2025-11-21 03:07:28
Remember the horrifying text messages that caught a Border Patrol agent bragging about shooting someone in Chicago last month?
Well, it seems that those texts—and the looming release of even more potentially damaging messages—are now prompting federal prosecutors to move to dismiss their charges against the woman, who prosecutors had accused of assaulting an officer.
A bit of a refresher on the case: On October 4, Charles Exum, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, multiple times and accused Martinez of ramming her car into his vehicle. Martinez was part of what the government alleged was “a convoy of civilian vehicles” that had been trailing the federal agents during their immigration enforcement operations. A lawyer for the government said Martinez had been broadcasting the incident on Facebook Live for a couple of minutes before the shooting.
As I wrote earlier this month:
When Exum got out of the car, Martinez allegedly drove her car “at” him, and the officer then fired five shots at her.
Martinez has pled not guilty, and contests the government’s allegations. In her account, Exum sideswiped her car, and fired the five gunshots at her “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle, according to court documents filed by her lawyer. After driving about a mile from the scene, Martinez took an ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for gunshot wounds and later arrested. She has been released from custody on $10,000 bond; a jury trial is scheduled for February.
This all occurred as federal officials were conducting immigration raids in the Chicago area, as part of an action dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Soon after, court documents revealed Exum expressing pride over the shooting. As I wrote:
In one exchange, the agent sent an article from the Guardian describing the shooting, adding, “5 shots, 7 holes.” In another, he clarified that he was explaining his pride of his abilities as a marksman: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” (Reuters reported that, when asked about these messages at a court hearing on Wednesday, Exum said: “I’m a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”)
In other messages, Exum wrote: “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out’” and “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.”
According to CNN, Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Perente, asked Exum about another text, in which Exum wrote about the incident: “I have a MOF amendment to add to my story.” Exum explained ‘MOF’ meant “miserable old fucker,” a term meant to refer to someone trying to one-up others, per CNN’s account. Exum explained the text by saying: “That means illegal actions have legal consequences.”
Following that explosive hearing, a federal court directed the government’s lawyers to provide the agent’s unredacted texts to the judge for her private review. Then, on Monday, the judge told the government’s lawyers they needed to provide the texts to Martinez’s lawyer, which would wind up making them public. But rather than do that, the government on Thursday moved to dismiss the case entirely, just hours before another hearing was scheduled to take place.
So what do those additional texts say? For now, we don’t know. Neither the lawyer representing Martinez nor spokespeople for the Department of Justice and Border Patrol immediately responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Thursday afternoon.
But for the government to drop the case entirely, there’s a good chance they are even more embarrassing for Exum than the previous texts were. And they likely add to a disturbing trend our reporting has repeatedly revealed: The federal agents the government claims are helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are, in fact, posing a danger to residents themselves. And sometimes, they’re even bragging about it afterwards.
2025-11-21 02:43:56
It’s been a week of Donald Trump outrages—he barked at a female reporter, “Quiet, quiet, piggy,” and during a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he denigrated Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was slain and dismembered by Saudi operatives, allegedly on bin Salman’s orders. But perhaps his most horrendous transgression, so far, is his amplification of a call to execute Democratic members of Congress.
Yes, the president of the United States endorsed hanging senators and representatives.
This distinctly Trumpian episode began with a video made by six Democratic lawmakers who each served in the US military or the intelligence community: Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona (Navy) and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan (CIA), and Reps. Chris DeLuzio of Pennsylvania (Navy), Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire (Navy Reserve), Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania (Air Force), and Jason Crow of Colorado (Army).
Addressing members of the military and the intelligence community, these legislators noted that the Trump administration “is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.” They pointed out, “Like us, you swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution,” and they stated that “right now the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home.”
Then the Democrats presented a dramatic reminder to service members and intelligence officers: “You can refuse illegal orders.” In fact, the six noted, “You must refuse illegal orders.” They acknowledged that this could be “hard” and that “it’s a difficult time to be a public servant.” But they added, “We have your back.” The video ended with a plea to stand up “for our laws, our Constitution” and the message, “Don’t give up the ship.”
The video was posted on social media on Tuesday, and within two days it had 12 million views and had made national headlines.
Republicans immediately howled about the video. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “Stage 4 [Trump Derangement Syndrome].” On Fox News, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said, “It is inconceivable that you would have elected officials that are saying to uniformed members of the military who have taken an oath that they would defy the orders that they have been given to execute their mission.”
And Trump went ballistic.
On Thursday morning, the president, on his Truth Social account, posted a link to an article about the video and wrote, “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT.”
Trump went further and reposted messages from other users of his social media platform decrying the video as “treason” and “insurrection,” calling these Democrats “domestic terrorists,” and urging their arrest. Among the posts Trump boosted was one that exclaimed, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”
Trump was spreading a call for deadly violence against members of Congress. Then Trump put up his own post directly suggesting these Democrats deserved execution: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Besides behaving like a tyrant, Trump was also showing his ignorance. Insurrection or sedition involve the use of force. It does not include encouraging anyone to disobey an illegal order.
This is not the first time Trump has endorsed the execution of a critic. Two years ago, he suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a traitor who deserved to be executed. And he pardoned violent January 6 rioters, some of whom had chanted “Hang Mike Pence” while they attacked the US Capitol.
Trump has long been a purveyor of violent rhetoric, and he has been accused of stochastic terrorism—the demonization of a foe so that they might become targets of violence. In recent days, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who earned Trump’s wrath by pushing for the release of Epstein files held by the Justice Department, has bitterly complained that Trump branding her a “traitor” has led to death threats against her. No surprise, Trump brushed aside a question from a reporter about violent threats Greene has received: “I don’t think her life is in danger. I don’t think. Frankly, I don’t think anybody cares about her.”
Elevating and echoing an explicit call for killing senators and representatives is a new high—or low—for Trump. For years, he has gotten away with horrific conduct that exacerbates and encourages political division and that could fuel violence. His supporters don’t recoil, and Republicans rarely say boo. Noting that Trump “just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), posted, “If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.”
Trump promoting a death threat should not be dismissed as just one more of his excesses. When a wannabe autocrat aligns himself with a call to execute political foes, it’s not just another Trump social media post. It’s another warning.
UPDATE: Slotkin responded to Trump’s death threat with her own video.
If you appreciate David Corn’s kick-ass reporting and analysis, sign up for his Our Land newsletter at www.davidcorn.com.
2025-11-21 00:02:51
Despite the anti-vaccine proclivities of the US Department of Health and Human Services under its secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s public-facing sites about vaccines had remained largely unchanged, reflecting scientific consensus.
That is, until Wednesday.
That’s when a new page from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on “Autism and Vaccines” appeared. Among other dubious assertions, it informed readers, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Also, it asserts, falsely, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
In an emailed response to a request for comment from Mother Jones, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon repeated those statements and added, “We are updating the CDC’s website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science.”
The information on the new page directly conflicts with that on other CDC pages that are still up. For example, an existing page about thimerosal, a vaccine additive, stated, “Research does not show any link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder.” A separate page about autism spectrum disorder states, “Many studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and ASD. To date, the studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD.” A note at the end of the new site clarified the reason for the apparent contradiction, stating, “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the US Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.”
The chair of this committee is Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who is also a physician and cast the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his post. On social media, critics of the new change have pointed out that Cassidy appeared to require the old language to stay on the site as a condition of his vote to confirm:
“We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”
In response to the new page, Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, expressed strong disapproval. “The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”
In contrast, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded, cheered the change:
On X, Informed Consent Action Network, the anti-vaccine advocacy group helmed by Del Bigtree, a TV and film producer and close Kennedy ally, took credit for the new addition. “This is the culmination of more than 6 years of work for @icandecide, which sued the CDC in 2020 to remove the unscientific claim from its website,” the group posted. “This represents vindication for the 40-70 percent of Autism Parents in America who have been marginalized because of that unsupported claim.”
The new page is just the latest move by Kennedy’s HHS to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on vaccines. As my colleague Anna Merlan and I wrote:
Long before he became secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was laying the groundwork for his war on vaccines. As the head of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy amplified once-fringe conspiracies about vaccine safety and joined a larger crusade against the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the government initiative that was established in the 1980s by Congress to compensate people who were able to prove a likely vaccine injury. In his current leadership role, Kennedy has leveraged political power, transforming conspiracy theories into action—and reshaping American vaccine policy in just a few short months.
Read our timeline of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade here.
2025-11-20 20:30:00
Recently, Clifford “Buzz” Grambo decided to upgrade his electric scooter. The old one he had purchased online reached only 16 mph and wasn’t cutting it anymore. He needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he chases around Baltimore. So Grambo bought a Segway Max G3, which features a 2,000-watt motor and can get up to 28 mph.
“The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew who I was,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. “They had seen me before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ‘Ha ha, bitches, I got a new scooter!’”
Grambo’s nickname comes from the buzz cut he has sported ever since a drunk driver crashed into his childhood bedroom, hitting him in the head and sending him to the hospital. Of late, he has earned another moniker, according to the Baltimore Banner, from fans of his mission to warn neighbors of ICE presence: modern-day Paul Revere. At the No Kings rally in the Charm City last month, Grambo dressed up as the Boston silversmith and revolutionary patriot, mostly because of his wife’s encouragement. (He also did it for Halloween, but trick-or-treating kids mistook him for Alexander Hamilton.)
“I told everybody: ‘I’m retired, I sit home all day. If we get any reports of ICE in the neighborhood, somebody text me, and I’ll run over on my scooter and go yell at them.’”
“A lot of people are worried about being under the spotlight of this regime,” Grambo told me. “I figure I’m already in their spotlight.”
Grambo, 43, is one of countless everyday people across the country stepping up to repudiate the descent of federal law enforcement agencies onto their cities and the violent abduction of their immigrant neighbors in broad daylight. In the face of increased threats of repression and at risk of retaliation, their displays of defiance, however small, show that resistance can surface anywhere.
These acts of peaceful disobedience look like the dozens, if not hundreds, of rapid response networks and neighborhood watch groups cropping up to bear witness to raids. It is the Chicago teachers blowing whistles outside schools when immigration agents are in the vicinity or someone is in the process of being detained. It is the Los Angeles “soccer mom” who drives after ICE cars and documents sightings on TikTok, raising more than $122,000 in donations. And it is Grambo on his scooter.
The work started a few months ago, after Grambo and his wife, Mandy, came across a post on social media about community members who had taken to the streets to protest ICE agents stopping an immigrant. The pair got in their car and drove over to join, shouting at officers until they left. Afterward, Grambo and others got together to discuss what seemed to have worked and what more they could do. A loose network formed.
“I told everybody: ‘I’m retired, I sit home all day,’” he said. “‘If we get any reports of ICE in the neighborhood, somebody text me, and I’ll run over on my scooter and go yell at them.’” Grambo soon started being notified about immigration enforcement activity, sometimes three or four times in a day. At first, when he went out on patrol in Highlandtown, a Latino-heavy neighborhood just east of Patterson Park that has seen a spike in immigration enforcement, residents seemed wary. But with time, he said, people came to recognize him as an ally.
“We’re not going out and getting rapists and murderers,” he said of agents’ raids. “We’re hunting people that support my community. I just want people to be treated like human beings.”
Grambo is cautious when it comes to sharing information or insights about his sources and tactics, in case ICE is paying close attention. It is sufficient to say that, by now, he knows what models of cars federal agents tend to drive and to be on the lookout for.
His goal is straightforward: He wants to make ICE agents uncomfortable. The way Grambo sees it, it’s a numbers game. If he can draw the attention of officers to himself, perhaps fewer immigrants will get swept up, and that’s a win. “I know I can’t stop them,” he said, “but if I can suck up their time, then at least I can help some people.”
While he’s at it, Grambo also hopes to deflate the agents’ spirits. It’s a lesson he took from his days in the military, having joined the Navy shortly after 9/11 and served as an aircraft mechanic with tours in Japan and Guam before retiring as a chief petty officer in 2022. “I want their morale as low as possible,” he said, “because a team with low morale is ineffective.”
On Veterans Day, I met up with Grambo as he braced the first bone-chilling cold temperatures of the season to join other former military members at Baltimore’s War Memorial Plaza to protest the Trump administration’s threats to send troops here and amid their deployment to other American cities. “Our people aren’t enemies, they’re neighbors,” said Tim Eppers, an Army veteran. “Our communities aren’t combat zones, they’re homes filled with stories, families, and dreams.”
Grambo was up next. “In America, we’re supposed to welcome the stranger, not hunt them,” he told a small group of reporters and supporters. He urged MAGA followers to turn off Fox News and realize they’re being lied to. He called for the dismantling of “concentration camps” on US soil. He urged Democrats to listen to their voters over their donors. “Veterans have done our part for democracy,” he concluded. “We should be at home watching sports and taking naps, not fighting fascism.”
Grambo was raised in a conservative part of Calvert County in southern Maryland. In 1995, when he was 13, he got kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America for admitting to being an atheist. That disciplinary episode made the pages of the Washington Post and, according to Grambo, caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who wanted to have him on her show.
He described himself as “Republican by zip code.” But by the time President Donald Trump came onto the national political scene, Grambo had grown disaffected with the party. For a moment, he thought a businessman like Trump could be the answer. Then Trump descended the golden escalator to announce his presidential candidacy, and Grambo thought, “Hell no.” (He said he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and instead remembers having written in John McCain.)
By then an anti-Trump Republican, Grambo said Trump’s first term led him to break with the GOP. The infamous travel ban targeting immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries was too much. “None of the Republicans spoke up about it, and that was my breaking point,” Grambo said. “I was just like, this judging people based on their religion, that’s not America.” He decided then that the Republican Party was “irredeemable.”
While Grambo doesn’t identify as a Democrat, he has chosen a side. “I look at it as I’m fighting for democracy,” he said. “We don’t have a conservative and a liberal party right now. We have a democracy party and a fascist party.” Grambo will tell anyone who will listen exactly what he thinks is at the root of the deterioration of American democracy: a conservative media ecosystem that traffics in disinformation and feeds the “cult” that is MAGA. “I realized Fox News is completely full of shit, and that you can put on the record,” he said.
Grambo is chatty and gregarious. He curses a lot, and he knows it. At times, he seems to get overwhelmed and loses his train of thought. (He attributes some of it to head injuries and memory issues.) At the “Refuse Fascism” protest in Washington, DC, in early November, it wasn’t hard to spot him—in a Navy hoodie and Baltimore Ravens hat with a “Human rights are not political” pin—hanging out in front of the 24/7 sit-in tent outside at Union Station, where a group of veterans have been protesting the deployment of the National Guard to the capital.
Grambo said he tries to come support them once a week, but he makes it clear that he isn’t exactly thrilled about it. “I’m supposed to be retired,” he said once more. As we’re chatting, two women wearing the Handmaid’s Tale red outfit overheard us. “Thank you for being here,” Carrie Salamone from Cincinnati told him. “You’re the kind of people we want to hear from.” Right then, CNN’s Manu Raju walked by, and Grambo ran off to take a selfie with him. “My wife is going to be so jealous,” he said.
His wife, Mandy, wasn’t surprised when he started to go on patrols; Grambo seems to have a penchant for good trouble. “It’s just part of who he is,” she said. If her work in corporate benefits for an international company allows it, she joins him by car so they can cover more ground and report back to each other.
“When he runs out the door sometimes, I’ll say, ‘I have a meeting in 30 minutes and won’t be able to bail you out right away,’” she said half-jokingly. “I was with him probably for the last 15 years of his military career, and it has been scarier to watch him go out the door with some of the things going on now than it was seeing him off to go to deployment.” She has managed to convince him to wear a helmet, which he does begrudgingly.
The couple, who have been together for 16 years, have discussed scenario planning in the event that something goes truly wrong. In September, Grambo said, he had a run-in with ICE agents who stopped him and threatened to take him to jail. He protested, asserting he was exercising his First Amendment rights, and continued to follow one of the cars while yelling that ICE was in the neighborhood. “If you’re going to tell me I can’t do it,” said Grambo, who carries a whistle on his keychain and has since bought a body camera to document future interactions, “I’m going to do it even louder.”
That wasn’t his only encounter. On a recent Sunday morning, Grambo and Mandy drove to an intersection in southeast Baltimore where they had gotten word that ICE had been spotted. He called other activists in his network to come to the area and hopped out of the car with a megaphone in hand. Unmarked vehicles lined the residential street. “Hey, we don’t want you here!” Grambo shouted as he walked toward a group of agents with black vests marked “police,” some wearing face covers, a video his wife recorded shows.
Next, Grambo said one agent, dressed in a hoodie, pointed him to move to the sidewalk and shoved him more than once. (Grambo said he called Baltimore police and reported the incident. A police department spokesperson confirmed that officers responded to a reported “assault by a federal agent on a 43-year-old male” and would forward the information to the “proper federal agency” for investigation. ICE did not respond to a request for comment before publication.) Mandy yelled at the man not to touch her husband and told him he was being recorded. “I don’t care,” the agent said, moving toward her until another officer took him away.
“Hey, don’t run, we got you on camera,” Grambo shouted as the agents appeared to get ready to leave. He stood in front of one the cars and told the men to take their masks off. “You have an oath to the Constitution,” he pressed. “What did you take an oath to?” The car then raced away with its sirens on. For a little while, Grambo continued to follow them, this time on foot.
2025-11-20 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In a dramatic twist of political defections and contentious concessions, the longest ever federal shutdown came to a close last week as Congress finally managed to agree on a deal to reopen the government. Federal agencies are now beginning to resume operations, employees are returning to work, and payments are beginning to flow once again.
Experts say, though, that the shutdown has left behind fractures on the nation’s food system that are only beginning to appear. These cracks will only widen with time as they join with all of the other major food and farming policy changes enacted by the Trump administration—which altogether are affecting who eats what, where that food comes from, and which communities get left behind.
“The United States was definitely the leader in agricultural research in the entire world, and that’s slipping out of our grasp.”
“When agencies like the USDA or FDA halt or scale back operations, there are ripple effects through the supply chain because of the effect on crop payments, insurance, inspections, and nutrition programs,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist studying food insecurity and climate change at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “These, along with unpredictable policies, can erode public trust and market transparency, weaken these support systems, and increase vulnerabilities to shocks like disease outbreaks or extreme climate events.”
Grist spoke to federal workers, farmers, economists, recipients of food benefits, and analysts throughout the country to piece together how the longest shutdown in US history is likely to affect America’s food system in the weeks, months, and years to come.
Among the furloughed federal staffers was Ethan Roberts, who represents the employee bargaining unit at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president and also works for the Department of Agriculture as a physical science technician. After six weeks out of office, Roberts returned to work at the Agricultural Research Service in Peoria, Illinois, on Thursday.
Going into the shutdown, Roberts said his lab “mothballed” nearly all of their projects, including their work on fungal diseases, such as fumonisin toxin and wheat scab blight, in addition to finding new uses for crops: “Basically, we just lost, like, a month and a half worth of progress and work, and a lot of those things will have to be restarted.”
Some of Roberts’ colleagues had to file for unemployment to pay their bills. Many were forced to look for other work. More still might not return to the USDA at all. The losses only add to the cuts that the Trump administration made before the shutdown. Upward of 20,000 USDA staffers, or roughly a fifth of the agency’s workforce, have lost their jobs this year. Only a small group of staffers in Roberts’ lab stayed on through the shutdown to continue work that the USDA considered critical, including the cryogenic preservation of the largest publicly available collection of microorganisms in the world.
Without adequate federal financial support, “the nation’s food is on track to become more expensive and more limited in supply.”
The consequences of the lab’s dwindling administrative capacity will eventually reach the country’s ranchers and farmers. “It is our job to find new products, new uses, new everything for the crops that farmers produce,” said Roberts. “So if we’re not working on that for a month and a half, that’s time we weren’t working on solutions and implementations to assist these farmers.”
Fewer employees at labs like Roberts’, of course, also means that the USDA will fall further behind on agricultural research. “The United States was definitely the leader in agricultural research in the entire world, and that’s slipping out of our grasp,” he said. “In terms of ripple effects, it can’t get much bigger than that.”
This growing exodus of federal workers doesn’t just compromise research capacity, but also food safety oversight, putting Americans’ health at risk. Leading into the shutdown, federal food safety agencies had already faced significant staff losses threatening their ability to ensure the safety of the national food supply. Between January and April, the Food and Drug Administration lost around 4,000 staffers to mass layoffs, according to government data. Operational slowdowns during the shutdown then limited routine inspections, facility oversight, and ongoing food safety investigations.
Quietly tucked into the stopgap funding bill that will keep the government open through January 30 was a one-year extension of the 2018 farm bill and an annual USDA funding bill.
The two bills will get essential services—think farm loans, conservation assistance, and local food grants—operating after weeks of disruption. But the appropriations bill also cut more than $75 million from conservation technical assistance programs, while the farm bill extension removed payment limits for cost-sharing conservation programs. Combined, this is both bad news for climate-weary farmers and could result in inequitable distributions of those funding pots, according to Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
All told, farm bankruptcies are soaring, and farm debt is set to hit a record high this year. Farmers are currently being squeezed by low commodity-crop prices, spiking interest rates, struggles following several successive federal funding cuts, blowback from the president’s tariffs on markets, and stubbornly high costs of energy and fertilizer, among other inputs. Livestock producers are confronting supply chain constraints, persistent droughts, and rising production costs. Climate change and extreme weather have been amplifying all of these existing issues—as has the shutdown. “When the government is closed for 43 days, it really does stunt the possibility of federal policy to provide more timely solutions,” said Lavender.
“When SNAP shrinks, the whole food economy shrinks.”
“The negative effects of the shutdown on the US agricultural industry, coupled with climate change-driven disruptions to agriculture in the US and globally, could create crop deficits and contribute to rising prices of food,” said Alla Semenova, an agricultural economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Other typical effects of delayed climate adaptation include rising food production and transportation costs, falling nutritional quality of foods, and deteriorating population health.
The shutdown also further exposed the US agricultural sector’s high reliance on federal financial assistance, such as farm subsidies and loan programs. That reliance, warned Semenova, is at risk of only increasing over the next two years because of climate change.
“As the government shutdown froze financial assistance to farmers during the critical harvesting and crop-planning season,” Semenova said, it has created “potential risks to the US food supply chain in 2026 and 2027. Without adequate financial assistance from the federal government, the nation’s food is on track to become more expensive and more limited in supply.”
On Monday, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden announced that the administration will release another tranche of the billions in emergency assistance to help struggling farmers authorized by Congress last December. According to Vaden, the agency is now opening up applications for another installment of a $16 billion pool for weather-related aid.
The effects of the shutdown have already begun reverberating throughout the supply chain. Nearly 42 million Americans who rely on programs like SNAP spent weeks waiting on their supplemental grocery stipends, while the Trump administration fought a series of legal battles to hold off on paying those benefits during the shutdown.
According to Parker Gilkesson, a senior policy analyst who researches SNAP at the Center for Law and Social Policy, every $1 in SNAP benefits generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Even a single week’s suspension of the food stamp dollars, said Gilkesson, can drive lasting effects on everything from supplier relationships to business revenue.
She’s also near certain it will further inflate America’s rising food insecurity problem. New SNAP work requirements taking effect, alongside historically unprecedented program funding changes—now coupled with USDA warnings of an imminent program overhaul—threaten to push the nation’s food safety net to a breaking point. But tracking the fallout on food access will be close to impossible. That’s because, preceding the shutdown, the Trump administration got rid of the nation’s primary tool that would do so. “When SNAP shrinks, the whole food economy shrinks. And it doesn’t just affect households who receive SNAP. It affects every household,” said Gilkesson.
Jared Grant, an agricultural economist who specializes in food security at Ohio State University, said that the shutdown exposed vulnerabilities throughout the nation’s supply chain that could shift consumer behavior in the grocery stores and slow overall consumer spending. A new preliminary report from the University of Michigan found that consumer confidence dropped to its lowest point since June 2022 this month, largely driven by the shutdown.
“The government shutdown is going to affect consumers in their perception and behavior,” said Grant. “They might think they see higher prices on certain items.”
That will have a knock-on effect: When consumers slow their spending, that in turn can slow economic growth, which ramps up pressure on the labor market, strains public services, and widens income gaps.
It wasn’t so much the shutdown in isolation that created the biggest problems for America’s food system, said Rodger Cooley, executive director of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, but the policies that fueled the congressional gridlock to begin with. The loss of health care subsidies has trickle-down effects for things like household economic stability, which is directly tied to food access and affordability. And the administration’s funding priorities for Trump’s hard-line immigration enforcement agenda, which staunchly divided Democrats and Republicans during the government impasse, is what Cooley considers the biggest issue impeding the future of the food system, as the immigration crackdown continues to throttle the farm and food sectors with labor shortages that risk supply shortfalls and sticker shock.
“Leading up to the shutdown, many, many programs and policies had been turned over, shut down, and inverted. Food banks, local governments, and state governments just are in constant emergency-pivot modes, and now the administration is moving massive amounts of demand back to the private sector and local government sector to fill in that gap, which is impossible,” said Cooley. “There’s a lot of ‘Okay, what is next? What even is [Trump’s] vision of an operational food system?’”
2025-11-20 19:00:00
This story was produced in partnership with the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. Watch the accompanying episode below or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
At a White House ceremony last February, before President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund schools if they permit transgender girls to play girls’ sports, he turned and looked over his shoulder. Behind him stood former college swimmer Riley Gaines, wearing suffragette white in a crowd of young female athletes and conservative activists. “You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Trump told the 24-year-old.
Almost three years, to be exact. Since tying for fifth place in a March 2022 championship race against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, Gaines has used the story of their matchup to leap to the vanguard of the anti-trans movement, campaigning not just to ban trans women from women’s sports, but to end public acceptance of transgender people.
Gaines joined the political fray just as 14 states had already enacted restrictions on trans athletes and four more were on the verge of doing the same. With backing from GOP donors like the Amway billionaire DeVos family, she has crisscrossed the country with a simple message: Women’s sports need “saving” from “men”—that is, transgender girls and women.
No matter that the NCAA president said in 2024 that less than 0.002 percent of college athletes at the time were openly transgender (the percentage of Olympians is about the same). Gaines and her allies argue that trans athletes are stealing opportunities from every woman and girl who competes with them. Alongside other athletes, she filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to ban trans girls from girls’ school sports nationwide, arguing that trans-inclusive policies are a form of discrimination against women.
“She’s a perfect message,” says Ronnee Schreiber, a political science professor at San Diego State University who studies women in the conservative movement. Even voters who generally support transgender people, Schreiber adds, are “still a little anxious about the trans athlete thing.”
Indeed, before Gaines arrived on the scene, right-wing politicos had sought for years to draw attention to transgender women in sports—a poll-tested wedge issue to stoke anti-trans outrage among voters across the political spectrum. Lia Thomas, tall and unapologetic, was the villain they’d been waiting for, and Gaines—feminine, poised, outspoken—the ideal victim. Within months of her race against Thomas, Trump was summoning Gaines onstage at CPAC: “Where’s our beautiful, great swimmer?”
Thanks in large part to Gaines, trans athletes became the reddest of red meat issues during the 2024 presidential election, with the Trump campaign pouring money into a brutally effective attack ad declaring, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” During the executive order signing ceremony, Trump declared, “This was one of the big reasons that we all won.” He added later, “I want to thank Riley. She really has been in the forefront.”
Interviews with former teammates and competitors at the fateful 2022 championship, as well as a review of Gaines’ public statements, legal documents, nonprofit filings, and other records, reveal how she transformed herself from captain of a deeply troubled swim team to one of the leading conservative activists of her generation.
Today, Gaines serves as a real-life Regina George figure in the MAGA universe, with her online dustups receiving celebrity coverage in the right-wing press. A Fox News darling and social media bomb-thrower affiliated with some of the country’s most influential right-wing advocacy groups, she broadcasts the pictures and names of trans middle and high schoolers to her 1.6 million followers on X, encouraging younger athletes to boycott and shun trans competitors. For her, this cause is “spiritual warfare.”
Meanwhile, she’s cashing in: Between recording sessions for her podcast, Gaines for Girls, she reps an anti-trans clothing line and slings a student debt refinancing plan, herbal supplements, and ivermectin. In 2024, she released a children’s book and a memoir. Her speaking fees run as high as $25,000.
By multiple measures, Gaines and her allies have largely prevailed in their original quest to rid women’s sports of trans athletes. Twenty-nine states have now banned trans girls and women from participating on the school sports teams that match their gender identity (though some of those bans are blocked as they work their way through the courts). And after Trump’s executive order, the NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee both changed their policies to categorically exclude trans women.
But Gaines, who did not respond to interview requests and questions for this story, shows no signs of stopping. After all, sports is just a stepping stone to a more sweeping goal.
“The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she told the New York Times last August. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Riley Gaines opens her 2024 memoir, Swimming Against the Current, with a formative experience from her childhood. When she was 8, she writes, her father, Brad, led her to the edge of an outdoor pool in the middle of winter and told her to jump in. “No shaking or chattering,” he commanded. She needed to learn “mental toughness.”
As she grew up in a conservative Christian family in the suburbs of Nashville, the daughter of two college athletes, her father’s lesson served her well. Especially when she was recruited to swim at the University of Kentucky, a Division I school with a women’s swim team rising in the national rankings under a mercurial head coach, Lars Jorgensen.
Gaines was a repeat Tennessee state champion and had qualified for the Olympic trials at age 15. Despite such accomplishments, during her recruiting trip to campus, Jorgensen told her she was “okay” and “walk-on material,” she’d later tell a local sports reporter. She committed to UK anyway. “You could look at his comments as hurtful and mean, but I know it was just tough love,” she said. “He would trash talk you, but that was part of what makes this special for me.”
During her first year, she writes, Jorgensen often called her a LOFT—for “lack of fucking talent.” But she was not offended. “He didn’t actually think I was a LOFT,” she explains in her book. “This was just his way of seeing how we liked to be motivated.”
Jorgensen “definitely had this cult of persona around him,” recalls Trinity Ward, a teammate one year behind Gaines. “When he was singing your praises, at least for me, it felt like you were on top of the world. And when it felt like you were disappointing him, that felt horrible.”
Ward, as well as two more of Gaines’ teammates—who requested anonymity to avoid backlash from Gaines’ fans and followers—are speaking publicly for the first time. They say Jorgensen often screamed at swimmers, told them they weren’t worth coaching, and tried to force them to swim when sick or injured. According to a 2023 investigation by UK’s athletic compliance office obtained through a public records request, swimmers reported that “voluntary” practices weren’t really optional and that Jorgensen imposed grueling extra swims for transgressions. “We had a punishment where we had to swim with our snorkels for two hours and we weren’t allowed to stop,” one of Gaines’ teammates remembers. The NCAA eventually suspended Jorgensen for violating limits on practice hours.
“It’s been really weird to see [her] completely transform. If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump at CPAC, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy.’”
Swimmers say Jorgensen mocked teammates’ weight and pressured them to lower their body fat percentage to extremes. “Lars is the biggest reason that an alarming number of the Women’s Swim Team suffers from Eating Disorders,” one former swimmer wrote to UK officials. “The damage from Lars’ words and remarks about female bodies last long beyond the four years of collegiate swimming.”
“It was hard to know until we got out of it that he was crossing the line,” Ward says. Teammates who complained were treated as “not tough enough,” one of the anonymous teammates adds. “They didn’t have what it takes to be a D1 athlete.”
Ward maintained a friendship with Gaines, who she says was generous with her car and could party hard. Even when Ward, who is queer, started dating a woman, Gaines was “friendly and respectful.” Once, as they drove together to a team retreat, they chatted about their respective experiences of being raised in religious conservative families. It was the summer of 2021, Trump had recently left office, and Ward remembers Gaines saying she didn’t like Trump. “It’s been really weird to see [her] completely transform,” Ward says now. “If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump at CPAC, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy.’” Gaines, who was seen as one of Jorgensen’s favorites, seemed to weather the pressure on the team better than most. “I never saw Riley cry because of something Lars said,” Ward recalls. “I never saw her have like a mental breakdown or show that any of this was getting to her.” In her book, Gaines writes that, despite his “utter savagery,” Jorgensen “became, and still is, one of my best friends.”
Jorgensen wasn’t the only swim coach creating a toxic environment. In the fall of 2019, Gaines’ sophomore year, the university started looking into the behavior of one of their assistant coaches, Laurence “Chip” Kline, based on complaints from swimmers who had graduated. “We all felt uncomfortable about Chip,” one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates remembers. According to records from the ensuing investigation, Kline allegedly touched a swimmer’s leg under her towel, forced her to hug him before letting her enter the team room, and made sexual comments about team members, comparing their bodies to meat and saying, “With a butt like that she ought to be a good swimmer.” The school eventually determined that Kline violated its harassment policy and suspended him, then declined to renew his contract; it also suspended Jorgensen for six days for failing to report what he knew about Kline’s conduct. (Kline declined to comment.)
The problems on the UK team reflect widespread issues in women’s athletics. One in 5 NCAA athletes experience some form of abusive supervision by coaches, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Sexual misconduct is distressingly common: A 2021 World Players Association survey of female professional athletes worldwide found that 1 in 5 had experienced sexual abuse as children in connection with sports. And coaches are the most common perpetrators of unwanted sexual contact, according to a survey by the US Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit authorized by Congress to investigate and prevent abuse and misconduct.
Still, despite everything, the UK team was getting faster. In 2021, they won the prestigious Southeastern Conference Championships for the first time in the school’s history. At the NCAA national championship that year, Gaines came in seventh in the 200 freestyle and was crowned an All-American. “As soon as I placed seventh in the country my junior year, I immediately made it my goal to win a national title my senior year,” she writes in her memoir. “It was all I could think about.”
But by the next year’s NCAA championship, the world of swimming had become fixated on Lia Thomas. The transgender competitor at the University of Pennsylvania had been breaking pool, school, and conference records since that fall, generating a flood of news coverage that began in right-wing media—Fox aired 32 segments about her in six weeks—and spread to virtually every major news outlet.
Thomas had competed on the men’s team at Penn for three years, winning three silver medals at the 2019 Ivy League Championships. She’d come out as transgender to her family and a friend after her first year of college but delayed her medical transition until after she completed her sophomore season. “I did HRT [hormone replacement therapy] knowing and accepting I might not swim again,” she told Sports Illustrated.
But when she returned to school after taking a year off during the Covid pandemic, she was eligible for the women’s team under NCAA policy, which at the time allowed transgender women to compete after 12 months of testosterone suppression. There was just one problem: She was winning. Her race times, though slower than before her transition, qualified her among the country’s best female swimmers that season.
The science around trans women athletes is sparse and extremely contested. Though it’s well established that their athletic performance declines after hormone therapy, the data varies on how much. A 2024 International Olympic Committee–funded study of 23 transgender women athletes found that participants on hormone therapy tended to have greater handgrip strength compared to cis women, but lower jumping height and aerobic capacity. A pair of studies analyzing military fitness test data from the Air Force in 2020 and 2023 found that after two and four years of hormone therapy, respectively, trans women’s performance was comparable to that of cis women on two out of three measures.
Thomas declined an interview request, but, in a radio interview, said she returned to swimming after Covid feeling “confident and happy in my body”—a stark contrast from the depression and hopelessness she’d experienced the previous season. “I was way, way weaker. My muscle mass had decreased so much, and I had way less endurance, but I could put my full energy into swimming again because I wasn’t putting most of it into dissociating just so I could get through the day.”
By the start of the 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming championships, held at Georgia Tech’s aquatic center in Atlanta, the attention on her had become a frenzy. Protesters held signs outside the facility. Leading up to the championships, the UK swimmers had been obsessing over Thomas, says one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates: “I do remember, as we were training for NCAAs, people being like, ‘Oh my gosh, is she gonna be there? Is she gonna compete? Is she gonna be in our locker room? I’m gonna look at her when we’re in our locker room,’ stuff like that,” she says. “[Gaines] and Lars and some of the other coaches would just talk about how disgusting it was, and unfair, and they just couldn’t believe it was happening.”
When Thomas won the 500 freestyle, receiving the national title—albeit with a relatively slow time for that race—the swimmers reacted with despair, the teammate says. “I think there was this idea in everyone’s heads that, ‘She won the 500, she’s about to take them all,’” she recalls. “People were acting insane over this, like she’d done this jaw-dropping, Katie Ledecky–rivaling time, and that’s just not what happened.”
The next day, members of the UK team stood on the pool deck to cheer as Gaines lined up for the 200 freestyle. It was one of the team’s best shots at an NCAA title. But when the results appeared on the scoreboard, Gaines and Thomas had tied for fifth, at 1:43.40—a full 2.28 seconds slower than the first-place finisher.
Seeing the numbers appear, the teammate felt a sense of dread. “I remember looking over at [another member of the UK team],” she says, “and we were like, ‘Fuck, this isn’t good.’”
The story of what happened next appeared five days later in the conservative Daily Wire. After tying her race, Gaines and the other swimmers went behind a curtain, preparing to take the podium. There, an NCAA official informed her that he had already given the fifth-place trophy to Thomas, Gaines recounted to the reporter. Her own fifth-place trophy would come in the mail. In the meantime, she could pose with the sixth-place trophy.
Gaines was indignant. “I told the guy, ‘I don’t think that’s right, and I don’t think that’s fair,’” she said. But the official insisted. “The more I thought about it, the more it fired me up,” she remembered. “Who are we trying to protect here?”
Sharing the podium with Thomas, “aghast that no one was standing up for female swimmers,” changed the trajectory of Gaines’ life, she writes in her memoir. “I decided I was no longer willing to cower and lie.” In an interview years later, she’d say, “I thought of it as a tragedy. I thought to myself, no one, no girl, no woman should ever have to face” that “level of humiliation.”
The Daily Wire article catapulted her into the feverish world of right-wing media. On March 28, 10 days after her race with Thomas, she appeared on the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show; on April 1, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn hosted Gaines on her podcast; on April 6 she was a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where Carlson lauded her for “bravery.” “I’m just fortunate enough to where I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky, whether that be from the athletic director all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen,” she told him.
“I’m going to save the world woman,” Gaines texted her mother. “Martyrs have to be willing to put themselves out there if you want to make change.”
As she made more media appearances, Gaines’ rhetoric grew sharper. In her initial Daily Wire interview, she’d said of Thomas: “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that, because there’s no doubt that she works hard too, but she’s just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place, and that’s the issue.” Yet by the following spring any empathy she once had for Thomas had vanished: “He is an arrogant, cheat who STOLE a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman,” she tweeted.
Soon the locker room became a central theme, as she accused the NCAA of having “forced” the swimmers to change with Thomas and allowing “any man” to walk in—though both the men’s and women’s locker rooms had been opened to the competitors at the women’s championship. “If you walked in and saw Lia and you didn’t want to be in there, you could walk next door to the other locker room, or go in the stall,” says one of Gaines’ teammates. Though a handful of swimmers at the meet also went public to say that Thomas’ presence in the locker room made them uncomfortable, Gaines’ version of the story was more lurid: “We turned around and there’s a 6-foot-4 biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia,” she told Fox News. “Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.”
But other swimmers who saw Thomas in the locker room say she changed facing a corner, wrapped in a towel. “She was just in the corner, changing normally, keeping to herself,” says one competitor.
Gaines fit seamlessly with a right-wing strategy that dated back to 2015, when the Supreme Court recognized the right to same-sex marriage and when Christian conservatives, fearing they were losing the culture wars, began searching for issues to fire up their political base. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” Terry Schilling, the president of the socially conservative American Principles Project, later told the New York Times. His group polled voters on a range of messages and found that trans people in women’s sports struck a nerve, including among conservative Democrats and independents. Thus began an effort to transform the debate about trans athletes into a political lightning rod.
Then Gaines came along. Within weeks of the NCAAs, she started collaborating with the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group that would later bring her aboard as a spokeswoman. Its savvy operators helped her “understand the logistics of the political sphere as well as tools to increase my effectiveness in spreading my message,” she writes in her memoir. The month after the championship, she appeared in the Kentucky Legislature as the guest of a Republican state representative, successfully urging lawmakers to pass a trans sports ban over the governor’s veto. She would go on to testify for anti-trans bills in at least 10 statehouses and appear in ads for Republican candidates including Kristi Noem, Rand Paul, and Herschel Walker (as he fended off domestic violence allegations). Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign paid her, at one point, for “political strategy consulting.”
Online, she started to toe the line between earnest advocate and troll. She stirred up conflict with prominent female athletes who supported trans people in sports, including Megan Rapinoe and Brittney Griner, then reveled in the ensuing coverage. In speeches, she tried out a religious tone: “I feel like we’re in this battle of really spiritual warfare,” she said at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2023. “It’s no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.”
In July 2023, the Fox-owned sports website OutKick announced the launch of the weekly podcast Gaines for Girls, whose first episode promised to expose “the truth about transgenders in women’s sports.” She would interview not only fellow anti-trans athletes, but also powerful anti-LGBTQ Republican lawmakers and officials, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and former Oklahoma public education superintendent Ryan Walters.
Meanwhile, the Leadership Institute, a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit that trains conservative activists, launched a project it called the Riley Gaines Center. In fundraising materials, it promised to send Gaines to speak on college campuses and recruit other student athletes who had been “harmed by zealots of transgender ideology.” The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation—one of the biggest funders of the conservative movement—donated $100,000 to the project in 2023. In the first five months of the center’s existence, the Leadership Institute paid Gaines more than $126,000, according to tax filings. As more student athletes began to forfeit matches with trans players, Gaines awarded them medals stamped with the Leadership Institute logo and emblazoned with the name of her center.
She also signed on with Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk. Following Kirk’s model, she gave speeches on college campuses, then debated students who disagreed with her. In April 2023, she took her message to what was sure to be a hostile crowd at San Francisco State University. In a third-floor classroom, Gaines spoke to about 75 students, some with slogans written on their bodies in marker. Scores of protesters chanted in the stairwell, and more gathered outside.
When the event finished and the classroom door was opened, protesters rushed toward Gaines. She tweeted that she was assaulted by a man—“a guy in a dress,” her husband later clarified to Fox News—though the university police later said in a statement to the student newspaper that “claims of crimes committed were unfounded.” “We had four different cameras, and we reviewed all of the footage, we asked all the reporters, we interviewed a majority of the people, everyone we could identify we reached out to and interviewed. Nobody saw that happen,” says Josh Carter, the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. “We scoured the video pretty religiously…We confidently could say, 100 percent beyond the shadow of a doubt, that she was not hit.”
But Gaines was forced to stay in a separate classroom for about three hours while campus police guarded the door against furious protesters. At one point, as an administrator tried to calm them, a protester shouted, “Tell her to pay us, then she can go—10 bucks each,” and was met with laughter. Eventually, more police arrived, formed a protective escort, and whisked her downstairs and out the back, to her car parked behind a police line. “I literally had to run from the middle of the diamond formed around me and into the car to avoid being slammed to the ground by protesters,” she writes in her memoir. “It was like a scene from Black Ops-Zombies.” (Two student reporters present say there were no protesters nearby as she got into her car.)
Gaines had a new story of victimization—this time by a “woke mob.” In the following days and weeks, she embarked on a media tour, claiming she’d been “punched,” “hit multiple times,” and held for “ransom.” The next month, testifying before a House Homeland Security Committee hearing titled “‘Mostly Peaceful’: Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence,” she described the episode as “kidnapping.”
After the event, Gaines texted her mother. “I’m going to save the world woman,” she wrote. “Martyrs have to be willing to put themselves out there if you want to make change.”
By early 2024, Gaines was preparing to take her fight to the legal arena in partnership with the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, a new nonprofit known as ICONS. Like Gaines’ activism, ICONS was born from the furor over Lia Thomas. Its founders—Arizona backstroke champion Marshi Smith and swim mom Kim Jones—have said that they were first introduced by Gaines herself in the spring of 2022, not long after the NCAA championship.
Smith had co-authored a letter to the NCAA protesting Thomas’ inclusion. Jones—a Stanford tennis player in her glory days—had been concerned about Thomas since she first spotted the swimmer’s meet results early in the 2021–2022 season. Her daughter, who swam the 200-yard freestyle at Yale, placed second to Thomas at a meet and missed the Ivy League Championships final by one spot while Thomas swam to victory.
In 2022, they formed ICONS, which the New York Times has called the “pre-eminent organization in the trans sports ban movement.” By the end of 2024, ICONS had grown to a million-dollar operation, according to tax filings. Aside from an early $54,000 infusion from Jones and her husband, a tech executive, their donors are largely anonymous.
“I feel like we’re in this battle of really spiritual warfare. It’s no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.”
One exception is XX-XY Athletics, a sports apparel brand launched in 2024 by former Levi’s marketing executive Jennifer Sey, which blends open transphobia with glossy girl-power messaging to sell T-shirts, shorts, and hoodies. The company, which intentionally misgenders trans people on its social media, offers endorsement deals to students who denounce trans athletes and says it has donated revenue to ICONS, the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute, and Gays Against Groomers. Gaines, who released a clothing line with the company last summer, serves as a brand representative, as does her younger sister.
Initially, ICONS hosted press conferences and events where Gaines and other athletes delivered speeches. But the group soon shifted its focus to lawsuits, arguing that trans-inclusive sports policies discriminated against women. For help, it turned to Bill Bock, the former general counsel of the US Anti-Doping Agency, whose legal bona fides include nailing Lance Armstrong for using performance-enhancing drugs and representing Donald Trump in his bid to overturn the 2020 election results in Wisconsin. (Bock’s son also worked for Trump for a time as a fact-checker in the White House speechwriting office.)
Bock, too, has said that Thomas was the catalyst that made him shift his focus to transgender athletes. “Bill has made this a life cause,” says a lawyer with knowledge of Bock’s cases. In 2024, he resigned his position on an NCAA committee and authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed accusing the association of having “regressive, discriminatory, antiwoman policies.”
One month later, funded by ICONS, Bock filed Gaines v. NCAA. The class-action lawsuit retold the story of the NCAA 2022 women’s swimming championships, arguing that the NCAA—and, by extension, the Georgia state university system that hosted the meet—had violated Title IX, the federal law that forbids sex discrimination in education, including school sports.
The NCAA “imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports, reinterpreting Title IX to define women as a testosterone level, permitting men to compete on women’s teams, and destroying female safe spaces in women’s locker rooms,” the lawsuit argued, adding that the NCAA’s previous rules were unfair because they allowed trans women to have testosterone levels higher than cis women could achieve without doping. In practice, according to the 2024 IOC-funded study, the testosterone levels of transgender women athletes on hormone therapy are equivalent to those of cis women.
Bock wasn’t the first to bring the fight over trans athletes to court. Alliance Defending Freedom—the conservative Christian legal nonprofit behind major anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion Supreme Court decisions—filed an early case in Connecticut in 2020, arguing that two trans high school runners deprived other girls of championship titles and potential scholarships. (After being quashed and later resurrected in appeals, the case is currently stayed, pending a Supreme Court decision on trans athletes.)
In 2020, as Republican state legislators started passing trans sports bans, LGBTQ rights groups began to fight back with lawsuits of their own. In West Virginia and Idaho, for example, the ACLU sued on behalf of a trans middle schooler and a college student who wanted to join their schools’ women’s cross-country teams. They won in the circuit courts, with judges ruling that sports bans counted as a kind of illegal sex discrimination. The Supreme Court agreed to review both cases at the request of Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers representing the states. A decision is expected by summer 2026.
“Once you chip away at trans people’s rights, and you see them as not being entitled to the same protections as everyone else, then it’s easier to attack their rights in other ways.”
Gaines v. NCAA is even more sweeping than the current Supreme Court cases. Rather than arguing over whether states can ban trans athletes from teams matching their gender identity, the case argues that trans girls and women must be banned from women’s sports, starting with the NCAA and Georgia. The case contends that “trans inclusion is sex discrimination against cisgender women,” summarizes Jess Braverman, legal director at Gender Justice, a Minnesota nonprofit. In September, a judge dismissed the claims against the Georgia state university system but allowed Gaines’ Title IX case against the NCAA to continue.
ICONS is also funding two more Bock-led cases making similar arguments. One, filed in November 2024, involves college volleyball players who opposed a trans player at San José State University; Gaines reportedly helped recruit the lead plaintiff, Brooke Slusser, who previously had been close with her trans teammate. The other accuses the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League Council of Presidents of violating Title IX by letting Thomas compete three years ago, and calls for Thomas’ name to be erased from public record books.
The underlying goal of ICONS’ lawsuits is much bigger than Thomas and bigger than athletics. Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, says the cases “could have a huge impact beyond sports,” affecting trans people’s rights under Title IX and potentially their constitutional protections. “Once you chip away at trans people’s rights, and you see them as not being entitled to the same protections as everyone else, then it’s easier to attack their rights in other ways,” Patel explains. “And that’s what’s happened here. It began with sports five years ago, and then it went to bathrooms, gender-affirming care, or other aspects of education and life.”
ICONS, for its part, isn’t hiding this strategy. Sports “is the public arena of the difference of the sexes,” Jones said in an Instagram video in 2024. “If men can’t be women in sports, and we win there, they can’t be women anywhere.”
With Donald Trump back in office, Gaines’ political influence has reached new heights. She recounted a story recently that highlighted her access to the new administration. Right after Trump’s inauguration, she contacted the incoming director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, with a complaint. Her husband, a British swimmer whom she had met at the University of Kentucky, had been unable to get a green card due to a requirement that he receive the Covid vaccine. Within a couple of days, Edlow’s office had dropped the requirement, which the immigration official confirmed personally while appearing as a guest on Gaines’ podcast.
“It would be an absolute privilege to swear him in personally to be a citizen,” Edlow gushed.
Meanwhile, Trump’s White House immediately started using its power to target trans athletes. Under President Joe Biden, the administration had interpreted Title IX to forbid discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Trump promptly reversed that policy. He signed his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order the day after ICONS filed its lawsuit against Penn. The day after that, the Education Department opened Title IX investigations into both Penn and San José State University, using the same arguments ICONS made in its legal cases. Soon, the administration announced it was withholding $175 million in federal funding for Penn over its trans athlete policy.
“I think it’s very telling,” says one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates. “She’s very, ‘Protect women’s sports.’ But not when it comes to our team.”
Penn folded under the pressure. Last summer, Gaines returned to the White House, along with Bock and Smith from ICONS, for the announcement of a resolution between the administration and Lia Thomas’ old university, putting an end to the Title IX investigation. The school had agreed to wipe Thomas’ records from its books, ban trans women from women’s teams and locker rooms, and send “a personalized letter of apology” to each “impacted female swimmer.”
“The most prolific offender of Title IX in collegiate sports has bent the knee,” Smith declared on Gaines’ podcast soon after. “But,” she added, “it’s definitely not enough.”
What would be enough? Thomas’ name is still on the record board at an Ohio university, Smith pointed out. The NCAA hasn’t erased her national title either. And then there’s every other trans athlete to go after: “There are many other sports affected and many other schools aside from just Lia Thomas, over the past few years, that need to be rectified.” ICONS, she told Gaines, will keep pushing for anti-trans court rulings that will outlast their allies in the Trump administration. “I feel really secure for the next three years or so, but we don’t know who’s coming next,” Smith said.
As her clout within the MAGA universe grows, Gaines has expanded her repertoire beyond anti-trans advocacy. On her podcast, she now decries the gamut of right-wing bugaboos, from Planned Parenthood to the “deep state.” Nor is she the only Gaines making her presence known in politics. Her dad, Brad, is running for Congress in Tennessee.
As of last June, she’d clocked 118 Fox News appearances since the NCAA championship, according to Media Matters. She’d appeared on the network nine times that month alone, amid an online skirmish with Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who had slammed Gaines on X for misgendering a transgender high schooler. “You’re truly sick,” Biles posted. “All of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser.” In response, Gaines posted a video of Biles testifying that she was sexually abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. “Simone Biles when she had to endure a predatory man Vs Simone Biles when other girls have to endure predatory men,” she quipped, equating trans women in sports to sexual abusers.
Since Biles had compared Gaines’ body to a man’s—Biles later apologized—Gaines unveiled her baby bump and ultrasound photos onstage at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit put on by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. “How many men do you know that have this?” she beamed at a crowd of shrieking young fans.
It was a crowning moment for Gaines, who had consolidated her position as one of the country’s most prominent female conservative activists. Fordham University associate professor Zein Murib compares her to an internet-era Anita Bryant, the singer and Miss Oklahoma turned anti-gay activist in the 1970s whose “Save Our Children” campaign overturned anti-discrimination ordinances. Gaines, Murib says, is similar to Bryant in “the ways that she is working to create hysteria around a vulnerable group of people for her own political purposes and profit.”
Her rhetoric about protecting women, Murib adds, “is part of a long history of whiteness and femininity being deployed, under the logic of protection, to advance a very particular political project.”
After Kirk’s assassination in September, Gaines was floated as a possible successor. The night after the shooting, she filmed a video in her pajamas, calling him a friend and a mentor. “I would have been there with him this week when he was fatally shot if I weren’t this far along,” she said, indicating her pregnancy.
Gaines pledged to continue touring with Turning Point USA. “I would be lying to you if I said there wasn’t any apprehension on my end to go back onto these college campuses,” she said. “I have seen with my own eyes and my own experiences the violence…especially from Transtifa,” she added, using a term used to falsely portray trans people as violent extremists.
Then she went a step further. Anyone who believes that people can be transgender is crazy enough to commit murder, she argued. “If you’re insane enough to believe that men can get pregnant and that women need prostate exams, and that tampons belong in boys’ bathrooms or whatever other crazy stuff that they believe, you’re insane enough, clearly, to pull a gun and shoot someone.”
While Gaines continues blasting her message, another lawsuit is making its way through the courts more quietly. In the spring of 2024, two former members of Gaines’ University of Kentucky swim team filed a lawsuit alleging that Lars Jorgensen, their coach, had sexually assaulted them.
Both swimmers are former students whom Jorgensen hired as assistant coaches. In their complaint, they allege he groomed them by pressuring them to lose severe amounts of weight, emotionally abusing them in front of team members, and making sexual comments to them. The assistant coaches, who believed their careers were dependent on Jorgensen, allege he invited them to his home and sexually assaulted them.
One swimmer alleges Jorgensen forcibly raped her multiple times between 2019 and 2023, telling her he would “ruin her reputation” if she told anyone. The other says that in 2022, he groped and kissed her despite her protests. Their complaint also alleges that Jorgensen raped a third assistant coach at his home after a coaching staff Christmas party several years earlier. They claim that university employees were aware of some of Jorgensen’s abuse and discouraged them from reporting it when they came forward. (“UK has consistently acted upon and investigated allegations when they were known and when complainants have opted to pursue allegations and participate in the investigative process,” a university spokesperson says.)
One of the assistant coaches who filed the complaint now identifies as transgender. (In court documents, he uses she/her pronouns to refer to the period before his transition.) When news of the lawsuit first broke in April 2024, Jorgensen’s attorney at the time claimed the allegations were politically motivated, fabricated to punish Jorgensen for supporting Gaines. “This all has to do with NCAA woke philosophy and his support of his swimmer, Ms. Gaines,” the lawyer, Greg Anderson, told the Lexington Herald Leader. “The timing of it, in light of her statements publicly, is extremely suspicious.”
Gaines—who had once declared her trust in and affection for Jorgensen—posted a long message on social media a few days after the lawsuit was reported. “I never saw or heard any of these claims taking place, but it isn’t difficult to say I vehemently condemn all violence, especially sexual violence against women,” she wrote. “While I spend most of my time speaking to the harm and severity of allowing men into women’s sports, we can’t neglect or condone other issues that are far too common in female athletics like sexual abuse from authority figures. It’s my mission to defend women (really, humanity) and this falls in line.”
But in the year and a half since then, Gaines has been quiet in public about the lawsuit. Two UK swimmers told me they’re disappointed and frustrated that she has not used her platform to talk about the problems that affected her teammates. “I think it’s very telling,” says one of her anonymous teammates. “She’s very, ‘Protect women’s sports.’ But not when it comes to our team.”
“The reality is that there are much bigger problems that women face in sports,” Ward says. “Society has ignored these problems for decades. And now, all of a sudden, we’re pretending to care about women in sports in the name of banning trans people?”
In October, following an investigation, the US Center for SafeSport permanently banned Jorgensen from coaching, citing sexual and physical misconduct, sexual harassment, and other findings. The lawsuit against Jorgensen has not yet gone to trial; a judge ruled last February that some of the allegations were too old to sue over. Jorgensen did not respond to a request for comment; in court papers, he has denied the claims. Ward says she believes them. “When I wear my UK swimming gear out,” she says, “I’ve had three times where somebody’s approached me and asked me about Riley Gaines. And I’ve said, ‘Well, do you know about Lars Jorgensen?’”
“Every single time, they’ve said no,” she continues. “And I just say, ‘You know, it’s hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates.”
