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2026-03-28 23:43:00

Persians for Trump are here in force.

Steve Bannon was broadcasting his War Room show live from the CPAC exhibit hall on Friday morning. A small crowd had gathered around the sound stage, and one of Bannon’s minions passed the mike to an onlooker named Nima Poursohi, who was wearing a “Persians for Trump” T-shirt, a Trump-Vance hat, and mirrored sunglasses. Bannon asked him what his shirt was all about. “I’m proud to represent the Iranian–American community and their quest for freedom after 47 years of repression and tyranny under a repressive regime,” Poursohi yelled into the mike.

But he was only getting started.

“I cannot tell you how grateful the people of Iran, and the Iranian–American diaspora is for President Trump, because no other president had the courage to stand up to the Islamic regime,” he continued. “There is not a single Iranian- American who does not like Trump. President Trump, you hear me loud and clear: We love you, we’ll forever be grateful. You are the next King Cyrus the Great,” he said, invoking the founder of the Persian Empire, who is credited with liberating the Jews from captivity.

Bannon, who opposes deploying American ground troops to the Middle East, asked him if the Iranians finally overthrew radical Islam, “would they be a great ally to America?” Poursohi was unequivocal. “You have no idea, brother,” he replied. “The Persians would be the greatest ally ever.”

Poursohi seemed to speak for the remarkably large contingent of Iranians who have come this week to Grapevine, Texas, to attend the nation’s oldest conservative convention. President Donald Trump’s traditional MAGA base may be torn between their opposition to the foreign wars he had campaigned against and his latest foray into a messy Middle East conflict. But the Iranians at CPAC had no such reservations.

Ray Rezaeifar, an Iranian who has been in the US for 15 years and works as an engineer in Houston, told me that Iranians have always attended CPAC, but that this year at least five times more of them showed up. “I support President Trump. I love him—his ideology,” he told me. “We truly appreciate President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. They really support Iran.”

At first glance, the Iranians might seem an unusual pocket of support for Trump and the larger conservative movement. After all, the MAGA faithful are inclined to see anyone from the Middle East as a potential terrorist threat rather than an ally in the fight against woke liberals. Indeed, Iranians have not been exempt from the mass deportation efforts of the Trump administration. Hundreds have been swept up in the effort and many have been Christian converts and political dissidents.

But the Persians at CPAC are staunch Republicans who supported Trump long before the war started. And many of them have been finding common cause with MAGA’s Islamophobes, who have seen a resurgence in the past year since the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mandami, a Shia Muslim.

In early March, Poursohi attended the anti-Islam protest in front of Gracie Mansion organized by January 6 rioter Jake Lang, where two teenagers allegedly inspired by ISIS, threw explosive devices into the crowd.

Some of the Iranians I met at CPAC said they may have been raised Muslim, but no longer practiced. Others were Baha’i, part of a religious minority that’s persecuted in Iran. One man told me that he is first an Iranian, but if pressed on his religious affiliation, he considers himself a Zoroaster, following the ancient Persian belief in the ethical tenets of “three good things.”

Iranians have been carrying signs around the convention center that say, “Don’t Sharia My Dog.” They’re put out by a Texas group trying to pass an anti-Sharia state ballot measure by focusing on conservative Islam’s restrictions on dog ownership. The signs dovetail with legislation introduced in February by Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), called the “Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act” that would block federal funds from any state that bans dog ownership. (None has.) “In America, we will not allow anyone to tell us that we cannot have dogs,” Fine said when he introduced the bill. “There are 57 countries that are Sharia compliant; the United States will not be the 58th.”

What also unites many of the Iranians at CPAC, aside from their dislike of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is their nostalgia for the days of the shah, whom they hope Trump will return to power. They have set their sights specifically on “King” Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah who was deposed in the 1979 revolution because of his corrupt and repressive governance. Pahlavi was scheduled to speak at CPAC on Saturday.

On Friday morning, Akbar Ravari, from Katy, Texas, was watching the War Room broadcast with his wife. He came to the US two years before the Iranian revolution, but his wife only arrived two years ago. They were both wearing new T-shirts with the image of Trump and Pahlavi emblazoned across the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag. Ravari loves Trump and had been hoping to see him at the conference. He was deflated when I told him that the president was probably going to be in Florida golfing on Saturday. Nonetheless, Ravari told me he “100 percent supports the war” in Iran, and believes that restoring the shah’s son will return democracy and women’s rights to his native country.

But Trump seems likely to disappoint his Persian supporters. According to the New Yorker, Trump and his aides refer to Pahlavi as the “loser prince,” because they don’t believe he has sufficient support within Iran to lead an uprising against the existing regime. (Pahlavi, a longtime resident of suburban Maryland, hasn’t visited Iran in at least 50 years.) And recently, Trump has suggested that “me and the Ayatollah” might jointly oversee the operation of the critical Strait of Hormuz, a partnership that would seem anathema to Iranian exiles in the US.

But thus far, those comments didn’t seem to have dimmed Trump’s support among the Iranians at CPAC. When I asked about Trump’s comments regarding his potential cooperation with “the Ayatollah,” Ray Rezaeifar told me the president is “very good and talented with playing with the media.” He thinks Trump was just joking. “He’s looking for peace. President Trump is a smart guy. He’s protecting America.”

2026-03-28 20:00:00

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

Beneath the neon lights of a laser-scanning microscope, newly classified species glow in vivid greens and oranges—a far cry from the pitch-black abyss of their natural ocean floor. 

Researchers have identified 24 new deep-sea creatures and a whole new evolutionary branch in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a wide swath of ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. The findings surface as the Trump administration, via a January mandate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has fast-tracked permits for deep sea mining in that zone, one of the planet’s richest rare-earth metal regions. 

The identification of a new branch of life underscores the stakes of an international regulatory vacuum: Mining might be allowed to occur before scientists even have the chance to name species that call the seabed home.

Tammy Horton, co-author and researcher at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, explained the significance of a new evolutionary branch this way: “If you imagine that on planet Earth, we know about carnivorous mammals, we know that bears exist and we know that the families of cats exist, it would be like finding dogs.”

That superfamily of amphipods that researchers described dwell 13,000 feet down. Compared to their shallow-water relatives—like common sand fleas tucked under seaweed on beaches—these deep-sea species have evolved in darkness for millions of years. The shrimp-like creatures with a unique conical mouth mostly measure around one centimeter. 

“It was, and it still is, the most exciting thing I’ve had in my career,” said Horton, highlighting how discovering new species in the deep sea is relatively common, but only very rarely a new superfamily. “It just shows you how little we know about what’s in the deep sea.”

The breakthrough was the result of immense scientific collaboration. Horton and co-author Anna Jażdżewska each individually worked on their collections before realizing they’d reached the same conclusions. Merging datasets and bringing together a team of more than a dozen experts accelerated the often years-long taxonomic process into a single week’s workshop.

Researchers immortalized their finds by naming them. Byblis hortonae and Byblisoides jazdzewskae took inspiration from Horton and Jażdżewska, respectively, while Horton bestowed her daughter’s name on the new superfamily: Mirabestia maisie. The names serve a deeper purpose than mere tribute.

Naming species affords them a “passport for living,” said Jażdżewska, professor at the University of Łódź. It allows people and policymakers to think about a species like the living entity it is.

“Until they are properly named for science in this official way, they are not communicable about,” said Horton. “It absolutely gives them a passport to be discussed, to be talked about, to be conserved.”

However, with over 90 percent of species in the CCZ still unnamed, it will likely be difficult for policymakers to know the true impacts of proposed deep-sea mining projects on fauna. 

Spanning 1.7 million square miles of the eastern Pacific seabed, the CCZ teems with significant stores of manganese nodules. These potato-sized deposits contain high concentrations of battery-grade metals such as nickel, cobalt and copper. 

In January, NOAA finalized changes to the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act that fast-track deep-sea mining projects by allowing companies to apply for a commercial recovery permit at the same time as an exploration license. Previously, companies were required to undertake extensive scientific research prior to receiving an extraction permit. 

“This consolidation modernizes the law and supports the America First agenda,” said Neil Jacobs, NOAA’s administrator, in a statement. Earlier this month, NOAA accepted for review an application from The Metals Co. to target over 25,000 square miles of the same zone where the new species live.

Mining exacts an environmental cost. Just two months after commercial machinery plowed the CCZ’s silty seabed in large-scale tests in 2022, species abundance dropped 37 percent and biodiversity fell by almost a third, according to sediment analysis by the UK’s Natural History Museum. 

Horton and Jażdżewska plan to keep uncovering the wonders of the deep sea as part of the International Seabed Authority’s Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative to identify 1,000 new species by the end of the decade.  

Indeed, while the description of two dozen new species and the discovery of a new superfamily is a monumental leap, researchers know much further identification work lies ahead. Understanding how the animals live, how they reproduce and what they feed on is completely unknown beyond basic inference, said Jażdżewska.

“We’ve just done 24 and that is a drop in the ocean, literally, of how many more we have to describe,” said Horton. 

2026-03-28 15:01:00

Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled.

The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public art programs, historical research, and community arts initiatives. 

Angela Sutton and a team of archaeologists were in the middle of excavating a long-forgotten Black neighborhood in Nashville when she got the news: “Just got an email out of the blue saying, ‘Please stop. You’re done.’”

This week on Reveal, reporter Jonathan Jones travels to Nashville and beyond one year after the cancellations to meet the people living with the fallout. From musicians to visual artists, historians, and arts administrators, they’re confronting a new reality: Federal support now depends on the shifting political priorities in Washington. Some organizations are scaling back their work. Others worry artists will censor themselves just to survive. But many are fighting back.

2026-03-28 05:20:17

Like many Americans, Amanda Moore spent a lot of time this week in Houston’s airports. For much of the past year, Moore has reported on the federal law enforcement agencies that President Donald Trump has deployed to cities around the country. So when Trump announced he was sending in ICE to—supposedly—help deal with the hours-long airport security lines caused by the partial government shutdown, she set out to learn what the agents were really up to.

As it turns out, the answer was often: not much. The ICE agents were “sometimes discouraging people from cutting in line, or ushering people up escalators,” Moore reports in a new video for Mother Jones. “Other times, they’re just sitting around chatting with each other.”

Early Friday morning, the Senate voted to restore funding to the Department of Homeland Security, but so far, House Republicans are refusing to go along. Meanwhile, Trump is claiming he will unilaterally pay TSA agents, even without congressional approval. Either way, it’s not clear when or if ICE will be leaving the airports. Some ICE agents in Houston told Moore they don’t expect to depart anytime soon.

2026-03-28 00:50:24

Twenty years after An Inconvenient Truth made a devastating case for climate action, American leadership on the issue has all but vanished. But former Vice President Al Gore, the film’s crusading star, hasn’t given up hope.

In a sit-down interview with Reveal’s Al Letson this week, Gore returned to a familiar theme from across his career in activism: people-powered change. “Sometimes the time frames, the time cycles, take a little bit longer than we’re comfortable with,” he admitted. “But I do believe in the resilience of American democracy, and I say all the time that political will is a renewable resource. It is.”

He cast the interview as a rallying cry ahead of this weekend’s No Kings events—nationwide protests against President Donald Trump’s sweeping consolidation of federal power. His message for those in the MAGA movement who have embraced what Gore has called authoritarianism was blunt: “There is a feeling on the part of some that we do need a king, we do need an autocrat,” he said. “Well, to hell with you, we do not. We’re Americans. And the whole spirit of these demonstrations is to reassert that fact.”

Gore pointed to the historic scale of the protest movement so far, noting that earlier demonstrations drew millions, and predicted an even bigger turnout this weekend. “Everybody’s kind of expecting that it’ll blow the roof off of those numbers,” he said. “I think these things matter.”

“If they think we’re going to put up with this, they think we’re fools,” he added. “You watch and see.”

For more from this interview, including Gore’s scathing assessment of Trump’s strategy in Iran, watch our previous clip below, and stay tuned for more on an upcoming episode of More To The Story with Al Letson. Subscribe here.

2026-03-27 19:30:00

In the days leading up to this week’s opening of CPAC, the nation’s oldest conservative political convention, organizers still seemed to be holding out hope that some brighter MAGA luminary would agree to headline the event. The CPAC app and social media accounts offered a slow drip of news of newly confirmed speakers. There was the HUD secretary, a low-level HHS official, and a Nigerian lawyer who advocates for Christians in his Muslim country. On March 21, CPAC excitedly announced that Todd Chrisley would be joining the lineup.

Who?

You could be forgiven for not knowing about Chrisley. A minor reality TV star, Chrisley was in prison until May last year, serving a 12-year sentence for bank and tax fraud, when President Donald Trump pardoned him. What Chrisley has to offer the CPAC audience is unclear. “To speak on the process of receiving a pardon?” posited one incredulous Facebook commenter responding to the Chrisley announcement.

During the Trump decade, CPAC had been a showcase for the MAGA faithful, and Trump and his family were its biggest stars. Trump himself first appeared at the event in 2011 when he was toying with a presidential run. He hasn’t missed the event in a decade. “Nobody can deny that [CPAC] is the center of political gravity,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp told me in 2022.

But the center of gravity has clearly tilted if the modest crowd in the convention hall at the Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine is any indication. “It’s shitty,” Warner Kimo Sutton told me of the turnout. “Last time this place was packed.” A GOP stalwart who who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign in Hawaii, he was here two years ago, the last time CPAC came to Dallas. He was still hoping more stars would show up. “I’ve heard the widow is coming,” he whispered, saying he had it on good authority that Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, might be making a surprise appearance.

Whether a late showing by “the widow” is enough to spice up the convention remains to be seen. After all, people book hotels and buy tickets months in advance, often expecting to see Trump and some of his famous children. CPAC doesn’t discourage this view. Trump’s previous appearances feature prominently on the CPAC website. But as of Thursday night, not a single Trump family member was on the 2026 lineup, and Trump has reportedly said he is not coming. (A CPAC intern on Thursday held out hope and told Sutton and me that Trump’s visits are often last-minute affairs.)

Still, CPAC attendees won’t even hear from Trump-adjacent Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former CPAC regular who was exiled to Greece as the US ambassador after Don Jr. ditched her for a younger woman. And the primacy of CPAC as a testing ground for future presidential candidates seems threatened. As of Thursday, not a single 2028 aspirant was scheduled to speak in Grapevine. No Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, no Vice President JD Vance. And Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio was way too busy plotting to overthrow Cuba. The closest he has come to the event was appearing on the big screen in the exhibit hall Thursday morning during a broadcast of the president’s predictably fawning cabinet meeting.

Headlining the annual Ronald Reagan dinner is Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Currently running for the US Senate, Paxton is an underwhelming candidate to fill a speaking slot once occupied in 1985 by the Gipper himself. Paxton has a long history of scandals, ranging from a 2015 securities fraud indictment to his impeachment in 2023, to his messy divorce that revealed a series of infidelities. Despite Paxton’s popularity among MAGA voters, Trump has thus far declined to endorse him in his primary race against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

Part of the problem with CPAC this year may be that many of its biggest draws in the past are now part of the government they long railed against. FBI Director Kash Patel, who wrote a whole book about “government gangsters,” is now one of them. Ditto for Pam Bondi, who just last year shared the mainstage with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz but now runs the Justice Department, where she’s under fire from Trump’s own fans for her handling of the Epstein files.

Former White House National Trade Council director Peter Navarro appeared at CPAC in 2024, shortly before heading off to prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena. Now pardoned, he has thus far skipped this year’s event, perhaps to better mismanage the president’s trade war—though he did find the time to show up at Politico’s Economy Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. Those still on the schedule are a sorry lot of wannabes and has-beens. Former Florida representative and catastrophically failed Trump attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz? Check.

What might account for the lackluster affair? Sutton, a three-time delegate to the GOP presidential nominating convention who moved to Texas six years ago, suspects that the war in Iran is likely keeping Trump away. But he also despairs that “there’s a malaise in our party” preventing people from engaging more in this year’s midterms.

Perhaps Americans, even the MAGA faithful, are too pinched by gas prices to shell out for a trip to the resort in Grapevine, where, as Sutton complained, parking costs $29 a day. Maybe a lame duck Trump, whose approval rating has never been lower, has hurt attendance. Or maybe even Republicans have grown weary of an event that has strayed far from its roots as a conservative policy confab and increasingly served as a platform for some of the GOP’s most morally compromised representatives. As conservative radio host Erick Erickson lamented in an X post Wednesday, “’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the world ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”

It’s also possible, however, that the main problem with CPAC is CPAC itself. The conference has suffered in recent years from competition, most notably from Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative youth group. (T-shirts featuring Kirk as martyr are a hot item in the CPAC exhibit hall.) Turning Point’s national convention in December drew a whopping 30,000 people, which seems about 10 times larger than the occupancy of the Gaylord convention hall.

Even CPAC’s relatively paltry numbers seem padded with enough international visitors to make it a juicy target for ICE Director Tom Homan, who was a featured speaker on Thursday. Chief among these retinues is a huge contingent of conservative South Korean “stop the steal” activists associated with former president Yoon Suk Yeol. Yeol was impeached last year, and in February, he was sentenced to life in prison for starting an insurrection.

But the organization behind CPAC also seems troubled. I’ve been attending CPAC regularly since 2009, mostly when it was held in the DC area. It usually seemed like a decently well-oiled machine. But this year, its Grapevine event feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. Its buggy app wasn’t updated with the schedule until late Wednesday night, and it was clearly being tinkered with all day on Thursday, with headlines for sessions becoming snappier by the hour. A panel originally focused generically on “fraud” was transformed into “Ilhan Omar ‘Family’ Values.”

As of 5:30 pm on Thursday, there was still no public schedule available for Friday or Saturday, and new speakers were still being announced on social media throughout the day. “CPAC is proud to announce that Andrew Giuliani is a confirmed speaker for CPAC USA 2026,” came the news Thursday morning. The son of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is the current White House director of the FIFA World Cup task force. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen once famously said that the younger Giuliani “may be dumber than Eric Trump,” making the former pro-golfer’s addition to the CPAC agenda a mixed bag.

Thursday’s announcement of the last-minute addition of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. may help offset some of the disappointment with this year’s CPAC offerings. Even so, it can’t help the convention’s appeal that Schlapp is its MC. In 2024, the CPAC chairman settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit, reportedly for almost $500,000, filed by a man working on Hershel Walker’s 2022 Georgia Senate campaign who had accused Schlapp of groping him in the car.

Nonetheless, Schlapp still plays an outsized role in the convention, which is reflected in his salary. He earned more than $830,000 in tax year 2023, according to the group’s most recent IRS 990 form. Listed as “the Honorable Matt Schlapp” on the CPAC schedule, apparently in reference to his service as George W. Bush’s White House political director, he is the moderator of a disproportionate number of panels, along with his wife, (the Honorable) Mercedes Schlapp, who worked in the first Trump White House.

In fairness, not everyone seems disappointed with the event. I found Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, hanging out and watching Matt Gaetz record his OAN show in the CPAC exhibit hall. Tarrio seemed glad to be here and not in prison. In January last year, Trump pardoned him, saving him from a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy related to his involvement in the January 6 riot. He told me he comes to every CPAC and that this one was the same as in 2018, another non-presidential election season.

Tarrio said that a lot of people want to see Trump, and now that Trump doesn’t seem to be coming, they’re not that interested. He said some people at his hotel had cancelled based on the B-list offerings. But he shrugged it off, attributing the turnout to the normal political cycle rather than as a reflection on the current state of MAGA or CPAC itself. After all, he said, “It’s a midterm year.”