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2026-03-06 04:10:25

On Saturday, the United States and Israeli governments unleashed stealth bombers, drones, and missiles on Iran, citing a rationale of preventing Iran from developing and deploying catastrophic nuclear weapons.  

“They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore,” President Donald Trump would later say in an 6-minute address to the nation.

But in their quest to prevent Iran from developing an advanced weapon, the US and Israel were also deploying one of their own: artificial intelligence. 

As the Wall Street Journal reported the day of the strikes, the US military used Anthropic’s large language model, Claude, for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” to prepare its attack. 

But in the months leading up to the military action, the Trump administration and Anthropic had actually been at an impasse over how the Pentagon could use Claude, with Anthropic posing concerns about its technology being deployed for mass surveillance or to power fully autonomous weapons. Indeed, a few hours before approving the strikes, Trump posted to Truth Social that because of the disagreement, the US would “IMMEDIATELY CEASE… all use of Anthropic’s technology,” after a six-month phase out.

Even before Trump’s pronouncement targeting Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI had raced to fill the void and fulfill the vendor’s lucrative military contracts by agreeing their products could be used in “all lawful use” cases—prompting outcry among both the public and the companies’ own staff who feared that wording was too vague. 

In response to that pushback, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote an internal memo, which he later posted on X, saying the policy change had been too rushed. “We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy,” it read.

If Altman’s about-face seemed candid, it was also emblematic of a broader problem among AI sector leaders: Their job is to chase the dollars spun off by a technology that could plausibly lead to widespread doom.

Despite Anthropic’s red lines over military applications, its leaders also can’t help themselves from engaging in opportunism at the cost of caution. Just last month Time reported Anthropic would drop the core of its safety policy, which promised to only advance AI systems the company could guarantee were safe. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments… if competitors are blazing ahead,” Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan told the magazine. 

In other words, if their competitors jumped off a bridge, they probably would too.

“They think that they can do this horrible task a little more safely than the next guy. And presumably, at least one of them is right,” says Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of the 2025 best-selling book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. “But they’re not comporting themselves with the gravity of this horrible situation.” 

Observers in the AI industry have long been warning of—and hyping up—the life-altering, world-ending potential of their flagship products. A few weeks before the attacks on Iran, an essay posted to X went viral. Titled “Something Big Is Happening,” it was about the future of the artificial intelligence industry, and, fittingly, seemed to have been written with generous help from AI. The author was Matt Shumer, who runs an “AI personal assistant” company. 

Shumer’s point was, effectively, that artificial intelligence is taking over the world, that the technology has grown exponentially in just the last few months, and that those who don’t embrace it immediately will be left behind. 

“The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet,” Shumer wrote. “They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that’s wisdom or rationalization, I don’t know.” 

His breathless post, which has so far garnered 85 million views, came at virtually the same time as the very public resignations of a dozen industry AI workers, with many announcing their deep ethical reservations about the field on their way out. (Like Shumer’s essay, these resignations were posted on X, the place where the snake most energetically eats its own tail.) 

The first to quit in recent weeks was Anthropic researcher Mrinank Sharma, who announced on February 9 that he’d be leaving his job, and the industry, to “explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech.” 

“I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation,” Sharma wrote. “The world is in peril, and not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this moment.”

Sharma was followed by OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig, who announced she was leaving her job on February 11 via a New York Times op-ed that cited her concerns about her employer’s decision to run ads in ChatGPT. Hitzig wrote that relying on advertising revenue could incentivize a downward spiral of changes to increase user engagement, which could mean “manipulating” people who already use ChatGPT to talk about deep personal questions about health, relationships, faith, and the afterlife. 

Then researcher Hieu Pham announced he was leaving Open AI in late February, having posted a dire warning just a few days before: “We have summoned an extremely powerful creature. If let loose, it would grow much faster than whatever we can do to tame it.”

“I cannot believe I would say this one day, but I am burnt out” after less than a year at Open AI, wrote Pham, who had previously worked for xAI. “All the mental health deteriorating that I used to scoff at is real, miserable, scary, and dangerous.”

Over a single week in February, at least 11 engineers and two co-founders quit xAI, owned by Elon Musk, whose flagship AI product Grok has been embroiled in an ongoing scandal about its creation of non-consensual sexualized images of women and girls. (As TechCrunch reported, Musk has implied he forced some of those resignations; it’s unclear whether that’s true.) 

Collectively, the resignations and nebulous warnings that have accompanied them suggest existential terror has seized the AI industry. The people involved are actively debating whether they are building the future of humankind or paving the way for its downfall. Their agonized trepidation was being aired in an extremely public way, even before the use of Anthropic technology in the Iran attacks gave it new urgency.

“People in Silicon Valley are spooked. They know, by their own admissions, that they are toying with an extremely dangerous technology. It’s not a big surprise that conscientious people regularly leave sounding shaken,” explains Soares. 

This is concerning, says Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the open-source AI company Hugging Face, because those who become worried about the ethical, environmental, and human impacts of AI tend to be the first to depart the companies developing it. They leave behind people who are less bothered by the way their products might be affecting society.

“For some people, their ability to feel and experience harm to others makes it impossible for them to continue to do work that’s complicit in harming those others,” Mitchell says. “For some people it doesn’t affect them as much.” 

To be clear, it’s not just the AI industry that appears frightened of AI; almost every day heralds a new apocalyptic headline or study about the ways that it could destroy various industries or plunder the entire economy. Consider the so-called 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS REPORT, which roiled the stock market last month. The fictionalized future economic analysis published by the No. 1 finance Substack, Citrini Research, offered a grim prophesy where millions of white collar workers have lost jobs to AI bots, which—unlike humans—don’t have mortgages to pay, families to feed, or vacations to take, a scenario it describes as “more economic pandemic than economic panacea.”

One of the biggest issues in the AI industry is much more pedestrian than the cri de coeur resignations indicate, says Katharine Trendacosta, director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: none of these companies have exactly figured out how to make money. 

Tech companies investing heavily in AI have, as she puts it, “hit the ceiling on the places where it’s useful and easy to sell, and now they’ve moved to the classic Silicon Valley thing of ‘we have to be the only one doing it.’” Hype can bring in the venture capital it takes to squeeze out competitors, Trendacosta explains, so huge—sometimes apocalyptic—claims about what a product, or AI technology generally, can do are incentivized. 

It’s also common for AI companies to claim that their competitors are dangerous, sloppy or technologically unsound. “Most of today’s AI companies exist because the people running them don’t trust any of the other AI executives,” Soares says. “None of the top executives think any of the other executives can do the job properly.”

Anthropic is the most obvious example. Its founders were senior leaders of OpenAI who left over “differences in vision,” including safety. Another former senior leader at OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever launched Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) in 2024, aiming to avoid “short-term commercial pressures.”

The process can be cyclical. Just look at what OpenAi’s Altman said regarding the new deal his company signed with the Pentagon after Anthropic blanched: “We think our agreement has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments,” he wrote.

These assurances of a “safer” product seem increasingly threadbare—but Altman has continued to make them. In the memo Altman tweeted on Monday, he tried to tamp down public concern about the Trump Administration using their product by assuring employees that their OpenAI systems would not be “intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals,” and would not be used by “Department of War intelligence agencies” like the NSA. 

“There are many things the technology just isn’t ready for,” the memo read, “and many areas we don’t yet understand the tradeoffs required for safety. We will work through these, slowly, with the DoW, with technical safeguards and other methods.”

But there’s a limit to according to a report by CNBC, in internal meetings Altman has said something different, telling employees that the company and its workers don’t “get to make operational decisions” about how their technology is used. 

“So maybe you think the Iran strike was good and the Venezuela invasion was bad,” Altman said, according to CNBC. “You don’t get to weigh in on that.”

2026-03-06 03:30:07

On Tuesday, now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified for hours in a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing about her department’s immigration enforcement actions. At one point, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois turned the questioning to the issue of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program intended to shield from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

He pointed to a February DHS letter signed by Noem that disclosed the scope of the Trump administration’s targeting of DACA recipients: 261 arrested and 86 deported between January 1 and November 19, 2025. Sen. Durbin then highlighted the case of a 42-year-old mother with DACA who had lived in the United States for more than 25 years before being detained at her green card interview last month and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. “In tears, she hugged her daughter goodbye,” he said.

Sitting in the audience was the woman’s 22-year-old daughter, Damaris Bello. When I met her after the hearing at a Latin American food hall in Union Market, she was still processing watching Noem dodge the question of why DHS had deported dozens of active DACA recipients like her mother, Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez. “There’s no straight answers given by the secretary,” Bello told me. “It feels like it’s purposely dismissed and gone over.”

Since its creation in 2012, DACA has allowed hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States without being subject to deportation. DACA recipients have generally been spared from immigration enforcement—until now. In a betrayal of the program’s intent, the second Trump administration has publicly taken the position—not reflected in the existing regulation—that DACA no longer protects people from deportation and started detaining and removing beneficiaries with permission to be in the country.

The data DHS has reported to members of Congress on the number of DACA recipients who have been arrested and deported since January 2025 has been inconsistent. In a January letter in response to a request for information from Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and other lawmakers, the department stated that 270 DACA recipients had been arrested between January 1 and September 28, 2025—more than the 261 figure shared with the Senate. DHS claims most people arrested have criminal convictions or pending charges, even though DACA recipients have to undergo regular background checks to keep their status.

The letter also disclosed that 174 DACA applicants were deported during the same period. “None of these applicants had been granted protected status at the time of their removal,” the letter said. (Mother Jones has reached out to DHS for comment on the discrepancies.)

The events of February 18 are still fresh in Bello’s mind. That morning, she helped her mother get ready for what they had thought would be the final step in Estrada Juarez’s process of becoming a lawful permanent resident as the relative of a US citizen over the age of 21. “We definitely didn’t think that she wouldn’t be coming home that day,” Bello said. The duo, residents of Natomas in northwestern Sacramento, California, had even made plans to eat at Estrada Juarez’s favorite breakfast restaurant.

Mother and daughter went in for the scheduled 10:30 a.m. interview, prepared with all the documentation—tax forms, vaccination records—and evidence of the life Estrada Juarez, who worked as a regional manager for Motel 6 and has no criminal history, had built for herself in California for more than two decades. They were so confident about the strength of her case that they didn’t think to bring a lawyer. During the interview, Bello and Estrada Juarez told the US Citizenship and Immigration Services officer that Estrada Juarez had DACA status and that in 2014 she had been granted permission to travel to Mexico, which she did, and experienced no issues when returning to the US.

As they neared the end of the interview, the dynamic shifted. The USCIS officer gave Estrada Juarez a piece of paper stating her case couldn’t be completed, according to the Sacramento Bee. He explained that her record showed a previous removal order from when she first came to the United States in 1998 at the age of 15. Estrada Juarez said she didn’t know about the alleged removal order. (In a statement to the newspaper, then–DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin reportedly said Estrada Juarez had “illegally re-entered” the United States.)

Bello recalled that after a brief period of time, someone knocked on the interview room’s door and asked for Maria Estrada. When she answered, Bello said agents without uniform or name identification came in and said she was going to be detained and deported to Mexico. Before the officers could handcuff her, Estrada Juarez asked if she could hug her daughter one last time. She held Bello’s face and told her to be strong, that God would guide them to the right place.

“It was so sudden and unexpected,” Bello said. “It felt like she never really had a chance.”

After the officers took Estrada Juarez away, Bello called her mother’s boss and close family friend for help. The immigration officers had told her to go home and collect some clothes and diabetes medication. Once at the home they shared, she went upstairs and stared at her mother’s big closet. She packed some shirts, pants, underwear, socks, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. “I felt like I had a timer,” Bello said. “It was so horrible because I knew that I only had a certain amount of time where I could see my mom.”

Later, Bello said she was taken to what appeared to be a visitation room where she could talk to her mother through a glass window. She said Estrada Juarez had asked to see an immigration judge to fight her case and that she didn’t want to be deported. The next morning, Bello received a text from her mother, who had been sent to Mexico. “She says she’s fine,” Bello said, “but I know she’s devastated because her life is here.”

For Bello, an only child, returning alone to the house she had shared with her mother was heartbreaking. Everywhere she looked, she saw reminders of Estrada Juarez, including the makeup she had used that morning. In the fridge, Bello found the ingredients for the pupusas they were going to make the following weekend. “Now I just feel like I’m staring at a house,” she said. “It’s no longer a home. It’s like a broken home.”

As a nursing school student, Bello said she will have to move out because she can’t afford the rent or the electricity bill. Two weeks after her mother’s deportation, she has already started packing. “My whole life has to change because she’s not here,” she said. “I feel like I’m grieving my mother.” But Bello hasn’t given up hope yet. “I want to fight for my mom because I know what they did was illegal and it was unjust,” she added.

Speaking from Mexico in a press call with reporters on Thursday, Estrada Juarez expressed her wish to return to the United States. “In a single moment, nearly 30 years of my life were taken away from me,” she said. “My home, my work, my community. The place where my memories and my future were.” She said the greatest pain in this moment is losing time with her daughter. “My family should not have to be torn apart.”

2026-03-06 03:25:20

Kristi Noem’s time as Department of Homeland Security secretary is coming to an end, according to a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma who is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter, is Trump’s pick to replace her. 

“A MAGA Warrior, and former undefeated professional MMA fighter, Markwayne truly gets along well with people, and knows the Wisdom and Courage required to Advance our America First Agenda,” Trump wrote, adding that Noem “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!)”

It’s unclear if or when Mullin will get Senate approval, as Congress remains locked on funding the agency he’s named to lead.

Noem will move into a new role, according to the president, as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas” a “new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere” the administration plans to announce Saturday. Her removal will be effective March 31. 

Since Noem was confirmed in January of 2025, her tenure has been defined by a violent mass-detention and deportation campaign, which included Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deadliest year in two decades in 2025, two US citizens being shot and killed—who Noem painted as domestic terrorists—and the repeated use of chemical weapons on protestors and minors by DHS agents. 

Her replacement, Mullin, is the only sitting Native American senator. He describes himself as a “Christian. Husband. Father of 6” in his social media profiles and repeatedly posts in support of DHS and ICE’s actions. 

On January 7, hours after DHS confirmed that an agent had shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis—who would later be identified as Renée Good—Mullin posted a message defending agents. “ICE agents aren’t Disney villains. They’re our neighbors, friends, and loved ones,” he wrote. “These immigration and customs enforcement officers are red-blooded American patriots doing a tough job to keep our nation safe.”

2026-03-06 02:08:58

A lawyer for the Justice Department argued on Wednesday that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine decisions are protected from legal scrutiny, in a case brought by medical groups challenging HHS’s vaccine policy changes. So much so that the Trump administration appears to believe that Kennedy’s actions are “totally unreviewable.”

Reuters reports that Trump administration lawyer Isaac Belfer was asking District Judge Brian Murphy to rule that Kennedy and other health officials are protected from legal challenges by, for example, medical groups who accuse the department of imperiling the public’s health. 

Murphy asked: “If the secretary said instead of getting a shot to prevent measles, I think you should get a shot that gives you measles, is that unreviewable?”

“Yes,” Belfer replied.

As of February 27, 1,136 confirmed measles cases were reported in the United States in 2026, primarily from the large outbreak in South Carolina, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—though that number is likely higher.

Should Murphy, a Biden appointee, rule in the DOJ’s favor, Kennedy and his team could have further leeway to upend long-held vaccine schedules and inject confusion into the health decisions of everyday Americans.

Related

The Plot Against Vaccines

James Oh, a lawyer for the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups included in the case, urged Murphy to block a series of actions by HHS, including a May directive to the CDC to remove its vaccination schedule recommendation for COVID-19 shots for pregnant women and children, as well as another move from January to reshape and diminish childhood vaccination schedules. 

He also requested that the judge block a meeting from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices scheduled for later this month that will cover “COVID-19 vaccine injuries and Long-COVID.” Oh told the judge that the meeting is a “recipe for spreading distrust and dare I say misinformation or disinformation about vaccines.”

This is the same advisory committee that voted to abandon the universal hepatitis B birth dose recommendation for newborns in December, ending a decades-old advisement. Oh argued that the committee violates balance rules in the Federal Advisory Committee Act after Kennedy, last Summer, fired all 17 members of ACIP and installed allies. 

Murphy said he plans to rule on the arguments before the next ACIP meeting, calling it his “hard deadline.”

2026-03-05 23:49:26

On Monday afternoon, as war raged with Iran, President Trump was seemingly preoccupied with more trivial matters. “FREE TINA PETERS!” he wrote on Truth Social, referring to the former Colorado election clerk who’s serving a nine-year sentence for giving election conspiracists access to sensitive voting equipment.

While it might seem odd for Trump to be posting about Peters as bombs fell on Tehran, there’s a connection between her and Trump’s orbit—her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, is a former classmate of Trump’s at the New York Military Academy who has represented the president in litigation against his political opponents. And Ticktin is now pushing Trump to declare a national emergency, based on the false claim that China interfered in the 2020 election, so that the president can assume vast new powers over the voting process. After the US invaded Iran, Trump reposted an article from a far right news site claiming that Iran also attempted to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections, seemingly tying the military effort to his voting crusade.

The 17-page executive order Ticktin is lobbying Trump to sign would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an unprecedented attempt to usurp powers that the Constitution gives to states and Congress. The order claims that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much longer and be far more error-prone than a regular machine count.

That’s not all. The order would require all Americans to re-register to vote in person before the 2026 midterms, effectively voiding all state voter rolls, and force voters to re-verify their status before every election, a wildly impractical measure. It would mandate that all absentee ballots be notarized and restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or are out-of-town during the election. It would require strict forms of voter ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, which could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who lack such documents. “Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” notes the voting rights group Fair Fight.  

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” Ticktin told the Washington Post. “But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

Of course, there is no evidence that China interfered in the 2020 election. And the two statutes that Ticktin claims allow Trump to declare a national emergency—the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—in fact give the president no control over the voting process. (The Supreme Court just ruled that the president could not invoke the IEEPA to justify his tariffs.)

“None of the cited authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone the wholesale takeover of federal and local elections that the draft EO attempts to enact, even in the face of national emergency—including attempted foreign interference,” says an analysis from the Center for American Progress.

For these reasons, any such executive order would likely be immediately blocked in the courts, much like the last executive order on elections Trump issued last March.

Trump said last week he’s “never heard about” Ticktin’s proposal, but he’s already vowed to issue a new executive order on elections. And given his obsession with the 2020 election and calls for Republicans to “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” the allure of attempting to gain dictatorial control over the electoral process, no matter how illegal it is, is sure to appeal to the president.

Some of the sketchiest figures in the far right’s election denial movement are behind this push.

Ticktin, whose friendship with Trump dates back to their time at the military academy in the 1960s, has had a rocky career as a lawyer. He’s been suspended twice from the Florida bar. After the 2020 election, he represented Trump in a sprawling racketeering lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and Democrats of manufacturing allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and ordered sanctions against Trump’s lawyers, including Ticktin.

“The rule of law is undermined by the toxic combination of political fundraising with legal fees paid by political action committees, reckless and factually untrue statements by lawyers at rallies and in the media, and efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory,” wrote US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks.

Ticktin subsequently went on to seek pardons for election deniers including Peters, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, members of the Proud Boys, and other January 6 insurrectionists. He told Steve Bannon the 101^st Airborne should be sent in to free Peters, who was convicted of giving access of 2020 election records to an associate of My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Ticktin has been promoting the proposed executive order since last April, including on QAnon-affiliated talk shows. “If President Trump can’t call a national election emergency, then we will lose our country,” he told QNewsPatriot in January. Ticktin said the right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has also “been very involved” in the effort. Corsi has been circulating a new draft since the summer alleging that Trump could invoke emergency powers because of alleged foreign intervention in the 2020 election.

Corsi was the driving force behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry’s military record in 2004 and the birtherism conspiracy against Barack Obama, which Trump amplified. Corsi was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly acting as a conduit between Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks as part of the effort to leak emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Corsi falsely claimed the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.

The work of these fringe characters has been amplified by outside advisers closer to the president. Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who helped the president attempt to overturn the 2020 election, said on a podcast in September that she believed “the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Bannon has repeatedly promoted the national emergency scenario on his radio show in recent days.

In December 2020, the likes of Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne went to the White House to urge Trump to order the military to seize state voting machines. Trump was talked off the ledge by his advisers, but now says he regrets not doing so.

Whereas the craziest schemes hatched by election deniers were rejected by Trump’s aides in 2020, today those very election deniers hold prominent positions in the administration and are plotting from the inside. Recently, six administration aides took part in a gathering hosted by Flynn where attendees called on Trump to declare a national emergency. “At some point,” Byrne, the ex-CEO of Overstock.com, said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”

2026-03-05 20:30:00

Children were starting to stream out of Peres Elementary School in Richmond, California, as activist Katt Ramos pointed towards a plume of smoke in the distance. Ramos is an activist who, at the time, helped to lead the Richmond chapter of Communities for a Better Environment. She was standing outside of the school in the Iron Triangle, the local name for a part of town defined by three railway tracks. The smoke was emanating from the vast Chevron refinery that borders the elementary school.

Chevron is Richmond’s largest employer—and its largest polluter. When it flares hazardous gases, or when mysterious, sulfurous smells suffuse the city, there is no daily newspaper to report on health concerns or keep residents in the know. The primary local news site, the Richmond Standard, largely avoids covering local health issues or the impact of Chevron’s facilities on people’s wellbeing. Perhaps because the site is owned by Chevron itself.

Given Richmond’s status as a news desert, most people here have come to accept the lack of deeply investigated stories, the kind that help keep corporations accountable. But plenty of locals are deeply aware of the implications of living in proximity to the refinery, and, like Ramos, have turned to their own activism and organizing. I spent time in Richmond interviewing and photographing local people, including former Chevron employees, activists, reporters, and politicians.

This work was done in conjunction with a project about news deserts and misinformation supported by Amplifier Art.