2026-04-18 06:24:11
Hasan Piker’s name is everywhere. Not because he won an election or passed legislation. Not because he’s a big sports star or an astronaut. It’s because he won’t stop yapping—and scores of people won’t stop listening. Depending on who you ask, he’s either one of the most dangerous voices in American politics—or one of the most honest.
Piker, an avowed Marxist, is among the loudest voices on the American left. His megaphone is a Twitch stream where he spends roughly eight hours a day, seven days a week, breaking down political news to an audience that skews young and male. He’s blunt, frequently crass, and deeply influential. There seems to be a profile of him every other day. (One such New York Times headline: “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’”.) Time named him on its Top 100 Creators list. All of this is why certain factions of the Democratic Party have spent the last several weeks trying to make him a liability for the candidates he supports, pointing to off-color, if not offensive, comments he’s made over the years as evidence that he’s too toxic to touch.
So I sat down with him.
We talked about why Fox News can’t stop covering him—and why he thinks that’s a gift. We talked about the ideological fault lines inside the Democratic Party, what he actually believes about Israel and Zionism, and why people can’t stop talking about him. “We’re on the fourth week now,” he jokes. “Like, why are you still talking about me? I’m irrelevant.” We don’t think so, Hasan.
2026-04-18 04:02:32
The AI infrastructure reckoning has until recently stayed local, its battles fought in the relatively puny arenas of town council and zoning commission meetings. But the pushback to hyperscale data centers has now stepped onto a larger stage: this week, Maine’s legislature passed the nation’s first state-level hyperscale data center moratorium, freezing construction approvals for data centers requiring more than 20 megawatts of power—the level of massive computing facilities required to train and deploy AI models—for the next year and a half.
In Maine, electricity bills have already increased by 58 percent on average over the last 5 years. Much of that price jump is likely due to the state’s reliance on natural gas—but some Mainers fear that data center buildout will only increase their expenses.
By pressing pause on data centers, says Dan Diorio, who represents the industry lobbying group Data Center Coalition, Maine is missing out on money. “A statewide moratorium on data centers would discourage investment and send a signal that Maine is closed for business,” he said in a statement. “It would deprive local communities of the opportunity to compete for investment and jobs, while forcing Maine to relinquish significant long-term economic investment.”
Democratic state Rep. Melanie Sachs, who sponsored the measure, doesn’t buy it. “Frankly, the tradeoffs have not been shown to be of benefit to our ratepayers, water usage or community benefit in terms of economic activity,” Sachs told the Associated Press.
These facilities can strain the electric grid and pollute the air—the NAACP is now suing Elon Musk’s xAI for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act by using gas-burning turbines to power data centers in Memphis—while further enriching some of the world’s wealthiest men. Data center developers promise that they’ll bring economic benefits to the places where they build. But although they consistently receive millions of dollars in tax breaks, they are legally allowed to shield many of the financial details of their operation from state regulators. That makes it difficult to tell whether or not they’ll actually yield dividends for the communities in which they build.
Arjun Krishnaswami, who studies data center energy use at the Federation of American Scientists, says moratorium bills like Maine’s show that “tech companies failed to demonstrate that they are taking those risks seriously.” Their sales pitch, Krishnaswami said, isn’t working—in part because of a lack of transparency.
“They’re so secretive,” said Greg LeRoy of the corporate accountability research organization Good Jobs First. “They come in under LLCs and code names, they insist on non-disclosure agreements—as long as they’re acting like they have to come in the dark of the night, it just makes you ask, what are they hiding? And the answer is, it’s a bad deal.”
Maine’s moratorium bill represents a “seismic shift in public opinion,” LeRoy said. Data center construction is a massive industry, representing about 3 percent of US GDP growth in the past year. The electricity demands of data centers used for AI could increase as much as 165 percent by 2030—and President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind building them big and fast.
But the data center opposition is growing, too: beyond Maine, twelve additional states are now considering legislative moratoriums on data center construction, and dozens of municipalities have already passed such laws. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a proposal for a nationwide moratorium in late March. “A year ago, nobody was entertaining a moratorium,” LeRoy said. “Now a fourth of the states are.”
There are some ways data center developers could sweeten the deal. “Tech companies are not very sensitive to the price of electricity,” Krishnaswami said. Instead, they’re more interested in how fast they can get things built. That gives policymakers a chance to make AI infrastructure companies pay a premium for the electricity they use—cash that could then be reinvested into “clean energy, direct bill reductions, or other social programs that could directly benefit people.” But right now, that’s not what he’s seeing. “They’ve failed to demonstrate that they’re committed to figuring out how to really, truly, benefit the nearby communities, and take accountability for negative impacts.”
2026-04-18 03:16:08
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should be feeling optimistic. He’s a member of the 6-3 Republican-appointed majority on the highest court that is rapidly reshaping American law in a way Thomas has always wanted. To name a few of his recent victories, Thomas and his colleagues have ended the constitutional right to abortion, banned affirmative action in higher education, helped Donald Trump return to the White House, and this term are expected to toss out what’s left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For a reactionary like Thomas, things are going very well.
And yet, Thomas is worried. Maybe even mad. In a radical speech that drew headlines for its thinly-veiled animosity toward his fellow judges, fellow conservatives, and political opponents to his left, Thomas warned that the nation’s founding ethos that “all men are created equal” is under threat. His remarks, delivered at the University of Texas at Austin this week, pit the ideals of the Declaration of Independence against the scourge of “progressivism.” As Thomas warned, “It is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”
Press reports were rightly attuned to Thomas’ incendiary rhetoric and the fact that this was no ordinary speech for a Supreme Court justice. But the quick dispatches missed the critical historic and legal context of Thomas’ remarks—and just what they may foreshadow.
Thomas goes further than attacking agencies as undemocratic—to him, they are contrary to God.
Thomas’ speech, pegged to this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, comes in three parts. First, Thomas framed the revolutionary document as evidence that American law is not grounded in a legal text but rather comes from a higher power: that people’s equality is “endowed by their Creator” and that their “unalienable” rights come from God. “The Constitution is the means of government,” Thomas said. “It is the Declaration that announces the ends of government.”
This is nothing new from Thomas, who has been a fan of this “natural law” theory—the idea that there’s a superior moral code through which the Constitution must be interpreted—for decades. The danger in this theological approach is that an adherent might replace the dictates of a statute or the Constitution with his theologically-informed preference. At Thomas’s confirmation hearing in 1991, then-Sen. Joe Biden pressed the nominee on his many endorsements of natural law theory. At the time, liberals and Democrats were most worried that Thomas would use a natural law approach to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I don’t see a role for the use of natural law in constitutional adjudication,” Thomas swore in the hearings.
Today, he’s no longer downplaying the theory. “Justice Thomas is engaging in some strong natural law thinking,” says Andrea Katz, a professor at Washington University School of Law. “In fact, it’s close to theology on the bench.”
Next, Thomas’ speech warns that Washington is full of people who pay “lip service” to conservative principles—“claiming a commitment to some righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety, or to the original meaning of the Constitution”—but who falter in upholding those convictions. His screed against these right-leaning Judases is long, as he slams them for fearing criticism, exalting in flattery, and ultimately choosing to conform. “They water down their message, negotiate against themselves, vote against their principles, and hide in the tall grass,” he said. “They recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences and their country.” Without devotion to our founding principles, which he has cast as the natural law that reigns over the Constitution, our nation is in peril.
Third, Thomas identifies what he sees as threatening the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. The answer is progressivism. But the furor over his remarks didn’t capture the nuance of who exactly Thomas was talking about and what he was really driving at. He wasn’t merely talking about today’s progressives as the political opponents of conservatives; he was talking about a rightwing fringe theory that the early 20th century’s Progressive Era ushered in an unconstitutional change in our government that must be rooted out.
Thomas’ grudge goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when, as the nation’s economy and infrastructure became more advanced, Congress created new agencies to help manage modern American life. In 1913 and 1914, respectively, Federal Reserve Board to stabilize the banking system and the Federal Trade Commission were established to enforce anti-trust laws. During the New Deal era, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration responded to the urgencies of the Great Depression with new agencies to modernize government and tackle the problems highlighted by the crisis, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Communications Commission. This is a partial list, but they are all independent agencies, which Congress attempted to insulate from presidential control by placing them in the hands of bipartisan boards whose members can only be fired by the president for good reason.
The conservative legal movement has long been opposed to these agencies. With the notable exception of the Federal Reserve Board, which they concede is essential to the stability of the economy, far-right judges and academics decry such agencies as an unaccountable “fourth branch” of government. More broadly, the right looks skeptically on all agencies, even those that are not technically independent from the president, as an undemocratic administrative state.
Perhaps Thomas’ mood is because he thinks other GOP-appointees are chickening out.
One radical theory, affiliated with Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger, is that the administrative state is un-American and therefore unconstitutional. According to this narrative, President Woodrow Wilson, in the thrall of German-style bureaucratic managementand opposed to democracy, fought for an administrative state to hijack the government and ignore the will of the people. “The Germanic trope is the fever dream of right wing members of the conservative legal movement who want to discredit the modern administrative state,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan, told me in 2024; by that point the theory had wound its way from conservative books, blogs, and conferences to form the basis of an appeals court opinion. The “Germanic trope” ignores the fact that independent agencies were actually created in the United States’ earliest years, establishing plenty of American antecedents for today’s agencies.
Yet in Austin, Thomas clearly embraced this theory. “Progressivism was not native to America,” he argued. “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany.” But Thomas goes further than saying agencies are undemocratic—to him, they are contrary to God. He argues that the progressive vision of an administrative state transforms our system of government from one dedicated to unalienable rights of individuals to one where the government and its administrators are supreme: “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government… It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”
This is not normal. The idea that all people have inherent dignity is not incompatible with, say, a functioning Federal Trade Commission. Nor does the Constitution anywhere state that its prescriptions are based on theological conviction. “This critique is denying the premise of a written constitution,” says Katz. “Our rights come from our Constitution. They don’t come from God. That’s the premise of the US Constitution; we have to write down the rights that we have. That’s quite a statement from a judge whose job is to enforce the text.”
It’s impossible to know why Thomas sounded so stern this week. Perhaps this speech was something he’s been mulling for a long time. But there’s a chance that it reflects a current frustration with his colleagues. Right now the court is deliberating a case, Trump v. Slaughter, on the constitutionality of independent agencies. The court appears poised to strike down a seminal 1935 precedent that upheld the independence of these Progressive and New Deal era agencies. Why is Thomas so upset at the Progressive Era’s staying power and the conservative cowards who don’t live up to their promises if the court is about to strike a fatal blow to the administrative state?
Perhaps Thomas’ mood is linked to the possibility that he thinks his fellow GOP-appointees are chickening out. Based on the court’s recent actions and the oral arguments in Slaughter, it’s highly unlikely that Humphrey’s Executor will stand. But it is quite possible that the justices are crafting a compromise by which some agencies may remain independent. This almost certainly includes the Federal Reserve Board. And it may mean that rather than ending independence in one fell swoop, the justices will decide other agencies may qualify for independence from presidential control, possibly on a case by case basis.
Such a ruling would not be a victory for progressivism, good government, or democracy. But for Thomas, it would nonetheless be proof that his conservative colleagues had fallen short. His holy war, perhaps, is not yet won.
2026-04-18 03:02:52
This story was originally published by the Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Minnesota’s Boundary Waters comprise a vast stretch of wilderness bordering Canada, with over a million acres of untouched forest and thousands of lakes and streams. Accessible largely by canoe, it is an ecological gem and one of the most popular spots in the country for outdoor recreation. On Thursday, Senate Republicans voted 50-49 to open the area up to mining—passing a resolution that repeals a 20-year moratorium using a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act (CRA).
The act was designed in the 1990s by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who sought to cut back on government bureaucracy by eliminating regulations. It was engineered to allow Congress to quickly overturn regulatory rules with a simple majority, rather than the usual two-thirds vote. Critics say it’s dangerous because it enables public rules and regulations based on years of research to be quickly overturned with little debate.
With this move, Senate Republicans “disrespect tribal treaty rights and directly risk those tribes’ guaranteed access to their traditional way of life.”
“It allows Congress to basically do a thumbs up or a thumbs down, where otherwise a filibuster would apply,” explained Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit, public interest law firm. During the CRA’s first 20 years of existence, it was used only once by the second Bush administration. But President Trump and Republicans have worked to dramatically expand and weaponize the CRA, with the Boundary Waters case being the latest example, Schlenker-Goodrich said. In 2017, the Trump administration invalidated 17 rules from the Obama era. In 2025 alone, Trump signed 22 CRA repeals.
The CRA technically gives Congress 60 days to overturn a rule after it’s passed. The Boundary Waters protections were passed over three years ago during the Biden administration, and not as a rule, but rather as a Public Land Order. This puts the Senate and administration in territory that is “extraordinarily legally questionable,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. “We are not done fighting, and there are a lot of open questions because this is such uncharted territory.”
The decision could set a dangerous precedent. Should the resolution be allowed to stand, it could open up all land management decisions to political attacks. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, for example, has proposed a CRA resolution to eliminate the resource management plan for the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.
“All of these place-based attacks are occurring concurrently with talk on permitting reform,” Schlenker-Goodrich pointed out. Signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires federal agencies to assess how large-scale development would affect the environment before approving them. The policy has been an important tool for environmentalists, helping to halt or delay major industrial complexes or infrastructure. But in recent years, it has also curbed the deployment of solar and wind energy, as well as updates to the country’s grid required to accommodate new clean energy. Reforming NEPA has gained broad, bipartisan support in Congress, but when matched with this new use of the CRA, it could put protected areas in grave danger, Schlenker-Goodrich warned.
“The main winner out of the Boundary Waters debacle is Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Chilean mining outfit Antofagasta.”
The Trump administration’s use of the CRA also effectively cuts tribal nations out of Boundary Water negotiations. “Three tribes—the Bois Forte Band, the Fond du Lac Band, and the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa—have extensive treaty rights in Northeastern Minnesota,” New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich said in remarks on the Senate floor. “These rights are guaranteed to them by the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe and have been reaffirmed by federal courts over and over again. By overturning the Public Land Order with a CRA resolution, Senate Republicans will not only cut tribes out of the conversation. They disrespect tribal treaty rights and directly risk those tribes’ guaranteed access to their traditional way of life and subsistence use of this place.”
The mining ban repeal comes despite widespread opposition from environmentalists, outdoor recreation companies, and neighboring communities. Minnesota Senator Tina Smith spoke on the Senate floor for five hours on Wednesday night in an attempt to block the vote. “The Senate and House should follow the law,” Smith said, according to CBS News. “They should follow the laws they wrote about how public land orders are treated in this country. I do not believe that happened here.”
The main winner out of the Boundary Waters debacle is Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Chilean mining outfit Antofagasta. The company fought under the first Trump administration to build a copper and nickel mine on the Duluth Complex, one of the world’s largest undeveloped deposits of critical minerals located just 5 miles south of the Boundary Waters. At the time, the company was run by billionaire Andrónico Luksic, who was criticized for his connections to the Trump family—specifically for renting a house in Washington, DC, to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Although Luksic has since stepped down from Antofagasta’s board, his family controls a majority stake in the company.
“The corruption of rich individuals around the world is a big part of this,” said Miller-McFeeley. So are data centers. Since retaking office, the administration has raced to ramp up domestic production of critical minerals—the materials that are required for computing, batteries, renewable energy, and military technology.
“The US Forest Service is 100 percent opposed to mining in this watershed.”
Copper is critical to the artificial intelligence boom. The analytics giant S&P Global published a report earlier this year warning that copper demand was projected to expand 50 percent by 2040. Another recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace predicted a significant nickel deficit by 2035, due in large part to demand from the defense industry and the United States’ “limited ability to increase domestic production.”
Crucially, the report recommended shoring up international partnerships, rather than opening up protected land to mining, and it will take much more than mining to make the US self-reliant when it comes to critical minerals. The country currently has only three copper smelters and no nickel smelters, making production the real bottleneck. Antofagasta would likely “ship its product abroad to be processed and sold offshore, and then maybe resold back to the US,” said Miller-McFeeley.
Even if this is merely a test case for the administration to see how far they’re able to push legal limits, it has once again set the federal government in opposition of its own researchers. “The US Forest Service is 100 percent opposed to mining in this watershed,” said Marc Fink, director of the Public Lands Law Center and a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. In 2016, the Forest Service determined that a sulfide-ore copper mine, such as the one Twin Metals is proposing, could cause “extreme” and “serious and irreplaceable harm” to the area.
“This clearly goes against the science and the administration’s own agencies,” Fink said. “It’s a really unfortunate situation, but we’ll definitely keep fighting.”
The Boundary Waters bill will now head to President Trump’s desk. He is expected to sign it.
2026-04-18 02:55:41
At the start of this week, there were three men in Congress whose reputations had imploded after being accused of misconduct against women: Reps. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). On Tuesday, Gonzales and Swalwell resigned rather than face potential expulsion. Mills is different. He is hanging on despite facing a staggering number of scandals.
As I reported in a profile of Mills in February, the Florida congressman has been accused of hiring sex workers while on a “rescue mission” overseas, punching someone in Ireland while serving in Congress, earning a Bronze Star through false claims about saving the lives of multiple former Army comrades in Iraq, and of threatening to release sexually explicit content of an ex-girlfriend. In October, a Florida judge placed a temporary restraining order on Mills after finding that he subjected that ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking. (Mills was also implicated earlier in 2025 in an alleged assault involving a different girlfriend, although the allegation was later retracted.)
Mills has gotten off surprisingly easy for someone facing thoroughly documented accusations. But that is now starting to shift. “I’m glad that Eric Swalwell is leaving. I’m glad that Tony Gonzales is leaving,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said earlier this week. “Frankly, I think Cory Mills should probably be on that list as well.” Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.) said bluntly about Mills on Tuesday, “He should be expelled.”
Republicans have been more interested in removing Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.), who was indicted in November by a federal grand jury. The indictment alleges that she and her brother stole about $5 million in FEMA funding and then used some of that money to make illegal straw donations to her congressional campaign. In late March, the adjudicatory subcommittee of the House Ethics Committee found a pattern of “progressive and compounding corruption” on Cherfilus-McCormick’s part. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Tuesday that he believes House members will expel the Florida Democrat.
Mills is facing his own ethics committee investigation, but it is unclear when that will be completed. Politico reported this week that key figures in both parties are signaling that they will wait until the investigation is finished before deciding whether to punish Mills. Democrats and Republicans in the House could end up choosing to expel both Mills and Cherfilus-McCormick at once. Like the back-to-back resignations of Gonzales and Swalwell, removing the two Florida representatives would not impact the balance of power in the House, where Republicans now have a narrow majority.
Mills tried to defend himself this week by saying that he does not “fall into the category of Swalwell and Gonzales” because he is not married and has not been accused of sexually harassing members of his own congressional staff. (He was in divorce proceedings with his second wife as recently as this February.) He added that he has never been arrested and has “never gone to any proceedings.” Instead, he suggested that the restraining order placed on him in October was the result of “essentially just something where it was a bad breakup.”
That is not what Florida Judge Fred Koberlein Jr. found in October after Mills’ ex-girlfriend Lindsey Langston sought protection from the Florida congressman. According to court testimony, Langston ended their relationship in early 2025 after she learned that Mills was cheating on her through news stories reporting that the congressman had been implicated in an alleged domestic dispute with another woman. As I wrote in February:
But even after they stopped dating, Mills repeatedly threatened Langston and said he would kill anyone she dated, according to court records and testimony. He also wrote multiple menacing messages to Langston between May and June 2025. “May want to tell every guy you date that if we run into each at any point. Strap up cowboy,” Mills wrote. Multiple times, he implied potentially sending videos of sexual content recorded during their relationship to a future partner: “I can send him a few videos of you as well[.] Oh, I still have them” and “Thank [sic] again for the videos.” Langston reported Mills’ threats to police in Florida, then filed for a restraining order against Mills in August.
Mills, Langston, and their attorneys spent more than three hours in court during two hearings in September. “Please help me. Someone please help me,” Langston pleaded in tears while testifying. “Because I don’t know what to do and I’m scared. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Mills, for his part, falsely told Langston’s lawyer that no divorce proceedings had been filed in relation to his marriage to his second wife. Unfortunately for Mills’ credibility, Langston’s attorney was holding his divorce paperwork in her hand. In granting the temporary restraining order, Judge Koberlein went on to rule that Mills’ testimony had not been “truthful” when it came to explicit material recorded during the relationship with Langston.
The full list of scandals Mills is facing is even longer. As I reported, former colleagues who worked with Mills as private military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq have said that Mills severely exaggerated his military record by falsely claiming to have been an Army Ranger, an Army sniper, and a Special Forces qualified medic—none of which are supported by his official Army records. A man who served under Mills in the Army told me Mills is a “pathological liar.” He also said, “I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.” (Mills’ congressional office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Army records released earlier this year show Mills was awarded his Bronze Star in June 2024—more than two decades after the events in Iraq used to justify the award. The form submitted to recommend Mills for the Bronze Star stated that Mills saved the lives of three men during two battles in Iraq in 2003. (Mills has not said who wrote the form or when it was submitted to the Army.)
Joe Heit, one of the men whose life Mills allegedly saved, told me that he has no memory of ever meeting the congressman. He also said that Mills could not have saved his life because he did not sustain life-threatening injuries during the battle in question. A second veteran in a similar position has sworn in a written statement that the claims about him on Mills’ Bronze Star recommendation form are “false and a [f]abrication.”
The Florida Republican’s business and financial dealings are also complicated. Pacem Defense, an international arms dealing business closely tied to a company Mills co-founded before entering Congress, is now so broke that it has failed to pay its own legal bills, according to court records. A status report filed in federal court on Monday shows that the company has also failed to provide any of the $8 million that it is legally obligated to pay another company in response to litigation. Despite now facing $1,000 of additional interest per day, the court filing states that “Pacem has not paid a penny” of what it owes.
According to another filing in the case, a different Pacem entity called Pacem Solutions International paid $12,000 per month in rent to Pacem Estate Holdings through at least December while in financial distress. It also kept up those rent payments during a period when many of Pacem’s workers were indefinitely furloughed. Mills’ congressional financial disclosure states that he owns 49 percent of Pacem Solutions and 100 percent of Pacem Estate Holdings. In other words, a company he co-founded and in which he retains a major stake paid $12,000 per month in rent to a second company he wholly owned during the same period when many Pacem employees were out of work. (Coincidentally or not, Mills has been living in what was listed online as a $12,000 per month oceanfront rental in Florida.)
Mills has tried to distance himself from Pacem’s conduct by saying his companies are now in a “blind trust.” Kedric Payne, vice president and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told me earlier this year that the explanation is nonsensical because Mills’ own financial disclosure specifies the exact percentages he owns of the companies that are supposedly in the blind trust. As Payne made clear, “If you can see what your holdings are, it is not a blind trust.”
2026-04-18 02:47:51
On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth introduced a religious service at the Pentagon by offering a prayer, which he said he had learned from military leaders. “They they call it CSAR 25:17,” he said, using the acronym for Combat Search and Rescue missions, “which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.”
The prayer he recited, though, doesn’t appear in the Bible. Rather, as internet observers quickly pointed out, it bore an extremely close resemblance to the monologue that Samuel L. Jackson delivers in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, just before he executes someone.
The Pentagon was quick to explain away Hegseth’s apparent conflation of the Bible and a violent Tarantino classic. The prayer “was obviously inspired by dialogue in Pulp Fiction,” tweeted Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. “Both the CSAR prayer and the dialogue in Pulp Fiction were reflections of the verse Ezekiel 25:17, as Secretary Hegseth clearly said in his remarks at the prayer service. Anyone saying the Secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.” (On Thursday, Hegseth also used religious language to describe journalists. “I sat there in church and I thought, our press are just like these Pharisees,” he said, referring to the Jewish enemies of Jesus.)
“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bike. We need moms, but not in the military.”
We’ll probably never know precisely why Hegseth saw fit to use a cinematic prelude to murder as a blessing for the troops, but in the context of his religious beliefs, it’s not a particularly surprising choice. In fact, it aligns perfectly with Hegseth’sfixation on a violent version of Christianity. To start, there are his tattoos: a Jerusalem cross—a symbol associated with the Catholic Church’s anti-Muslim Crusades—and the related phrase Deus Vult, Latin for “God wills it.” Because of these tattoos, Hegseth was forbidden from serving as a guard at Biden’s inauguration. In his 2020 book, American Crusade, Hegseth rails against Muslims’ “well-documented aversion to assimilation.”
In addition to his fixation on the Crusades, Hegseth has close ties to a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government.
In that mission, Hegseth has excelled. One big accomplishment: He spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. During one such event in March, shortly after the start of the Iran war, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.
Wilson is a prolific blogger and producer of videos, many of which promote the muscular version of Christianity that Hegseth also seems to favor. As I wrote in 2024, Wilson’s videos have tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues, as he put it, of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’” Last year, during an interview with Tucker Carlson, he professed that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
Hegseth embraces a macho ethos in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, decrying the lack of masculinity in the military:”I’m going to say something politically incorrect that is perfectly commonsensical observation. Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bike. We need moms, but not in the military, especially in combat units.”
When Trump announced Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary, the X account of the podcast CrossPolitics, cohosted by a lead pastor at Wilson’s Idaho church, posted, “HUGE WIN! @PeteHegseth is a godly Christian man. He is a member at a CREC church and classically educates his kids. He’ll get the wokeness out of the military which will unfathomably bless our nation.”
Indeed, Hegseth has made anti-wokeness a priority. Under his leadership, the Pentagon has eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, severed ties with universities it considered too woke, and dismantled a group that promoted women in the military.
Hegseth bragged about his achievements in an address in Virginia last September, “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading and we lost our way,” he said. “We became the woke department. But not anymore.”
