Last week, I reported on the long history of bigoted and xenophobic remarks by Kingsley Wilson, a 26-year-old MAGA enthusiast who’s now a deputy press secretary at the Department of Defense. Following that article and and other outlets’ reporting on Wilson, members of Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee, among others, have expressed concern about Wilson’s extreme rhetoric and her fitness for the job.

Most scandals pass with little comment from the White House, Trump, or the agencies involved.

The response from the White House and the Pentagon has been notable: near-complete silence. With Wilson, as with other recent controversies involving Trump administration officials, the White House and federal agencies are making a clear and somewhat novel choice to ignore them entirely.

Wilson spent years espousing extreme ideas on Twitter and on various podcasts, including promoting the debunked lie that Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank was guilty of the crime for which he was wrongfully accused, an idea that is rarely repeated outside of dedicated antisemitic and white supremacist circles. She also aligned herself with extreme anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment, repeating a phrase associated with the German far-right, and, on Twitter, advocating to make “Kosovo Serbia again,” a particularly bizarre sentiment for someone who now works for the U.S. government, which supports an independent Kosovo and maintains military forces there. 

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

As fossil fuel interests attack climate accountability litigation, environmental advocates have sounded a new warning that they are pursuing a path that would destroy all future prospects for such cases.

Nearly 200 advocacy groups have urged Democratic representatives to “proactively and affirmatively” reject potential industry attempts to obtain immunity from litigation.

“We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to…shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception,” reads a letter to Congress on Wednesday. It was signed by 195 environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and Sunrise Movement; legal nonprofits including the American Association for Justice and Public Justice; and dozens of other organizations.

How the legend of 'rebellious', promiscuous saint Mary of Egypt broke boundaries

The Trump family has allegedly been discussing a possible investment in the crypto exchange Binance—a deal that, especially in light of Binance’s multi-billion-dollar valuation, would raise a host of conflict-of-interest questions. The discussions were first revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, which also reported that Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, is simultaneously seeking a presidential pardon after pleading guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws.

Zhao disputed the Journal’s reporting, posting on X Thursday that the paper “got the facts wrong” and that he’d “had no discussions of a Binance US deal with … well, anyone.”

On top of the ethical issues raised by the possible entanglement of executive clemency powers with a lucrative financial transaction, such an investment deal could also turn the Trump family into business partners with a Middle Eastern royal family.

News of the alleged Binance talks comes one day after an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm, MGX Fund Management, announced it is making a $2 billion investment in Binance, securing a minority stake in the exchange. MGX’s chairman is Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan—who is the national security adviser for the United Arab Emirates and brother of the UAE’s current ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Around this time last year, the USB hookup in my car stopped working. I started to listen to the radio more and began to buy CDs again, something I hadn’t done much since I was a teenager. Greg Mendez played a concert in Nashville, and before he went on, I bought two from his merch table: his self-titled album from 2023, and Live at Purgatory, from 2022. I put them in my car. I try not to skip songs on either one. But I am happy when I hear him introduce the sixth track on Live at Purgatory, “Bike.”

It’s a short song. Mendez sings the lyrics only once. This is what I hear, which is different from what I see on Genius but is the same as in a handwritten lyric card I can partially see in a picture on Bandcamp:

I wanna ride your brother’s bike
I wanna stab his friends sometimes
I wanna tell a million lies
I wanna steal your partner’s heart
I wanna turn your pain to art
I wanna cry in your mother’s arms
I wanna wear your daddy’s jeans
I wanna drink the way he did
I wanna smoke menthol cigarettes
and I wanna fight
I wanna fuck on ecstasy
I wanna love, but what’s that mean?
I wanna go back on EBT

Those words take a little more than fifty-five seconds. It’s instrumental for a minute more. I only recently realized how short it is. It was a strange realization, because I love this song and talk about it to my friends, and would have thought I would have already noticed that it was so brief, or that it doesn’t have a chorus, or a bridge, or even more than one verse. But by the end of the lyrics, I am often so struck by his voice and by the way his voice says these things—which in his mouth are so beautiful, even if they are not necessarily beautiful things to say—that my mind has gone into outer space, and I guess the rest of the song, or its absence, has been lost on me.

These Scandi-style homes were part of a global boom in simple, modernist houses