Three unions representing 9,000 faculty members at Rutgers University are suspending their strike after reaching a tentative framework on Friday night with Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) and his staff.

After more than nine months without a contract, faculty unions and the Rutgers administration worked out the deal in marathon negotiations in Trenton. The framework secures major pay increases for union members, along with improvements in job security, working conditions, and other areas. Classes will resume on Monday. 

Rutgers faculty had never before gone on strike in the university’s 257-year history. In a show of cross-faculty solidarity, unions prioritized improving conditions for the poorly paid adjunct faculty and graduate student workers that Rutgers relies on to teach many of its courses. Their success could serve as a model for faculty at universities across the country.

“This was a campaign…where those in our community at Rutgers who have the most on the faculty, who get paid the highest, who have the most job security, were in this fight not for themselves but those who have the least,” Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union President Amy Higer said during a virtual town hall meeting on Saturday. “That is really important and we should all know that.” 

Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway called the framework “fair and equitable.” Union leaders told members they “believe we have secured profound victories.” Among other wins, Rutgers AAUP-AFT President Rebecca Givan said during the town hall that graduate student workers would see their pay go from about $30,000 today to $40,000 starting in 2025.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is on the verge of signing a bill that would allow people in Florida to be executed without a unanimous decision by a jury. Instead, an 8-4 vote would be enough for someone to be put to death in the state.

The bill passed the Florida Senate last month and passed the House on Thursday by an 80-30 margin. The bill has been a priority for DeSantis, who opposed the decision not to sentence to death the Parkland school shooter who killed 17 people in 2018. Three jurors voted against the death penalty in that case.

“I’m sorry, but if you murder 17 people in cold blood, the only appropriate punishment is capital punishment,” DeSantis said in October. “We need to reform some of these laws.”

According to the Washington Post, only three of the 27 states with capital punishment allow people to be executed when a jury is divided during the penalty phase. A unanimous decision would still be required in Florida to convict a defendant.

In 2016, the US Supreme Court struck down a Florida law that allowed judges to decide whether to sentence someone to death after receiving a recommendation from a jury. “The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomyor. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough.”

In 2017, Matthew Kacsmaryk, then deputy general counsel at the right-wing First Liberty Institute, criticized protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions in a draft law review article. The Obama administration, he wrote, was ignoring doctors who, for religious reasons, “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”

What’s unusual is what happened next. The Washington Post reports that Kacsmaryk, now the federal judge issued who issued the temporarily-stayed decision to ban the abortion drug mifepristone across the country, asked an editor at the law journal a few months later to remove his name from the article because of “reasons I may discuss at a later date.” Instead, he asked the journal to put the names of two of his colleagues on the article. At the time, Kacsmaryk was being considered for a judgeship. As the Post explains:

As part of that process, he was required to list all of his published work on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, including “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited.”

The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a right-leaning journal that Kacsmaryk had led as a law student at the University of Texas. But Kacsmaryk’s role in the article was not disclosed, nor did he list the article on the paperwork he submitted to the Senate in advance of confirmation hearings in which Kacsmaryk’s past statements on LGBT issues became a point of contention.

Kacsmaryk did not respond to requests for comment from the Post. A spokesman for First Liberty told the paper that Kacsmaryk’s name was “placeholder” on the article and that the now-judge did not make a “substantive contribution.” But a former editor at the journal said there was no sign that Kacsmaryk was being used as a “placeholder.” He had never seen the name of an author changed out before, according to the Post.

Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s former CIA Director and Secretary of State, was never going to be president. Now he’s admitted that he won’t be running in 2024. Few Republicans will think twice; a poll this month put him at 1 percent. 

Pompeo has long harbored presidential ambitions. The problem was that his base never extended much beyond Republican apparatchiks for whom bombs over Baghdad is a career milestone, not a song. Having ruled himself out, he can now return to pasture as a distinguished fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. 

In another era, Pompeo might have been a plausible Republican nominee. After graduating first in his class in high school and at West Point, he served as a tank commander then left the military for Harvard Law. He later went into the defense industry with substantial financial backing from the Kochs. But as Susan Glasser reported in a 2019 New Yorker profile, he mostly failed in business anyway. 

Nevertheless, he positioned himself as something of a corporate guru while successfully running for Congress in 2014 in his adopted hometown of Wichita, Kansas. During the 2016 primary, he warned that Trump would follow Barack Obama in being “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.” He later supported Trump anyway and used his ties to Mike Pence to become CIA Director. Trump bumped up Pompeo to Secretary of State after firing Rex Tillerson by tweet. 

As Glasser made clear in her profile, Pompeo’s singular talent was sucking up to the president. One formal official told her he was “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.” Another, a former ambassador, said, “He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” Trump, for his part, claimed, “I argue with everyone. Except Pompeo.”

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

Even America’s favorite pastime is not immune from climate change. A new study from researchers at Dartmouth College says that a warming atmosphere could be causing more home runs in professional baseball.

The research, published last week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, looked at 100,000 Major League Baseball games and found that at least 500 home runs since 2010 can be attributed to climate change. 

As the planet warms, the authors predict that climate change could be responsible for nearly 10 percent of all home runs by 2100, with each degree of warming associated with 95 more home runs per season. Eventually, the report concludes, several hundred additional home runs per season could be due to climate change. 

The paper was born out of Callahan’s interest in baseball as a Chicago Cubs fan as well as his background in climate science. 

The Florida legislature on Thursday approved a ban on abortion after six weeks gestation, before many women know they’re pregnant. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the bill into law, ending the state’s status as an abortion destination for women throughout the South and likely forcing many to travel even farther to access care.

As we reported in May 2022, Florida, despite its conservatism, has been a bastion of abortion access since the 1980s, when voters enshrined a right to privacy in the state constitution. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Florida banned abortion after 15 weeks gestation but remained a destination for people who lived in nearby states with even more restrictive—or total—abortion bans. The 15-week ban (and by extension the restriction at six weeks) remains in legal jeopardy as the Florida Supreme Court decides whether the state’s right to privacy extends to abortion care.

The new bill includes exceptions for rape, incest, and human trafficking up to 15 weeks, but only if women provide documentation proving their circumstances. Seven Republicans broke with their party to vote against the ban.

The law will likely be politically fraught for DeSantis, ahead of his widely expected presidential campaign. Since the overturning of Roe, abortion rights have consistently won elections, even in red states like Kansas. Furthermore, public opinion polls have routinely shown that voters in Florida, like voters throughout the country, oppose abortion bans.

“We have got to stop imposing our personal beliefs on other people and do what’s right for people,” Democratic state Rep. Dianne Hart said on Thursday, the Tallahassee Democrat reported. “Illegal abortions will be on the rise, and we will return to some very, very dark ages where people will die as a result of their inability to get a legal abortion.”

On Thursday morning in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Martin Gliserman, a silver-haired English professor wearing his cap and gown, looked to be an elder statesman of the picket line. But despite having taught at Rutgers for more than 50 years, this was all new to him.

For the first time in Rutgers’ 257-year history, the faculty is on strike.

The story of why 9,000 faculty members represented by three unions decided to go on strike on Monday is a familiar one. “Buildings. A lot more buildings. Administrators. A lot more administrators. Poorly-paid faculty. A lot more of that,” Gliserman said about the changes that led to the strike. “That’s the direction in which it’s going.” The last time he saw the campus so energized was during Vietnam War protests in 1972, his second year on campus. 

Faculty members are bargaining and striking together as they try to not only secure across-the-board pay increases but fix the systemic issues that impact their most vulnerable members. Like schools across the country, Rutgers now relies on poorly paid adjuncts and graduate students to teach many of its classes. The strike is showing what can happen when a relatively privileged group—tenured professors—unite with colleagues who lack the protections they enjoy.

Rutgers’ faculty members have gone more than nine months without a contract. A strike authorization vote passed last month with 94 percent support. Union leaders announced the strike after they failed to secure a new contract.

By any measure, Stephanie Seneff is an accomplished scientist. A senior researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, she’s been a leader in the emerging field of computer response to human speech. After earning two PhDs from MIT in the early ’80s, in the following decades she paved the way for the scientists who worked on virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri. In 2012, Seneff’s many achievements earned her the honor of being named a fellow of the International Speech Communication Association, a professional society for researchers in the field.

Many of Seneff’s MIT lab mates and former graduate students have continued to make breakthroughs; some have gone on to careers at the many tech companies eager to hire scientists with expertise in artificial intelligence. But Seneff has spent the last ten years going in a different direction, publicizing her theory that exposure to minute amounts of the weedkiller glyphosate—commonly known by the brand name Roundup—causes a host of neurological conditions, especially autism. Known as a spectrum disorder, autism manifests in a range of neurological diagnoses that run the gamut from subtle brain differences and trouble reading social cues to significant communication challenges. In a 2014 conference presentation, Seneff predicted that because of the ubiquity of glyphosate, half of all children born in 2025 would eventually be diagnosed as autistic. Since then, she often has repeated this claim in interviews and speeches, warning a tidal wave of autism cases was just around the corner.  

It doesn’t look like Seneff’s forecast will pan out. Today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 36 children are autistic. And Seneff’s theory has been widely discredited: There is no evidence that glyphosate exposure causes autism. But the scientific consensus has not stopped her from airing her beliefs on social media and becoming a sought-after speaker at conferences. In 2020, with the onset of the pandemic, she broadened her Roundup theory to include vulnerability to the coronavirus, making the completely unsubstantiated claim that Americans were getting more serious cases of Covid than their international counterparts because glyphosate exposure weakened the immune system and increased the risk of severe infection.

For a quarter of a century, proponents of unproven autism treatments have overlapped with anti-vaccine activists. The vaccine skepticism movement took off after British physician Andrew Wakefield published a study in 1998 suggesting that routine childhood vaccinations caused autism. That study was later found to be fraudulent, the paper retracted, and Wakefield barred from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, the myth of vaccines causing autism persisted and has been amplified by organizations like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense and celebrities including Jenny McCarthy, and Oprah Winfrey. Even the largest and most powerful autism advocacy organization, Autism Speaks, which was founded in 2005 and today runs a $50 million budget, did not officially distance itself from vaccine skepticism until 2015. Over the last few decades, many groups and individuals who spread falsehoods about vaccines as the cause of autism began to promote unproven and sometimes dangerous treatments for it—special diets, supplements, cleanses, and pricey medical spa experiences.

This world of dubious autism treatments used to be mostly limited to private social media groups and conferences. Indeed, beginning about a decade ago, the very notion of autism as a disorder began to lose currency among many autistic people and scientists who study autism: They started to view the condition not as an affliction, but rather as an innate brain difference. Autistic people experience the world differently, and that difference, they say, is something to be honored rather than treated.

If you’re not driving an electric car yet, you probably will be soon. (Provided, of course, that you drive a car at all.)

The Environmental Protection Agency just proposed two ambitious new regulations that seek to cut vehicle emissions dramatically and ensure that two-thirds of new vehicles sold by 2032 in the US are all-electric. That’s a lot faster than many automakers had planned to transition to electric. The EPA anticipates that the rules could save between $850 billion and $1.6 trillion in climate and health impacts.

The rules do not explicitly say that a certain percentage of vehicles needs to be electric. Instead, they set pollution limits under the Clean Air Act that only electric vehicles are currently able to meet. If automakers could figure out some other way to fuel a car without emissions, that’s fair game, too.

Some critics have called the emissions regulations government overreach, and Republican state attorneys general have already sued the EPA for allowing California to set its own emissions standards. But, as I reported last month, government regulations have historically spurred technological change.

When the EPA mandated emissions reductions in the 1970s, “there was a big outcry from manufacturers because they had very limited technology that was available to them at the time,” John Mohr, a historian of technology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told me. But the mandate worked. Cars became more efficient. Automakers were forced to comply, and they invested in creating technology that would allow them to. If you’ve ever had to bring your car in for an emissions test, you can thank the Clean Air Act. And if you live in a city and enjoy good air quality, you can thank the Clean Air Act for that, too.

Days after Nashville officials unanimously voted to reinstate Rep. Justin Jones, one of two Black Democrats expelled last week for participating in a gun control protest, the Shelby County Commission on Wednesday voted to reappoint Justin Pearson to Tennessee’s House of Representatives. 

HAPPENING NOW: @garrison_hayes is on the ground with some exclusive photos and video while we wait as the Shelby County Commission in Memphis votes to reinstate ousted Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson. Take a peek, and follow along pic.twitter.com/3cE5dUP75o

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 12, 2023

Pearson, Jones, as well as Rep. Gloria Johnson, were thrust into the national spotlight last month after the three lawmakers, all Democrats, demonstrated in solidarity with Tennesseans demanding gun control after a mass shooting killed six people, including three nine-year-olds, at The Covenant School in Nashville. Johnson, a white woman, was subjected to a similar vote calling for her expulsion but was ultimately spared from removal. When asked why she survived the vote, Johnson suggested that her skin color had likely played a role.

“Is what’s happening outside these doors by Tennesseans who want to see change a ‘temper tantrum’?” Pearson said in a speech responding to Republican complaints that their protest was tantamount to a “temper tantrum.”

On February 16, John Fetterman, the first-term Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to receive treatment for depression. Fetterman, who defeated Republican Mehmet Oz in one of last fall’s tightest and most expensive races, had been in office for a little more than a month and was still dealing with the effects of a stroke he suffered in 2022.

Fetterman never fully stopped working—he was briefed every morning by his chief of staff, according to the New York Times, and he introduced a bill last month relating to railroad safety. But he was devoting the bulk of his time to his own recovery. Evidently, he’s made significant progress. Fetterman was discharged on Friday. He will return home to Pennsylvania for two weeks, and plans to return to the Capitol on April 17 when the Senate resumes its business after a spring recess.

In an interview with CBS News, Fetterman elaborated on the experiences that had brought him to Walter Reed. He was losing his appetite and struggling to get out of bed. “It’s like, you just won the biggest race in the country, and the whole thing about depression is that, objectively you may have won, but depression can absolutely convince you that you actually lost,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened. And that was the start of a downward spiral.”

Six weeks after entering Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for inpatient treatment for depression, Sen. @JohnFetterman shares his struggle with depression, his health, and more in an intimate interview with Jane Pauley this "Sunday Morning." pic.twitter.com/3o2926I48B

— CBS Sunday Morning (@CBSSunday) March 31, 2023

The coronation next month of Kaiser Wilhelm’s and Tsar Nicholas II’s distant cousin, Charles Philip Arthur George, as King of England is a big event, but it is not such a big event that people are afraid to turn it down.

As my colleague Inae Oh noted in February, “Some of the United Kingdom’s biggest stars, including Adele, Harry Styles, Elton John, the Spice Girls, and Ed Sheeran have all reportedly declined invitations to perform at Charles’ big day.” To that list of thanks-but-no-thanks and oh-I-wish-I-could and I’ve-got-to-see-a-man-about-a-dog, you can add a new luminary: President Joe Biden.

Per The Telegraph:

The US president is ‘not expected’ to join dozens of heads of state for the event on May 6, according to sources close to the discussions, and will send a delegation in his place.

America is keen to counter any perception of a snub and show support for the King by sending high-profile representatives, with one possibility under consideration being that Jill Biden, the first lady, could attend.

Almost immediately after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced that he had indicted ex-president Donald Trump, Republican critics settled on a company line. Trump’s impending arrest was, in the words of Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, “some Third World Banana Republic lunacy and a very, very dangerous road to go down.”

Schmitt should probably ask his local history professor what a “Banana Republic” is, why we call them that, and which country’s marines had a tendency to deploy to their shores to force them at gunpoint to stay that way. But he and others are wrong on the underlying point, too: Wealthy democracies investigate and indict their leaders all the time. 

Former French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to a year in prison in 2021 for—oh!—campaign finance violations. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a Trump-like figure in many ways, has been involved in 35 criminal cases, with one conviction for tax fraud. Trump’s good friend, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted for corruption. And the current Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, was once sentenced to 12 years in prison.

That the Brazilian case was later thrown out, precisely because it was a politically motivated hit-job, might sound like a point for the skeptics, except that American conservatives were quite happy with that outcome: It gave them Jair Bolsonaro.

It’s indicative of a certain kind of American exceptionalism that some politicians are so likely to claim that countries like this don’t investigate their presidents, and that their supporters are so eager to believe it.

It was a grim but not terribly surprising coincidence. Last Monday morning, just a few hours after the Washington Post published a new series on the popular semiautomatic rifles known as AR-15s, a suicidal 28-year-old used one to murder three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school. It was the sixth mass shooting in the past 10 months committed with this type of highly lethal firearm, according to our Mother Jones database.

Semiautomatic pistols used to be the top weapon of choice for mass shooters. But ever since the massacres at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school just over a decade ago, many perpetrators of these crimes have armed themselves with AR-15s and caused growing carnage. The phenomenon accelerated further with five high-profile attacks in 2022, beginning with those in Buffalo and Uvalde. (In the several years prior: the massacres in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Pittsburgh, Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, Boulder, Indianapolis—the list quickly grows long.) Mass shooters increasingly also use body armor, tactical vests, and other tactical gear, the Nashville perpetrator included. As I reported in December:

The past decade brought a sharp increase in shooters using military-style semiautomatic rifles. Among the 83 mass shootings since 2012 documented in the Mother Jones database (whose perpetrators also include several high school adolescents and various middle-age men), 34 of the cases involved such assault rifles.

As those weapons have soared in popularity in the United States, there also remains scant regulation of the military-grade body armor that mass shooters increasingly use. Such gear helped protect the perpetrator who committed the racist mass murder at the supermarket in Buffalo; his body armor stopped a bullet fired by a security guard, whom he then fatally shot. Body armor also made it more difficult to stop the attacker at Club Q in Colorado Springs, according to the military veteran who heroically took him down.

This disturbing trend connects in part to how mass shooters emulate previous attackers as they plan and prepare, one of multiple common warning behaviors I examine in Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings through the method of threat assessment. The weapons and gear these perpetrators select has coincided with aggressive marketing tactics long used by the gun industry:

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

A handful of weary residents gathered at the windowless Randolph church to mull over the latest effort by an electric utility to expand its power station—a polluting gas-fired plant next door to the community that the state regulator has blocked on environmental and health grounds.

Randolph is a historic Black community in central Arizona flanked by railroads and heavy hazardous industries, a small dusty place where residents are exposed to some of the worst air quality in the state while lacking basic amenities like fire hydrants, trash collection and healthcare.

Last year, the community celebrated a historic win when the state regulator rejected a proposal by the public utility Salt River Project (SRP) to more than double the size of its power plant, ruling that it would cause further harm to Randolph residents and was not in the public interest.

It was major victory for clean energy and environmental justice in Arizona, according to the Sierra Club, the environmental group which condemned the proposed expansion as “textbook environmental racism.”

Last week, a bill introduced by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) received a hearing.

For some congresspeople, this would not be news. For Boebert it is: In her first term, she sponsored 41 pieces of legislation—one set out to impeach President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris; another to require the Department of Homeland Security to treat fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction; a third to prohibit the use of federal funds to research youth gender transitions—and none warranted a hearing.

This turned out to be a problem. Despite being predicted to comfortably win reelection, Boebert prevailed over her Democratic opponent by less than a percentage point. Voters in her district told me the reason was simple: “I don’t think she did shit,” one constituent explained. “She didn’t back one bill, she just talked a lot.”

Now, it seems Boebert has taken that message to heart. In proposing to remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act, she has taken aim at a serious, complex issue in her home state.

In 2020, Coloradans narrowly voted to allow the reintroduction of gray wolves, which had been hunted out of their natural range in the 1940s. Environmentalists say that wolves are an important part of ecosystems, allowing aspens and willows to thrive by mediating the elk population that feeds on them. Because wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act, it is illegal to kill them—except in the Northern Rocky Mountains, which encompasses Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, because those states have already successfully restored their gray wolf populations. (Endangered species can be killed in self-defense.) Wolves have not yet been officially reintroduced by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Still, some packs have migrated into the state from Wyoming. These wolves occasionally kill cattle, frustrating ranchers, who view the reintroduction of wolves as harmful and say that the state’s city-dwellers don’t know what it’s like to have their livelihood threatened by carnivorous animals. By removing wolves from the ESA, Boebert wants to allow Colorado ranchers to shoot wolves.

Starting tomorrow, states will begin to terminate health care coverage for people who no longer qualify for Medicaid, marking the end to a pandemic-era rule that automatically renewed coverage for Medicaid recipients even if they were no longer eligible. An estimated 15 million Americans, a majority of whom are low-income, are expected to lose their health insurance before the end of the year. 

The emergency policy was created at the start of the pandemic under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act which prevented states from kicking off Medicaid recipients regardless of whether they had filled out the necessary paperwork to re-enroll. During the pandemic, the program saw 20.2 million new recipients over the course of two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. With the end of the pandemic-era requirement, states will return to checking people’s Medicaid eligibility by requiring recipients to fill out forms to verify their personal information, income, and household size—a massive administrative effort for families likely economically struggling.

According to a Department of Health and Human Services analysis, the 15 million expected to lose coverage include an estimated 5 million children; Black and Latino households will be disproportionately affected. Others at risk of losing their insurance include: individuals who have moved out of state during the pandemic, people with limited English proficiency, and those with disabilities.

Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, and South Dakota will be the first states to end coverage. Most states will move to do the same in either May or June. 

Donald Trump is going to be spending a lot of his time in courtrooms this year—and not just fighting Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s newly-filed charges. The recent indictment has raised legitimate questions about how Trump would manage the roles of being both a presidential candidate and a criminal defendant. But the reality is that Trump was already going to have an incredibly busy schedule fending off legal threats. There are as many as 40 other lawsuits and investigations into his behavior before, during, and since his time in the White House.

And three of them—all major, all potentially extremely costly—are set to go to trial at some point in the next ten months. The last of the cases will kick off in early 2024, and all will occur as Trump is trying to get his 2024 presidential campaign into high gear. All will be heard in courthouses within one block of each other in southern Manhattan, and by the end, each case will likely have cost millions of dollars, thousands of billable hours, and weeks of time in front of empaneled juries. Trump will not necessarily have to appear in the courtroom for every hearing in every case—he will be paying attorneys millions to do most of it for him—but the former president is going to have a legally busy, and legally perilous, year ahead—whether Bragg’s charges stick or not.

For starters, there is the lawsuit filed by writer E. Jean Carroll who has accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Carroll has filed both a defamation lawsuit—alleging that Trump had disparaged her when she first made her accusation saying, by saying, among other things, that Carroll was “not my type”—and a civil lawsuit accusing Trump of battery for the alleged assault. The defamation lawsuit has been temporarily put on hold. But the battery lawsuit is moving forward—made possible by a new New York law that makes it easier for adult survivors of sexual assault to make civil claims against their alleged attackers. The trial will begin April 25 in a federal courtroom a block from the New York City courthouse where Trump will be arrested and fingerprinted on Tuesday in Bragg’s case.

The testimony in the Carroll case is expected to last a week and judging by the flurry of pre-trial motions that have been filed back and forth for months, it has enormous potential to be ugly for Trump. Win or lose, it seems likely to be a high-profile platform for allegations that Trump routinely made aggressive, uninvited sexual advances toward women fairly regularly. Attorneys in the case, for example, are waiting for the judge to rule on whether depositions from other women who say Trump sexually assaulted them should be admissible. They are attempting to demonstrate that his sexual advances on women constituted a “signature crime”—meaning Trump had a modus operandi of preying on women. Never a positive description for a presidential candidate.

Then, there is the massive $250 million civil lawsuit that New York attorney general Letitia James filed against Trump last fall. It’s a sprawling case that accuses Trump of systematically manipulating the values of his various properties. When using them as collateral to get loans and insurance coverage, he would pump up their value, and then drastically undervalue them when it came time to pay taxes. James’ office has been sparring with Trump for nearly four years in the matter, but it will all come to a head on October 2, when the case will go to a full jury trial.

Editor’s note: The below article is a preview of the lead item in the next edition of  David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

Donald Trump has been a one-man stress test for the American political system. The framers did not envision such a dishonest, narcissistic scoundrel winning the highest office of the land. And the system of laws, rules, and norms that began with the Constitution and that has evolved in the past two centuries was not formulated to deal with a demagogue with a cult-like following who would baldly lie about anything and everything, who would aid and abet a foreign attack on the nation, who would flaunt numerous and brazen conflicts of interest, and who would try to blow up the nation’s constitutional order and incite violence to remain in power. But—so far—the nation appears to have survived the authoritarian threat Trump poses. Yet with his historic indictment in New York City on charges related to the $130,000 hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to prevent her from airing the story of her alleged sexual romp with Trump, the failed casino owner who became president is once again about to stress test the nation.

Never has the US judicial system contended with the criminal prosecution of a former president (who is also the leading GOP 2024 aspirant). That almost happened with Richard Nixon. But his handpicked successor, President Gerald Ford, granted the Watergate co-conspirator a pardon. Ford insisted that would allow the country to move on. But in retrospect, his pardon did the United States a disservice by not allowing the nation to establish a precedent for managing the sensitive matter of presidential criminality.

So after years of repeated brushes with the law and other sordid actions—from allegedly violating housing law to hobnobbing with mobsters to possibly committing perjury to mounting  assorted tax  dodges to obstructing justice to plotting multiple schemes for overturning an election—Trump is finally being prosecuted for a caper that involved paying off and silencing an adult film director and star. As did the January 6 insurrectionist riot, this will place tremendous pressure on American politics.

Trump's chaos machine has already been unleashed following his indictment. And now the system is about to be tested like never before, warns @DavidCornDC. pic.twitter.com/gjOn4ztrPR

When the NFT trading platform OpenSea agreed to meet with representatives from Color of Change, staffers at the civil rights advocacy group assumed that meant that the largest and most prominent business in the space would be receptive to suggestions on making their business more inclusive.

Before their first video conference in April, Color of Change had found, through a series of quick searches, that OpenSea was facilitating and profiting from the sale of a slew of indefensibly racist and antisemitic collections of NFTs. (Non-Fungible Tokens are commodities based on crypto blockchains that usually signify ownership of digital art, videos, or photos.)

When questioned about those tokens in a series of three meetings that unfolded into September, OpenSea staffers defended their presence as a matter of not stifling users’ expression and creativity. Participants in the meetings from OpenSea, according to the Color of Change representatives, falsely claimed the inability to police their site, compared their platform to the Holocaust Museum, and ultimately defended leaving up NFTs that used the n-word, depicted Black people as racist caricatures, and that featured antisemitic, pro-Nazi content. 

OpenSea is far and above the most well-known and used NFT trading platform; it has accrued over 1 million users, who have traded billions of dollars worth of NFTs. One 2022 survey found that a quarter of Black Americans own crypto—only 15 percent of whites do—and Color of Change set up the meetings as part of an effort to make the space more hospitable for people of color. 

OpenSea’s response tracks with a broader hesitation to grapple with racial issues in Web 3, as the ostensibly decentralized apps and communities around crypto are collectively known. The heavily white, male community of Web 3 founders and developers who built a libertarian dream have sometimes been resistant to adjust to the reality of society’s persistent inequities. In 2020, in the wake of demonstrations over George Floyd’s murder, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced a controversial policy barring employees from debating “causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work.” A year later, his company quietly pulled language from its prohibited uses policy that explicitly barred users from using the crypto platform to “encourage hate” and “racial intolerance.”