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.” 

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon signed a bill Friday prohibiting abortion pills, making it the first state to ban abortion medication independent of an overall ban on abortion. Separate legislation, which Gordon did not sign but allowed to become law, put a near-total abortion ban into place. 

The majority of abortions are performed with medication. Wyoming’s only clinic exclusively performs medication abortion and would be shut down by the new law, which goes into effect in July. Thirteen other states have bans on the medication, but also ban all abortions. Another 15 states have partially restricted access to the pills. 

While the law wouldn’t affect doctors and clinics outside of Wyoming, the state does control who can offer online medical care to residents. That means it could limit their ability to get the medication through telehealth or Internet mail-order. (The law does not go as far as legislation pending in Texas which would make it a crime to host, create, or manage a website that provides information about or access to abortion medication.) 

The abortion restrictions which Gordon allowed to become law without his signature would make performing the procedure a felony, leaving only narrow exceptions for cases involving rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life. In a letter accompanying his signature on the medication bill, Gordon wrote that he “acted without bias and after extensive prayer, to allow these bills to become law.”

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Texas heard arguments in a case to ban the medication mifepristone, which is one of two drugs used in medical abortions—and which is banned by Wyoming’s new law. In that case, a Christian legal group has asked the judge to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug for use in medical abortions, saying the FDA didn’t consider all side effects when it approved it 23 years ago. The judge, a conservative Donald Trump appointee, appeared open to the idea and is poised to issue a ruling that could include a nationwide ban any day.

Donald Trump and his family members accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from foreign leaders as they travelled the world and welcomed dignitaries to the White House. But according to a new report from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, the former president and his family failed to properly report many of those gifts, including many from leaders of countries with high-stakes and sometimes contentious relations with the United States—like Chinese President Xi Jinping, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

While presidents—and sometimes their families—are regularly offered gifts in the course of diplomacy, they aren’t allowed to keep any worth more than $450. And everything has to be reported to the State Department and properly accounted for by the federal government. In total, according to Friday’s report, internal White House records indicate the Trumps failed to report 117 gifts worth at least $291,000.

Trump is widely know as a man who is extremely susceptible to flattery, and he and his family received a lot of gifts that would hold little appeal to anyone else. The president of El Salvador, for example, sent a life-size portrait of Trump. Shinzo Abe, then prime minister of Japan, presented Trump with high-end clubs when the two golfed together.

But no matter how personal seeming the gifts were, US law requires them to be reported. They may then be purchased back from the government if a president or his family wants to keep them. Nearly all of the unreported gifts Trump and his family received have been accounted for—some are with the National Archives, some have been sold to the Trumps, and some have been sold at auction. But not all have been accounted for—like the portrait of Trump, which government records indicate may have been moved to one of his Florida properties. 

The report does raise the possibility that there are other gifts for which absolutely no records exist—gifts that could not, therefore, be tracked. National Archives and Records Administration documents show that the Trump administration’s interest in reporting gifts seemed to tail off as his term went on. In 2017, for instance, the White House reported a total of 74 foreign gifts to Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, or her husband Jared Kushner. Every year after that, the number of reported foreign gifts declined. In 2020, the four family members reported having received just one foreign gift.

Former president Donald Trump posted on his social media platform early Saturday morning that he expects to be arrested on Tuesday in New York City—and that he wants his followers to protest.

Trump has been under investigation in multiple jurisdictions around the country for years. But action seems near, as this week it was reported that a grand jury called by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg was close to handing down an indictment. Early Saturday morning, Trump took to Truth Social, the Twitter alternative he founded, with an all-caps screed that started with a section on his belief that America has become crime-ridden and impoverished, before dropping his claim that he would be arrested on Tuesday.

“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK,” Trump wrote. “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

Bragg is investigating whether Trump made improper hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the weeks before the 2016 election to try and cover up an alleged extra-marital affair the two had in the early 2000s. Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to making the payments, but the investigation into Trump’s role has dragged on. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels; his Saturday morning rant called it “AN OLD & FULLY DEBUNKED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!) FAIRYTALE.”

It’s not clear why Trump thinks he will be arrested on Tuesday, or what he thinks that might look like. Trump needs to be indicted before he can be arrested, and for now, Bragg’s grand jury, which operates in secret, appears to still be working. While Cohen, who is likely to be the key witness for Bragg, testified on Friday, Daniels has yet to appear. White collar criminals are typically given the opportunity to turn themselves in, and any courthouse appearance by Trump would be a highly choreographed affair involving the Secret Service, worked out well in advance. It’s worth nothing that in his post on Truth Social, Trump credited the news of his arrest to “ILLEGAL LEAKS FROM A CORRUPT ‘& HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE”—not communications to his attorneys.

Before last year, the public monthly meetings of the board of Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida, were sleepy affairs, typically drawing just a handful of attendees. The hospital, a 98-year-old public healthcare system that serves more than a million patients a year, was considered a crown jewel of the community: A highly rated public safety net institution composed of two hospital buildings and several clinics, its core mission is to serve people who are uninsured or underinsured. At a typical board meeting, members would discuss the hospital’s priorities, from finding healthcare providers who practiced in specialties that the community lacked to building a new cancer center.

So it came as a surprise late last year when attendance at the board meetings began to grow: More than a hundred people showed up in December’s monthly board meeting, then 200 in January, and 300 in February. The attendees, some traveling from hours away, lambasted the hospital for adhering to the CDC’s recommended Covid protocols, accusing emergency care physicians of murdering patients. “We were getting people complaining, and they’ve never even had a family member in the hospital, and they’re talking about the horrible treatment they’ve received,” Dr. James Fiorica, the hospital’s chief medical officer, told me. “You wonder if there is a different agenda than how we treated the particular patient.”

Indeed, the campaign against Sarasota Memorial appears to be part of a coordinated effort of a varied constellation of right-wing groups and individuals. Some have deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement; others are part of the “parents’ rights” movement that has sought to stack school boards with conservative members; a few are ardent Big Lie promoters with ties to the January 6 insurrection. The result is an increasingly unhinged and threatening campaign against the very healthcare workers who saw the community through the worst of the pandemic, says a hospital spokesperson, Kim Savage. “Our board meetings are open to the public, and for the first time, we feel like we have to wand people,” she says. “We worry that the language these groups use might incite someone who is not stable.”

In years past, the Sarasota Memorial Hospital Board hasn’t been a political group—most of the members were retired executives of local businesses who wanted to give back to their community. But in 2022, recalls Savage, the burgeoning medical freedom movement—which opposed pandemic restrictions such as mask and vaccine mandates and which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also has championed—was having a moment. Four hospital board candidates ran on a so-called medical freedom platform, and three of them successfully unseated former board members. “People were not sure what ‘health freedom’ stood for, but it sounded good,” Savage says.

The Sarasota Memorial Hospital had already developed a reputation in the medical freedom community. In 2021, a woman named Michelle Tavares went on a few right wing shows to accuse Sarasota Memorial of mistreating her father, who was critically ill with Covid. Tavares, it turns out, had been protesting pandemic restrictions since 2020: She was the executive assistant of Sherri Tenpenny, a leader in the anti-vaccine movement who drew media attention for her outlandish claim that Covid vaccines make people magnetic. Tenpenny, who was named a member of the Disinformation Dozen by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, appears to have been part of an effort behind the first protest at Sarasota Memorial in August 2021.

In late November 2021, Steve Bannon appeared in a live broadcast on GTV, a media outlet that he’d helped his friend Guo Wengui launch a year earlier. Bannon used the appearance to celebrate HCoin, a supposed cryptocurrency that Guo was selling. The currency, Bannon said, was a “monumental” and “extraordinary” success. Bannon also hailed the Himalaya Exchange, Guo’s purported platform for trading digital assets like HCoin. Bannon lauded GTV. He even touted Guo’s fashion company. These ventures, Bannon suggested, were an opportunity for Guo’s fans, mostly Chinese emigres, to hurt China’s rulers. “If you look at institutionalization of the counteroffensive to Chinese Communist Party, it’s pretty impressive,” Bannon gushed.

That was just one of numerous occasions in which Bannon has heaped praise on Guo and his companies, often in venues where his words mostly reach Guo’s anti-Communist followers.

On Wednesday, federal agents arrested Guo and accused him, along his former financier William Je, of stealing more than a $1 billion from thousands of Guo’s own supporters by soliciting investments in some of the same companies that Bannon has promoted. Prosecutors said those companies were mostly fraudulent. An early HCoin valuation at a preposterous $27 billion, they said, was completely fake, as was the blockchain technology Guo and Bannon claimed supported it. Guo—who fled China in 2014 ahead of separate criminal charges there—allegedly used investors’ money to fund a lavish lifestyle, including a Ferrari, two $36,000 mattresses, and a yacht on which Bannon himself has lived. Guo allegedly did this while claiming in federal bankruptcy court to have almost no assets. Guo, who did not receive bail Wednesday, has pleaded not guilty.

In multiple indictments and an SEC complaint Wednesday, federal law enforcement also offered a broader critique of the joint project Bannon and Guo have taken on over the past five years. Prosecutors suggested that an entire constellation of companies and nonprofits that Bannon and Guo have launched together, which they collectively dub the “whistleblower movement,” was largely a con. That “counteroffensive to Chinese Communist Party” that Bannon touted was just a means for Guo to line his pockets, the feds said.

Bannon has not been charged with any crimes related to Guo. Bannon, his lawyer, and a spokesman did not respond to repeated inquiries. Bannon is not mentioned in any of the federal charging documents. And no evidence has emerged showing that he knew about the alleged diversion of investor funds at the heart of the charges against Guo. 

Last week, Silicon Valley Bank, one of the most prominent banks used by the venture capital and startup sectors, collapsed.

SVB’s rapid crash—the largest such failure since the 2008 financial crisis—grabbed headlines and generated concern: How could a bank with nearly $210 billion in assets fall apart in just a matter of days? And, perhaps more to the point: How worried should I be?

Ross Levine, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley business school who specializes in banking and finance, believes SVB’s collapse is a manifestation of other problems within the banking system, and among federal banking regulators, that have been growing for years.

In the last week, many experts have focused on the 2018 legislation passed by the Trump administration to deregulate banks like Silicon Valley Bank. Its CEO, Greg Becker, engaged in an expensive, multi-year lobbying campaign to help pass this law, which raised the threshold for banks subject to additional risk checks—also known as “enhanced supervision”—by the Federal Reserve from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion, a line that SVB never crossed ahead of its collapse. The theory goes that this deregulation contributed to SVB’s failure.

Levine, who’s co-written two books on banking regulation in the United States and abroad, thinks that argument is both far too simple and absolves federal banking regulators of responsibility for the mistakes they continue to make in overseeing the banking system, going back as far as their response to the 2008 financial crisis. Here’s more of our conversation from earlier this week, edited for clarity and length:

During the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, people in tech started to realize something: a lot of people really don’t like them.

Since the bank started to buckle late last week, tech luminaries have taken time out of their busy schedules of doing innovation to tweet about how everyone rooting against a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank simply doesn’t get it. Silicon Valley had birthed “the greatest wealth generation engine this country has had for the last 2 decades,” said Austin Federa, a spokesperson for the crypto blockchain Solana, and a bailout was essential to save a cornerstone of the American economy. 

While getting ratioed in their own tweet threads, the wizards of tech seethed that so many didn’t see what they could. “The events of this weekend change things. The bank run isn’t actually the biggest thing—the reaction to it is,” tweeted Flo Crivello, a former Uber product manager who is now CEO of a remote work tool company. “It’s making me and a lot of people realize that the media’s coordinated anti-tech campaign over the last 6yrs has been a lot more effective than we thought.”

Helen Min, a co-founder of a tech venture capital firm tweeted a less conspiratorial version of the same diagnosis: “VCs [are] now realizing Silicon Valley has a public image problem.” Indeed, prominent venture capitalist David Sacks, astutely noted that many were resistant to bailing out Silicon Valley Bank because it “has the name Silicon Valley in it.” If the situation were a little bit different, Sacks posited during an interview with UnHerd, people would get it; say, Sacks argued, “this was a farmers’ bank and it was 40,000 farms, small business farms that were on the hook, everybody would understand.” 

Without realizing it, Sacks crystalized people’s real beef with Silicon Valley: if people felt like Silicon Valley actually improved or sustained their lives, they would defend it. More people would be up in arms about a bank for farmers collapsing because farmers make food that they like and literally need to survive. The region that once produced microprocessors, personal computers, internet search, and web browsers, kind of doesn’t really do that stuff as much as it used to, and people are noticing. 

Hungary, the landlocked Central European country of about ten million people, has become an unusual role model for US conservatives, with Tucker Carlson describing it as a place “with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”  Since 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has transformed the democratic country into a right-wing autocracy, or in his words “illiberal democracy,” by delegitimizing the independent press, building a militarized wall along the country’s southern border, expelling asylum seekers in potential violation of international treaties, separating migrants from their children, essentially outlawing gay adoption, and banning schools from teaching LGBTQ content to students under 18. After meeting with him at the White House, former president Donald Trump was inspired to say Orbán was “probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK.”

If Orbán’s policies sound similar to the Build-the-Wall, Don’t-Say-Gay brand of American conservatism, his penchant for bolstering the birth rate and rewarding large families appear to be yet another Hungarian-inspired social policy blueprint some Republicans are pining to adopt. The Hungarian government covers the cost of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatments, provides up to three years of paid maternity benefits, doles out discount coupons for minivans, and grants forgivable interest-free loans to young couples who plan to procreate.

In the US, where birth rates have also fallen about 16 percent in the last decade, the imitators are lining up. Earlier in March, former President Donald Trump floated “baby bonuses for a new baby boom” at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “You men are so lucky out there!” Trump added, offering an unsubtle reference to how this government policy would enhance men’s sex lives.

Also this month, Senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who reduces his views on reproductive and family policy to the concise “babies are good” declarative sentence, suggested to reporters on Capitol Hill that the cost of childbirth should be paid for by the government. Previously, Vance has lauded Orbán for his forgivable loan program for married couples, in which they can get interest-free loans dependent on their promise to have kids.  “Why can’t we do that here?” he asked, speaking to a conservative think-tank in July 2021. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

Orbán often says that his pro-natalist policies stem from a desire to bolster the size of the country’s declining population and labor force through a baby boom rather than through immigration. Some countries “want as many migrants to enter as there are missing kids so that the numbers will add up,” Orban said in 2019. “We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”

Guo Wengui, a far-right mogul on the run from criminal charges in China, has worked for years with Steve Bannon to promote charitable organizations and for-profit ventures that the men say are collectively aimed at destroying the Chinese Communist Party.

By claiming to be an outspoken Chinese dissident, Guo, who also uses the names Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, won a large and ardent following in the international Chinese diaspora. And his fans have showered his enterprises with investments and donations.

But his project was largely a scam, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged on Wednesday. FBI agents arrested Guo early Wednesday morning, and prosecutors charged him with 12 criminal counts, including wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering.

 “As alleged, Ho Wan Kwok, known to many as ‘Miles Guo,’ led a complex conspiracy to defraud thousands of his online followers out of over $1 billion dollars,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Wednesday. “Kwok is charged with lining his pockets with the money he stole, including buying himself, and his close relatives, a 50,000 square foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and even two $36,000 mattresses, and financing a $37 million luxury yacht.”

Federal prosecutors also charged a longtime Guo associate, William Je, with taking part of many of the same crimes. Je, who reputedly lives in London, was not in custody as of Wednesday evening. Guo’s personal assistant, Yanping Wang, was also charged in a separate case with wire and securities fraud for her role in some of the same transactions.

Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, is a 52-year-old Swiss-Italian with dark eyebrows and an intensely round, perfectly bald head, like a soccer ball that had a dream of becoming an accountant. He splits his time between Zurich, Doha, and anywhere in the world that wants him—a stadium ribbon-cutting in Mauritania; a second-division match in England; a G-20 luncheon in Indonesia. Infantino has been a ubiquitous figure in the sport for years; before he was in charge, he enjoyed cult status as the guy who pulled names out of a box to determine the matchups at major tournaments. At last year’s men’s World Cup, TV cameras cut to his seats in the V.V.I.P. section so often it seemed as if they were under a contractual obligation to do so. Which, it turned out, they were.

But one morning last November, Infantino woke up and felt like an entirely new man.

“Today I feel Qatari,” he announced at a press conference in Doha. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel [like] a migrant worker.” Infantino, looking out at a room of journalists from behind an array of sponsored sports drinks, was none of those things, he helpfully clarified. But as a child in Switzerland, he had been bullied for his red hair and freckles. “Plus, I was Italian,” he said, “so imagine.”

Fed up with criticism of the host nation’s labor record, infuriated by the desire of some national teams to wear armbands asserting their support for LGBTQ equality, and genuinely angry that actual discussions of human rights were overshadowing FIFA’s broad platitudes about human rights, he delivered an hour-long apologia for autocracy. He railed against “what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years.” He endorsed a future World Cup in North Korea. And he praised the good soccer was doing for women’s rights in Iran, where the regime was at that moment violently suppressing protests for women’s rights.

Infantino’s remarks drew swift condemnation. Activists called his comments “crass” and dismissive—an “insult” to the lives of workers. In an on-air response that went viral, Melissa Reddy, a Sky Sports reporter, argued that the speech offered a glimpse of soccer’s new reality. “This will be the World Cup that really underpins just how dirty the game is,” she said.