Mother JonesModify

2026-04-14 19:30:00

There’s a virus in our tax system.

A stealth virus, it was embedded in America’s economic DNA for a century, biding its time, waiting for the appropriate conditions to reveal itself. And then we created those conditions, unleashing it to infect our institutions of culture and democracy, replicate, and burst forth to infect anew.

An oligarchy virus.

In his departing address, President Joe Biden warned of rising oligarchy in the United States—a notable event, being the first time any US president had thus directed a term previously associated with corrupt Russian billionaires. In truth, oligarchy has been thriving for decades in the United States, though never so much as it is today. University of California, Berkeley, economist Gabriel Zucman recently calculated that, as of November 2025, the richest 0.00001 percent of the population, just 19 politically influential billionaires, held in excess of $3 trillion. That’s more than 12 percent of the nation’s total income. The richest among them, Elon Musk, may soon be the planet’s first trillionaire.

The United States now has 1,000 billionaires, give or take. This so-called megadonor (really megataker) class has always pulled strings in the background. But with a few exceptions, only recently have they become such conspicuous political players. After Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance, mainstream media headlines conveyed, without a lick of irony, who was really calling the shots: “Biden campaign tries to soothe panicked donors in tense phone calls” (Reuters); “Democratic Donors’ Big Question: What’s Plan B?” (New York Times).

A Washington Post analysis last fall found that federal campaign spending by the 100 richest Americans, untethered by a series of permissive Supreme Court rulings, had soared 50-fold over the previous decade. In March, a New York Times analysis revealed that 300 billionaires and their close family members had spent more than $3 billion on federal elections in 2024—19 percent of overall expenditures, whereas billionaire spending on the 2008 election had been a scant 0.3 percent of the total. Many of these same billionaires, the Times noted, are now flexing their wealth power in state and local elections as well.

Nowhere is the oligarchy problem more acute than among those 0.00001 percenters. Fifteen of the 19 are hectobillionaires, with assets north of $100 billion each. Each of the top six controls a major media outlet or social media platform—three (Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) sat onstage at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebration. 

No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer—and delivered.

Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms’ share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly—not in eliminating government fraud and waste as promised, but in gutting and disabling federal agencies, including the ones creating headaches for Musk’s companies. 

Whatever you may think of billionaires and their existence, the ways in which extreme wealth concentration distorts our culture and government have become so screamingly obvious that they no longer need be debated. The real, existential question is: Can this oligarchy virus be stopped? Or have we, as with our climate, allowed things to go too far?

To answer these questions, it pays to examine how we got here in the first place.

You’ve probably heard the term “progressive taxation.” That’s when the government claims a larger chunk of each successive tier of a person’s income as they move up the ladder. In theory, our federal government does so now, but with caveats you could drive a vintage Ferrari through.

Only families with excess income can accumulate wealth, of course. And those with extraordinary incomes accumulate an extraordinary share of the wealth. Which brings us to our first caveat: The government’s definition of income is wrong. When I say “income,” I’m not talking about the number on the W-2 form that reports your wages to the IRS, but rather your true economic income, which is known as Haig-Simons income.

Tax analysts Robert Haig and Henry Simons developed the concept early in the 20th century. It’s simple: Haig-Simons income is the increase (or decrease) in your pre-tax wealth from the start of the year to the end of the year assuming you haven’t spent a penny. This definition accounts not just for work earnings, but also for changes in the value of a family’s assets and investments (real estate, a business, artwork, stocks and bonds, jewelry, etc.) even if those assets haven’t been sold. Gains on unsold investments, often referred to as “paper profits” or “unrealized gains,” are as real as any other form of income when it comes to measuring wealth.

Barring government intervention, the wealth derived from Haig-Simons income—which I’ll just call “income” going forward—always concentrates in the hands of the rich. To understand this, picture 2,000 working-class families with annual earnings of $50,000 each—$100 million all told. Suppose those households live very frugally and spend only 90 percent of their earnings. That leaves them with pre-tax savings at year’s end of $5,000 per family, or $10 million total.

Now consider a single ultra-rich family with the same total income—$100 million, mainly from investments. Even if this absurdly fortunate family burns through $10 million living in luxury, they end the year up $90 million. So, our working-class group and our ultra-rich family have the same overall income, but the rich family pockets 90 percent of the resulting wealth.

These figures are pretax, so let’s tax them.

What if we imposed an across-the-board flat tax, as Republicans often have advocated? Make it 10 percent. Our working-class households, after taxes and living expenses, break even. The ultra-rich household ends up with less money—$80 million—but its share of the overall wealth gain rises to 100 percent.

Winner takes all.

In theory, an income tax, if sufficiently progressive and combined with an enforceable inheritance tax, can prevent an oligarchy from arising in the first place. And for a while the federal tax system actually accomplished this. During the post-World War II period—when family wealth derived largely from earnings that were subject to annual taxation at progressive rates, and when the country’s income distribution wasn’t so heavily skewed in favor of those at the top—it did a decent job of preventing undue wealth concentration. But the system’s fatal flaw, the oligarchy virus, always lurked just beneath the surface in the way the IRS defines income.

The income tax was first enacted by Congress early last century in response to the Gilded Age, which began soon after the Civil War ended and lasted until World War I. Then came the Great Depression and the robust tax-the-rich initiatives of the World War II years, which brought about an unprecedented de-concentration of wealth in America. From 1945 through the 1970s, the top marginal tax rate on wages—that is, the rate that applied to the topmost portion of a high-earner’s income—fluctuated between 70 and 94 percent, which helped maintain a relatively egalitarian wealth distribution as the GI Bill and other government programs contributed to a thriving (if overwhelmingly white) middle class.

The system only worked because economic conditions were not yet conducive to the emergence of the virus. The 1956 federal minimum wage was worth more than $12 an hour in today’s dollars, for example, versus $7.25 now. Antitrust laws were strictly enforced to block mergers in a wide variety of industries, including banking, brewing, consumer products, groceries, shoes, and steel. Strong unions kept wages on track with the nation’s rising GDP while the S&P 500 lagged. These and other factors prevented the most affluent families from realizing the full regressive potential of the tax system and, for nearly four decades, stopped wealth from re-concentrating to Gilded Age levels.  

We’ve now overshot those levels. The Great Re-Gilding commenced in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan oversaw the first of two major tax-cut packages and Congress left the minimum wage to the hungry teeth of inflation, such that its buying power today is less than half of what it was in the year the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Relentless attacks on organized labor by conservative politicians eroded private sector union membership from a mid-1950s peak of 35 percent to about 6 percent in 2025. Decades of trade policies that made it cheaper for US firms to manufacture products overseas curbed demand for domestic labor, constraining wage growth. These wage-reducing strategies didn’t merely reduce the quality of life for millions of Americans, they also shifted a significant portion of workers’ wages into corporate profits—boosting the bosses’ stock portfolios and creating ripe conditions for the oligarchy virus. 

The impact of stagnant wages on the fortunes of the rich wasn’t a one-off. Economic policymakers increasingly based their decisions almost solely on protecting and boosting the value of investment assets owned by relatively few affluent Americans. The government all but gave up on antitrust enforcement, granting near monopolistic power to major players in industry after industry—airlines, energy, groceries, media.

A 1982 regulatory change allowed public corporations to buy back their shares en masse from the market. When a company does this, its value is divided among fewer shares, thereby boosting the share price and giving a tax-free bonus to the remaining investors—who would have been taxed had that money instead been distributed as dividends. In 2018, Republican lawmakers slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. That generous rate cut, and the unprecedented buyback binge it fueled, drove stock prices up while doing nothing to enhance the productive value of the companies.

And who owns stock in America? The richest one-tenth of 1 percent of the population owns nearly one-quarter of it. The remaining nine-tenths of the top 1 percent owns another quarter. In fact, the average household in that topmost tier holds almost 500 times as much stock as the average household in the bottom 99 percent.

How did a supposedly progressive income tax system fail so miserably? That’s the oligarchy virus at work. The virus ensures that when investment gains become too prominent in the nation’s overall income mix, the system flips regressive. That’s because the federal government taxes investment gains at a fraction of the rates it applies to other income (like your salary)—and that’s when those gains are taxed at all.

Haig-Simons income, to remind you, includes the gains on unsold investments, which are by far the biggest source of income for America’s wealthiest families. But the IRS won’t touch that income. And even when the gains are “realized” via the sale of the underlying investment, the government touches that income lightly.

Look at Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, who holds more than $100 billion in unrealized profits from his company holdings. He need never sell those shares, because, like other wealthy investors, he can simply borrow against them at low interest rates, avoiding income tax almost entirely. And if Huang does sell those shares, his windfall is subject to the maximum capital gains tax (23.8 percent), already far lower than the rate he would pay on a CEO’s conventional salary (roughly 41 percent, with payroll taxes).

But Huang would get a far better deal than a mere halving of his tax rate, because it turns out that allowing unrealized gains to compound tax-free for decades drastically lowers the effective annual rate at which they are taxed when the investment is sold.

Confused? Check this out: Suppose you invest $1 million in a company that grows at 10 percent per year. If you sell that stock after 20 years and pay the 23.8 percent tax, you end up with the same amount of money as you would if your paper gains had been taxed at 12.4 percent annually, and you sold just enough stock every year to pay the tax. That’s only about a third of the top rate a high earner pays on wage income, and even less than a typical worker—say a plumbing contractor making $80,000 a year—is charged on their earnings.

But wait! The math gets even more advantageous for a guy like Huang, thanks to an often-overlooked aspect of federal tax regressivity. Namely, the faster an investment grows, the lower the effective tax rate when it is eventually sold. If, in 2006, you had put your $1 million into Nvidia stock—which had a staggering average return of 37.7 percent per year through 2025—and then sold it at the end of those 20 years and paid the tax, your effective annual tax rate would be less than 5 percent. Nice, huh?

By rewarding the most fortunate long-term investors with the lowest tax rates, federal policymakers have virtually guaranteed oligarchic levels of wealth and power. If you hit a home run, as in our initial example, you pay only half the already favorable capital gains tax rate. But if you’re Huang, or Jeff Bezos, whose company’s value has risen roughly a millionfold over 32 years—a real grand slam—your effective tax rate when you finally sell those shares dwindles to a paltry 4 percent. 

From 1945 to 1982, the virus remained dormant. The inflation-adjusted S&P 500 index roughly doubled in value over that 37-year period. From 1982 to today, it has ballooned fifteenfold. As the gap between the true incomes of the wealthiest households and other Americans widened, and the share of upper-crust incomes comprised primarily of investment gains swelled, our ineptly designed tax system produced the opposite of a desirable outcome—a pernicious oligarchy class, which is now fighting tooth and nail to extend its economic and political advantage.

What if we had put up guardrails? Something like the Buffett Rule—an unsuccessful proposal to tax annual incomes of $1 million or more at a minimum of 30 percent, inspired by Warren Buffett’s observation that it was unfair he paid lower tax rates than his secretary. Had that rule been applied to Buffett’s Haig-Simons income—if his Berkshire Hathaway gains were taxed at 30 percent annually, and he sold just enough each year to cover the bill—he would have been worth $9.5 billion as of January 2026—not $149.5 billion. And had he been charged the same rate each year that the IRS charges on the top wage tier for a married couple, his Berkshire wealth, excluding state taxes, would today add up to about $1.4 billion, less than 1 percent of its present value—which resulted from his true income going largely untaxed for six decades.

The same applies to other members of the 12-figure club. Taxed properly, they could never have accumulated such colossal, democracy-distorting piles of treasure. In 1982, per Zucman’s analysis, the average top 0.00001 percent household (just 11 families) had 14,000 times the wealth of the average household. Now they have 200,000 times more.

The virus in action.

Is there hope for a vaccine? Some cure for this societal affliction? 

Theoretically, yes. To address the Haig-Simons income gap, you could raise the minimum wage, enhance legal protections that allow workers to organize, update overtime laws, and properly fund the agencies that enforce the antitrust statutes. You could pass laws to reverse pro-monopoly court decisions and repeal the 1982 SEC ruling that enabled unlimited stock buybacks.

Simultaneously, you could overhaul the tax code to create a truly progressive income tax. This would require abandoning the fiction that investment gains aren’t real until the investments are sold, and that income from sales of stocks and bonds and gold bars and stud horses and rare sports cars deserve to be taxed at lower rates less than the compensation we earn by hauling garbage or painting houses—or writing magazine articles. 

All of that would all be a step in the right direction. Yet given the damage the virus has already wrought to our body politic—and this might well require a constitutional amendment—we need a wealth tax as a circuit breaker. For this very purpose, I helped write the Oligarch Act of 2025, introduced in the House last April by Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.).     

The Oligarch Act taxes excessive wealth progressively, at a maximum rate of 8 percent on fortunes in excess of 1 million times the median US household wealth. (This rate would apply to more families today, five, than at any time since the Gilded Age.) By taxing relative—not absolute—wealth, the legislation serves as a firewall against extreme wealth inequality. When inequality is moderate, fewer households would be subject to it. But in an oligarchic era such as today, it would put brakes on the undeserved growth of the most obscene fortunes and help shift political power back to whom it was once promised: the people. 

So yes, we know what’s needed, but the odds of accomplishing it? Mighty slim. Oligarchy feeds on itself. Wealth begets power—which begets more wealth, which begets additional power. Disrupting that vicious cycle by peaceful means becomes increasingly difficult and, at some point, maybe impossible.

If political efforts prove futile, could a popular uprising—like the French Revolution—dethrone our oligarchs? Fun idea, but consider how, in the hands of King Louis, mass surveillance and armies of AI-controlled drones and robots might have changed the outcome.

When you’re battling a virus, the longer the infection festers, the worse your chances of survival. Have we waited too long to treat this one? No doubt. But confronting American oligarchy now—before it’s entirely unstoppable—is the only rational choice.

Bob Lord, a former tax attorney, is senior vice president of tax policy for the group Patriotic Millionaires.

Methodology: Estimates of billionaires’ stock holdings in their primary company on January 1, 2026, were based on publicly available sources. For simplicity, the graphic only considers the effect of taxing each billionaire’s unrealized (paper) gains annually from the year the stock was first publicly traded. The calculations assume the billionaire sold just enough of the stock each year to cover the tax owed. Had we also taxed their gains in valuation during the pre-IPO years, the effect would be more profound. For example, had Jeff Bezos’ January 1 Amazon holdings been taxed at the prevailing ordinary wage rate (income plus payroll taxes) each year during the pre-IPO period and subsequently each year thereafter, they would have been worth roughly $7 billion in January—not more than $200 billion.

2026-04-14 19:30:00

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

Governments desperate for cash to protect their citizens from the growing impacts of the climate crisis are being put in a “beyond absurd” situation this week at global finance talks: they are being urged not to mention the climate, even as they address the current oil crisis.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) spring meetings take place this week amid a fragile ceasefire in Iran and upended geopolitics. One of the priorities was to forge a new “climate change action plan” (CCAP) for the world’s biggest provider of funds to developing countries to replace the current strategy, which expires in June.

Now, it looks like the new plan may be shelved, along with substantive discussion of the climate crisis.

With the oil crunch still biting, the delegates from up to 189 countries at the conference in Washington, DC, might have been expected to discuss investments in renewable energy, which many see as crucial to energy security and an antidote to volatility. Climate finance is also a pressing issue for poor countries already paying billions each year to repair the damage from droughts, floods and storms.

If these discussions are instead largely confined to whispers in corridors, the reason is clear: the US president, Donald Trump. Insiders have told the Guardian the White House is forcing countries to choose between opening up a potentially unbridgeable rift or playing down the climate crisis and trying to squeeze in green priorities by the back door.

Last autumn, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanded the removal of some climate finance targets from the World Bank’s aims and insisted it must “finance all affordable and reliable sources of energy…[with] an all-of-the-above approach to energy that includes financing for gas, oil, and coal.” The US is the biggest shareholder in the World Bank, with about 17 percent of its capital.

Other countries, including large developed economies, have reacted with alarm. Senior staff of several international finance and development institutions have said the US has piled pressure on the World Bank, the IMF, and other publicly funded institutions over the climate.

They said that, although the climate was still on the agenda, people at a senior level were “self-censoring” and removing the term from reports and projects. The Guardian understands some leading countries prefer not to push for a new CCAP.

That would be disastrous for the developing world, experts said. “It is beyond absurd that, in the middle of an escalating oil crisis, a World Bank meeting could sideline talk of climate change,” said Mohamed Adow, the director of the Power Shift Africa think tank. “Fossil fuels and the climate emergency are inextricably linked. This moment is a huge opportunity to accelerate the shift away from fossil-fuel dependence, with potentially historic benefits for the world. It will be a tragedy if politicians fail to do so.”

Catherine Abreu, the director of the International Climate Politics Hub, said: “The spring meetings will be a big test of these institutions. Will we see the World Bank and IMF unable to respond to the majority of their members, because they are swayed by these powerful minorities?”

Under its current CCAP, the World Bank Group aims to devote 35 percent of all its funding to climate-related activities, half of which should be for adaptation, and the group has also moved to end most finance to fossil fuels, though loopholes remain. The World Bank is the biggest single source of climate funding, and many donor countries channel their climate finance largely through the multilateral development banks.

At the Cop29 UN climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, countries agreed that at least $1.3 tillion a year should flow to the developing world by 2035, to help countries cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather. Developed countries committed $300 billion a year of that total, and reaching the target cannot happen without the World Bank.

In the World Bank Group’s last financial year, from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, 48 percent of financing qualified as having climate co-benefits under its methodology.

A spokesperson for the World Bank Group said: “The World Bank Group supports public and private clients in achieving their smart development goals. This includes building low-carbon, resilient infrastructure, and energy systems that manage emissions responsibly so countries can create jobs and sustain growth.

“We will finance what works best for countries, using a least-cost, reliable mix to meet their needs, while managing emissions responsibly. It is not an either/or and we are continuing to see strong demand for support for adaptation and mitigation from our clients. Over the last decade, 215 million people have gained new or improved access to electricity through our current energy programs, and we expect this number to grow to 575 million.”

Much could still be achieved without formally labeling projects as climate-related, Lord Stern, a former World Bank chief economist and now a professor at the London School of Economics, told the Guardian. “You don’t have to plant big climate flags on these things; it’s just a good investment,” he said.

“US pressure is coming on the World Bank, but they can continue to do agriculture, forests, water, energy, public transport. These things are highly relevant to tackling the climate crisis—without highlighting climate change,” he added.

He also pointed to mass transit systems, such as urban railways, in cities in the developing world. “Metro systems in cities are a big part of the climate story. Why would the US oppose metro systems in overcrowded cities? Building a metro is not a covert climate action; it’s just doing things better.”

There is still much work to be done on clarifying what should make up the $300bn and $1.3 trillion targets. Stern said: “The way climate finance is counted is something I hope will develop. Without jiggery-pokery, there are lots of things that we should be supporting that should be counted towards the global climate finance goal.”

2026-04-14 18:00:00

Blair’s mom had been cautious when she first brought her 6-year-old to the LGBTQ clinic at Cleveland’s MetroHealth hospital, “trying to figure out why he felt different inside,” as she puts it. She didn’t want to rush her child into treatment. So she was grateful to find the clinicians there took a slow and careful approach to Blair’s health care. Over the years they provided open-ended counseling, monitored his hormone levels and bone development, and only progressed with puberty blockers when it was clear that transitioning was making him happier and more confident. “That was my barometer for doing the right thing,” she tells me.

Today, at 16, Blair (a pseudonym to preserve his privacy) has been going to the clinic for a decade, and, by his mom’s account, thriving. Even when Ohio banned transgender medical treatments for minors in 2024, he could stay on his medication thanks to a grandfather clause in the law. But a few months ago, his mom got a message from MetroHealth alerting the family to a new threat.

On December 18, 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a declaration that rebranded transgender medical care as “sex-rejecting procedures” and claimed, erroneously, that the treatments “fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care” when given to minor patients. That same day, his agency proposed a pair of regulations that would curtail access nationwide. The first would forbid federal insurance programs that cover kids in low-income families from paying for puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and the surgery used in rare cases to treat gender dysphoria. The other would deliver an ultimatum to hospitals: Stop providing the treatments to trans kids, or else get kicked out of the federal Medicaid and Medicare programs.

The rules were designed to be a “nuclear weapon” against trans youth health care, a former Trump domestic policy assistant explained at a recent event. Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements cover nearly half of all hospital-care spending. “Hospitals just are not in a position to say, ‘You know what? It’s really important to us that we continue to provide this care, and we’re going to forego payments from the federal government,’” says Lindsey Dawson, director of LGBTQ program at the health policy research firm KFF. The rules are not yet final, but they’ve already sent shockwaves through the health care system. Since the start of the year, at least nine hospital systems stopped providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy—including Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago and Rady Children’s Health in San Diego, according to a STAT News analysis.

For a teenager struggling with gender dysphoria, a break in treatment could mean their body proceeds with the puberty of their birth sex, with potentially severe mental-health consequences. Blair’s mom worried not just about her son losing his medication, but also the counseling, regular blood tests, and side effect monitoring he received from his team at the MetroHealth clinic. So, after taking some time to think, she wrote a comment on Regulations.gov, beseeching the government to stay out of her family’s personal business.

“I have learned that my original vision of what my child’s life would look like is very different from reality—and yet, this version is just as beautiful, if not more so,” she wrote. “That is why I find it so hard to understand why the government would try to interfere in such personal and medically complex matters.”

She’s not the only parent pleading with HHS not to cut off their child’s treatment. “Every decision I have made as a parent is to keep my kid healthy and safe,” wrote one of the 30,000-some public commenters on the proposed regulation. “In an emerging culture where parents’ choice is so important to school and child development policies, why is my choice to consult with my child’s medical team and make informed decisions being taken away and infringed on?”

The answer is bound up in a Trump Era political crusade against transgender people, one that has the backing of a small cadre of academics and clinicians who disagree with the position held by virtually all leading US medical groups that gender-affirming treatments are medically necessary for some kids. In its latest attempt to wipe trans health care off the map, the administration drew on a report authored by these opponents—none of whom have direct experience providing hormone treatments to trans children, and some of whom have a background in anti-trans activism.

Right-wingers began drafting the earliest bans against transgender health care around 2019. Since then, following a coordinated campaign, 27 states forbid doctors from following mainstream medical standards that regard puberty blockers and hormone therapy as reasonable treatments for teens with gender dysphoria. Such treatments are rare even among the tiny fraction of minors whose doctors have coded them as trans; only about 5 percent of them take puberty blockers and 11 percent take cross-sex hormones, per one study of insurance data. Gender-affirming surgeries, also forbidden under the state bans, are even more uncommon. These treatments remain available mostly in Democratic-led states, 14 of which have passed “shield laws” protecting providers from other states’ crackdowns.

The Trump administration’s latest rules would reach past those shield laws by cutting off insurance coverage and threatening hospital balance sheets, creating yet another “significant barrier” to care, according to KFF’s Dawson. Families like Blair’s would need to find new doctors unaffiliated with hospitals—a daunting prospect—and pay out-of-pocket or with private insurance. “The people who are going to have the hardest time accessing care moving forward are the people with the fewest resources,” Dawson says.

President Donald Trump’s administration has been laying the foundation for this specific attack since his first day back in the White House. That’s when he issued an executive order instructing federal agencies to “take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.” A few days later came another order that characterized gender-affirming treatments for minors as “blatant harm [that] cloaks itself in medical necessity” and told HHS to do everything in its power to shut down treatments.

But to so dramatically change the way the federal government viewed trans health care would require expertise. So Trump’s order also instructed the agency to produce a report examining evidence and best practices for treating children who present with gender dysphoria or, in its words, “identity-based confusion.”

That May, HHS published a several hundred-page document written by anonymous authors whom the White House described as “distinguished scholars.” The report, which HHS said was “informed by an evidence-based medicine approach,” scrutinized the decade-plus of research previously used to support transgender health care for minors, and ultimately declared most of the treatments unethical. It suggested that kids with gender dysphoria be treated only with psychotherapy rather than a mix of therapy and hormone treatments medical providers sometimes prescribe. (The report specifically defended the use of so-called “exploratory” psychotherapy, an approach embraced by modern-day conversion therapists that seeks to identify the supposed cause of a client’s transgender identity.) The report didn’t stop there; it also went so far as to question whether the concept of gender—as opposed to sex—was even real.

The report read like “an anti-trans fever dream,” Kellan Baker, a trans health care policy expert and advocate, told me on the day of its release. To Baker, the whole exercise seemed like a charade—“a post-hoc justification for a political agenda they wanted to pursue anyway.”

The HHS report served as the foundation for the new, pending Medicaid rulings that threaten to end pediatric transgender care at hospitals. Who were the “distinguished scholars” who authored the document, and what experiences informed their analysis? In recent months, more details have come to light, giving more weight to Baker’s and other critics’ charge that the project was political from the start.

In November, HHS announced the names of its nine authors. The ringleader was Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank perhaps best known in recent years for stoking a right-wing panic around “critical race theory” in schools. Sapir has long made clear his stance opposing trans rights; in his political science PhD 2020 dissertation from Boston College, he argued that the federal ban on sex discrimination in schools should not be interpreted to also ban anti-trans discrimination. Since joining the Manhattan Institute in 2022, he’s written essay after essay criticizing pediatric transgender health care and its supporters.

Then he got the call to spearhead the creation of the new HHS report and recruit its team of authors, as he explained on a recent episode of the Manhattan Institute podcast. The idea was to produce a US version of the Cass Review—the controversial 2024 report commissioned by England’s National Health Service that found a lack of methodologically rigorous evidence around medical treatments and social and psychological interventions for kids with gender dysphoria.

But the Cass Review took four years; Trump wanted a report within months. “We basically had about eight weeks, nine weeks,” Sapir says on the podcast. “[The Trump administration] wanted to be able to cite it in their regulatory action,” he goes on to explain. “It’s obviously going to be central justification in the administration’s various actions on this issue.”

Sapir says he assembled his scholars with an eye for the optics. “I didn’t want this to be perceived as some hit job by a bunch of MAGA-aligned conservatives,” he said on the podcast. Yet he chose eight individuals who all already held positions against gender-affirming treatments for minors, as documented in court testimony, writing, social media posts, or public speaking. Not a single report author was transgender or had direct experience treating trans kids with puberty blockers or hormone therapy.

“Having Sapir at the helm of this project absolutely and completely discredits it as a work of scientific scholarship worthy of the agency,” says Khadijah Silver, director of gender justice and health equity at Lawyers for Good Government. (Sapir declined to comment.)

The nine authors included Duke University professor Farr Curlin, a Christian palliative care doctor who has been arguing since at least 2017 that medical transition for youth is morally problematic and repeatedly testified in favor of banning it. Others were philosophers: MIT professor Alex Byrne, who in 2023 published a book challenging the concept of gender identity, and Colorado State University professor Moti Gorin, who writes frequent commentaries in academic journals criticizing different justifications for transgender care for minors.

Another of the HHS report’s authors was Michael Laidlaw, a private practice endocrinologist who has been publicly speaking against transgender health care since at least 2018. He’s called gender identity “a fantasy or superstitious belief” and said that providers of transgender health care were “deluded by their gender identity phantoms.” At various points, he’s been a member of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), a small but influential group of religious-right doctors originally formed to oppose gay and lesbian couples adopting children, and the Kelsey Coalition—a now-defunct activist group of parents who argued against accepting trans children’s gender identities.

Laidlaw also consulted on one of the earliest bills to ban gender treatments for minors in South Dakota. “These are not physician-patient relationships at all, they are criminal-victim relationships,” he argued in a 2020 email to the bill author. Doctors who provide such care “must be prosecuted by the law,” he insisted.

Laidlaw, with his ties to ACPeds, represents the old guard of religious-right doctors who can be counted on by think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and legal groups like Alliance Defending Freedom to produce research backing conservative social policy on matters like LGBTQ rights and abortion.

But among opponents of transgender health care, there’s also a new guard—neither overtly religious nor partisan. Helping lead it is the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, or SEGM, a controversial advocacy group of clinicians who are highly critical of gender-affirming treatments for minors. Several of the HHS report’s authors have ties to SEGM. Founded in 2019, the group “frames itself as a secular alternative to the major medical, mental health professional associations’ line on gender-affirming care,” says Joanna Wuest, a scholar researching the anti-trans movement at Stony Brook University.

SEGM argues that gender-affirming treatments for youth have an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio: the benefits of treatment are “uncertain,” while the harms, such as the loss of fertility in some cases, are “more certain.” Mainstream medical associations have long taken the opposite stance, citing the evidence that gender-affirming treatments improve mental health and wellbeing for youth with gender dysphoria, as documented in a 2024 review by the University of Utah.

On its website, SEGM says it “opposes all politicization of transgender care” and does not take a position on bans. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified SEGM as a hate group and described it as the “hub” of an anti-LGBTQ “pseudoscience network” (characterizations SEGM rejects.) According to an analysis by the watchdog group Documented, a trio of therapists who advised SEGM for years have collectively been affiliated with at least six other organizations whose main purpose is to criticize transgender medical care for minors or to promote non-affirming alternatives.

One of SEGM’s cofounders, William Malone, was involved in early anti-trans legislation; he once suggested language for an Idaho bill forbidding trans people from changing their birth certificates. In 2019, Laidlaw wrote in a letter to Malone that one of his long term goals was to make sure that the Endocrine Society, which publishes clinical guidelines for transgender hormone treatments, was “publicly humiliated and sued mercilessly.”

“It might take years, but we’re going to get them,” Malone replied.

One of the HHS report’s scholars previously worked with SEGM to evaluate the evidence for pediatric evidence for gender dysphoria. Three others have reportedly presented at SEGM conferences. And another author is a SEGM cofounder: Evgenia Abbruzzese, a health care researcher and consultant. (In a statement, the organization said it was “not involved” in producing or directing the HHS report. “This is a relatively small and specialized field in which leading researchers and clinicians frequently know one another and regularly present at the same conferences, including those hosted by SEGM. “)

It was at one such conference, in 2024 in Paris, that Abbruzzese pushed the theory that gender-affirming care for minors has become more common not because it’s helpful but because it makes money for doctors and LGBTQ rights organizations. “These same organizations now are fighting to let lesbian girls remove their breasts by calling them trans men,” she argued, “and by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in litigations when states step in and say no, minors should not be receiving mastectomies.”

Abbruzzese is right about one thing: Supporters of LGBTQ rights do intend to keep fighting back in court—including against the proposed Medicaid regulations. “I feel very confident that if the rules come out as they were in the draft forms, that they’ll be challenged,” says Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law. “There are limits to the federal government’s ability to coerce states to regulate medicine in a particular way.”

To Levi, the potential damage of the Medicaid rule goes beyond the loss of health care for trans kids. “Of course it dramatically harms the transgender community,” she says. “But it ultimately erodes public health because you have an HHS that ignores science. That’s bad for public health. It’s bad for all medical care for anyone.”

Advocates like Levi have already succeeded at countering some of the administration’s attacks. Last year, a federal judge blocked Trump’s original executive order threatening to cut federal funding for providers of trans health care, ruling that it likely was unconstitutional because it violated the separation of powers and discriminated on the basis of sex. Lawsuits have halted at least eight subpoenas sent by the Trump administration to hospitals, seeking trans kids’ sensitive medical records. Then, in March, in a response to a lawsuit brought by 21 states and Washington DC, a federal judge in Oregon ruled that RFK Jr. overstepped his authority when he declared unilaterally that pediatric gender treatments “fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care.”

That ruling will prevent HHS from pulling federal funding from providers—for now. But when the Medicaid regulation is finalized, it will create a new pathway for HHS to go after hospitals. “We see the fellow federal administration trying every which way and center to shut down the care,” Levi says. The sheer number of attacks could help prove in court that the government is motivated by antipathy to trans people, she adds.

The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services could issue a final version of the rules at any time. When it does, HHS is required to evaluate and respond to the public comments on the regulations. That includes the feedback from Blair’s mom, along with the letters written by other parents, doctors, teachers, and allies.

“My entire job as a pediatrician is to ensure that kids are cared for during some of the most vulnerable times,” wrote a commenter. “I believe this decision is being driven by rhetoric and politics, not what is in the best interest of our kids and their families.” “Please do not do this,” another commenter begged. “You are politicizing my child’s mental and physical health.”

Some commenters who identified as trans kids themselves penned pleas. “Gender affirming care is a step to me feeling that I am safe in my own body,” one wrote. “I have this body for a lifetime, why not make it feel like home?”

2026-04-14 03:39:51

Despite his brashness, Donald Trump has built a habit of taking back some of his most obscene social media posts. 

On Monday, the president deleted a bizarre image of what appeared to be an AI-generated depiction of him as a Jesus-like figure following immediate criticism, many from his own right-wing supporters such as Fox News host Joey Jones and anti-trans political activist Riley Gaines. Trump had initially posted the picture on Sunday during his feud with Pope Leo XIV over the US-Israeli war in Iran. 

Trump told reporters on Monday that he thought his post portrayed him “as a doctor” and “had to do with [the humanitarian nonprofit] Red Cross.” 

“Only the fake news could come up with that one,” he continued, in response to the idea that the image made him look like Jesus.

Much like many of his policies, Trump’s posts often have no actual substance. Let’s step back in time and revisit some of the president’s previous highlights:

Where Trump depicts former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes in a racist video (February 2026)

As Katie Herchenroder wrote for Mother Jones shortly after the Truth Social post was deleted the next day:

“Toward the end of an unrelated video alleging interference in the 2020 presidential election, a clip that is around 2 seconds long features the first Black president and his wife on the bodies of apes as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. That clip comes from a longer video that a meme account posted in October.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) wrote on X: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

Trump refused to apologize, and the White House blamed a staff worker for “erroneously” posting it.

Where Trump referenced Nazi-era language in a video looking forward to a potential win in the 2024 election (May 2024)

About four seconds into a video promoting Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign asking “What happens after Donald Trump wins? What’s next for America?,” an imaginary news headline reads “Industrial strength significantly increased…driven by the creation of a unified reich.”

According to the Associated Press, the headline appeared to be text copied word-for-word from a Wikipedia entry on World War I at the time: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”

“This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press statement. The video stayed up for about 15 hours.

Where Trump violated a gag order on his criminal hush money trial nine times (April 2024)

In a criminal case where Trump was ultimately found guilty for falsifying business records to hide payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels for silence over an alleged sexual encounter, a New York judge fined the president $9,000—$1,000 for each violation—over posts on his campaign website and Truth Social page that attacked potential jurors and witnesses on the morning of April 30, 2024. Trump was ordered to delete the posts by the afternoon—which he complied with.

Some of the targets of Trump’s attacks: expected witnesses Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, and condemning prospective jurors as “liberal activists.”

Where Trump threatened all of his enemies during the Jan. 6 Capitol attack (January 2021)

At 2:24pm ET on January 6, just after rioters breached the Capitol, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Many of the rioters were demanding that Pence stop the certification of the election.

Other posts inciting violence and reiterating unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen were also deleted or removed following social media platforms Facebook and Twitter temporarily suspending Trump’s accounts.

In response to the bans, Trump launched Truth Social in 2022 so that he could continue posting through it.

2026-04-14 02:21:26

Graham Platner could very well be the Democratic nominee running against Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) for her long-held Senate seat.

Platner’s run has not been without controversy, to put it lightly. A tattoo that Platner had, a Totenkopf, was worn by Nazis and is still a symbol embraced by Neo-Nazis today. In an article published in the local publication Maine Monitor on Saturday, the Senate candidate explained his initial reaction:

Platner said he didn’t know what it was until it became an issue during this campaign. Even when someone working with his campaign told him there was a rumor going around that he had a white supremacist tattoo, he said he didn’t connect it to the skull and crossbones on his chest. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s the fucking most r-tarded shit I’ve ever heard in my life,’” he told me. “‘No, I don’t have a white supremacist tattoo,’ and I never thought about it again. And then it came up later on, and I was like, ‘God fucking damn it.’” (He had the tattoo covered in late October.)

Platner has made some attempts to reconcile with Maine Jewish communities, including hosting a Passover seder. But now, as healthcare data wonk Charles Gaba raised on Bluesky, why is Platner using the r-word, a slur that is greatly offensive to many disabled people, in 2026?

I asked the Platner campaign for comment, but they have not responded by the time of publication.

The Arc, which supports those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, explain, “If you constantly heard a core part of your identity used as shorthand for ‘stupid’ or ‘worthless,’ how would you feel? It chips away at dignity. It sends a message about who is valued and who isn’t.”

If it’s casually part of someone’s vocabulary, they might not get the harm. This also points to a lack of engagement with disabled people.

Considering how the Trump administration has targeted disabled people—including enacting brutal cuts to Medicaid, which will alter the services some disabled people receive—some people may argue that others are overreacting to Platner’s use of the r-word. However, having better standards than President Donald Trump has for himself is a good thing when trying to play a role in flipping the Senate to Democratic power.

As I’ve reported previously, Trump has a long history of making offensive remarks targeting disabled people. This includes casually using the r-word on the Howard Stern show, as well as calling Deaf actress Marlee Matlin the r-word behind her back when she competed on The Apprentice.

Trump’s use of the r-word has also been a dealbreaker for some Republicans. Back in November, Republican Indiana State Senator Michael Bohacek said that he would not vote for redistricting in the Republican state after Trump used the r-word to refer to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. “I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter,” Bohacek wrote on Facebook, “I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.” Redistricting efforts in Indiana, after Bohacek’s remarks, proceeded to fail.

This is not the first time that Platner has been criticized for using the r-word. As reported by CNN, Platner used the r-word several times in Reddit posts in 2021. After his Reddit history leaked, he distanced himself from his posts, saying that his views have changed and came from a troubled place after serving in the military.

“I didn’t feel connected. I didn’t feel like I understood my place in the world, my place in our society,” Platner said, according to Maine Public, “And that of course resulted in a lot of feelings of alienation and loneliness. And that’s when all this happened.” 

None of this excuses why Platner is still using this slur in 2026. It also shows that the left have their own ableism problems to grapple with, not just Republicans.

2026-04-14 00:12:58

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly making an AI clone of himself to provide feedback to his employees. 

According to a Sunday night report by the Financial Times, sources said that Zuckerberg’s tech giant Meta is training an AI character on the CEO’s image and voice, as well as mannerisms, tone, and thoughts on company strategy “so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.” 

The move is part of Meta’s push to catch up to competitors like Google and OpenAI in developing AI technology. According to the same Financial Times report, the company has been working on creating 3D AI avatars that users can converse with in real time, but has run into problems with scaling the technology as it requires massive amounts of computing power to seem real.

But those struggles haven’t stopped the company: if the Zuckerberg character works, influencers and creators could follow suit, according to FT. 

Putting aside the creepiness of Meta making an AI clone of its CEO so that it can watch over all of its employees, this sounds similar to the ill-fated metaverse. Zuckerberg’s multi-billion-dollar failure to create “the future of connection” via virtual reality playground tanked spectacularly. Meta promised an immersive VR world where users could socialize, work, and play through online avatars. Zuckerberg went all-in on the metaverse, even re-naming his company Facebook to “Meta” in 2021 to note its commitment. But, despite the investment, the VR headsets did not take off and Meta’s VR platform Horizon Worlds is on its last legs.  

Another dubious initiative in the name of “efficiency” from one of our so-called tech geniuses that we will likely pay for in jobs, data center resources, and all-around digital safety.