Could a blossoming kinship, forged in the fire of unceremonious dismissals on the same day, be developing between Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon? 

Maybe. That’s one of the big takeaways from Brian Stelter, who reports for Vanity Fair that the two men, in addition to retaining the same entertainment lawyer, have reportedly exchanged several texts in the last few days. The content of those messages isn’t yet known, but I have a feeling they hit the same notes as the statements the two men put out since getting canned: stunned, chaotic, and fuming.

At first blush, Carlson and Lemon don’t seem to share much in common. Carlson helmed one of the most racist, toxic, and hateful programs on cable TV, and is someone of genuine evil. Lemon, though irritating and sexist, during his career as one of CNN’s top personalities, is not. In fact, as Stelter notes in his report, Carlson and Lemon have bashed one another on air: Carlson has deliberately mispronounced Lemon’s name; Lemon once called Carlson’s claim that white supremacy is a “hoax” one of the “dumbest things” he’s ever heard.

But it’s hard to ignore the ominous nature of a potential relationship between the two scorned former anchors, who are all but certain to be plotting their paths back to prominence. That’s especially true when one of the few threads of commonality between Carlson and Lemon, in addition to their high-profile firings, is repeated accusations of misogyny.

On Friday, Montana joined an alarming number of states to ban gender-affirming health care for minors when its Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, signed a bill that had been condemned as “unconscionable” by the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker.

Gianforte, who catapulted to the national spotlight in 2017 after body-slamming a Guardian reporter, signed the legislation despite protest from his nonbinary son, David Gianforte.

“For my own sake, I’ve chosen to focus primarily on transgender rights, as that would significantly directly affect a number of my friends,” David said in a statement that was read to his father last month. Referring to the proposal to restrict transition health care for kids and separate legislation to expressly define sex as binary in Montana code and ban drag performances from public spaces. David added, “I would like to make the argument that these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights.”

According to an email exchange seen by the Montana Free Press, the governor expressed a willingness to discuss the issue and hear his son’s concerns. But the subsequent conversations, both in email and in person, don’t appear to have swayed Gianforte from approving the bill to block transition health care for minors.

While speaking out against the anti-LGBTQ bills earlier this month, Zooey Zephyr, the state’s first and only openly trans lawmaker, said she hoped that the next time supporters of the bill prayed, they would see “blood on [their] hands.” The remarks prompted the state’s GOP to ban Zephyr from speaking or voting from the floor. 

In a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito seethed against criticisms of the high court, appeared to mock the abortion pill, and suggested he knew who leaked the draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. 

“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible,” Alito said, declining to name names, “but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody.” He then claimed, without providing any evidence, that the leak was an effort to protect abortion rights.

In January, the official investigation into the leak announced that it could not identify a person responsible. But speaking to the WSJ, Alito continued to push unfounded theories that the leak was a left-wing project aimed to “intimidate the court,” before moving on to complain that the leak endangered his life, as well as the lives of other conservative justices on the court.

As for the abortion pill mifepristone, which has been at the center of an incredibly consequential legal battle after a Trump-appointed judge suspended its FDA approval, Alito could barely contain his contempt. “Mifestiprone? However you pronounce the word,” he said. 

All in all, Alito’s comments—unusually loquacious, derisive, and conspiratorial for a Supreme Court justice to air publicly—sure make him sound like someone auditioning to replace Tucker Carlson. That or they’re simply typical of the kind of man, who, shortly after the Dobbs decision, publicly bragged about authoring the opinion to strike down the constitutional right to an abortion. As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote last year, Alito has a particular track record of intellectual condescension and a stunning lack of empathy, characteristics we’ve seen in many of his rulings. Still, even against that history, these new remarks stand out.

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

In his opening statement in the ongoing civil sexual assault and defamation trial against former president Donald Trump, his attorney Joe Tacopina was aggressive, scathing and snarling in his attacks on E. Jean Carroll, the writer who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1997.

By Carroll’s admission, her story contains inconsistencies. She can’t remember the date the assault occurred, for example, and has said she doesn’t know why she went into the dressing room with Trump that day. In his opener, Tacopina told the jury he would expose all of Carroll’s inconsistencies, show that she was indeed the liar Trump claimed her to be, and prove she made up the entire story in pursuit of public attention. 

But on Thursday, when Tacopina, a burly, muscular man with a growling deep voice and a thick Brooklyn accent, had his chance to question Carroll, a former fixture of New York media society, now 79, he hit a brick wall. Carroll parried his initial attempts to unravel inconsistencies in her story, so the lawyer proceeded to grill her on slight inconsistencies between her testimony in a deposition last fall and what she has said on the stand this week. Those efforts left even the judge, Lewis Kaplan, appearing exasperated, and snapping at Tacopina to move on. 

But when Tacopina tried to challenge Carroll about why she did not scream when Trump was allegedly raping her violently, Carroll ultimately delivered a strong rebuke.

“I’m not a screamer, I was in too much of a panic, I was fighting,” she responded to his initial query.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to go after Disney last spring for opposing his “Don’t Say Gay” law, he was making it an example. He chose a powerful, high profile target that had disagreed with his policy preferences, and he punished that company for crossing him. In doing so, he sent a clear warning to other companies: Disagree and I will come knocking. If he was willing to attack Disney, one of the state’s largest employers and a major tax source, no business was safe.

This is an authoritarian tactic. Authoritarian leaders use various means to control the private sector to suppress dissent and bring a powerful segment of society under their sway. But in order to make an example of Disney, DeSantis had to be clear that Disney was suffering as a direct result of speaking out against him.

Unfortunately for DeSantis, that kind of retaliation against speech is a violation of the First Amendment. When Disney finally decided to fire back on Wednesday by filing a suit against DeSantis, the governor had spent over a year doing the company the favor by making myriad comments explaining he was seeking revenge against Disney, strengthening its legal hand. As Disney predicted in its complaint, “This is as clear a case of retaliation as this Court is ever likely to see.”

“It is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to punish a corporation because of the company’s expressed viewpoints on political issues,” Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA School of Law and the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights told Mother Jones a year ago when DeSantis first passed legislation targeting Disney for retribution.  

As Republican Mitt Romney famously reminded Iowans during his 2012 presidential campaign, “Corporations are people.” And for many legal purposes, he was right. Over the last century, the Supreme Court has extended civil rights to corporate entities, a trend Republicans and the conservative movement generally cheered. In 2010, the Supreme Court granted them the right to spend money to influence elections, ruling that was a form of political speech protected by the First Amendment. In 2014, the justices decided that some corporations also have religious rights.

On Wednesday evening, Tucker Carlson broke his silence on his surprise firing from Fox News.

After saying he’d taken a moment to step back, Carlson lamented that both political parties had cohered around a set ideology endorsed by cable news. But now, after his dismissal, he foretold an end. “This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue,” Carlson said in a video he posted on Twitter. “The people in charge know this. That’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive…but it won’t work when honest people say what’s true.”

That is funny to hear because I’ve spent the last few days poring over hours of Tucker Carlson videos from the archives, listening to what he has previously considered “true.” And, as you can see in five very clear chapters of footage, his truth has often involved promoting Nazi conspiracy theories; broadcasting racist and self-serving propaganda; spewing hate about trans people and children; and pushing the Big Lie. (You can read more about that last part here from our DC Bureau Chief David Corn.)

It’s unclear what will happen next for Carlson. On Monday, when Fox News announced they would be parting ways with the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight—one of cable’s most popular programs—the reasons were unclear. Rumors swirled as speculation about the split began. One theory focused on the legal trouble: Fox News had settled to pay Dominion Voting Systems over $785 million in their defamation trial against the news network following their network-wide promotion of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. One of the most popular perpetrators of promoting those pretenses was, of course, Tucker. Had he been ousted for hurting the bottom line? Or was it the content of his text messages, many redacted, that pushed Fox to act?

Tucker’s announcement implied he would continue broadcasting in some form. “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change,” Carlson said in his Wednesday night rejoinder, in what looks like the studio he built in Maine, which residents voted to approve. “When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues?”

In 2011, Robert Regan of Bourne, Massachusetts, stopped working as a forklift operator after being diagnosed with COPD. In 2015, he failed to pay about $900 in property taxes. The next year, the town took the tax title of his home. Bourne would eventually be able to sell it if Regan failed to pay back taxes and other fees—and under Massachusetts law, Regan and his relatives would get nothing from the sale. Bourne stood to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by dispossessing a dying man dependent on disability checks and supplemental oxygen.   

Local governments across the country have the right to take people’s homes when they don’t pay their taxes. In most states, extra money from tax sales go to the former owners. If a family owes $10,000 and the government sells their old home for $150,000, they can get $140,000. But in about a dozen states, the government keeps all $150,000.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could deem that unconstitutional. The question in Tyler v. Hennepin County is a simple one: Should governments be able to keep excess funds after taking and selling the homes of residents who fail to pay their property taxes? The case has brought together disparate groups from across the political spectrum, and justices on the right and left of the Court were unusually in sync during Wednesday’s arguments.

The Court appears likely to rule that those laws violate the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking private property for public use “without just compensation.” That would prevent states from keeping potentially hundreds of millions of equity in the coming years. Public-interest law groups say the benefits would disproportionately go to low-income Americans who are often elderly or in poor health.

The named petitioner in the case is Geraldine Tyler, a now 94-year-old Minnesota woman whose home was sold in 2016 for $25,000 more than she owed in taxes. Her case was argued by Christina Martin of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which was founded in 1973 by staffers of then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan. PLF has received support from allies on the right, but progressive organizations have gotten behind the case, as well. One of the many amicus briefs supporting Tyler was filed jointly by an unusual coalition that included the libertarian Cato Institute, the National Association of Home Builders, and the ACLU.

In late March, I watched as some 300 lawyers, doctors, and activists assembled in the aggressively beige conference wing of the Midtown Atlanta Hilton for the inaugural Covid Litigation Conference. A promotional flier promised that the event would “provide attendees with the resources they need to begin taking on Covid cases for the first time or to expand the range of Covid claims that they currently handle.” An unsuspecting lawyer could have been forgiven for expecting tips on how to help clients who had been disabled by Covid that they caught at their factory jobs, for instance, or those whose medical bills their insurance refused to pay.

But those kinds of cases were entirely absent from the agenda. Rather, the topic was a very particular kind of litigation: How best to advance the movement that organizers called “medical freedom.” In other words, how to sue the people who created and enforced public health measures like vaccine and mask requirements, policies against Covid misinformation, and treatment protocols for hospitalized Covid patients.

The conference organizers wore t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Misinformation Superspreader.” Steve Kirsch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a main organizer of the event, told me that the slogan was a cheeky reference to what he saw as the unfair labeling of anti-vaccine activists as peddlers of misinformation. “We said, ‘Okay if that’s what they’re calling us,” he explained, “let’s kind of make fun of it.” Indeed, many of the attendees seemed to see themselves as underdogs, scrapping against government and pharmaceutical behemoths.

What those underdogs didn’t mention during the sessions, though, is their friends in high places: specifically, federal judges who seem to be sympathetic to their aversion to pandemic policies. Pointing to some of the victories that medical freedom lawyers have enjoyed in US District courts, Dorit Reiss, a public health lawyer and law professor at the University of California College of the Law, noted, “They’re having some success in the federal system in front of Trump-appointed judges, and they’re very much forum shopping right now.” Adam Winkler, a constitutional law scholar at the University of California-Los Angeles, agreed. “The courts have issued a lot of what were once thought to be outlandish kinds of rulings with regard to any number of issues like abortion and affirmative action,” he said. “I’d expect that encourages people to bind hope to the prospects of lawsuits that they would otherwise seem certain to lose.”

When I arrived, I didn’t think I’d get past the Misinformation Superspreaders and make it into the ballroom where the event was taking place. The media liaison for the conference, Trevor FitzGibbon, asked me if I was there to write about disinformation, and he seemed to balk at my affirmative answer. When I said I worked for Mother Jones, he noticeably brightened. He had come up in the PR business working for prominent progressive candidates and groups, he explained, including Barack Obama, MoveOn, and Planned Parenthood, which I took to mean that he considered us to be politically kindred spirits. And then he let me into the ballroom.

Are House Republicans, if you’ll pardon the expression, peeing in their own Jacuzzi?

I raise this question because some of the spending cuts the House GOP and its quasi-leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, are demanding in exchange for raising the debt ceiling—a deal the Democrats have vowed to reject—are destined to hit Republican-led states hardest.

That’s likely true of the social programs such as food stamps that GOP members aim to further restrict. But it’s definitely the case for the host of clean-energy incentives (see page 2) of the Inflation Reduction Act Republicans just put on the chopping block. These federal perks have been flowing in spades to red states, notably Georgia, as Oliver Milman, a reporter for our Climate Desk partner the Guardian, pointed out in February. 

“Once known for its peaches and peanuts,” Milman wrote, Georgia “is rapidly becoming a crucible of US clean energy technology,” drawing billions in new solar, electric vehicle, and battery manufacturing subsidies, putting it at “the forefront of a swathe of southern states that are becoming a so-called ‘battery belt’ in the economic transition away from fossil fuels.”

Jack Conness, a transportation analyst at the University of Washington, helpfully put together a wonderful database depicting the jackpot that the IRA and the Chips and Science Act (CHIPS) represent for Republican-led local economies.

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.”