2026-04-18 01:43:12
Last week, conservative influencer Isabel Brown celebrated 100 episodes of her podcast, where she sings the praises of motherhood, frets about the dangers of open borders, and asks rhetorical questions about homosexuality and what she frequently terms “radical” Islam.
To celebrate, Brown had a party thrown by the Daily Wire, the right-wing site that hosts her podcast. The event was also sponsored by Meta, the mega-company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, among other sites. The decorations included an archway that read “Seeking Truth to Save The West,” underneath the words “Presented by Meta” and the company’s logo. An Instagram post from Brown celebrating the party thanked “my amazing team at the Daily Wire and our friends at Meta for throwing me the cutest ‘save the west’ party right in the heart of dc,” and reiterated that the tech company had made “this special celebration possible.”
Meta hasn’t trumpeted their sponsorship of the party, but the Daily Wire, which advertises heavily across Facebook and Instagram, did, including in a Facebook ad that offered a video recap of the event and in an Instagram post that included the hashtag #MetaPartner.
Brown, who got her start working with right-wing activist factories Turning Point USA and Prager University, described herself in her TPUSA bio as “a Generation Z conservative activist who endured years of leftist indoctrination in college.” Last month, during an appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, she called for parents to push their children to “have more kids than they think they can afford, before they think they’re ready” and for women to quit taking birth control pills. The comments generated several days of headlines after a panelist on The View called it the “stupidest” advice.
Brown has been intensely critical of Islam. In a November episode she claimed that “institutionalized Islam” is incompatible with Western values. In February, she invited the Islamophobic far-right British activist Tommy Robinson on her program to talk about what she called “the clash” between Islam and “the West.” The conversation painted Muslims in Britain as overwhelmingly responsible for the rape of women and children. Robinson has been one of the leading figures in Britain to foment hatred against Muslims and non-white immigrants more broadly, and served a seven-month jail sentence last year for repeating defamatory statements against a teenage Syrian immigrant. When Brown talks about “saving the West,” she often seems to mean “saving” it from Muslims and immigrants; like Robinson, she draws attention to horrific crimes to further those views.
“These are not merely ‘cultural differences,’ that we should accommodate for in society,” she tweeted last year, amid a discussion of a 2022 murder in which an Algerian woman under a deportation order in France killed a 12-year-old Parisian girl. “This is an intentional takeover of the West, and we’re tolerating it under the guise of ‘inclusivity.’”
It was not long ago that Meta used partnerships to spotlight Muslim creators, especially women, like in its 2022 “Month of Good” campaign that pointed out charitable work undertaken by Muslim influencers during Ramadan. Meta’s backing of Brown and the Daily Wire could be reasonably seen as part of the company’s ongoing rightward pivot: its current president and vice chairwoman is Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump national security advisor married to Sen. Dave McCormick, a Pennsylvaia Republican. In August 2025, as part of a lawsuit settlement with Robby Starbuck, the company hired the right-wing activist to advise it on combating “bias” after years of complaints from conservative groups about censorship of right-wing viewpoints. And, of course, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was one of a cluster of tech leaders who joined Donald Trump on the dais during his second inauguration.
As Media Matters pointed out in 2023, the Daily Wire has been a major advertiser on Meta, and has used those ads to promote right-wing causes—for instance, spending some $5.7 million “amplifying anti-trans content from its media personalities and other anti-trans rhetoric.” Those ads, the watchdog group wrote at the time, often seemed to directly contravene Meta’s policies on hate speech.
Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan acknowledged a request for comment, but did not answer questions about their sponsorship of the party. Brennan, the former director of strategic response for Trump’s 2020 campaign, was hired by Meta in January 2025, where he also works as public affairs manager for strategic response. Brennan and Meta did not respond to several follow-up emails.
2026-04-17 21:18:30
Beginning in early March, Virginia voters, particularly members of the Black community, began receiving mailers that compared a proposal by Democrats to temporarily redraw the state’s congressional districts to the Jim Crow era.
One mailer featured images of the KKK in white hoods and teenagers running from police in the 1960s. “Just like Jim Crow, they want to silence your voice,” it read. “Our ancestors fought to represent us. Now Richmond politicians are trying to take our districts away.”
Other mailers used past quotes from Gov. Abigail Spanberger and former President Barack Obama critiquing gerrymandering to make it seem as if they opposed the redistricting referendum on April 21, which could net Democrats up to four new seats if voters approve it. In fact, both support the initiative.
The mailers were sent by a little-known group, the Justice for Democracy PAC, that was founded by former state delegate A.C. Cordoza, who served two terms as the only Black Republican in the Virginia legislature before losing his seat last November.
But Cordoza has a powerful backer in the effort to thwart Virginia’s redistricting referendum. His PAC has received nearly $9 million in donations in recent weeks from a dark money group funded in the past by the pro-Trump tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder who is a longtime mentor of Vice President J.D. Vance. That group, Per Aspera Policy Incorporated, wrote four seven-figure checks to Cordoza’s PAC in March and April.
Thiel made a six-figure donation to Per Aspera Policy in 2018 to boost Kris Kobach’s failed campaign for governor of Kansas. Per Aspera Policy also gave $200,000 in 2022 to a super PAC supporting Vance when he ran for Senate in Ohio. Thiel donated $15 million to that pro-Vance super PAC, at the time the largest amount ever given by a single donor to a political campaign. The pro-Vance super PAC was run by Republican strategist Luke Thompson, who is the current president of Per Aspera Policy.
Per Aspera Policy is registered in Massachusetts and does not have to disclose its donors. A source familiar with the group told Mother Jones that “Thiel has nothing to do with it” and has not donated to Per Aspera Policy for years. They declined to say who the donors to the group currently are, but said Thiel was not one of them.
Civil rights groups have sharply criticized the mailers sent by the Justice for Democracy PAC. “We denounce the manipulative mailers sent by a MAGA-aligned political action committee aimed at deterring Black voters from supporting this referendum, which falsely compare this important measure to Jim Crow—a brutal system that stripped Black Americans of their voting rights,” the NAACP Virginia State Conference said in a statement. “This referendum addresses the manipulation of congressional seats, designed to imbalance representation and secure conservative wins ahead of the November midterm elections. We cannot stand idly by and allow these reprehensible racist tactics go unchallenged.”
Virginia’s redistricting referendum next Tuesday has major implications for the midterm election. Like with California’s Prop. 50, Democrats have proposed temporarily replacing Virginia’s current district lines, which were drawn by a bipartisan commission and result in a split of six Democrats and five Republicans, with a new map that could give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. Democrats argue that such a move is necessary to combat Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to persuade GOP states to redraw their districts mid-decade.
Democrats have largely fought Trump to a surprising draw in the gerrymandering arms race he started. But Florida is still planning to convene a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map, which could net Republicans anywhere from two to five more seats, while the Supreme Court is weighing whether to strike down the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, which could shift another half dozen seats to the GOP depending on the timing of the decision. Virginia thus represents the last, best opportunity for Democrats to play offense on redistricting before the midterms. Polls show the referendum narrowly passing, with the early voting turnout initially favoring more Republican areas of the state but trending toward Democrats as more polling locations opened in Northern Virginia.
“Over the past year, several Republican-controlled states have taken the unprecedented step of redrawing their congressional maps in the middle of the decade,” Obama has said. “And they’ve done it for a simple reason: to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterms this fall. In April, Virginians can respond by making sure your voting power is not diminished by what Republicans are doing in other states. This amendment gives you the power to level the playing field in the midterms this fall.”
2026-04-17 20:39:20
Gas prices are sky high. A war in Iran is far from over. Airlines are running out of jet fuel. And the GOP is stumbling into an important midterm season. So who is Donald Trump making time for on his busy schedule?
The 297 people most invested in $TRUMP, his meme coin.
Trump is once again offering exclusive access to anyone willing to buy his largely pointless crypto creation—a bit of blockchain that has no value other than virtual signaling admiration and (financial) support for the president. The top 297 owners of $TRUMP are invited on April 25 to attend a “conference” at Mar-a-Lago,which will include a gala lunch with Trump. According to the announcement for the event, the top 29 holders of this coin will receive an even more exclusive opportunity—”a VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, and other Superstar guests!”
Need to see the president of the United States? Stock up on $TRUMP.
Trump did this once before. Last May, he attended an event at his Virginia golf course with the top 220 $TRUMP holders and then held an exclusive meet-and-greet session with the top 25 $TRUMP investors, who also were granted a tour of the White House. Based on public listings of $TRUMP owners—which don’t identify who these holders were—the combined value of the coins held by the top 225 holders at that event was about $148 million.
Last year’s top coin holder was controversial crypto personality, Justin Sun—who, at the time was facing civil fraud charges filed by the Biden administration but since resolved under Trump’s Justice Department. Sun is still the top $TRUMP coin holder, but he has recently had a falling out with Trump’s other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.
The holders of Trump’s meme coin are not necessarily buying their $TRUMP tokens directly from Trump. When this venture was established three days before Trump was inaugurated president in January 2025, a billion of the digital coins were created. Eight hundred million of these coins were initially reserved for Trump and his partners. The other 200 million were made available for purchase by the public. The plan was to release more of Trump’s own stash over the next three years.
Yet no matter from where the coins are purchased—from the source or from a trader or holder—Trump earns a transaction fee on each transfer. He doesn’t just profit when he sells coins or if the price goes up; he profits from the movement of the coin. If people are buying or selling the coin, he pockets a piece of the action.
Which is fortunate for him—because the value of the coin has plummeted from its high of around $45 shortly after the launch to just under $3 as of Thursday. Again, this coin has no inherent value or use. It cannot be used to buy anything or exchanged for currency or other crypto.
There is no public information on how much Trump has earned off $TRUMP—either through sale of the coins or the transaction fees. What is clear, though, is that owning a ton of this coin what will get you into a room with Trump on April 25—no matter who you are or your interests.
Three Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren, Adam Schiff, and Richard Blumenthal, sent a letter to Fight Fight Fight LLC, the company that manages the coin for Trump, asking for more details about this gathering. They noted that $TRUMP has been a disastrously bad investment and ditto for the accompanying $MELANIA coin. (It shot up to almost $9 last year when it debuted and is now valued at around $0.10.)
The letter cites an analysis that found that regular buyers of the two coins have lost billions of dollars in value: “The official TRUMP and MELANIA tokens have erased an estimated $4.3 billion in retail wealth, with roughly 2 million holders currently underwater.”
But this analysis also found that 45 different crypto wallets that were early holders of the coins had profited by about $1.2 billion. These accounts were apparently able to stockpile the coin and sell toward the top, clearing profits while latecomers had to pay a premium to get in and saw their investment melt away as the price fell.
According to GetTrumpMemes.com, the coin’s official website, attendees at the Mar-a-Lago bash, will get to meet 18 other “superstars,” including former boxer Mike Tyson and several crypto company executives. Attendees will also be given plenty of swag: free Trump fragance, a commemorative poster, a commemorative trading card, and a red Trump watch (which retails for $499)
The site notes in its fine print that there’s no guarantee Trump will attend. But here’s the good news: If the event is cancelled, attendees will get a free Trump NFT. No attendeees, even the top 29 $TRUMP holders, will be granted a private meeting with Trump. The announcement says he won’t accept gifts from anyone.
The are a few limits on who can attend. The guest must be able to pass a background check, be 18 years old, and not currently be in litigation with the U.S. government.
2026-04-17 20:37:27
Was that lightning in the distance? The sound of God’s fury thundering over the White House? Probably not. But thanks to a series of incendiary moves by Republican lawmakers, it sure feels as though we’re witnessing the preceding events to some Old Testament plague. They include President Donald Trump insulting Pope Leo XIV, a now-deleted AI image the president posted of himself appearing as Jesus Christ, and prominent Republicans suggesting that the pope isn’t a very smart Catholic.
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vice President JD Vance said at a recent Turning Point event. “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.”
So it’s against this apocalyptic anxiety that I reached out to Heath W. Carter, a religious historian at the Princeton Theological Seminary who specializes in Christianity’s role in public life, to hear what he had to say about all of this.
What was your initial reaction to Trump’s attacks against the pope?
The president, in his criticism of the pope, didn’t reflect a deep understanding of the office of the pope or of the kind of Catholic theological traditions out of which the pope speaks about war. Various Catholics have since responded to say that the pope isn’t a warrior of American political life and rather that the pope is speaking out of these deep Catholic traditions about “just war” theory. It wasn’t clear to me in the president’s messages about the pope that he has a great depth of understanding of that tradition.
For sure. Even the president claiming that the pope is “weak on crime” really calls into question whether Trump understands what the pope even does. Can you clarify this for him? What is the pope’s role in the Catholic Church, and how does that reality contradict Trump’s insults?
The pope is the leader of a global church that is millennia old, and a church that would understand itself as being animated by the gospel, by the good news of Jesus Christ, and by the teachings of the Christian tradition for millennia. So in some sense, when the president attacks the pope as “weak on crime” and whatnot, it misunderstands the pope’s role. He isn’t some kind of player in American politics. In fact, the office of the pope is a global leadership office. Part of what’s so remarkable about the Catholic Church is that it is a church that spans borders, nationality, ethnicity, and language. It is, in its own way, a remarkably big-tent church. The church doesn’t understand itself to be an actor in American politics or a democratic boss in a big city or something like that. Not at all. It’s a global church that stands on truths that go beyond any given moment or any given nation, but are rather timeless.
“I’ll stop short of pronouncing any kind of eternal judgment. But all I can say is this: The biblical teaching is clear about the need for leaders to care for the people.”
The Trump administration keeps employing deeply religious, evangelical language to promote its policies. At the same time, one could make the argument that their policies are at odds with Christian doctrine.
Christians in the US have found themselves on all sides of any given political, social, or cultural question across the decades and the centuries of the nation’s past. So in that sense, [Trump’s rhetoric] isn’t that unusual. We know that part of how this president has gotten elected twice is by the support of a lot of, especially, white evangelicals. For sure, we know, you know, they overwhelmingly have supported this presidency—but also white mainline Christians, white Catholics have also supported this presidency, and in great numbers, at the same time.
But Christianity doesn’t belong to the right, and it never has. There are Christian communities around this country that would say that the policies and priorities of this administration fly in the face of deeply Christian ideas. For example, the idea of protecting the stranger, which is the Bible’s way of talking about migrants and immigrants. They would say that the cuts to social services fly in the face of widespread biblical imperatives to care for the poor and the oppressed and to lift up the lowly. Those traditions have also deeply shaped the nation’s past, and there are lots of Christians today who are pronounced critics of this administration and see the administration’s policies as a betrayal of the gospel in the ways that the pope called out of this war.
[Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth and other leaders of this administration have been invoking Christ’s name and the authority of Christianity to pursue projects around the world. I think this could end up initiating a strong backlash. It was striking to me that even folks who have been supportive of this presidency are deeply critical of [the AI image of Trump depicted as Jesus]. That was encouraging to me. I do wonder if they’re out over their skis a little bit with these criticisms of the pope.
I’ve similarly been taken aback by how many prominent Republicans seem to be comfortable chastising the pope. What does Scripture have to say about men who behave like this?
I’m not a Bible scholar, but one of the big themes in the Bible is that God opposes people who abuse power and people who use power to oppress the poor and the lowly. That’s something that God hates. This is where you can get powerful critiques of people in power who are not using their power to pursue the common good and not using their power to care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. This is a major theme across both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that God sides with the poor and the oppressed and the lowly. It’s a worrisome thing if you’re a person in power who is involved in oppressing the poor.
“There’s a deep sense of God’s willingness to forgive, even those who humans would say are unforgivable. But part of what is needed is repentance.”
Over the years, Trump has suggested that he does not think he is going to heaven. Do you think he should be concerned?
I’ll stop short of pronouncing any kind of eternal judgment. But all I can say is this: The biblical teaching is clear about the need for leaders to care for the people. Again, I’m not in the business of pronouncing a kind of final judgment on anyone—that’s God’s role. But anyone who reads the Bible carefully and finds himself in a position of leadership should have a sense of fear and trembling with the kind of responsibility that is involved in that leadership, especially when you have so much power. Here’s the other thing I can say: The way we treat people in the here and now is another major theme in the Bible. The way we treat people in the here and now has major consequences. And God cares about that stuff. One of the places in the Bible that is really stark on these matters is Scripture like Matthew 25, separating the sheep and the goats. It’s on the question of whether you cared for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. That’s what Matthew 25 argues: that God and the final judgment are going to separate the sheep and the goats on that basis.
But if the president is on the track to damnation, is there anything he can do to reverse course?
Another thing that I deeply believe, and that I think the Bible is also really clear about, is that it’s never too late to repent. It’s never too late to change your mind. That our God forgives and that our God’s mercy is endless. There are many examples in the Bible of prophets who came to kings who were unjust. [These prophets] called on them to repent. Some of these kings repented, and some of those kings didn’t.
In the Bible, there’s a deep sense of God’s willingness to forgive, even those who humans would say are unforgivable. But part of what is needed is repentance, the turning from the wrong.
Can you define blasphemy for us? And are you concerned that the president and his allies have committed blasphemy?
Blasphemy would be taking the name of the Lord in vain, or in some way claiming to be God, or in some way defaming God. For a lot of folks, that image of Trump as Jesus was blasphemous. One of the fundamental teachings of Christianity has always been that there’s a distinction between human beings and God and that human beings are all sinners, and we all need God’s grace, that we all rely on God’s grace. So for the president to post an image of himself in which he appears to be our Lord and Savior, [a figure] the Christian tradition is always taught was without sin and who is the one through whom salvation comes—that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between a human being and God.
2026-04-17 19:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales—enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered.
Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found.
“These whales could be passing information along generation to generation.”
Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin, and Slovenian.
The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution,” the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are “highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system,” it added.
The findings are the latest discovery about the lives of sperm whales by Project Ceti (standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative), an organization that has studied whales off the coast of Dominica in an attempt to find out what they are saying. Last month, the project released video of a sperm whale giving birth while other whales supported it.
Until the 1950s, it was not clear to scientists that sperm whales even vocalized but modern technology, including artificial intelligence, is helping unlock the language of these creatures—with unexpected similarities to our own speech.
“It’s like if you wanted to talk to someone about a Chaucer novel or something.”
“I think it’s another humbling moment that we’re not the only species with rich, communicative, communal and cultural lives,” said David Gruber, founder and president of Project CETI.
“These whales could be passing information along generation to generation to generation for over 20 million years. Humans now are just having the right tools and desire to be able to look at whale voices in this way to see the complexity that has been there all along.”
Studying sperm whales can be challenging—they dive deep underwater for up to 50 minutes in search of squid to eat, only surfacing for 10 minutes at a time. But it’s near the surface where the animals “chit-chat,” as Gruber put it, with their heads close together.
“If you watch sperm whales, they put their heads right together and click into each other’s heads,” he said. “It’s like if you wanted to talk to someone about a Chaucer novel or something—you wouldn’t want to do that from opposite ends of a football stadium. You would want to get real close to have a real sophisticated conversation.”
That sperm whale conversation sounds, to our ears, little more than a staccato morse code. But by removing the gaps between the clicks, researchers were able to find patterns strikingly similar to human speech. Much like how we alter our vocal folds to change an “A” sound into an “E” sound, whales can manipulate vowel sounds into different meanings.
Gašper Beguš, a linguist at University of California, Berkeley who led the new paper, said that this level of complexity in sperm whale speech was beyond anything he had studied in other creatures, such as parrots and elephants, and highlights the parallels between our lives and those of the whales.
“They have very different lives to us—they’re not stuck to the ground all the time, they float in the water, they sleep vertically,” said Beguš.
“Yet you realize that there’s a lot that unifies us. They have grandmas, they babysit each other’s calves, they give collaborative births, they’re very loud during a birth and so on. It’s such a distant intelligence, but in many ways very relatable.”
The new study shows that “sperm whale communication isn’t just about patterns of clicks—it involves multiple interacting layers of structure,” said Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute who was not involved in the research. “With this study, we’re starting to see that these signals are organized in ways we didn’t fully appreciate before.”
The latest discovery around sperm whale speech has inched forward the possibility of someday fully understanding the creatures and even communicating with them. Project Ceti has set a goal of being able to comprehend 20 different vocalized expressions, relating to actions such as diving and sleeping, within the next five years.
Actually being able to fully grasp what the whales are saying, or being able to converse with them, is still a longer-term proposition, Gruber said, but not an outlandish one.
“It’s totally within our grasp,” he said. “We’ve already got a lot further than I thought we could. But it will take time, and funding. At the moment we are like a two-year-old, just saying a few words. In a few years’ time, maybe we will be more like a five-year-old.”
2026-04-17 05:57:22
Last week, authorities in Louisiana issued an arrest warrant for a businessman who they believe has run a vitriolic social media account that for years has harassed and threatened critics of America’s largest hospital landlord—Medical Properties Trust (MPT). Last year, Mother Jones and Reveal investigated MPT and found that its business model was sinking hospitals around the country and hurting patient care.
Our reporting also unravelled an extensive campaign to silence MPT’s critics. The effort included surveillance by private intelligence firms and a coordinated social media push by anonymous accounts who sent thousands of messages trying to intimidate journalists and analysts raising the possibility that MPT may be committing fraud, in part through complex loans it was secretly sending to prop up its biggest tenant and joint partner, Steward Health Care, as it flailed financially. (The now-bankrupt Steward paid for the private intelligence firms.) It is unclear which anonymous trolls were paid for by the intelligence firm, but chief among them was an X user who goes by “Abe.”
Louisiana authorities believe they have identified the man behind Abe as Delaware’s Bruce Tigani Jr. He is the son of a prominent attorney and worked at commercial real estate company Newmark until sometime in 2025. Delaware State Police confirmed to Mother Jones that Tigani was arrested in Wilmington on April 2 and charged as an out of state fugitive. He was then arraigned in local court and released on $5,000 bond. (Tigani did not respond to phone calls and an emailed list of questions.)
The warrant charges Tigani with a felony for making death threats on X as Abe against a Louisiana lawmaker, state Rep. Michael Echols. For the last three years, Echols has blamed MPT for the devastation at the hospital in his district, and tried to hold the company accountable by convening public hearings and, eventually, penning legislation that targeted MPT, its board, and executives.
“Delete your account..then your life…assistance will be provided if you don’t take your own measures,” The Abe account wrote to Echols on X. “You’re going to lose everything you ever even thought about loving…wife? Bye…kids? Bye….Sweetheart it’s gonna be a long long summer you hog.. say goodbye to your children.”
For years, Abe sent similar screeds to financial analysts who questioned the image of success that MPT, which is publicly traded, has projected to shareholders. He appeared online not long after a pair of analysts—Rob Simone at Hedgeye, a financial research firm, and an X account that goes by Big River—began to publish reports asking whether MPT was hiding the damage its business was doing to hospitals with clever accounting that both overvalued its hospital real estate and papered over just how many were failing to pay rent under MPT’s oppressive leases.
Abe came after Simone with full force. He tweeted out Simone’s address and country club, threatened his family, and asked if he had security, saying that “his life is in danger.” In 2023, a prominent shortselling firm called Viceroy Research published its own report on MPT, expanding on the existing claims that the landlord was engaged in financial fraud. Abe immediately went after Viceroy too.
After we published our reporting on MPT in July 2025, Abe sent us sexist and harassing tweets and emails. We responded to his first email with a request for an interview. He answered: “Why don’t you use your superior investigative skills and look into your sources yourself,” he wrote. “Do you want to know where to look or do you want to keep being a cunt?”
Abe’s attacks on Echols ramped up in the summer of 2025, when the lawmaker introduced a bill in the Louisiana House to hold MPT financially liable for the downfall of the hospital in Echols’ district, Glenwood Regional Medical Center, which has been owned by MPT since 2013.
The bill proposed fining MPT, as well as its executives and board members, hundreds of thousands of dollars if Glenwood became insolvent. It was an attempt by Echols to prevent further gutting of the hospital by its owners.
For years, Steward Health Care had run Glenwood, while paying rent to MPT for the property. When Steward declared bankruptcy in 2024, the company revealed that it owed MPT about $6 billion in rent across more than 30 hospitals, including Glenwood. The effects of this financial deficit on patients had grown alarming at MPT-owned hospitals: Glenwood staff testified in multiple hearings that they regularly were without the basic materials they needed to do their jobs, suppliers went unpaid, and doctors and nurses left. Declaring bankruptcy solved none of these problems.
Echols’ bill to prevent more damage like this at MPT hospitals was voted down in committee, but the legislator became the public face taking on a powerful real estate company. The attacks online from the account allegedly run by Tigani “willfully and unlawfully use[d] violence” with “the intent to retaliate against” Echols, according to the warrant. It was just a few weeks after a legislative hearing on Echols’ bill that “Abe” sent the lawmaker the death threats that are now the basis of his felony charge in Louisiana, including, “Lol your life is over… get ready… piece by piece then all at’once remember? Little pieces for the fishies.”
“It’s disturbing that as elected officials, we have to deal with lunatics that bring our families into what are political decisions,” Echols says.
What remains unclear is why Tigani would devote so much energy to attack the critics of a real estate company. The warrant implies that it could be because Tigani wanted MPT’s stock to remain high. “Tigani Jr. heavily promotes MPT stock on social media,” the warrant notes. “Michael Echols has been publicly critical of MPT, giving Bruce Tigani motive to make threats.”
“If he’s out threatening to kill elected officials and their families and the other people who he has harassed online, you would assume he has a financial stake in something,” Echols told Mother Jones.
In a written statement, MPT denied having any relationship with Tigani Jr. “It is false and irresponsible for any media outlet to suggest otherwise. We condemn in the strongest possible terms threats of violence of any kind,” MPT told Mother Jones.
What we do know is that Tigani worked for Newmark, a commercial real estate advisory firm that helps businesses finance real estate expansions, until some point in 2025, according to a Newmark representative. Leaked documents shared with Mother Jones by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project show that a company affiliated with Newmark, Knight Frank, did valuations for MPT properties in 2020. A Newmark representative did not contest the work for MPT and noted that while Knight Frank and Newmark were affiliated then, they have not been for years.
Tigani’s father, who is also mentioned in the warrant, is a partner at Morris James LLP in Delaware. His firm has represented MPT, its hospitals, and its tenants numerous times in bankruptcies as recent as 2023.
Mforris James declined to comment, and MPT denied having any relationship with the elder Tigani.
The warrant for Tigani’s arrest and extradition to Louisiana now heads to the governor’s desk for signature. If Tigani does not agree to appear in court in Louisiana, there’s a “fugitive hearing” scheduled in Delaware in May to extradite him.
