2026-02-06 04:16:19
Every few months, you likely notice something: people on Instagram calling for a general strike.
The posts will appear suddenly, evincing urgency but sparse in details. Their provenance is usually obscure. But the message is always clear. To resist Trump’s authoritarian agenda, Americans need to unite in a national economic blackout.
The cyclical nature of the posts can be frustrating, but the impulse is born from a hopeful place. General strikes have a rich history in the United States. A wave of citywide strikes in the 1940s proved so threatening to the prevailing order that Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act, banning unions from striking in solidarity with workers at other companies. For the past few decades, the general strike has seemed more like the fanciful hope of the anarchist bookstore poster than a real possibility. Online, much the same has happened. Modern-day social media calls for mass strikes have rarely translated to collective action in the material world.
Then came Minneapolis.
On January 23, roughly 75,000 people flooded the streets on a workday, in sub-zero temperatures, demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leave Minnesota. Hundreds of businesses and cultural institutions in the Twin Cities closed their doors; one in four Minnesota voters either participated in the shutdown or knows a loved one who did, according to Blue Rose Research. A motley coalition led the charge: labor unions, racial justice groups, faith-based organizations.
“There is no one figurehead that’s going to save us from authoritarianism. What I’m seeing every day here is thousands of people finding the way to plug in and do what they can.”
The remarkable success of Minnesota’s “Day of Truth and Freedom,” as it was billed by organizers, inspired student groups at the University of Minnesota to call for another day of action. One week later, on January 30, tens of thousands of protesters across all 50 states took to the streets. Students held walkouts on high school and college campuses. Many businesses in major cities either closed for the day or committed to donating their proceeds to immigrant advocacy groups. More than 1,000 organizations signed on in support of the “national shutdown.”
“We want to bring it to the national stage and see it happen all over the country,” Austin Muia, vice president of the University of Minnesota’s Black Student Union told my colleague, Nate Halverson. “We want everyone to feel that solidarity that we felt last week.”
While the day of action on the 30th was an impressive start, it ultimately manifested more like a mass protest. A general strike requires a substantial portion of workers, organized across multiple industries, to halt economic activity in pursuit of a shared goal.
The US economy largely functioned as usual. That means there’s still a lot of work to be done.
But as Trump’s federal agents continue to occupy US cities—raiding workplaces, wrenching apart families, and shooting protesters dead in the street—the momentum for a national general strike is undeniably growing.
Last week, I spoke with five organizers involved in the Day of Truth and Freedom. We discussed the tactics they used to organize a labor stoppage in the Twin Cities and what strategies the rest of the country can employ to replicate Minnesota’s success.
Here are six key takeaways from those conversations.
Labor unions were vital for executing the Day of Truth and Freedom. They mobilized thousands of people to stop work across sectors—both those in their unions and those who aren’t in them.
Devin Hogan, president of OPEIU Local 12—whose members include roughly 2,000 clerical workers and paraprofessionals—told me that unions bring experience in spearheading collective action. “We’ve seen our labor movement so organized over the years,” he said, and so even if others were nervous, “we knew that this could be pulled off basically without a hitch.”
An event two years ago provided an example for how local labor leaders could coordinate mass action. In 2024, various unions across industries in Minnesota arranged for their contracts to expire at the same time, increasing their leverage and bargaining power. Local units are now “organized in a way that allows them to basically all be ready to go on strike if they need to,” said Hogan, “and also bring in the broader labor movement.”
Other union leaders told me similar stories of working across the movement. As a hospitality union composed largely of women, people of color, and immigrants, UNITE HERE Local 17 has been hit particularly hard by the ICE occupation in Minnesota. President Christa Sarrack said at least 17 of the unit’s members have been detained since December. She said organizing collectively was crucial to protect workers. “We’ve been working together closely with lots of other unions for years,” Sarrack said. “It can’t be any one union…We just had to take that risk and really believe in what we were doing and know that at the end of the day, if something happened, it was worth it.”
While organized labor provided a foundation, both Hogan and Sarrack highlighted the importance of unions working in coalition with a broad range of community groups to broaden the reach.
“It was very helpful to have faith leaders as part of the coalition from the start, because when we’re talking to employers, we’re not saying, ‘Oh, this is just unions doing union stuff.’ Instead, it was faith leaders, cultural organizations, and labor unions all working together for this goal,” said Hogan. “I’m glad to see the participation of clergy across various religions, seeing this as what it is—as a righteous fight.”
Minnesota organizers continually looked for people with different skillsets and positions that could help build the movement.
“We’re looking at our own communities to see where the pillars of power are represented. Do we have people in the press? In our churches and synagogues? Do we have people in major corporations?” said Rev. Dana Neuhauser, a Methodist deacon who serves on the steering team of MARCH (Multifaith Antiracism, Change & Healing). “There is no one figurehead that’s going to save us from authoritarianism. What I’m seeing every day here is thousands of people finding the way to plug in and do what they can, so the work is distributed and broad and growing deeper.”
Officially, of course, unions can’t call for general strikes. So Minnesota labor leaders tried something different: They asked their employers to close.
“That’s really the biggest lesson I can share to the rest of the country: just ask,” said Hogan. “You’d be surprised by how many people are willing to either close for the day, or make arrangements to plan ahead for their ‘business needs’ while also letting as many people off as possible.” Once a few large cultural institutions agreed to close, others followed suit.
“That’s really the biggest lesson I can share to the rest of the country: just ask.”
Hogan and Sarrack explained how they negotiated using a ladder of requests. First, if employers refused to close, organizers asked that unit members be allowed to take time off without penalty. Then, they requested permission for employees to use paid time off. If businesses imposed limits on how many people could take off that day, unions pushed to increase the cap. And then, finally, they asked employers to refrain from disciplining unit members who called in sick.
“Very, very few of our employers were just not willing to negotiate,” said Sarrack. “I think they also know that this is their workers’ safety too.”
Every person I spoke with emphasized that the Day of Truth and Freedom was made possible by Minneapolis’s decades of organizing history and the existing fabric of community groups.
“There’s a very deep movement ecosystem in the Twin Cities metro area, from unions to community groups to renters’ rights and worker centers,” said Merle Payne, executive director of Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha (CTUL), a grassroots organization that fights for fair wages and better labor conditions, especially among immigrant workers who can’t unionize. These hundreds of organizations, Payne said, enabled the people of Minneapolis to “take the anger of being pushed into a corner and channel it in a direction of mass peaceful resistance.”
That ecosystem didn’t appear overnight. It was built, often through previous tragedies. “Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of practice in Minneapolis responding to state-sanctioned murders of our neighbors,” said Rev. Neuhauser. She pointed to the police killings of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and others in recent years.
“I think with each of those inflection points, we’ve gotten more skilled at building deep relationships, so that we are nimble and ready to show up,” she said. “The on-ramp to growing a resistance was shorter because of that muscle memory.”
Hogan of OPEIU Local 12 also said that 2020 was a tipping point for building out organizing infrastructure. “We had Proud Boys and Boogaloos on the streets, so we had to get to know our neighbors in order to stand watch and protect ourselves.”
“Right now, the thing that is going to win is community-led, community-decided solutions.”
Rod Adams, founder and executive director of the New Justice Project—a Black-led organizing hub focused on racial and economic justice for low-income Minnesotans—told me something similar. “Every five years, there is a moment where Minneapolis is center stage in America or global political news,” he said. “It’s important for people around the country to learn how we got this way.” And, he noted, sustained mass political engagement has led to real legislative change. Adams cited a suite of progressive policies passed by the Minnesota legislature in 2023, including paid family leave, voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, and a new child tax credit.
“Those are policies that have been worked on for 20 years by hundreds, if not thousands, of people,” Adams said. “The thing that I say to the rest of the country is that right now is the moment to get organized.”
Okay, so you’re not in Minnesota, and you’re not in a union or in a community group. Now what? How do you actually get organized?
“Get to know your neighbors,” said Hogan. “Start with two or three people on your block, and then just keep talking to people. And then that can turn into not only protecting yourselves from ICE, but saying, hey, let’s all work together to show up at the next protest or event.”
Those neighborhood connections proved vital for pulling off the Minnesota strike. While social media played a role in getting the word out, much of the communication happened on the ground—whether among neighbors or labor unions, inside congregations and local ICE rapid response networks, or simply going from business-to-business, asking them to close for the day.
“We talked to dozens of Black businesses in North Minneapolis, which is really the core economic hub here for Black Minnesotans,” said Adams of the New Justice Project. Sarrack of UNITE HERE Local 17 said the regional labor federation went door-to-door with flyers.
“If your city is being occupied by ICE and there’s a rapid response group in your neighborhood, join it. If there isn’t, create one. If there is a mutual aid network, join it and support it. If there isn’t, create one,” Adams added. “Right now, the thing that is going to win is community-led, community-decided solutions.”
Building power at the micro level also means understanding the immediate needs of your community and strategizing accordingly. Since OPEIU Local 12 represents clinic workers, for instance, Hogan said that unit members had conversations with hospital employers about creating protocols for protecting the rights of undocumented patients in the event ICE shows up. Something everyone can do right now, he said, is demand their employer have a policy for when ICE enters their specific facility or detains a colleague.
Organizers pointed to the range of ways that community members showed up on January 23 and throughout that week.
While 75,000 people marched down the streets of Minneapolis, protesters demonstrated against ICE deportation flights at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport. Roughly 100 faith leaders were arrested after kneeling on the road, praying for immigrants who had been detained—including members of UNITE Here 17, Sarrack noted. A few days before that action, a group organized by CTUL’s worker-leaders occupied the offices of developer DR Horton, demanding that the company protect its employees against ICE raids on construction sites.
In addition to asking folks to strike, UNITE HERE Local 17 used the Day of Truth and Freedom to push out a mutual aid fundraising drive. When I spoke with Sarrack on January 29, she said the fund had already raised $100,000 for members who are currently unable to work.
Rev. Neuhauser said she saw a huge outpouring of donations of winter wear for protesters and clergy. “And then there are these community-based little glimpses of—I mean, I don’t know how to describe it other than love,” she said. People served hot beverages to marchers on the side of the road, while businesses opened their doors just so people could come get warm.
“One of my favorite things about what’s been happening in Minneapolis is the number of Somali aunties that show up to public actions with trays of homemade sambuses and cups of hot Somali tea,” Neuhauser added.
The Day of Truth and Freedom may be over, but the work will continue. “We’re in a different world than we were even a month ago. The possibility of what can be done is different,” said Payne of CTUL.
He noted that CTUL is using the momentum generated from the strike to demand workplace protections from large developers and visiting job sites to talk to workers about their rights.
“There’s been silence from the largest business interests in the state since all of this is happening, but this is impacting their bottom line,” Payne said. “We see an opportunity to make our campaign significantly larger than we ever could have in the past…and drive a wedge between the largest business interests and the Trump administration.”
Organizers all said they were encouraged by seeing people across the country march and strike in solidarity with Minnesota, because it shows people understand their struggles are connected.
“We are all under attack,” said Adams. “If you don’t understand that you’re under attack, you’re going to wake up one day and realize that you had an opportunity to stand up and now it’s too late.”
2026-02-06 03:26:19
During his address to God at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, a democrat from Illinois, called on President Donald Trump to be “invested in the elevation of suffering” of people in this country, including “the families preparing to bury their loved ones in Minneapolis.”
Rep. Jackson, son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, asked God to “remind” the president “that he has the power to turn mourning into dancing or to reduce the country into a cosmic elegy of chaos and suffering” as Trump stood just feet away, his eyes fluttering open and shut during the prayer.
The representative’s prayer provided an uninterrupted moment in a crowded room to call attention to the ongoing and violent federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, which, as Jackson noted, included agents fatally shooting two US citizens: Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
Both men were on stage for the 74th National Prayer Breakfast, an event that every president has attended since Dwight D. Eisenhauer. It was Trump’s sixth time speaking at the breakfast, and his address lasted over an hour and 15 minutes.
In that address, Trump falsely claimed that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election, joked that “I really think I probably should make it” into heaven, and defended his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who is facing increasing calls for her to be fired or impeached, among other boilerplate talking points for the president.
Rep. Jackson has been a critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations and was a part of the group of Illinois lawmakers who were denied entry into an ICE processing facility during the summer, before being granted access late last year. He’s faced pushback, though, for buying stock in Palantir, a major ICE contractor. The representative, according to NOTUS, “regretted buying this stock and that he asked his financial adviser to get rid of his Palantir holdings.”
Elsewhere in Rep. Jackson’s prayer about Trump, he asked God to “increase the stature of his wisdom,” to “lead this president into greater levels of compassion,” and to “give him greater clarity, greater courage, and greater capacity to do what is right.”
“For the sake of this nation, for the sake of this world, we pray that goodness and mercy would announce themselves in his life in new and powerful ways,” Rep. Jackson said, adding, “remind him that we are all Americans, all made in the image of God and that none of us are free unless all of us have our freedoms protected.”
2026-02-06 00:01:38
On Monday, in a dramatic escalation of his administration’s attempt to interfere in the midterm elections, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places.”
Trump’s efforts “to nationalize the voting,” as he put it, will be difficult to pull off, since states have control over the administration of elections under the Constitution. But there is one place he could succeed: Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI just seized more than 650 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in an unprecedented raid on January 28.
That’s because, in the aftermath of the president’s lies about the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a sweeping rewrite of the state’s voting laws that gave the state election board (which now has a Trump-aligned MAGA majority) the extraordinary power to take over up to four county election boards that it views as “underperforming” or where local officials have lodged complaints.
‘‘Why do they want Fulton County? Well, that’s obvious. It’s the biggest county in Georgia, and it houses Atlanta. If you control Fulton County that basically guarantees for Republicans they win every statewide race.”
That means someone appointed by the election-denier majority on the state board, which oversees voting rules and election certification, could sideline the Democratic majority on the Fulton County election board and take control of election operations in the state’s largest county, a Democratic stronghold that contains most of metro Atlanta.
Democrats and voting rights experts are warning that the FBI raid in Fulton County is exactly the pretext Republicans need to initiate a takeover.
“That is 100 percent what this is about,” says Democratic State Rep. Saira Draper, who represents metro Atlanta and was present when the FBI raided the county elections center. “To the extent the President gets his ego stroked, I’m sure that’s just icing on the cake. But I think the whole purpose of this is to take over Fulton County.”
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic member of the state election board, shares those concerns. “There certainly is a very strong possibility that they’re going to try to take over,” she says. With the Trump administration now in control of the ballots from 2020, “they can spin up whatever story they want.”
Janelle King, one of three election deniers on the board, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution following the raid that a takeover of Fulton County is “on the radar as an avenue we could take.” At a board meeting the week before the FBI operation, the board’s executive director James Mills, a former Republican state legislator, explicitly threatened to remove the elections chief in Fulton County, saying he was “ready to do something drastic.”
A pro-Trump majority gained control of the state election board in 2024 and were infamously praised by the president in August 2024 as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” The board attempted to pass a series of rule changes in advance of the 2024 election that would have made it easier to throw out votes and contest election results, which state courts ultimately blocked.
If someone appointed by the state board were to gain control of elections in Fulton County, which is more than 40 percent Black and where Trump lost by 44 points in 2024, “they could really devastate opportunities for Fulton County voters to exercise their franchise,” Tindall Ghazal warns. That could mean purging voters from the rolls, cutting polling locations, limiting early voting hours, challenging voters’ eligibility to cast a ballot, and attempting to refuse to certify election results if a Democrat wins.
“It would mean that they would never certify an election that didn’t have Republicans winning everything,” says Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory, a Democrat. “That’s what this is about. It’s about the ultimate certification of elections. So if they take over elections, they can refuse to certify.” (State courts in Georgia have ruled that certification is “mandatory” but election deniers are trying to challenge that holding.)
A MAGA takeover of Fulton County would have huge ripple effects across Georgia, both in 2026, when the state has competitive elections for every top statewide race and the US Senate, and in 2028.
‘‘Why do they want Fulton County?” asks Draper. “Well, that’s obvious. It’s the biggest county in Georgia, and it houses Atlanta. If you control Fulton County that basically guarantees for Republicans they win every statewide race.”
The MAGA disinformation campaign against Fulton County dates back to Election Night 2020, when Trump and his supporters spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted after GOP poll monitors left. These claims were thoroughly debunked and the Georgia results audited three times. Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani was ultimately ordered to pay $148 million for defaming two Black election workers in Fulton County who he falsely accused of election fraud.
But even as Trump’s lies were refuted, his allies sought to gain more control over state elections. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who had resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780” votes to overturn Biden’s victory, as chair and a voting member of the state election board.
Later that year the board, which was in the process of being taken over by Trump’s allies, initiated a performance review of Fulton County, the first step toward a possible takeover. In 2023, however, the state board unanimously voted not to replace the county board, praising them for making “significant improvements” in election administration.
‘‘This is nothing more than a rehash of conspiracy theories and people not understanding how elections actually work.”
But when Trump-aligned members gained a majority at the beginning of 2024, they intensified scrutiny of the county, seizing on small administrative errors, such as when the county accidentally double counted 3,000 ballots during a recount of the 2020 election, which did not change the outcome (Trump actually gained 1,000 votes during the recount).
The board appointed a bipartisan team to monitor the 2024 election in Fulton County, who praised the county’s election operations as “organized and orderly” in the run-up to the election. Nonetheless, on election night 2024, as Fulton County election workers dealt with bomb threats in the middle of a heated presidential election, the state board voted to subpoena records from the 2020 election, escalating its campaign against the county.
When Trump returned to office, the board’s MAGA majority felt empowered to escalate its probe into the 2020 results in Fulton County, which remained an obsession for Trump.
At the very end of a two-day state board meeting in July 2025, the board’s Trump-aligned majority voted to approve a resolution calling on the DOJ to “take any action necessary” to help them seize documents from Fulton County related to the 2020 election. The board chairman, Republican John Fervier, noted that he was “adamantly opposed” to the resolution, which passed 3-2.
The DOJ quickly acted on the board’s request, first with demand letters from Attorney General Pam Bondi asserting that the county had to hand over “all records… responsive to the recent subpoena issued to your office by the State Election Board.” The county replied that the records sought were under seal because of a Georgia statute and “may not be produced without a court order.” So, the DOJ filed a civil lawsuit in December, requesting the court make Fulton County comply.
It was one of two dozen lawsuits the DOJ has filed seeking extensive voting-related materials for federal review. Thus far, courts have rejected the DOJ’s arguments, possibly explaining Trump’s latest escalation, which he hinted at during a speech at Davos on January 21. People would “soon be prosecuted for what they did” in the “rigged” 2020 election, the president said.
A week later, the FBI obtained its criminal warrant to raid the Fulton County election center and collect ballots, voter rolls, and other 2020 election records. The impetus for that criminal investigation, according to The Atlantic, was a 263-page report written by conservative activists recycling old, disproven, and irrelevant claims.
Cleta Mitchell, the onetime Trump lawyer who helped the president try to overturn the election in Georgia and took part in the call when Trump demanded that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” claimed last week the report was “THE answer to everyone’s question” of why the FBI raided Fulton’s election warehouse. She said one of the report’s main authors, Kevin Moncla, “dotted every I and crossed every t and it is stunning.”
Moncla has been making debunked claims about the election for years and was referred to the FBI by Georgia election officials for sending threatening emails. He also has a lengthy criminal history, which includes pleading guilty to a misdemeanor voyeurism charge and being ordered to pay $3.25 million for secretly filming house guests, a couple and their two young children, in his bathroom.
“There’s nothing in there that has not already been investigated by Georgia certified law enforcement investigators, reported on to the state election board, and never once has any sort of criminal act been identified,” Ghazal tells Mother Jones. “This is nothing more than a rehash of conspiracy theories and people not understanding how elections actually work.”
For example, the report points to Fulton County ordering a little more than a million absentee ballots shortly before the 2020 general election, suggesting that these ballots were “used nefariously—and injected or cast as regular absentee ballots.” However, the report itself provides no evidence of such an infusion and points out that having extra emergency ballots on hand is not illegal; in fact, it is statutorily required. While Fulton County officials ordered more than the typical amount, they had understandable reasons; machine issues in the primary had caused at least one county to run out of provisional ballots, and a COVID outbreak among Fulton County staff in late October complicated machine testing and training for the general election.
The report also spends nine pages rehashing the baseless theory that “suitcases” of improper ballots were going to be conveniently snuck into vote counts after partisan election monitors left State Farm Arena, a large polling site.
Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly disproven that claim. “What you saw—the secret suitcase with magic ballots—were actually ballots that had been packed into those absentee ballot carriers by the workers in the plain view of the [partisan election] monitors and the press,” Gabriel Sterling, who served as Raffensperger’s election system implementation manager, said at the time.
Not to say the election in Georgia was conducted perfectly, especially in the chaotic COVID-era. Philip Stark, a Berkeley professor whose research on post-election audits was cited by the report, says many Georgia counties struggle with maintaining paper election records. But there’s a distinction, he says, between procedural mistakes and “deliberate malfeasance.”
“What I keep seeing in reports is just sort of equating ‘It wasn’t done well’ with ‘It was rigged,’” Stark says. “I’ve seen no evidence that it was.”
Most recently, members of the state election board have been in an uproar over Fulton County’s failure to sign tabulator tapes—essentially receipts of votes cast—for 300,000 ballots during early voting in 2020. But that does not mean those votes were illegal or invalid.
“It’s an insane position to take that, because you miss this one bureaucratic step out of 500 steps that happen in an election, that you should then nullify the votes of 300,000 people,” says Draper, the Democratic state Rep. “But that is exactly the kind of attitude that is taken towards mistakes in Fulton County. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that will be taken when they look at the ballots and whatever else they got through the warrant in Fulton County, to point to anything and say, ‘this is a big deal.’”
For election deniers in Georgia, the raid—and resulting possibility that the DOJ uncovers smoking-gun “proof” of a crooked election from the seized materials—was cause for celebration. Several prominent election deniers quickly applauded the operation and seemingly took credit for it. Two of the MAGA-aligned state board members, Jan Johnston and Salleigh Grubbs, observed the FBI raid while two other prominent 2020 skeptics, Garland Favorito and Jason Frazier, posted a selfie in front of the “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” tape in front of the building.
And while the alleged criminal investigation centers around the 2020 election, what happens next will likely have major implications for upcoming ones. Trump adviser Steve Bannon invited the election denial activists who witnessed the raid on his podcast the day after for a victory lap. “Yes it is about 2026,” Bannon said. “And it’s about 2028. We are not ever going to allow you to steal another election.”
2026-02-05 20:30:00
It’s been a half-century since Thomas Grace was knocked off his feet by an Ohio National Guardsman’s bullet, but he still braces for a flashback whenever people “under the color of uniform” concoct dubious claims to justify deadly force against other Americans.
Last month it happened again. He watched as videos from Minneapolis showed agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement shoot, first Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and, less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Administration nurse. And then he saw officials from the Trump administration scramble to avoid accountability and shift blame to the victims.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m able to shake this kind of thing off,” Grace told me when I gave him a call last week. But those attacks, he said, were “just so violent and unprovoked” that “it definitely had an impact on me.”
The basic facts of the tragedy at Kent State University are well-known. Shortly after noon on May 4, 1970, twenty-eight soldiers kneeled on a grassy knoll and fired more than sixty rounds in thirteen seconds into a crowd of students, most of whom were there to protest the expansion of the Vietnam war. They killed four and wounded nine, including Grace, a sophomore history major who was shot through his left heel.
The circumstances back then, of course, differed substantially from the deadly recent events in Minneapolis. Yet for those of us who came of age in that era, for whom the Ohio tragedy is seared into our memories as a critical turning point during a time of national crisis, the striking parallels are impossible to ignore: A country deeply divided over urgent matters both domestic and foreign. Opponents of a president, demonized with inflammatory claims by those in power. Unarmed citizens, dead at the hands of government agents ill-suited to their mission.
And, of course, the cover-ups. Before the blood had dried on the Kent State campus, the Guard commanders declared that the soldiers had acted rationally out of fear for their lives. Not only was a violent mob of antiwar protesters just yards away and closing in with rocks and bricks, they claimed, but someone else had fired the first shot. “At the approximate time of the firing on the campus,” a spokesman for the Guard told reporters, “the Ohio Highway Patrol—via a helicopter—spotted a sniper on a nearby building.”
They even provided evidence: a bullet hole in a fifteen-foot-tall abstract metal sculpture named Solar Totem #1, which sat roughly between the students and the Guard’s position on the knoll known as Blanket Hill. The jagged side of the hole faced the soldiers, and therefore, they argued, the bullet had been fired toward them by someone in the crowd.
That is why, three days later, the artist who’d created the sculpture, Don Drumm, accompanied journalists from Akron’s Beacon-Journal to a nearby farm. Drumm brought a sheet of the weathering steel he’d used. With a borrowed rifle and the same type of ammunition used by the Guard, the group fired a bullet through the sheet. The entry side turned out to be the jagged one. The bullet that struck the sculpture actually had been fired from the Guard’s position.
As for the supposed sniper on the roof? A photographer from the school paper holding his camera, not a gun.
If those errors by the Guard could be charitably chalked up as being a rush to judgment, another bit of faulty evidence could not. Captain J. Ronald Snyder, an 18-year veteran of the Guard, commanded one of the units deployed on campus that day. He claimed he had been first to reach the side of one of the dead students, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, a 20-year-old sophomore psychology major who was shot through the mouth and bled out, face down, on the pavement. Snyder told investigators that he’d found a .32 caliber revolver when he flipped the lifeless Miller over with his boot. Here was some evidence suggesting that if a sniper hadn’t been involved, perhaps Miller had fired first.
It wasn’t until five years later that Snyder confessed in a federal courtroom that he had planted the weapon in hopes of exonerating his colleagues—a throw-down gun, as it’s known in corrupt police investigations.
His admission was unsurprising. His lie had long been undermined by one of the most powerful images in that time of American crisis, one that appeared on the front page of nearly every major newspaper. In the photograph, a 14-year-old named Mary Ann Vecchio was crouched in anguish over Miller, her arms spread wide. No guardsmen could be seen anywhere nearby. The student who shot the picture, John Filo, would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, as did the Beacon-Journal for its coverage of Kent State.
As for the commanders’ assertion that the soldiers fired to defend themselves from imminent danger, the Scranton Commission on Campus Unrest, a national panel set up on orders of President Richard Nixon six weeks later, used films and pictures to determine that “the main body of aggressive students was about 60 to 75 yards away, at the foot of the hill.”
The four people killed were located in or at the edge of a parking lot outside Prentice Hall, a women’s dormitory. Closest to the shooters was Miller, 85 yards away. Allison B. Krause, 19, a freshman in the Honors College, was 110 yards away, killed by a bullet that passed through her left upper arm into her left side. William Knox Schroeder, 19, a sophomore psychology major, shot in the back, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, a junior studying speech therapy, hit in the front of her neck, each stood 130 yards from the soldiers.
Fast-forward to the morning of January 24, 2026.
At least six masked federal agents in Minneapolis confronted Alex Pretti, who had turned out to observe and record the often-brutal tactics of ICE immigration raids. As Pretti was helping a woman who agents had knocked down, they surrounded him, pepper-sprayed him, and knocked him to the ground before firing ten bullets at him. After Pretti’s death, a collection of Trump officials immediately amplified various justifications —none of them accurate— just as they had after the fatal shooting several weeks earlier of Renee Good. They claimed Pretti was “brandishing” his gun (which had been holstered until the agents pulled it out) and was out to “massacre law enforcement.” As for Good, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem branded her a “domestic terrorist” who had tried to run over the agent who ended up fatally shooting her.
In both instances, visual evidence collected by bystanders was crucial to getting closer to the truth. This is why I checked in with Tom Grace.
I’d met Grace a couple of years earlier at an author’s event where we both signed books, in his case Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties, published in 2016 (and mine, MAYDAY 1971). The bullet in 1970 took off a chunk of Grace’s left foot. The ambulance that sped him away from the scene also carried Sandra Scheuer, who died on the way. He watched as medics covered her head with a sheet. When he arrived at the hospital, only his mother’s plea to the surgeons saved him from an amputation. I knew that it had been excruciating for him and other survivors to see the National Guard try to blame the students for their own injuries.
Grace returned to Kent State, became a social worker, and then earned his doctorate in history, teaching until his recent retirement from SUNY Erie near Buffalo, where I reached him at home. He told me that just as photographs and films helped correct the 1970 narrative, so did smartphones this time. Without the videos of Pretti’s last moments, the falsehoods from the administration and ICE might have prevailed. “Half the country would still be thinking he was a would-be assassin,” he said. (Although, given the climate of misinformation created by our government, half the country still might.)
Grace suggested that I speak with another survivor, who now teaches in Kent State’s School of Media and Journalism. Roseann ‘Chic’ Canfora was part of the 1970 protest and became one of the most effective advocates for its proper remembrance and commemoration. Her brother Alan Canfora, who was also wounded that day, was Grace’s best friend.
“It’s chilling for us to see history repeating itself. The more confusion that sets in from the start, the harder it becomes to change minds that are already made up.”
“It’s chilling for us to see history repeating itself,” she said. Canfora teaches her students that when government officials muddy the truth, it can be hard to undo the damage even in the face of new evidence. “The more confusion that sets in from the start,” she said, “the harder it becomes to change minds that are already made up.”
If we needed one more reminder of the parallels between then and now, a bittersweet one showed up last week. Just as Kent State inspired Neil Young to write “Ohio,” which quickly became a timeless anthem of the era, another rock legend released a single about the current events. Bruce Springsteen went to Minneapolis to perform his new requiem, “Streets of Minneapolis.” “And there were bloody footprints,” he sang, “Where mercy should have stood.”
Not long ago, at the Kent State campus, I stood on the grassy knoll where the guardsmen kneeled, gazing down at the parking lot where most of the victims had been standing. The lot remains in daily use except for the exact spots where the dead students fell, each marked off permanently by six pylons that light up like beacons at night.
From that hill on a soft, peaceful morning, it was frankly impossible to fully grasp what occurred in 1970. If they weren’t about to be overrun by a bloodthirsty mob, if no sniper had fired, then what led a contingent of part-time soldiers to aim loaded M-1 rifles, weapons with a horizontal range of almost two miles, at anyone, never mind unarmed members of their own generation, the length of a football field away.
A similar curiosity motivated Brian VanDeMark, a historian and author, now in his sixties, to spend more than four years working on his 2024 book, Kent State: An American Tragedy, which is without doubt the most comprehensive look at the events. “I’d always been perplexed about the unanswered questions,” VanDeMark told me. “What led to the shooting? Why did this happen? How could it reach a point of tension and pressure where American soldiers could kill American students on American soil?”
To reconstruct the events, VanDeMark explored the archives and the historical context and spoke with scores of witnesses, including several guardsmen who had never granted interviews before. His research suggests to me that disaster was all but inevitable. Just as with Minnesota, the causes of the events of May 4 can’t be limited to the moments before the guardsmen pulled their triggers.
While not considered a major hotbed of 1960s activism, Kent State wasn’t immune to the country’s increasingly poisonous political and social atmosphere. It had been brewing for years, stoked by extremists of all stripes and by many of the nation’s top leaders. That spring brought a chain of events that created even more volatile conditions, primed for any spark.
On the evening of Thursday, April 30th, Nixon, who had won the White House with a promise to wind down the Vietnam War, announced on national television that he had expanded it instead into neighboring Cambodia. The next morning, he made an off-the-cuff remark overheard by reporters, denouncing “these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.”
Nixon’s remark reflected his visceral disdain for antiwar protesters. One of his first official acts had been to order intelligence agencies to investigate whether the movement was being financed by foreign agents. “Little bastards are draft dodgers, country-haters, or don’t-cares” and “revolutionaries and radicals and bastards” were typical of the comments captured on his White House tapes. He usually left the public insults to others, such as Vice President Spiro Agnew, who railed against “misfits” and “impudent effete snobs.”
As Nixon’s aides had warned him privately, the antiwar movement, which had lost momentum, revived in fury with news of both the Cambodia incursion and his “bums.” Protests broke out on hundreds of campuses. Movement leaders began planning for a national student strike and a mass march in Washington a week hence, on the ninth of May.
On Friday, May 1, angry Kent State students gathered on the grassy Commons, where they held a mock funeral for the Constitution. Late that night, scuffles outside a strip of bars escalated into pitched battles between city police and students, some of whom ran through downtown, breaking windows. The mayor asked Ohio Governor James Rhodes to dispatch the National Guard. Before the guardsmen arrived Saturday evening, students surrounded the one-story wooden building used by Kent State’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and set it afire with rags soaked in gasoline. Then they blocked city firefighters from putting it out.
Into this charged environment rushed military jeeps and trucks carrying hundreds of guardsmen, exhausted from having just spent four miserable days deployed by the governor at the site of a Teamsters strike in Akron. (Rhodes treated the Guard like his personal army, having called it out thirty-one times in two years, VanDeMark reported.) They arrived on campus with rifles and fixed bayonets, clashing with furious students as they forced them back to their dorms.
Sunday, May 3, was a textbook example of verbal provocation by government officials. The governor, who was term-limited and running for a US Senate seat as a tough law-and-order candidate, arrived in Kent to hold court. At a news conference, likely emboldened by Nixon’s “bums” comment, Rhodes spoke bombastically, pounding on his desk. The protests and the ROTC burning were “the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated” in Ohio, he told reporters. If he hadn’t called in the guard, he claimed without evidence, radicals would have burned more than a dozen other buildings. “They’re worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element, and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
“They’re worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element, and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
Asked by a reporter, “What size organization do you think that you’re up against here at the university?” Rhodes replied, “We’re up against the strongest, well- trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America,” one that would go to any lengths to achieve its purpose and “[causing] death is not going to stand in the way.” He added, “No one is safe in Portage County. No one is safe.”
Other officials at the news conference picked up on Rhodes’ tone. To stop the protests, “we will apply whatever degree of force is necessary,” declared the head of the Ohio National Guard, Adjutant General Sylvester Del Corso. The Kent police chief, Roy Thompson, agreed, adding, “Even to the point of shooting. We don’t want to get into that, but the law says we can if necessary.” Chief of the Ohio Highway Patrol, Robert Chiaramonte, warned that police and troops should prepare for possible snipers, and “they can expect us to return fire.” Canfora remembers hearing about the governor’s tirade at the time. “It never dawned on us that what this man was doing was not only sending armed gunmen onto our campus, but he was putting targets on our backs,” she said. If the students had realized that, “there might not have been so many of us there” the following day.
Grace recalls that he and his friends were angrier about the Cambodia invasion than the rhetoric of politicians. Still, the warnings about snipers must have been frightening to those on the other side of the barricades. Grace wondered in retrospect, “What kind of impact did that have on the National Guard?”
He heard an echo of those fighting words in a TV interview conducted last October with Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a clip that officials say is shown to ICE agents. “You have immunity to perform your duties,” Miller tells them. “And no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”
After another night of sporadic clashes between guardsmen and students, soldiers were posted on Monday near the Commons, where a midday rally was planned. The governor had declared martial law, a legally and constitutionally questionable decree banning any protest in town or on campus. Asked how big a group would constitute an unlawful gathering, he answered, “two students walking together.”
The students came anyway. By noon, there were more than two-thousand. People carried black flags and chanted slogans such as “Pigs off campus!” and “No more war!” Many taunted the soldiers. But witnesses, from students to faculty, from campus police to many guardsmen, later described the gathering as peaceful. Hundreds of kids coming through the center of campus after morning classes stopped to watch. It wasn’t easy to distinguish activists from spectators.
At this point, the belligerent comments from the governor, the head of the National Guard, and local officials must have been ringing in the ears of the highest-ranking officer on the scene, Brigadier General Robert Canterbury. A 55-year-old who’d seen combat in World War II, Canterbury nevertheless “lacked the understanding and empathy that are antidotes to tunnel vision and awareness of one’s limitations,” VanDeMark wrote. When the day was done, Canterbury would assert, improbably, that he had been present but wasn’t in the chain of command.
Against the advice of other officials, Canterbury decided to clear the area and told a university police officer to make the announcement over a bullhorn. The students refused to move. A few threw rocks. Canterbury, with approximately one hundred guardsmen at his disposal, ordered them to don gas masks and form a line with their rifles loaded and bayonets fixed to sweep a crowd of thousands off the Commons.
Most students didn’t realize the soldiers were permitted to carry live ammunition. They resisted until tear gas forced them to scatter. The guardsmen split up and kept marching beyond the Commons to push groups of students further out. In so doing, the contingent led by Canterbury found itself briefly trapped in a fenced-off football practice field, exchanging tear gas canisters and rocks with protesters. Under Canterbury’s orders, the nervous soldiers retreated, somewhat chaotically, aiming to regroup at the burned ROTC building. Dozens of protesters, realizing they had the guardsmen on the run, started moving in the same direction, some throwing stones and chanting with glee.
The soldiers later testified to investigators and in courtrooms that they were terrified they were about to be overrun and attacked, saying they believed the protesters were closing in and intended to inflict bodily harm or even death. They hustled up Blanket Hill. At the top, those on one flank stopped, turned on their heels, aimed. They had done the same thing minutes earlier in the practice field to halt the students’ advance.
But this time they fired.
Why? Was there an order? If so, who gave it? Over the decades, in reports and investigations, no clear answer emerged. A summary of an FBI probe of the killings, issued by the Justice Department in October 1970, was highly skeptical of the soldiers’ claim they were in imminent danger. The summary also suggested the bureau’s interviewers were frustrated at hearing conflicting stories: “One guardsman heard someone yell and believed he’d been given an order to fire. Another ‘thought’ he heard a command to fire. He, however, claims he did not fire. Another heard a warning to ‘get down’ just before the firing. Another ‘thought’ he heard ‘someone’ say ‘warning shots.’ Another ‘thought’ he heard ‘someone’ say ‘if they continue toward you, fire.’ Most guardsmen heard no order, and no person acknowledges giving such an order.”
For VanDeMark, however, the mystery is now solved. In 2020, he landed an interview for his book with Sergeant Mathew McManus, who had been on Blanket Hill in 1970. At the time, McManus was 25, had a job at a paper company and had served in the Guard for seven years.
McManus told the author that when he saw troops kneeling and aiming, he was desperate to avert tragedy. He said he yelled, “‘Fire one round in the air! Fire in the air!’” He then pointed his own shotgun up and pulled the trigger to demonstrate. The implication is that in the midst of all the noise and confusion, the others heard only “Fire!” and his weapon discharging. They then followed suit.
By this account, instead of heading off disaster, McManus’s good intentions brought it on.
The story was at odds with what McManus previously claimed to the FBI and others, which was that he shouted and fired only after hearing the first shots. He told VanDeMark he lied all those years out of fear and shame but has been haunted ever since. Finally, in his mid-70s, he said he wanted to set the record straight before it was too late.
For VanDeMark, this scenario fit the known facts and aligned with the testimony of nearly two dozen other eyewitnesses. “It was as if things suddenly rearranged themselves and clicked neatly into place,” he writes. Some of the student witnesses and survivors, like Chic Canfora, remain skeptical of this latest explanation of why the other soldiers fired. “That truth can only come from the triggermen themselves and not Mathew McManus,” she said, “who has changed his story numerous times over the years.”
Whatever the proximate cause, much if not most of the responsibility belonged to the officials who sent the guardsmen to Kent State in the first place, on a crowd control mission for which they were ill-suited, unprepared, and over-armed. They had little, if any, training in how to deal with student protesters or how to defuse a potentially violent situation. What’s more, politicians had vilified the people they were facing as dangerous and evil, and guardsmen had the added misfortune of Canterbury, an inept and reactive leader.
“That’s one of the pressing lessons of Kent State: abysmal military and political leadership set in motion a situation that contributed essentially to the thing getting out of hand and escalating into tragedy.”
“That’s one of the pressing lessons of Kent State: abysmal military and political leadership set in motion a situation that contributed essentially to the thing getting out of hand and escalating into tragedy,” VanDeMark said. Leaders have “a moral responsibility to minimize the risk of tragedy. That responsibility was abdicated in 1970.”
The consequences were dire. Four students were dead. Among the survivors, the most grievously wounded was Dean Kahler, a 20-year-old Ohio farm boy who had started college late and had only been on campus for about a month. He’d never been to a protest and wanted to check it out. A bullet in his back injured his spinal cord. He’s spent his life in a wheelchair.
Here is where I would love to report that these horrors launched a long overdue national soul-searching. That the nation’s leaders reckoned with the fallout from demonizing certain groups and unleashing an armed force upon them. That the divisions roiling families and communities healed as people came together to mourn their children. Even my own father, skeptical of the antiwar movement, a position that made my home visits increasingly uncomfortable, was so shaken by Kent State that he made a rare call to the pay phone in the hallway of my college dorm. You were right all along, he told me. It’s Nixon who’s the bum.
But it was not to be.
At first, it seemed the tragedy might melt one icy heart in the White House. Nixon was initially shocked when given the news from Ohio. “Is this because of me, of Cambodia?” he asked H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff. In his diary, Haldeman recorded, “Obviously realizes, but won’t openly admit, his ‘bums’ remark very harmful.”
Kent State haunted Nixon all week. Newspaper editorials heaped scorn on the White House. His remarks about students were “obtuse and heartless” and his invasion of Cambodia “a monumental blunder,” wrote Tom Wicker of the New York Times. Fires or explosions hit more than a dozen campuses. Nixon’s aides worried about his mental and physical state as tens of thousands of young people streamed to Washington for the big antiwar rally on Saturday, which was being supercharged by the Ohio killings.
The president couldn’t sleep that Friday night. Around 4 a.m. Saturday morning, he made one of the strangest moves of his presidency. He snuck out with his personal assistant, Manolo Sanchez, to visit the Lincoln Memorial. He was desperate to connect face-to-face with the young people sleeping there in advance of the protest.
In his own idiosyncratic way, Nixon was sincere in this effort, taking a real personal and political risk. But the meeting didn’t go well. A cluster of astonished demonstrators, most of whom had been roused from sleep, or were stoned, or both, stared at the president in silence for half an hour. He told them he understood that “most of you think I’m an S.O.B” and then delivered a rambling monologue on subjects ranging from Winston Churchill to travel tips. He asked a few about their schools’ athletics. But after Ohio, the kids were in no mood for presidential chitchat, and news reports veered close to ridicule. “Here we come from a university that’s completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team,” Joan Pelletier, a Syracuse University student, told reporters.
Later that day, the president glumly hunkered down inside a White House encircled by a cordon of municipal buses for protection, as some 100,000 people marched peacefully through DC. He soon reverted to his default emotional state of suspicion and retribution. Within weeks, Nixon approved the notorious Huston Plan, which proposed wiretaps, break-ins, and other illegal acts against movement leaders and anyone else deemed an internal security risk. (He withdrew approval after aides argued it could be legally dangerous to sign off on such a document, even if classified. Formally approved or not, the black bag activities never stopped. And we all know how that turned out for Nixon.)
Nor did Kent State at least provide a cautionary tale for law enforcement facing unarmed students. On May 15th, police who were summoned to quell rowdy students at Jackson State College in Mississippi fired into a dormitory, killing two young people and wounding 12. The incident didn’t receive the same national attention as the one at Kent State, which led to charges of racism in the media, the government, and among the public, since the victims were Black.
As for public opinion, a Gallup poll conducted for Newsweek a few weeks after Kent State found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for what happened, and only 11 percent blamed the National Guard. In a representative letter to the editor in Ohio, 23-year-old Sherry L. Parke wrote to the Beacon-Journal, “It was a sad day indeed, when a minority mob of radical students could threaten the existence of our government and then be made heroes of the day by men and women of the news media.” Hundreds of construction workers brutally attacked antiwar protesters in lower Manhattan and went on to force Mayor John Lindsay to raise flags he had ordered set at half-mast to mourn the Ohio deaths.
Some grieving family members began receiving hate mail. The first get-well card Kahler opened in the hospital turned out to be from someone saying they wished he were dead.
Nor did the quest for accountability bring satisfaction anytime soon to the victims and their families. The state of Ohio filed no charges against the guardsmen. Justice Department officials initially declined to pursue a civil rights case, explaining there was no expectation they could prove criminal intent or conspiracy. State officials empaneled a special grand jury. It indicted not the soldiers but one faculty member and 24 current and former students, including Chic Canfora, on various charges of rioting, assault, and arson. The indictment criticized the university’s “overemphasis” on the right to dissent. (Canfora and 21 others were either acquitted or had charges dropped.)
Under pressure from the victims’ families, Nixon’s Department of Justice revisited the case and indicted eight guardsmen in 1974. All were acquitted.
The families didn’t give up, filing a civil case in federal court against the guardsmen and state officials. They lost again. Following a successful appeal, a retrial was granted. And in the end, in January 1979, the families agreed to settle in exchange for an “official statement of regret” plus a payment of $675,000. To get there had taken them nearly nine years and countless hours sitting in courtrooms facing the shooters.
As a survivor of the Kent State killings who participated in those trials, Chic Canfora said the Minnesota incidents are “painful to see, and it’s also troubling because it means we’ve learned nothing from that dark chapter in American history.”
Despite the extreme acts of those who more recently have been employing state power against dissenters, it is heartening to see that, over time, at least there’s been a genuine reckoning with what happened back then. In a national survey conducted by Emerson College to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the killings, 36 percent said the National Guard was responsible, nine percent blamed the Ohio governor, and eight percent blamed Richard Nixon. Thirteen percent blamed the students.
Prodded by survivors and their supporters, Kent State University, after many years of ambivalence about how to mark this difficult history, ultimately decided to fully embrace it. Memorials and markers on campus display the facts and chronology as well as any Civil War battle site. The university opened an impressive May 4 Visitor Center in 2013. Three years later, the terrain of the shootings was designated a National Historic Landmark.
And every May 4, the college sponsors a series of commemorations that begin on the Commons at 12:24 p.m., the time of the shootings, and culminate at midnight with a silent candlelight march around the campus and the town. It is not possible to remain unmoved on this march, as I discovered when I joined not long ago. What becomes clear in the silence is that whatever happens in the future, the four dead in Ohio, victims of one terrible moment in an era of national emergency, have not been forgotten. One hopes the same for those victims of our own angry times.
Lawrence Roberts, a former investigative editor with the Washington Post and ProPublica, is the author of MAYDAY 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest.
2026-02-05 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025.
The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda.
A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Kennedy has also called for overhauling the current safety monitoring system for vaccine injury data collection, known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), claiming that it suppresses information about the true rate of vaccine side effects. He has also proposed changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that could make it easier for people to sue for adverse events that haven’t been proven to be associated with vaccines.
Jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, VAERS was established in 1990 as a way to detect potential safety issues with vaccines after their approval. Anyone, including health care providers and members of the public, can submit an adverse reaction report to the database. Because these claims are not verified, VAERS data alone can’t be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event.
“I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through.”
“VAERS, at best, was always a hypothesis-generating mechanism,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was previously a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. “It’s a noisy system. Anybody can report, and there’s no control group.”
Offit says the system only shows adverse events that happened at some point following immunization; it doesn’t prove that a vaccine caused those reactions. CDC’s own website says that a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event. Despite this, anti-vaccine activists have misused VAERS data over the years to argue that vaccines are not safe.
Leslie Lenert, previously the founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics, says government scientists have been using traditional natural language processing AI models to look for patterns in VAERS data for several years, so it’s not surprising that HHS would move toward the adoption of more advanced large language models.
One major limitation of VAERS is that it doesn’t include data on how many people received a vaccine, which can make events logged in the database seem more common than they actually are. For that reason, Lenert says it’s important to pair information from VAERS with other data sources to determine the true risk of an event.
LLMs are also famously good at producing convincing hallucinations, underscoring the need for humans to follow up on any hypotheses generated by an LLM. “VAERS is supposed to be very exploratory. Some people in the FDA are now treating it as more than exploratory,” says Lenert, who is currently the director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Health Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers University.
Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reportedly proposed stricter vaccine regulation in a recent memo sent to staff in which he blamed the deaths of at least 10 children on the Covid-19 vaccine without citing evidence. The deaths were reported to VAERS and had previously been reviewed by FDA staff. More than a dozen former FDA commissioners responded with a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine, expressing concern about Prasad’s proposed guidelines. The changes, they wrote, would “dramatically change vaccine regulation on the basis of a reinterpretation of selective evidence.”
Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at Georgetown University, says that the use of LLMs could potentially detect previously unknown safety issues with vaccines. But since VAERS can contain inaccurate and incomplete data, he says it’s important that any leads are thoroughly investigated first.
“I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through by people who understand vaccines and possible adverse events, as well as statistics, epidemiology, and challenges with LLM output,” he says.
With deep staffing cuts at the CDC, Goodman says it would be important to have plans and capacity in place to deal with any emerging data, including screening it and deciding what may need to be studied further and how.
In the past, VAERS has flagged legitimate safety issues, including instances of a rare clotting disorder among some people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and rare cases of myocarditis, particularly among younger males, who got the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
2026-02-05 19:00:00
“Big moves on Day 1,” White House senior policy strategist May Mailman crowed on X the morning of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, linking to a news article about a forthcoming executive order. Even amid the barrage of actions during the first hours of the Trump 2.0 presidency, the order—“Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—was a bombshell. It directed federal agencies to eradicate every trace of what it called “gender ideology” and established new government-wide definitions of the sexes. “Woman” meant adult human female. “Female” was “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Men made “the small reproductive cell.” “Sex,” it decreed, was an “immutable biological reality.”
For at least two years, Trump had been promising to “get transgender out” of schools, women’s sports, and the military. “It will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” he would tell his cheering crowds.
Riley Gaines, the swimmer–turned–anti-trans activist, fangirled, “May Mailman is my Taylor Swift.”
But the order’s sweep and audacity seemed to surprise even Trump’s admirers. “It’s perfection,” Megyn Kelly gushed on her SiriusXM show. “In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have drafted something this beautiful.” On X, the kudos flowed in from people in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Brazil. Many of the posts singled out Mailman, a Harvard-educated lawyer quickly identified as the order’s chief author. Riley Gaines, the swimmer–turned–anti-trans activist, fangirled, “May Mailman is my Taylor Swift.”
Mailman had spent four years working in the first Trump administration, becoming an immigration hawk and close ally and friend of senior adviser Stephen Miller. During the Biden era, she landed at the Independent Women’s Forum, a Washington power player that rose to prominence by pink-washing conservative economic policies—claiming to champion women’s freedom and equality while actually working to undermine them. There, she threw herself into the anti-trans cause, going from state to state to promote model legislation, known as the Women’s Bill of Rights, that enshrined narrow definitions of “male” and “female” into law.
Now, at the start of Trump’s second term, Mailman was stepping into the spotlight as a White House surrogate and speaking to conservative outlets about the need to “protect” cisgender women. “If men can just assert that they are women and take women’s privacy away, take their opportunity away, take their safety away,” she told a St. Louis radio host, “then there is no such thing as women’s rights anymore.”
But there were intimations that the crusade against trans people encompassed something broader. Mailman wasn’t just anti-trans; she was profoundly dismissive of feminism. “There’s something about, you know, swiping right and left in your apartment by yourself at 11 p.m. after working a hard day that, like, doesn’t feel like feminism is the answer to all your problems,” she mocked on one podcast. She was worried about how “gender ideology” would affect men, too. “Who’s going to be our firefighters? Who are going to be our policemen?” she fretted on another.
At a Federalist Society webinar last March, she urged listeners not to even use the word “transgender,” so as not to give “credence” to the idea of “this being a category of people.” She also raised an essential question: After defining sex in the law and kicking trans women out of sports and sororities, what comes next?
The answer, she suggested, had something to do with sorting out social roles for men and women. “Trying to figure out how much do we care about gender roles, how much should gender roles infect the idea of womanhood, will, I think, ultimately affect our thinking about gender roles absent transgenderism,” she mused.
Then she stopped, as if realizing she was treading into dangerous territory, and smiled. “That conversation is maybe for another day.”
This is the story of an extraordinary effort by the second Trump administration to shape our ideas about who and what men and women are—a campaign that began with the targeting of trans people but has vast implications for the rights of cisgender people as well. At the center is Mailman, who describes herself as “one of the most effective and connected veterans of the Trump West Wing,” the get-it-done woman for Trump’s get-it-done man. “Stephen [Miller]’s the ideas guy,” she told Blaze News in April. “And then I’m trying to be the one who makes it happen.”
In her whirlwind tour through the White House last year, Mailman made quite a few things happen very quickly—including a high-profile pressure campaign against her alma mater Harvard University to adopt Trumpian priorities in hiring and admissions or lose federal funding. Then, after six months, she left the administration, returning to IWF—now rebranded as just Independent Women—to direct its law center. There, she co-authored amicus briefs in two of the biggest Supreme Court cases of the year, both involving transgender students trying to overturn laws that forbid them from playing girls’ sports. The day after oral arguments, Mailman was on Fox News complaining that some of the justices had dared to call the students “transgender girls.”
“The executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender women. Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.”
Her Defending Women executive order—and the other anti-trans federal decrees that followed—had an immediate, sweeping impact on the estimated 2.8 million trans Americans over age 13. On the phone several days after January’s Supreme Court hearing, Mailman tells me the push to enshrine definitions of sex had two goals: to prevent courts and administrators from interpreting existing laws in ways that are inclusive of trans people and to make voters feel alienated from Democrats. She frames the idea that transgender women are women as an “elite” concept. “If the left can’t agree that ‘woman’ means ‘female,’” she says, “there is something very othering about that to most Americans.”
Now feminist scholars are also starting to raise alarms about the order’s implications for non-trans women. They warn it could be used to undo 50 years of legal and economic progress in the workplace, health care, education, and much more. “At the moment, the most painful, prejudicial consequences are for trans people,” says Kathryn Abrams, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor studying sex discrimination. But “the executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender women,” she says. “Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.”
For decades, much of the conservative movement has been fighting to undermine anti-discrimination protections based on sex, explains legal historian Mary Ziegler of the University of California, Davis. These include landmark laws like Title IX, which applies in education, and court decisions like United States v. Virginia, which said the government must have a strong reason, based on more than just stereotypes about physical capabilities, to treat men and women differently. Those protections profoundly reshaped American society, giving women more freedom to pursue the lives of their choosing. But they imposed new requirements on powerful institutions that balked at being regulated, and, Ziegler says, they outraged Christian conservatives who believe that “God has a plan for marriage and sexuality and the family” and “God’s plan should be written into the law.”
The right slowed the momentum for women’s equality when it killed the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1980s and turned abortion into a wedge issue. Decades later, the anti-trans movement’s emphasis on strictly defining sex as “biological” has given conservatives a new weapon to claw back the feminist movement’s earlier gains, Ziegler says. The term “biological sex,” she says, has become “the new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law.”
Mailman, not surprisingly, disputes that the sex definitions are part of a wider effort to weaken sex discrimination law. “Simply cementing the case that sex is real doesn’t change anything,” she tells me. “It is the status quo.” Nor does she think enshrining sex definitions based on eggs and sperm will lead to women being treated differently from men in, say, classrooms and workplaces. “There’s nothing about that that forces a woman into a separate calculus class.”
But Mailman’s allies in the conservative movement—groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the religious right legal organization that has led many of the biggest attacks on abortion and LGBTQ rights—have their own agendas. “What they’re trying to do is to replace sex discrimination law with a Trojan horse sex discrimination law that no longer prohibits sex discrimination,” Ziegler says. Rather than attacking protections head on, she explains, “they’re going to say, ‘American anti-discrimination law means you can treat men and women differently because they have different bodies.’” If courts embrace this logic, Ziegler says, it would be much harder to fight back against potential restrictions on women’s lives—laws that limit job options for pregnant workers, for example, or that ban women from military schools—by arguing they violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
“The administration is telling us what their long game is, which is to treat women’s bodies as commodities and to create laws to exert control over these commodities.”
Other Trump 2.0 priorities, like its fixation with increasing birth rates, add to this growing sense of feminist dread. “They’re so open about the fact that they want women to leave the workforce and have babies—the earlier, the better—and fulfill the role of motherhood,” says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at the NYU School of Law. “The administration is telling us what their long game is, which is to treat women’s bodies as commodities and to create laws to exert control over these commodities.”
“The foundational piece,” Cheng adds, “is defining people by their biology—to essentially see women as people who have one manifest destiny to fulfill.”
Last spring, to mark Trump’s 100th day in office, Mailman spoke with Debbie Kraulidis, vice president of Moms for America and host of its podcast. Inevitably, the conversation turned to trans kids in schools. Mailman recalled her own childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s: “When I was growing up,” she declared, “it was okay to be a feminine guy. It was okay to be a masculine girl.” Nowadays, she lamented, “you can’t be a tomboy anymore, because you’ll get your body parts chopped off.”
The first child of a surgeon and his Korean-born wife, Mailman (née Davis) remembers her upbringing in “middle-of-nowhere” Kansas with great fondness: “For kids who are from small towns,” she told another podcaster, “you really get to build up your self-esteem and try a lot of things.” At Clay Center Community High School (class of 2006), she was a student council officer, drill team member, and athlete (lettering in cheerleading, tennis, and track), as well as the star at the top of the “Singing Christmas Tree.” By college, she was also a committed conservative, serving as treasurer for the University of Kansas College Republicans and interning for US Sen. Sam Brownback, a GOP stalwart who later became governor. But she didn’t seem to take herself too seriously, entering Spike TV’s “sexiest co-ed” competition in 2007 and earning a write-up in the college paper. “If somebody was doing it who wasn’t me, I’d probably be judgmental,” she told the reporter. Then again, “Why not, for $5,000?”
Graduating into the Great Recession with a journalism degree, she joined Teach for America, landing at Pathway Academy, a majority-Black charter school in Kansas City, Missouri. The school’s executive director, Jennifer Fleming, recalls her as “extremely intelligent, very self-motivated, goal-oriented,” building relationships with students and their families. Mailman would later describe implementing strict discipline, like “standing silent lunch,” in her classroom. Her sixth-grade class scored so high on state tests that the school got its accreditation back, Fleming says. The experience seemed to reinforce Mailman’s conservative beliefs. “I had always thought that Teach for America would help me equip people to be responsible for themselves,” Mailman later recalled for a profile on IWF’s website. “But my kids didn’t have the home environment necessary to do school…I became much more focused on what we can do to build families.”
After two years and a master’s degree in education, Mailman headed to Harvard Law, where she chafed at automatically being made a member of the Women’s Law Association, she told me in an email after we spoke in January. “They gave us ladies a little pep speech, saying that women should support each other in class by applauding other women’s contributions,” she wrote. Men had no equivalent. “I hated this. It felt so infantilizing.”
Mailman wanted me to know that as a conservative, she’s in favor of treating women equally; it’s left wingers who seek, through such “race and sex based identity groups,” to treat women as “weak or ill equipped” in her view. (Equal doesn’t mean identical, however: “At the same time, sex exists,” she wrote, citing differences between men’s and women’s LSAT scores.)
Mailman’s aversion to groups like the Women’s Law Association would echo, years later, in her Trump 2.0 campaign to eliminate diversity and inclusion measures at Harvard and other higher education institutions. The problem with universities, she told the New York Times last fall, is their “culture of victimhood—a glorification of victimhood—that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country.”
During her Harvard years, she’d felt very much outside the Obama-era political mainstream. “Conservatism was a lonely place,” especially for women, she told a podcaster last year. But that isolation was also empowering: “You end up being very comfortable with yourself, comfortable with your arguments, comfortable not having a lot of friends.” She became president of the ultra-elite Harvard chapter of the ultra-connected Federalist Society. Post-Harvard, she landed a prestigious clerkship with a federal appellate judge in Denver, then moved on to a private law firm. When a Harvard friend reached out with an offer to work at the “center of the universe”—the first Trump White House—she accepted immediately.
Mailman started on day one of Trump 1.0 and stayed until the bitter end. According to emails reported by the New York Times, as deputy White House policy coordinator in 2018, she floated a proposal to send detained migrants to sanctuary cities. She describes herself as part of the “cleanup crew” for the administration’s family separation policy at the border. Later, she was promoted to the powerful White House counsel’s office, where her portfolio included social issues and the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Trans issues were also on the White House’s radar, including a military ban. In 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services even considered an order that would have narrowly defined sex as “immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” But the conservative base reacted with crickets to proposed anti-trans policies, Mailman recounted on a podcast. “Nobody seemed to care, except for people who didn’t like it.”
Indeed, public support for trans rights was at an all-time high. When North Carolina passed a law in 2016 restricting trans students’ bathroom access in schools, Fortune 500 companies boycotted the state. Then in June 2020, the Supreme Court stunned conservatives by ruling 6–3 that firing someone for being gay or transgender violated the federal law banning sex discrimination in the workplace. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointee to the high court, reasoned in Bostock v. Clayton County. Mailman hated the decision: “I would argue there’s no logic to Bostock,” she told me.
Mailman was still working for Trump when his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That very day, she accepted a job offer from the Ohio attorney general, anticipating that her colleagues were about to become “unhirable for a very long time,” she later admitted. One month after Trump left office, Mailman also began a fellowship with the Independent Women’s Forum. Like many conservative organizations, IWF was starting to invest in anti-trans politics—putting Mailman at the center of the next big culture war.
The organization Mailman joined had its roots in the 1991 Supreme Court nomination that was itself a turning point for the role of women in American politics. President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the nation’s highest court was greeted with howls of liberal outrage. Even before Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations threatened to tank his nomination, Thomas’ close friend Rosalie Silberman organized “Women for Judge Thomas” to vouch for his character. Thomas’ confirmation activated a generation of left-leaning women around the issue of sexual harassment. Silberman and her comrades created the Independent Women’s Forum to counter them. “We listened to the spin of those days—the litany that women are victims and men just don’t get it—and decided that those woebegone women did not speak for us,” Silberman said in 1998. “Nor did we think that they spoke for the vast majority of American women.”
IWF’s policy agenda was defined by being anti-regulation and anti–“female victimhood.” At various points over its 35-year history, the organization has opposed the Violence Against Women Act, women’s admission to the Virginia Military Institute, the Affordable Care Act, and paid family and sick leave. It claimed Title IX was being used to defund men’s sports, that sexual violence rates were overblown, and that the gender pay gap was the result of women’s choices. For a time, it was run in tandem with the Koch brothers–affiliated interest group Americans for Prosperity.
From the beginning, much of IWF’s influence was derived from its messaging, starting with its claim to be “independent”—seeming to stand apart not just from feminists, but from ultra-right groups, in part because it didn’t take a public stance on abortion. “Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know-know that you’re actually conservative, puts us in a unique position,” IWF Board Chair Heather Higgins, a pharmaceutical heiress, explained at an event for potential 2016 donors. “Our value…is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable.”
IWF’s first public, tentative forays into anti-trans politics seem to have started around 2017, with news releases ridiculing colleges for putting free tampons in men’s restrooms and for recommending that professors ask students their pronouns. Then in 2019, the conservative anti-trans movement suddenly got serious. That’s when the far-right American Principles Project turned a Kentucky gubernatorial election into a petri dish for anti-trans messaging—and found that a video about a boy in girls’ wrestling struck a nerve.
It didn’t matter that trans athletes were—and continue to be—vanishingly rare, or that lawmakers in some states were unable to identify a single player who would be affected by their bans.
The Democrat won anyway. But conservatives had identified a compelling narrative: Trans people were victimizing female athletes. Within months, Republicans in 17 states introduced a new type of bill, banning trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams. It didn’t matter that trans athletes were—and continue to be—vanishingly rare, or that lawmakers in states like Tennessee and South Carolina were unable to identify a single player who would be affected by their bans.
The sports issue became the turning point for an anti-trans coalition that included juggernauts of the religious right like the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom. IWF stepped up to provide a female face and voice for the message. Never mind that the “women are victims” narrative contradicted so much of its past work. By 2022, threat of trans athletes had become a central theme of IWF’s messaging. It snapped up aggrieved athletes like college swimmer Riley Gaines, training her to communicate her story of tying for fifth place with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and eventually hiring her as a spokeswoman. Payton McNabb, a high school volleyball player injured from a spike by a transgender girl, became another “ambassador.”
Mailman embraced the message too, testifying on behalf of IWF against trans athletes in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee. IWF’s media training was a big part of why she joined the group. “I wanted to be on liberal media as a conservative person,” she says, “trying to talk to people,” the way pundits of old used television to shape public opinion when she was a kid.
As Mailman sees it, female messengers have been critical to shifting the narrative around trans issues because—stereotype alert!—they are better at conveying empathy than men. For a long time, she tells me, progressive messages of acceptance and affirmation held sway, and “women do want to be kind, and we do want to be empathetic.” So conservatives needed women to challenge “the empathy play,” she went on. For men, it’s “not their natural language.”
Differentiating the sexes based on such stereotypes is exactly the type of thing that causes left-leaning women to shudder. But one of the most confounding aspects of the Defending Women executive order is its connection to a group of activists who define themselves as radical feminists.
In 2022, IWF announced an ambitious new project that would serve as a prototype for the Defending Women order: a model bill, then known as the Women’s Bill of Rights, that defined male and female in law according to a narrow view of biology. At a press conference, IWF and other social conservatives spoke alongside current and former members of Women’s Liberation Front, a small left-wing group vehemently opposed to the very idea of transgender identity. IWF leaders described their legislation as merely ensuring that policymakers were all on the same page about the meanings of “female” and “male.” But former WoLF board member Kara Dansky, speaking on the call, made it clear that the bill’s goal was to end legal recognition of transgender people. “Everyone is either female or male,” she declared on the call. “Everything else is a lie.”
Sometimes known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, activists like Dansky believe that women’s rights will be lost if the category of “women” includes people assigned male at birth. They’ve pushed for decades to exclude trans women from women’s spaces. (Some who adhere to these views—including, famously, Harry Potter author JK Rowling—consider the TERF acronym a slur and describe themselves as “gender critical”; others embrace it.) Mailman tells me that TERF activists, particularly Dansky, were the intellectual force behind the effort to enshrine sex definitions. “The ones that were really driving the charge and had just a lot more knowledge and background, and had been thinking about these issues, writing about these issues, for such a long time, tended to be people on the left,” she says. (Dansky, in an email, says she did not contribute directly to the model bill’s language or strategy, though she does call Mailman an “extremely intelligent lawyer.” Like Mailman, she doesn’t believe that enshrining sex definitions could turn back the clock on women’s equality under the Constitution. “Radical feminists are gender abolitionists who fully support women who do not conform to sex stereotypes,” she writes.)
The Women’s Bill of Rights wasn’t the first time radical feminists had teamed up with social conservatives on transgender issues. In 2016, WoLF received a $15,000 grant from the Alliance Defending Freedom to fund a lawsuit over trans students’ access to bathrooms and locker rooms. In 2021, WoLF took another $50,000 from ADF to sue California over a law that allows transgender women to be housed in women’s prisons. “It would be foolish to let performative virtue-signaling prevent us from using available resources,” WoLF legal director Lauren Bone emailed when I asked about the group’s work with the far right.
Both sides have benefited from the strange alliance, Joanna Wuest, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, points out. Right-wing money and connections allow fringe TERF groups to “punch above their weight,” she says. And conservative Christian groups get “a lot of rhetorical leverage out of saying [that even] radical feminist organizations are opposed to this interpretation of sex as gender identity.”
Conservative Christian groups get “a lot of rhetorical leverage out of saying [that even] radical feminist organizations are opposed to this interpretation of sex as gender identity.”
Soon after the Women’s Bill of Rights was unveiled, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) introduced a version of it in Congress. With the midterms approaching, IWF targeted hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in swing states with ads touting the model bill as part of its supposed crusade for women’s empowerment, boosted by a $100,000 “Innovation Prize” from Heritage. In 2023, versions of the legislation began popping up in statehouses around the country. To promote it, IWF sent Riley Gaines and Mailman—a trip Mailman would later describe as her “first foray into TERFdom.”
Mailman, by then married to former professional baseball player David Mailman, leaned on her own experiences as a woman to advocate for the bills. “‘Identification’ replaced the biological reality that we have been living our entire lives—that I am particularly 32 weeks into living right now,” she said on a stage in West Virginia, visibly pregnant with her second child. Her blitz through the state “was terrifying to watch,” says Khadijah Silver, director of gender justice and health equity at Lawyers for Good Government. “She did an incredible job of flooding legal and political environments, partnering with the right groups, to normalize a regressive and anti-scientific and extremely unfeminist analysis of gender—and make it pretty hard to break through that messaging.”
The Kansas legislature became the first state to pass the bill in the spring of 2023, and when Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed it, the Republican supermajority overrode her. (“Victory!” WoLF declared in a press release.) Today, 16 states have similar laws, and two more have issued executive orders likewise defining sex.
Logan Casey of the Movement Advancement Project describes the Women’s Bill of Rights as “more existential” than other anti-trans bills. “They’re not targeting just one policy area,” he says. “They’re zooming up and saying across the entire government, here’s how we define the word ‘sex’ so that we can basically apply it everywhere that we want, until somebody stops us.”
Mailman drew on the state sex-definition bills as she drafted the Defending Women executive order. But the ink on Trump’s signature was barely dry before scientists began to push back, arguing that for all the order’s claim to “biological truth,” a modern understanding of sex involves far more than eggs and sperm. Today, many biologists view sex as measured by multiple indicators—hormones, chromosomes, genitalia, brain physiology—that typically but don’t always align.
Scientists began to push back, arguing that for all the order’s claim to “biological truth,” a modern understanding of sex involves far more than eggs and sperm.
More outcry came from reproductive-rights advocates, because the order defined sex as existing “at conception”—language that nods to anti-abortion religious activists who argue that fetal rights begin at fertilization. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for one, was elated about that phrasing, vaunting it during the 2025 March for Life in Washington. Mailman tells me the “at conception” language was added not for abortion policy purposes, but to make the point that sex is determined by DNA prior to birth. Still, “there’s a nice flavor to respecting fetal personhood,” she says. “That’s an added benefit.”
So far, the Trump administration has not used the Defending Women order to pursue anti-abortion policies. Instead, it has zeroed in on attacks on the transgender community. The order had an immediate impact on passports, federal funding for gender-related health research, and transgender prisoners. Soon came more executive orders targeting teachers who supported trans students, schools that let them play girls’ sports, and doctors who provided them gender-affirming health care. Another order stated that being trans “conflicts” with a soldier’s “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” The Departments of Justice and Education formed a special team to investigate schools for promoting “gender ideology”—and some universities, in this new climate, fired instructors and censored Plato.
The changes have been so drastic that federal judges have put many of the federal government’s anti-trans policies on temporary hold. But the ultimate decider will be the Supreme Court, which already has signaled its willingness to interpret sex discrimination law in ways that exclude trans people. Last June, conservative justices ruled 6–3 that states can ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. In November, the Supreme Court allowed the State Department to stop changing trans people’s gender markers on their passports.
The court is currently considering a pair of cases that directly ask how much different treatment for the sexes based on “biology” is allowable. The cases involve two states, Idaho and West Virginia, which have both passed laws banning trans girls and women from playing on women’s school sports teams.
During oral arguments in January, ultra-conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed to view the cases as an opportunity to enshrine a constitutional definition of sex: How can a court determine whether there’s discrimination on the basis of sex, he asked, “without knowing what sex means?” But Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared to understand that there would be greater consequences to a decision that gave states more leeway to treat men and women differently, so long as the state claimed the reason was biological.
“Your whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences, right?” Barrett asked the lawyer for West Virginia. But, she hypothesized, what if a state could produce studies showing that women’s presence in calculus classes held back men’s learning? Could women be excluded from calculus? “Seems to me like there would be some risk on your understanding that that would be okay,” she said.
The exchange showed that even the Supreme Court justices are thinking about how an anti-trans ruling could have wider consequences for sex equality, says Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. “They’re opening up the possibility of much broader potential exclusions,” she says. Such a decision could call into question decades of progress fighting sex discrimination. After all, differences between men’s and women’s bodies have been used for much of human history to justify treating women as inferior to men.
The Trump administration has been open about its desire to return to those old days—from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat to the White House’s reported consideration of proposals for “baby bonuses” to incentivize women to have more children. Even the title of the Defending Women executive order reflects early-1900s logic that the government needs to protect women due to their inherent fragility—an idea the Supreme Court rejected during the sex equality revolution of the 1970s, Shaw argues in a recent law journal article. And at a December press conference announcing a rule targeting trans teenagers’ medical care, Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill described gender roles as divinely ordained. “Men are men. Men can never become women,” he paraphrased Mailman. “Women are women. Women can never become men.” Then he went a step further: “At the root of the evils we face—such as the blurring of lines between sexes and radical social agendas—is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived.”
It’s the focus on transgender people that gives the administration “cover” to pursue this broader regressive agenda, Ziegler argues. For that strategy, she credits Mailman and her allies. The Defending Women order “is about to matter in a big way,” she says. “It created political cover for all of these changes that are going to affect trans people, queer people, along with cis, straight men and women.”
Mailman left the White House in early August, pregnant with her third child. But she’s found it hard to step away entirely. In addition to rejoining Independent Women, she has launched her own consulting firm and is representing Netflix as it attempts to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery (reportedly alongside Kellyanne Conway, a Trump 1.0 loyalist who used to be on IWF’s board). She also continued to work for the administration in its negotiations with Harvard. At the time we spoke, she hadn’t turned in her government laptop.
On her last official day in the White House, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled, “The Conservative Women Who Are ‘Having It All,’” with Mailman prominently featured. She’d been flying on weekends from DC to Texas, where her husband, who owns a tree-transplanting company, took care of their children with a nanny’s help, the Journal reported. “In theory, I would love to be a trad wife,” Mailman confided. She’d intentionally picked a husband who made more money so she “wouldn’t feel trapped” in the workplace, she said. But she didn’t feel guilty about missing time with her kids: “I don’t have a victimhood mentality.”
For all the praise that conservatives heaped on Mailman for her work in the White House, these details about her home life rubbed some the wrong way. A few weeks later, the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank, started publishing rebuttals to the Journal article—and to the lifestyles of the conservative women it featured. “There is no boss, no industry, no political administration or nation who needs a woman more than her children need her,” one writer, Maria Baer, reprimanded.
Baer was calling out Mailman for defying the gender ideals that social conservatives were working so hard to promote. And then Baer stuck in the knife: It was a matter of biology for women to devote themselves to mothering. “We pursue high-powered careers because we want to make an impact, to leave a legacy, to be remembered, or to change the world,” Baer wrote. “There is no surer way to accomplish each of these than by mothering our own children—a job which, by definition, no one else in human history can do.”
Mailman probably shouldn’t have been surprised. But the criticism from an organization she respects came as a blindside. “It was frustrating,” she tells me on the phone, her baby fussing in the background. “I felt like I was getting critiqued on something that I literally was actually doing the opposite on.” She’d joined the Trump transition team thinking her tenure would be brief, she says, then accepted a job in the administration to “help my friends,” but only for six months. She’d repeatedly said no to working in the White House “because I wanted to be around my young kids and my husband, not for any cultural pressure reason, but that’s what’s best for me and for what I wanted.”
It was yet another reminder that, despite Mailman’s insistence that defining sex narrowly wouldn’t affect women’s equality, right-wing groups can’t be counted on to go along with that rosy thinking. Nor did it seem to strike her as contradictory that being able to pursue “what’s best for me and for what I wanted” depends on the very feminist gains that those groups—now armed with the Defending Women order—are working to undermine.
But Mailman was too busy to be upset at her allies-turned-critics. “Everybody is going to have their own opinion about everybody else,” she says. “You just move on.”
