2026-01-14 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell.”
Studies claiming to have revealed micro- and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries, and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian and Mother Jones. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years.
However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.
One scientist estimates there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” on microplastics in biological tissue.
The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics.
There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies.
“Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024.
However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.”
One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.
Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue.
Matthew Campen, senior author of the brain study in question, told the Guardian: “In general, we simply find ourselves in an early period of trying to understand the potential human health impacts of MNPs and there is no recipe book for how to do this. Most of the criticism aimed at the body of work to date (ie from our lab and others) has been conjectural and not buffeted by actual data.
“We have acknowledged the numerous opportunities for improvement and refinement and are trying to spend our finite resources in generating better assays and data, rather than continually engaging in a dialogue.”
But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present.
Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system.” But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.”
This study was by Campen and colleagues, who responded: “To steal/modify a sentiment from the television show Ted Lasso, ‘[Bioanalytical assays] are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can and if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving toward better.’”
“This isn’t a dig…They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us.”
Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood—in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms—and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per liter of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists.
The doubts amount to a “bombshell,” according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.”
While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyze samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr. Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.”
These include measures to exclude background contamination, blanks, repeating measurements and testing equipment with samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. “So you cannot be assured that whatever you have found is not fully or partially derived from some of these issues,” Béen said.
A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporizing it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia.
“I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.”
“This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.”
She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy.”
“It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers,” but today’s instruments “cannot detect nano-size particles.”
Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolyzing the sample—heating it until it vaporizes. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them.
The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains, the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives.
Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometers can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.”
“It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.”
Further criticism came in July, in a review study in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German Medical Association. “At present, there is hardly any reliable information available on the actual distribution of microplastics in the body,” the scientists wrote.
Plastic production has ballooned by 200 times since the 1950s and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion metric tons a year by 2060. As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion metric tons now contaminating the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled.
An expert review published in the Lancet in August called plastics a “grave, growing and underrecognised danger” to human and planetary health. It cited harm from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to their production, use and disposal, which result in air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals.
Insufficiently robust studies might help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution.
In recent years, the infiltration of the body with MNPs has become a serious concern, and a landmark study in 2022 first reported detection in human blood. That study is one of the 18 listed in Rauert’s paper and was criticized by Kuhlman.
But the study’s senior author, Marja Lamoree, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, rejected suggestions of contamination. “The reason we focused on blood in the first place is that you can take blood samples freshly, without the interference of any plastics or exposure to the air,” she said.
“I’m convinced we detected microplastics,” she said. “But I’ve always said that [the amount estimated] could be maybe twice lower, or 10 times higher.” In response to Kuhlman’s letter, Lamoree and colleagues said he had “incorrectly interpreted” the data.
Lamoree does agree there is a wider issue. “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.”
“I think most of the, let’s say, lesser quality analytical papers come from groups that are medical doctors or metabolomics [scientists] and they’re not driven by analytical chemistry knowledge,” she said.
Improving the quality of MNP measurements in the human body matters, the scientists said. Poor quality evidence is “irresponsible” and can lead to scaremongering, said Rauert: “We want to be able to get the data right so that we can properly inform our health agencies, our governments, the general population and make sure that the right regulations and policies are put in place.
“We get a lot of people contacting us, very worried about how much plastics are in their bodies,” she said. “The responsibility [for scientists] is to report robust science so you are not unnecessarily scaring the general population.”
“We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume.”
Rauert called treatments claiming to clean microplastics from your blood “crazy”—some are advertised for £10,000 (about $13,400). “These claims have no scientific evidence,” she said, and could put more plastic into people’s blood, depending on the equipment used.
Materić said insufficiently robust studies might also help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution.
The good news, said Béen, is that analytical work across multiple techniques is improving rapidly: “I think there is less and less doubt about the fact that MNPs are there in tissues. The challenge is still knowing exactly how many or how much. But I think we’re narrowing down this uncertainty more and more.”
Prof Lamoree said: “I really think we should collaborate on a much nicer basis—with much more open communication—and don’t try to burn down other people’s results. We should all move forward instead of fighting each other.”
In the meantime, should the public be worried about MNPs in their bodies?
Given the very limited evidence, Lamoree said she could not say how concerned people should be: “But for sure I take some precautions myself, to be on the safe side. I really try to use less plastic materials, especially when cooking or heating food or drinking from plastic bottles. The other thing I do is ventilate my house.”
“We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume,” said Materić. “But real hard proof on how much is yet to come. There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.” Experts also advise avoiding food or drink that has been heated in plastic containers.
Rauert thinks that most of the MNPs that people ingest or breath in probably expelled by their bodies, but said it can’t hurt to reduce your plastics exposure. Furthermore, she said, it remains vital to resolve the uncertainty over what MNPs are doing to our health: “We know we’re being exposed, so we definitely want to know what happens after that and we’ll keep working at it, that’s for sure.”
2026-01-14 20:30:00
In Iran, millions of protesters have taken to the streets to protest the repressive religious regime that has ruled the country for more than four decades. The response of the government, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been swift and brutal, with thousands of protesters reportedly killed. All over the world, onlookers are cheering the courage of the Iranian people who are risking their lives to fight for their freedom. In a video posted on X, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah who led the country for 38 years until he was ousted by the current regime in 1979, vowed, “We will completely bring the Islamic Republic and its worn-out, fragile apparatus of repression to its knees.” In a Tuesday post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump encouraged the Iranian people to “KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!”
But for some Christians, the Iranian protests are more than just a popular uprising; they are the fulfillment of ancient Biblical prophecies that foretell the second coming of the Messiah. Last June, shortly after the United States bombed Iran, I wrote about the US evangelicals who were cheering that move:
Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.”
The dark side of this theology, Taylor added, is that in this version of the end times, once the Messiah comes, the Jews will either convert to Christianity or perish.
Ben Lorber, a senior research associate with the far-right monitoring group Political Research Associates, explained via email this week that for Christian Zionists, Iran is “an embodiment of the satanic force of fundamentalist Islam, arrayed in a ‘clash of civilizations’ against the Judeo-Christian West, represented by America and Israel.” The uprising, therefore, is a good thing—but not only because of liberation from an oppressive regime. “An apocalyptic war between these players is often seen as a precondition and sure sign of the End Times,” and by extension, the second coming.
Christian Zionists agree on those broad strokes, but they’re a little fuzzier on the details—there is some disagreement as to exactly what part of the Bible predicts the current geopolitical situation. Some believe that God is using President Trump to protect Israel from Iran. As I wrote in June:
Hours before news of the bombing broke, Lance Wallnau, an influential [charismatic Christian] leader with robust ties to the Trump administration—last year, he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance—warned his 129,000 followers on X, “Satan would love to crush Israel, humiliate the United States, destroy President Trump’s hope of recovery for America, and plunge the world into war.” But then he reassured them: “That’s not going to happen. Why? I was reminded again just a few moments ago what the Lord told me about Donald Trump in 2015.” He explained that he had received a message from God that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” an Old Testament Persian king whom God used to free the Jews, his chosen people. In a video posted two days after the bombing, Wallnau concluded that the prophecy was coming true. “Jesus is coming back, and I believe this is all part of him setting the stage for his return,” he said.
For other evangelicals, current events echo the Old Testament book of Daniel, in which Michael, Israel’s guardian angel, battles a demon named the Prince of Persia. After a long period of suffering and much turmoil, God ultimately wins.
Others see yet another Bible story playing out—but with the same outcome. Last week, the Christian Zionist news site Israel365 News ran a story laying out the details of the prophecy. This particular prophecy can be found in the book of Jeremiah, in which God promises to wipe out the brutal military forces in the Iranian city of Elam before restoring order there.
Israel365’s article focuses on Marziyeh Amirizadeh, an Iranian Christian who fled to the United States when she was imprisoned and sentenced to death for her conversion. In it, she describes a 2009 dream she had when she was in prison. “God said that He is giving a chance to these people to repent, and if they do not, He will destroy them all,” she explains. And now, with the protests, “God’s justice against the evil rulers of Iran has already started, and he will destroy them all to restore his kingdom through Jesus.”
“The Bible can open the eyes of Iranians to the truth,” she adds. “Therefore, inviting Iranians to Christianity is very important because the majority of Iranians have turned their back on Islam and do not want to be Muslims anymore.”
“Inviting Iranians to Christianity is very important because the majority of Iranians have turned their back on Islam and do not want to be Muslims anymore.”
Her remarks refer to widespread claims that Muslims in Iran are converting to Islam in droves. In an article last year, for example, the Christian Broadcasting Network reported that “millions” of Iranian Muslims had recently converted to Christianity and that most of the country’s mosques had closed as a result.
The claims of the extent of the conversions are impossible to verify—there is scant hard evidence of a dramatic uptick in them. Practicing Christianity is illegal in Iran, and converts can face the death penalty.
But believers remain convinced that the uprising is part of a cosmic plan. Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist musician who organizes prayer rallies at state capital buildings, told his 205,000 followers on X last week, “While they build mosques across Texas, they are burning them down in Iran!” He added a lion emoji, which some evangelical Christians use to symbolize Jesus.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Colorado evangelist Dutch Sheets, a key figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election and the lead-up to January 6, offered a prayer asking God to free the Iranian people “from Iran’s tyrannical government and the evil principality that controls it,” adding a plea for “an earth-shaking revival.”
Tim Ballard, who has been accused of sexual misconduct and is the leader of an anti-trafficking group, posted to his 166,000 followers earlier this month, “Jesus is also making a move in Iran.” Over the last few days, Trad West, an anonymous account on X with 430,000 followers, has repeatedly posted “Iran will be Christian.”
As the protests wear on, the government’s retaliation is intensifying. With information on the crackdown tightly controlled by the regime, and strictly curtailed citizen access to the internet, the precise death toll so far is unclear. According to reporting from CBS, the UK government estimates that 2,000 protesters have been killed, while some activists believe the total could be as much as 10 times that figure.
“Revolution is inevitable in Iran,” Feucht, the Christian musician, said in another tweet. “It’s prophecy, and it is going to happen.”
2026-01-14 20:30:00
Even as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has promised to deploy an even greater surge of federal agents into Minneapolis, ostensibly to investigate fraud, city residents have shown up in large numbers to express their desire for ICE to, as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
Defying the strong resistance to ICE in the community following the tragic shooting last week of 37-year-old Renée Good, federal agents appear to have become even more aggressive in their enforcement activities. Agents have gone door-to-door demanding entrance; they’ve pulled people from their cars, arrested them for supposed immigration violations or specious infractions such as interfering with operations while filming. If a person is caught protesting or simply turning down the wrong street while driving, they are likely to face a wall of masked and armed agents.
In addition to citizens with cellphones who diligently record the actions of DHS, local photographers have been joined by photojournalists from around the country and Canada to document federal agents and the stiff resistance they’ve faced from brave Minnesontans. Here are a few of their images from the past week.
2026-01-14 19:00:00
A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.”
The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term.
“There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.”
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: Bob, how are you today?
Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago.
I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things.
So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing.
It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away.
No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in.
Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role.
So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned.
Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis-
Absolutely, yeah.
In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference.
Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country.
In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence.
Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV.
Yeah.
What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play?
Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders.
This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders.
So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild.
You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper?
Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard-
Yeah.
So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit.
That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought.
Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population.
Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about.
Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins?
The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off.
Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs.
Yeah.
Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving.
I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that?
I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse.
Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it?
So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different.
Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat.
On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here.
Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing.
I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind?
That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.
And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him.
Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially.
Yep.
The amount of money that they get in the budget is-
Enormous.
Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people-
It is about to become its own army.
Right.
And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground.
We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote.
In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition?
Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing.
Okay.
One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here.
I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah.
Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out.
Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.
2026-01-14 06:26:48
A Republican-appointed majority of Supreme Court justices appeared ready to uphold two state laws that ban transgender women and girls from participating on girls and women’s school sports teams. Though the scope of the rulings and how sweeping its implications will be both remain unclear, oral arguments on Tuesday showed there are likely at least five votes for upholding transgender sports bans in Idaho and West Virginia.
Justice Kavanaugh called sports a “zero-sum game” where trans players inevitably cost cis players.
The justices heard two cases on Tuesday, one brought by a college student in Idaho and one brought by a now-high school student in West Virginia. Going into oral arguments, there were fears that the justices—who have amassed a recent track record of ruling against the rights of trans people—might use the occasion to broadly undermine transgender rights, and not just in school sports. And in both cases, a majority of the court’s right wing appeared ready to rule in favor of the laws and against exceptions for either plaintiff. But whether or not the rulings would have further impact remained unclear. A decision in the cases is likely to come at the end of the term in June.
One key vote appears to be Chief Justice John Roberts, who six years ago joined the landmark Bostock decision finding that discrimination against gay and transgender people in employment contexts is illegal sex discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Bostock was a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and joined by Roberts as well as four Democratic appointees. There are now just three Democratic appointees, lowering the current Bostock majority down to five. But on Tuesday, when it comes to whether to allow banning trans students from sports, Roberts’ comments indicated that he was switching teams.
“In terms of Bostock, I understand that to say that discrimination on the basis of transgender status is discrimination on the basis of sex,” Roberts said Tuesday. “But the question here is whether or not a sex-based classification is necessarily a transgender classification.”
The idea put forth by Roberts here is that while transgender discrimination is part of the sex discrimination Venn diagram, rules limiting team membership to a single-sex do not necessarily target transgender people. This may be technically true, but it’s too cute in this context. It allows Roberts to ignore the obvious, purposeful effect of discriminating against trans people by using terms like biological sex rather than the term transgender. There is a long history of discriminating against classes of people without specifically naming the target—literacy tests and grandfather clauses come to mind.
Roberts’ comments are unsurprising. He made essentially the same argument last year in authoring the Skrmetti decision, in which the court allowed states to ban gender affirming medical care for transgender minors on the grounds that the prohibitions were based on age and on medical use—even though it was clear that the laws were targeted at transgender kids. In this way, Roberts’ logic provides a door to more anti-trans discrimination under the guise of legitimate purposes.
Gorsuch, who authored Bostock, was harder to pin down during oral argument, but he too indicated that he sees school sports as different from Bostock‘s workplace context. Even if Gorsuch were to surprise courtwatchers and side with the plaintiffs, it appeared unlikely that there is a fifth vote to either strike down the laws or, as the three Democratic appointees were pushing for, allow exceptions for transgender athletes who prove they do not have a biological advantage over their cisgender teammates.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the possibility using the case to ban trans students’ participation in sports in states where they are currently allowed to join girls and women’s teams, and even repeatedly asked whether allowing transgender women and girls to play alongside cis women and girls actually violated the rights of those cis teammates under Title IX, which requires equal opportunities in education. He called sports a “zero-sum game” in which a trans player inevitably costs a cis player a spot on the team, or the podium, or a college recruitment offer. The ACLU’s Joshua Block, arguing for transgender teen Becky Pepper-Jackson of West Virginia, responded that girls lose these opportunities to other girls all the time. If they lose them to a trans girl whose medical transition has erased any biological advantage, then there’s no real difference.
As Block points out, the question of whether trans athletes have an advantage animates the arguments on both sides. The science is unclear. The plaintiffs argue that if they can show there is no unfair advantage, then they should be allowed to play. The states, as well as the Trump administration, argue there should not be exceptions.
The question of whether the biological sex requirement should be waived for trans athletes who can demonstrate no advantage was a long and technical part of oral argument, but it also was particularly revealing. One side says if there’s no advantage, let them play. The other side still says no.
2026-01-14 03:30:15
With the death toll reportedly surging in the thousands as Iran continues to brutally suppress the nationwide demonstrations over the country’s economic collapse, President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged Iranians to keep protesting the regime.
“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING,” he posted on social media. “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price.”
In perhaps the strongest signal yet that the US could be planning to intervene, Trump added, “HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!!”
The president’s message came as the number of dead is estimated to be as many as 2,000 to 3,000. According to a report by the Associated Press, Iranian state TV first recognized the devastating death toll on Tuesday. Reports from inside the brutal crackdown have been limited after Iran shut down internet service last Thursday and blocked calls from outside the country.
The unrest, which started in December after the country’s currency collapsed, has prompted the Trump administration to threaten military strikes against Iran if it continues to kill protesters. “Diplomacy is always the first option for the president,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday. “However, with that said, the president has shown he is not afraid to use military options if he deems it necessary.” On Monday, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on any country that does business with Iran, potentially leading to further economic turmoil for Iran.
Iran’s head of the country’s Supreme National Security Council also shot back at Trump’s message on Tuesday with the following:
Trump’s encouraging words for protesters in Iran come as his administration cracks down on protesters at home after the killing of Renée Good, the 37-year-old woman who was shot multiple times and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis last week. The glaring dissonance has been especially evident in the administration’s accusation that Good was guilty of “domestic terrorism,” as well as its apparent approval of federal agents continuing to brutalize, and sometimes shoot, at protesters.
As my colleague Jeremy Schulman wrote on Sunday, Trump’s second-term crackdown on dissent started with pro-Palestinian activists, and never stopped.
Early last year, ICE began arresting and attempting to deport people with legal immigration status—such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk—who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism or expressed pro-Palestinian views. The administration was explicit about the new policy. Troy Edgar, Trump’s deputy secretary of Homeland Security, made clear that the government was seeking to remove Khalil in large part because he’d chosen to “protest” against Israel.
