of the Pennsylvania litigation were utterly false, and recklessly so,” the panel said.

The recommendation that Giuliani lose his license must still be okayed by DC’s Board on Professional Responsibility and by Court of Appeals. One of Giuliani’s lawyers said he will file “a vigorous appeal.” Ted Goodman, a Giuliani spokesman, called the DC Bar Association’s leaders “an arm of the permanent regime in Washington,” adding: “This is also part of an effort to deny President Trump effective counsel by persecuting Rudy Giuliani—objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history. I call on rank-and-file members of the DC Bar Association to speak out against this great injustice.”

Over the last two years, Republican state politicians have done their best to wipe out access to gender-affirming medical care for trans adolescents. In a flurry of lawmaking—coordinated by conservative Christian legal groups and think tanks, and backed by fringe doctors and activists who deny that anyone is truly transgender—a whopping 20 states have passed laws forbidding medical professionals from caring for trans adolescents with treatments supported by all major US medical associations.

Three more states may still pass similar bans this year: In North Carolina, and Louisiana, Republican-controlled legislatures are preparing to call special sessions to override their Democratic governors’ vetoes of several anti-LGBTQ bills, including trans healthcare restrictions. And Ohio still has a ban on the table. 

Yet even as more states consider banning affirming medical care for trans youth, federal courts are blocking or overturning these restrictive laws in a cascade of wins for transgender rights. In Arkansas, on June 20, a federal judge struck down a law banning gender-affirming care for youth, concluding after a trial that “the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients” and that despite its claims to the contrary, the state hadn’t been protecting children when it passed the law. Meanwhile, judges in Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee all granted temporary injunctions last month that will keep puberty blockers and hormone therapy accessible to trans adolescents while legal challenges to their state bans play out in court. (Update: Tennessee’s injunction was overturned on July 8 and the ban was allowed to go into effect.)

The decisions, all issued during Pride month, follow a similar ruling in Alabama in May 2022 that temporarily blocked a law banning gender-affirming medication for trans people under the age of 19. All in all, in almost every court case so far in which a decision has been issued on gender-affirming care bans for youth, judges have sided with the trans adolescents and their families suing for access to treatment.

The rulings are a victory—though temporary, in some cases—for the parents who have sued their states to protect their children’s healthcare. The plaintiffs include the mom of a 9-year-old in Florida who had told her parents she was a girl even before she started kindergarten. According to court filings, she had stopped expressing the desire to self-harm after socially transitioning, and was waiting to start puberty blockers before the new law was passed. In Kentucky, a dad sued the state to protect his 14-year-old transgender son’s access menstruation suppressants and testosterone patches—medication which had helped reduce his gender dysphoria and suicidality. And in Arkansas, the parents of a 10-year-old transgender girl joined a lawsuit knowing that if the ban there took effect, they would have to move to make sure their daughter could get appropriate medical care when she enters puberty.  

In May, Starbucks abruptly shuttered a unionized store in Ithaca, New York. This week, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Starbucks had violated federal labor law, and ordered the company to reopen the store.

The College Avenue store, near Cornell University, was one of three Ithaca stores that closed after workers unionized, a move that the union characterized as retaliation. In a Thursday ruling, Judge Arthur Amchan wrote that the College Avenue store’s closure “was done in large part to discourage unionization efforts in Ithaca and elsewhere” and that Starbucks hadn’t proved that it wouldn’t have closed the store “absent its animus towards the pro-union employees who worked there,” Bloomberg reports.

As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had billed himself as a benevolent CEO, but, in coming out of retirement to attempt to quell the growing movement to unionize Starbucks cafes, has shown a different side of his American dream. The company has increased wages and allowed baristas to receive tips by credit cards—but only at non-union stores.

The Ithaca store closures aren’t the first examples of outright retaliation. As Noah reports:

According to an NLRB court filing, illegal firings of pro-union workers became routine. In one case, seven workers leading a drive at a Memphis store were simultaneously fired; a federal judge later found that to be illegal retaliation and ordered their jobs be offered back.

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

A constitutional legal strategy is gaining traction as a way to potentially help bring about climate justice, boosted by a recent high-profile trial in which 16 young plaintiffs spoke movingly about how the climate crisis has affected their lives.

That case, the first US constitutional climate trial, came to an end in Helena, Montana, earlier this month, with a verdict expected to be delivered by a judge in the coming weeks.

Climate and legal advocates say the Montana case—which made national and international headlines—could inspire more legal action, while also pushing forward similar lawsuits pending against four other states and the federal government.

Some climate advocates are, meanwhile, working to enshrine similarly robust environmental rights in other state constitutions, which they say could become the basis of future climate litigation.

Last Friday morning, at the beginning of a hot June day in Philadelphia, I walked through a phalanx of about a hundred protesters in order to make my way to the Joyful Warriors Summit, the annual convention of the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. It was early in the day, but the bass from the speakers was already thrumming, and the protesters—most were young, many were not white—danced behind the barricades that separated them from the Marriott where the convention was taking place. Bedecked in rainbow gear, the jubilant crowd waved signs: “STAND UP TO BULLIES,” “DANCE THE HATE AWAY,” “GO HOME, KAREN.”

This was my second encounter with the joyful warriors, having attended their convention last year, in Tampa, Florida. At that event, there were a few lackluster official protesters, but most of the action outside came from kids attending the anime gathering at the convention center next door. Back then, inside the Marriott, I watched Moms for Liberty heads Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Marie Rogerson present Gov. Ron DeSantis with a commemorative sword. The golden boy in Tampa, who would be speaking at breakfast in Philadelphia, had a far less prominent role this year; it was clear that the headliner would be Friday’s evening speaker, former President Donald Trump.

Demonstrators react as James Calkins, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, walks outside the Moms for Liberty meeting in Philadelphia, Friday, June 30, 2023.

Nathan Howard/AP

Founded in 2021, Moms for Liberty began in Florida as a protest against school closures and then mask mandates. But as the pandemic wore on, the group’s mission coalesced into what is now known as the parents’ rights movement, focusing on what its supporters see as the dire consequences of schools’ over-involvement in shaping the moral lives of their offspring. The Moms do not think children should be learning about institutional racism in the United States. The Moms consider schools’ social-emotional learning programs—which focus on soft skills like friendship, anger management, and being part of a community—to be Trojan horses for a Marxist agenda. The Moms want to purge school libraries of books that present gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. The Moms want the federal government out of the schools, and, while they’re at it, abolishing the Department of Education would be a good idea as well.

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

More than 1,500 lobbyists in the US are working on behalf of fossil-fuel companies while at the same time representing hundreds of liberal-run cities, universities, technology companies and environmental groups that say they are tackling the climate crisis, the Guardian can reveal.

Lobbyists for oil, gas and coal interests are also employed by a vast sweep of institutions, ranging from the city governments of Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia; tech giants such as Apple and Google; more than 150 universities; some of the country’s leading environmental groups—and even ski resorts seeing their snow melted by global heating.

The breadth of fossil fuel lobbyists’ work for other clients is captured in a new database of their lobbying interests which was published online on Wednesday.

It shows the reach of state-level fossil fuel lobbyists into almost every aspect of American life, spanning local governments, large corporations, cultural institutions such as museums and film festivals, and advocacy groups, grouping together clients with starkly contradictory aims.

Why the hell did President Joe Biden nominate a one-time protector of war criminals to a top administration post?

On the Monday before July 4—a black hole day for news—the White House let drop the word that it was appointing Elliott Abrams to the bipartisan US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The commission’s job is to oversee US government information programs designed to convey American diplomacy to the world. It keeps an eye on the US Agency for Global Media, which manages the Voice of America and similar programs. The commission essentially helps the United States present its idea of itself to the rest of the planet.

This is a task for which Abrams is distinctly unsuited.

Long a stalwart in neoconservative circles, Abrams was one of the many cheerleaders in the early 2000s for the disastrous Iraq War. A decade earlier, in 1991, as a player in the Iran–Contra affair, he pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about the Reagan White House’s secret operation to arm the Nicaraguan Contras. In short: As a top State Department official, he engaged in a cover-up to hide the arguably illegal operation overseen by Oliver North. 

But Abrams most odious (known) action occurred several years previously. As a top Reagan official, he dismissed reports that the US-trained-and-equipped military had massacred 1,000 civilians—including many women and children—in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981. This was the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. But Abrams wanted to protect the Salvadoran army, which the Reagan administration was showering with guns and money, despite its well-established record of human rights abuses. Abrams trash-talked American journalists who reported on the massacre and claimed the horrific reports were “implausible.” He praised the military unit that conducted this awful action. He suppressed the truth to assist killers.

For GOP presidential hopefuls, the weekend that marked the anniversary of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade presented an opportunity to demonstrate just how opposed to abortion they were. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference on Friday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez all made their respective cases to an audience of approximately 500 religious conservatives in Washington, DC. Then on Saturday, it was former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s turn to defend her self-described “unapologetically pro-life” record, with the weekend culminating in the appearance of former president Donald Trump.  

“We’re certainly going to do everything that we can, as an organization and as a pro-life and pro-family movement, to give our candidates a little bit of a testosterone booster shot and explain to them that they should not be on the defensive,” Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition said before the conference. “Those who are afraid of it need to, candidly, grow a backbone.” 

As historically one of the most ardent anti-abortion candidates who calls himself an “advocate for the unborn,” Mike Pence urged all Republican candidates to support a federal 15-week abortion ban. “We must not rest and we must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in this country,” he said on Friday.

Trump has avoided taking a definitive position on a national abortion ban, largely dodging the issue on the campaign trail. He has also expressed concerns that abortion might be a losing issue for Republicans, blaming his party’s lackluster performance in the midterm elections on the defeat of Roe. But at the Faith & Freedom Coalition annual event, the 2024 GOP candidates refrained from taking shots at Trump, who, Politico wrote in describing his appearance at the conference, “is still king of the evangelical cattle call.”

Nonetheless, there was one notable exception to the avoidance of discussing the former president: Chris Christie.