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2025-12-04 20:30:00

Comedian Megan Sass has been struggling to get their health insurer to cover intravenous immunoglobulin for more than a year. The treatment, which addresses a genetic antibody deficiency, requires antibodies from blood donors. Without insurance, it’s unaffordable. And with the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, Sass’ insurance will soon cost $1,300 a month.

“I am not at a place where I’m been able to joke about this,” they said.

ACA marketplace subsidies, first implemented in 2014, expanded greatly during the Biden administration, allowing millions more people to afford private health insurance. But enhanced premium tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2025. As ACA architect Jeanne M. Lambrew told me in October:

When the Biden administration came in during the pandemic, they tweaked the premium tax credits to improve them, which doubled enrollment. It increased the racial diversity of enrollment. It increased [the number of] low-income people enrolled. It removed a cliff, so when people’s income increased, they didn’t like fall off and have nothing. All that led to great gains and all that is at risk.

For contractors and freelancers in particular, the expiration of these enhanced subsidies could decide whether or not they can afford health insurance. According to KFF, around half of adults who purchase ACA marketplace plans are self-employed, small business owners, or their employees. Disabled people who work are 50 percent more likely to be self-employed than non-disabled people, meaning that people with existing health issues are at disproportionate risk of losing private health insurance for affordability reasons.

The ACA offers disabled people “options that many other people take for granted,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative, especially given the ties between insurance and employment.

The situation is especially frustrating for chronically ill and disabled contractors who watched Democratic leadership in Congress abandon a shutdown meant to protect those subsidies; President Donald Trump, during Thanksgiving week, then backtracked on a supposed plan to extend the tax credits when faced with the displeasure of congressional Republicans.

New Hampshire therapist Amanda McGuire is infuriated that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) voted to end the government shutdown without a deal to extend ACA tax credits: after all, McGuire created a video that Shaheen’s team posted on social media during the shutdown advocating for the importance of the ACA. McGuire feels betrayed.

McGuire doesn’t qualify for ACA subsidies, though she expects to have to buy a marketplace plan next year as her disabilities, including multiple sclerosis, increasingly compel her to reduce her working hours. McGuire’s therapy practice focuses on patients with chronic illnesses and disabilities, and she’s even more afraid of what the future holds for them.

“A lot of them can’t even look at the options in the marketplace right now, because they know they’re going to be priced out of policies,” McGuire told me. “As someone with chronic illness, you can’t just go without insurance.”

Kathryn Sullivan Graf, a contractor who works as a writer and editor in Arizona, has multiple sclerosis; she expects to pay around $300 more a month and to have to seek new specialists. She was relieved when her neurologist assured her that he’d remain her neurologist no matter what happened—”but that’s just one of my providers,” Sullivan Graf said.

Sass doesn’t believe that politicians on either side of the aisle are doing enough. Members of Congress, Sass noted, get comprehensive health insurance through the government—so they can’t personally experience the stakes.

“Obviously, the main culprits are Republicans,” Sass said, who supports socialized medicine. “But the system,” they said, was either “broken, or it was intentionally designed badly.”

2025-12-04 20:30:00

Activist and educator Loretta Ross didn’t know she was helping to birth a movement. The year was 1994, the place was a crowded hotel room in Chicago, and the impetus was frustration bordering on rage. Pro-choice activists from around the country had just heard a presentation about the historic health care reform initiative led by then–First Lady Hillary Clinton. But the plan was “very male-centric,” Ross recalls—and very white-centric. In a futile effort to win over moderate Republicans, it ignored abortion and other basic reproductive care, as well as other health services vital to Black and brown women. 

Afterwards, Ross and other Black feminists gathered in one of their rooms to vent about the systematic devaluation of women by their own allies and brainstorm about how to fight back. Their first salvo was taking out full-page ads in The Washington Post and Roll Call. The presentation was buttoned-up, the ideas—“Reproductive freedom is a life-and-death issue for many Black women and deserves as much recognition as any other freedom,” and “WE WILL NOT ENDORSE A HEALTH CARE REFORM SYSTEM THAT DOES NOT COVER THE FULL RANGE OF REPRODUCTIVE SERVICES FOR ALL WOMEN, INCLUDING ABORTION”—profound. “We didn’t know we had created a paradigm shift,” Ross says, “because that wasn’t our intention at that time. We meant it only as a response to the Clinton administration and to Congress.”

Thirty years later, the conceptual framework that Ross helped launch has been transformational. Where once abortion was the primary focus of the reproductive rights movement, reproductive justice is equally concerned with birth control, sterilization, the criminalization of pregnancy, and maternal health. Where “pro-choice” centered the concerns of middle-class white women, reproductive justice widens the lens to include women of color, LGBTQ people, and the poor. Instead of tokenizing Black and brown activists, reproductive justice organizations—including the SisterSong collective, which Ross cofounded in 1997—reflect the diverse communities they serve. At the core of reproductive justice is autonomy: the idea that people have the right to control their own bodies; to have children, or not have them; and to raise those children in safe and healthy environments.

“It was radical then,” adds Ross’s longtime friend and collaborator, activist and scholar Marlene Fried, “and it’s radical still.”

In the Trump 2.0 era, the reproductive justice framework is more important than ever, Ross and Fried argue in their new book, Abortion and Reproductive Justice: An Essential Guide for Resistance. Reproductive justice stands in opposition to pretty much every health and social policy espoused by the Trump administration and its Christian nationalist, pronatalist allies. “We are in a ferocious backlash,” Fried says. “It’s a moment when people see the fragility of rights won or not—realizing that rights are not secured forever.” With so much under attack, it can be tempting to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton era, sacrificing those on the margins in a vain attempt to avoid greater losses.

“We’ve been very struck by how little of our own history of resistance and activism is known within our own movement,” Fried says. “We want people to learn their own history and gain inspiration and strength from it.”

No one is better suited to tell that story than Ross, whose work earned her a MacArthur “genius” award in 2022, and Fried, an emeritus professor in philosophy at Hampshire College who was the founding president of the National Network of Abortion Funds. I caught up with them soon after the release of their book, Ross from her office at Smith College, where she is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies, and Fried from her home office outside Boston. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you feel the need to write this book now? 

Marlene Fried: We actually decided to write it during the first Trump administration. What immediately prompted us was the fact that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump and, at the same time, were opposed to the administration’s policies attacking abortion and contraception. So one of our goals was to expose the way in which abortion is located in the world of racism and white supremacy. It was also important to us to include the international context—to ground reproductive justice in human rights.

Much of the book is focused on this country’s history of racism and oppression—exactly the history that Trump 2.0 is trying to erase.

Loretta Ross: As we frequently say, if you don’t understand white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism, you don’t understand reproductive politics. Because it’s not just about gender. Racism and [homophobia] and Christian nationalism and antisemitism and ableism and Islamophobia—all of those things affect reproductive politics. 

One of the things we always want to do is correct the record, because there are many accounts of how people are oppressed, particularly women, but fewer accounts of how they fought back. So we wanted to make sure that we included women who mounted strategies of resistance—not just detailing what happened to them, but what they did for themselves.

Fried: When you examine history, what you see is that the world we’re living in now is not that different from the world we’ve been in. In some ways, yes, it is a different world. It’s a very frightening world. But it has been for a very long time. We have been here before.

Tell me about your own histories—how you became not just abortion activists, but reproductive justice activists. Loretta, you were from Texas, right? 

Ross: I call myself an accidental feminist because I had no intention of dedicating my life to [this movement]. But as I always say, my plumbing got in the way of my dreams. I was pregnant through incest at 14, and had a baby at 15 because in 1968, one didn’t have a choice about whether or not you were going to continue a pregnancy. I chose to keep my son after his birth instead of giving him up for adoption. 

You got into Radcliffe College at the amazingly young age of 16. But when they found out about your baby, they took away your scholarship. Is that how you ended up at Howard University?

Ross: Right, and I got pregnant again during my first semester. I was under 18, so I needed parental consent for birth control, and my mother wouldn’t sign the permission slip. I had an abortion, and this is when I accepted implantation of [an early IUD,] the Dalkon Shield. Within a few years, it sterilized me. 

A lot of people have forgotten the story of the Dalkon Shield. This was an IUD with a defective design that made it incredibly dangerous. 

Ross: It was a piece of plastic with a string attached. The string was only there to make it easy for the physician to remove the device. But it served as a bacterial wick into the uterus, which led to pelvic inflammatory disease and acute sepsis. Hundreds of thousands of women were sterilized because of that design flaw, and some died.

I got an acute infection in my fallopian tubes, and they burst one night—sending me into a coma. I had been suffering all these mysterious symptoms, but I was a young, Black, single mother, so instead of conducting lab tests, the doctor made a lot of racist assumptions about me. And I was sterilized at the age of 23.

My god, Loretta, I just have to say how sorry I am to hear that this happened to you. Marlene, your background and experiences were quite different. You were a white, middle-class kid from Philadelphia who ended up writing your dissertation at Brown University on Marx’s theory of historical materialism.

Fried: In grad school, I got caught up in politics—the anti-war movement, women’s liberation, civil rights. I came to work around abortion rights when I was pregnant with a much-wanted pregnancy after several miscarriages. The experience of not being able to get pregnant when I wanted to be felt very connected to the experience of trying not to get pregnant when I didn’t want to be. 

Your personal stories really highlight how abortion is just one aspect of reproductive health and rights. How, then, did the pro-choice focus become so narrow?

Ross: You can’t understand the myopic focus on abortion that women’s rights activists were pushed into until you understand how abortion became a significant wedge issue for the Republican Party in the post–Brown v. Board of Education era. In their attempts to reclaim power, the segregationists who were resentful of the civil rights movement formed an alliance with the evangelical Christian movement that was opposed to abortion. They integrated anti-gay activists, anti-immigrant people, and a very hawkish set of people who were very pro–Vietnam War. This unruly coalition was eventually called the Moral Majority when Ronald Reagan used the same tactic, but it all started under Richard Nixon. And opposition to abortion became the best mobilizing strategy that these right-wing people had. 

The feminist movement also played into the hands of those conservative forces—for example, by not working harder to stop the Hyde Amendment, which passed in 1976 and banned federal funding for abortion.

Fried: The Hyde Amendment erased Roe for millions of people. I mean, who cares if abortion is legal if you can’t get one? By not putting access and affordability in the foreground, the larger mainstream choice movement was pretty much saying, “Okay, here’s this group of middle-class white women whose rights we’re putting ahead of everybody else.”

The mainstream pro-choice movement also didn’t spend a lot of time focused on sterilization. There was the kind you experienced, Loretta, from an unsafe medical device. And then there was America’s ugly history of forced sterilizations, which continued for decades and targeted poor women and women of color. 

Fried: It’s about who’s supposed to have children, what the country is supposed to look like. Going back to the genocide of Native American people, this was established as a white country for white people. Many of the reproductive policies put in place throughout our history are implicitly or explicitly eugenicist. The only time I can think of when Black and brown babies were valued is when children of enslaved women were enslavers’ property. Otherwise, most reproductive policies in this country have been enacted to prevent women of color from having children. 

The activism against sterilization abuse—which was led by women of color—was going on at the same time as the fight for Roe v. Wade. But you wouldn’t know that if you looked only at what was going on in the abortion sector of the movement. 

Frustrations about all of this came to a head in the summer of 1994. Loretta, why then? 

Ross: 1994 was a very eventful year. I had just returned from South Africa, serving as an election monitor for Nelson Mandela’s election in April as president. Later that year was the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, which explicitly renounced population control as a framing for reproductive rights and asserted that reproductive rights were human rights. That June was also the OJ Simpson car chase, when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend.

So there were a series of huge events that spotlighted, in their different ways, themes like human rights, population control, misogyny, and violence against women. 

Ross: There was a conference in July organized by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance. A number of women of color had received scholarships from the Ms. Foundation to be there. We heard this proposal by the Clinton administration for health care reform that pretty much left out reproductive health care, as well as the needs of Black women. One of the people at the conference, [Georgia state lawmaker and activist] “Able” Mable Thomas, convened 12 Black women in her hotel room and asked us what we wanted to do to respond. 

That’s when we first analyzed that abortion was always separated from routine health care, which doesn’t make sense. We talked about how both the pro-choice and the pro-life movements neglected things that were important to Black women—not just the right not to have a child, but because of the history of sterilization abuse, the right to have children under the conditions in which we want to have them. Neither the pro-choice nor the pro-life movements spent a lot of energy on what happens to children once they’re born. 

And so we spliced together the concept of “reproductive rights” and “social justice” and coined the term “reproductive justice.” We decided to purchase an ad in two national newspapers that more than 800 women signed. But the ad didn’t mention reproductive justice, because nobody would understand what it was.

I remember the first time I heard the term—my reaction was, What?

Ross: A communications specialist for nonprofits heard about this term and offered to test it with some focus groups. And she came back and said, “I don’t think this ‘reproductive justice’ thing is going to work.” The first focus group asked, “Do you mean Law and Order?” Because the word ‘justice’ made people think of criminal justice. The second focus group seized on the word “reproductive” and asked, “What do y’all got against Xerox copiers?” They actually thought we were organizing to protest the Xerox copier! 

But Marlene, you were an early adopter. What about the repro justice concept spoke to you?

Fried: I came to abortion rights activism with a broader view, having been schooled by the civil rights and anti-war movements, and socialist feminism. I was also one of the founders of the National Network of Abortion Funds, where my work was very focused on access issues and helping people obtain abortions when they didn’t have the money or other resources to afford one. In a way, reproductive justice gave us a language for how we already saw the world. It was a way of putting intellectual arms around our politics. But it didn’t take hold right away, because it’s a radical framework.

Ross: It’s radical because it transcended the limits of the US Constitution. It invoked the global human rights framework.

A lot of the mainstream abortion rights movement found it threatening.

Fried: Some very prominent abortion rights groups opposed it. They worried that by widening the frame, you would shrink the importance of abortion rights. There was a commitment to single-issue politics on the assumption that it is the most winning approach. If nothing else, people who read our book should come away understanding that it doesn’t make sense.

Flash forward 31 years. Reproductive justice has become a critical part of the broader reproductive rights movement. So that is the good news. But now the right wing has captured our country. It’s targeting people of color, especially Black women. Under Trump 2.0, just using the word “justice” in a research grant application is enough to get your grant canceled.

Ross: Justice is about accountability. And I think that’s one of the things that scares the bejesus out of the Trump administration, because accountability is not their strong suit.

How, then, can the reproductive justice framework help us get through this dire moment?

Fried: The right is trying to take back every civil, political, and human right possible. The extremism that’s been unleashed at this moment is terrifying—for example, abortion abolitionism, which calls for the death penalty for people who are engaged in abortion work or have an abortion. As people struggle to access abortion, the fear is that sterilizations will rise, and while some of those procedures might be voluntary, we know that a lot of them will not be. In a moment like this, people often retract. “OK, we’ll ask for less, because otherwise we’re going to get nothing. Let’s just try to hang on to something.” But if you ask for less, you get less. If you truncate the frame, you’re not going to end up with justice. 

So that’s one big lesson—Don’t retreat. Another seems to be: “This is not new. Don’t freak out—fight.” And maybe the most important message: The past is prologue.

Ross: I’ve been thinking about how we need to update the reproductive justice framework that we created in the 20th century, for the 21st century so that we can look at what’s coming down the pike in 30, 40, 50 years. It’s something we call reproductive justice futurism.

For example, designer babies. We’ve got these amoral scientists working with these immoral billionaires trying to sculpt the future of the human race, that’s all designed around themselves and their genes. They’re not even showing me pictures of designer babies that are Black or brown!

Fried: Is this a whole new thing we’ve never seen before? No, it’s good old eugenics and population control repackaged in a new way. Seeing how these oppressive frameworks emerge in different moments in our history is an important tool for trying to understand where we’re at now, but also what’s going to come.

But meeting this political moment requires us to be focused on the resistance as a source of inspiration and hope. We tell a history of abortion that shows us that people have historically struggled against oppression in order to lead the lives they want for themselves, despite the danger and the strength of the opposition. Yes, we are living in a dangerous and frightening time, and that history calls us to action.

Top image: Mother Jones illustration; images courtesy: UC Press, Hampshire College, National Women’s Hall of Fame.

2025-12-04 20:30:00

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

Zillow, the US’s largest real estate listing site, has removed a feature that allowed people to view a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales.

In September last year, the online real estate marketplace introduced a tool showing the individual risk of wildfire, flood, extreme heat, wind, and poor air quality for 1 million properties it lists, explaining that “climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions” for many Americans.

But Zillow has now deleted this climate index after complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the rankings appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged, and harmed house sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property data that Zillow relies upon.

Zillow said it remains committed to help Americans make informed decisions about properties, with listings now containing outbound links to the website of First Street, the nonprofit climate risk quantifier that had provided the on-site tool to Zillow.

Matthew Eby, founder and chief executive of First Street, said that removing the climate risk information means that many buyers will be “flying blind” in an era when worsening impacts of extreme weather are warping the real estate market in the United States.

“The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability,” Eby said. “Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after the sale that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area.

“Access to accurate risk information before a purchase isn’t just helpful; it’s essential to protecting consumers and preventing lifelong financial consequences.”

Eby claimed that the push to delist the First Street ratings from Zillow is linked to a challenging real estate environment, with a lack of affordable housing and repeated climate-driven disasters that are causing insurers to raise premiums or even flee states such as California. “All of that adds pressure to close sales however possible,” he said. “Climate risk data didn’t suddenly become inconvenient. It became harder to ignore in a stressed market.”

As the US, along with the rest of the world, has heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels, worsening extreme weather events have taken their toll directly upon people’s homes, as well as other infrastructure.

Last year, disasters probably amplified by the climate crisis caused $182 billion in damages, one of the highest on record, according to a government database since taken offline by the Trump administration.

As a consequence of these mounting risks, the home insurance required for buyers to obtain a mortgage is becoming scarcer and more expensive across much of the US. These changes are running headlong into an opposing trend whereby more Americans are moving to places such as Florida and the Southwest, which are increasingly beset by threats such as ruinous hurricanes and punishing heatwaves.

But assigning climate risks to individual properties has been controversial within the real estate industry, as well as some experts who have questioned whether such judgments can be made at such a granular level.

Warnings of such perils deterred some buyers, especially if the home was particularly costly anyway. Last year, a sprawling Florida mansion was put on sale for $295 million, making it the most expensive property in the country and in a place also ranked as one of the most at-risk in the US for flooding. After several cuts to the asking price, the house has been taken off the market.

Jesse Keenan, an author and expert in climate risk management at Tulane University, said many scientists and economists have argued that “proprietary risk models that provide highly uncertain assessments can have the perverse effect of undermining the public’s confidence in climate science.

“There has been a growing bipartisan recognition that the government should play a more active role in supporting and standardizing risk assessment for properties,” Keenan said. “At the same time, the science is limited in its capacity to assess property-by-property assessments.

“I do not believe that this is a sign that the brokerage industry is trying to hide climate risks,” he added. “Brokerage firms know they cannot stop the transmission of climate risk information because climate impacts are already being felt far and wide in the sector.”

Eby defended First Street’s methods and accuracy, pointing out that the models used were built on peer-reviewed science and validated against real-world outcomes.

“So when claims are made that our models are inaccurate, we ask for evidence,” he said. “To date, all the empirical validation shows our science is working as designed and providing better risk insight than the tools the industry has relied on historically.”

2025-12-04 05:23:23

The United States Department of Agriculture is threatening to withhold federal funding for food stamps for more than 20 Democratic-led states that have refused to hand over sensitive personal data about millions of participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. 

The agriculture department is seeking personal information like Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses—information it claims will aid officials in rooting out fraud. Democratic leaders have warned the data could be used for other policies not related to keeping people fed, like immigration enforcement.

During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, USDA Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said that leaders have until next week to send in data or the department will “begin to stop moving federal funds into those states,” adding that her office wants the data to “protect the American taxpayer.” If the administration follows through on this deadline, according to the New York Times, more than 20 million beneficiaries could be affected. 

“NO DATA, NO MONEY,” Rollins wrote on X, “it’s that simple.”

According to the agency, since the administration asked states for SNAP recipients’ data in May, 28 largely Republican-controlled states have already complied. 

The move comes after SNAP recipients across the country have just recently emerged from the confusion and frustration surrounding whether they would get money for food during the longest government shutdown in US history. It’s unclear how the secretary’s current request will impact—or avert—the ongoing SNAP-related legal battles between states and the Trump administration. 

Just last week, Democratic attorneys general from 21 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over language within the GOP’s tax and spending package, which the group says unlawfully blocks certain groups of legal immigrants from accessing SNAP benefits. 

Following the secretary’s Tuesday announcement, Democratic governors across the country accused the Trump administration of, once again, playing politics with peoples’ hunger.

“We no longer take the Trump Administration’s words at face value — we’ll see what they actually do in reality,” Marissa Saldivar, a spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said in a statement. “Cutting programs that feed American children is morally repugnant.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul posted on X, “Genuine question: Why is the Trump Administration so hellbent on people going hungry?”

Claire Lancaster, a spokesperson for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said the state’s leader “wishes President Trump would be a president for all Americans rather than taking out his political vendettas on the people who need these benefits the most.” 

“The Trump Administration is once again playing politics with the ability of working parents with children, seniors and people with disabilities to get food,” Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts, said in a statement, calling the move “truly appalling and cruel.”

2025-12-04 03:44:26

The Department of Homeland Security officially launched what it’s calling “Operation Catahoula Crunch” in New Orleans on Wednesday, expanding the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown in Louisiana. Federal immigration officers, in coordination with local law enforcement, are aiming to arrest 5,000 people in southeast Louisiana and into Mississippi. 

The wider operation is called “Swamp Sweep.” 

New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat who was born in Mexico, has been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s impending presence in the city. “You have parents who are scared to send their children to school,” Moreno told the local CNN affiliate WWL. “At my church,” she said, “there is a one o’clock service, Spanish-speaking service every Sunday, that keeps getting smaller and smaller. People are really, really scared.”

Moreno’s office has released guidelines instructing residents on how to interact with ICE. “Always comply with lawful orders from Law Enforcement,” the website reads, adding that local law enforcement “will not ask about your immigration status.” “Most of all,” the guidance continues, “keep each other safe.”

The governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, is more eager to comply with the administration’s deportation efforts.

“Thank you President @realDonaldTrump and @Sec_Noem for putting AMERICANS first,” Landry said, tagging President Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in a post on X. “We welcome the Swamp Sweep in Louisiana.”

Landry, a Trump ally, has also been working with the president to send National Guard troops into the state in coming weeks, a presence that the governor says will continue through Mardi Gras, which is scheduled for February 2026. 

Trump and Landry claim that the efforts are to address crime across New Orleans and the state, though the city “has logged significant drops in crime and is on pace to have its lowest number of homicides in nearly 50 years,” according to reporting from NBC News based on crime data from the police department.

DHS’s campaign in New Orleans is the administration’s latest stop in a cross-country immigration crackdown. Officers, under Trump’s guidance, have been picking up people from New York City to Portland to Tucson to Minneapolis. 

Newly elected Councilmember-at-Large Matthew Willard (D-La.) told CNN that there has been “mass chaos and confusion” ahead of ICE’s operation in New Orleans on Wednesday.

“We’re really just fearful of the unknown, and looking at the coverage that we’ve seen in other cities by CNN,” he said, adding, “we certainly don’t want that here in the city of New Orleans.”

2025-12-03 22:37:04

Last year, a US district court sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. Orlando was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, where he was extradited after completing his second presidential term in 2022.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice considered the Hernández conviction a victory. “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement last year. “The Justice Department will hold accountable all those who engage in violent drug trafficking, regardless of how powerful they are or what position they hold.”

That is, until this week, when President Donald Trump abruptly pardoned Hernández in the midst of a tumultuous Honduran election. “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The pardon came during the same week that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was facing scrutiny for his role in lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats, and Trump accused Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro of “narco terrorism.” So why would an administration hell bent on punishing drug traffickers pardon a kingpin like Hernandez?

Some have argued that this could simply be a way to make trouble for the left- wing successor to Hernández, the current Honduran president Xiomara Castro, who has been a strong critic of Trump’s mass deportations. In a recent thread on X, right-wing extremism researcher Jennifer Cohn unearthed an article from January that Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone—the convicted and now pardoned felon and political strategist—wrote with conservative commentator Shane Trejo. They suggested that Trump pardon Hernández as a way of trolling Castro:

Castro’s statements in recent weeks in defiance of President Trump’s proposal of mass deportations have raised her profile and caused enmity to build against her from the ‘America First’ right. Castro’s provocations of President Trump, a desperate attempt to rally Hondurans to her side in an election year, may backfire and prove to be her undoing as Trump has quite a bit of leverage at his disposal to upend her fledgling regime.

But they went further in elaborating the benefits of this strategy. In helping to unseat Castro, Stone and Trejo wrote, Trump could both “crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras.” The “freedom city” in question, they explained, was Próspera, a special economic zone founded in Honduras by a cadre of American tech titans including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen—both friends and fans of Trump family.

While Hernández strongly supported Próspera, his successor, Castro, spoke out against the project, which she saw as merely a shelter for foreign actors to undermine Honduran sovereignty and to skirt labor and environmental regulations they may face elsewhere. Last year, the Honduran Supreme Court declared special economic zones like Próspera unconstitutional, a move that Stone and Trejo described as “a starkly political maneuver.”

Próspera is an example of the tech-right concept of the network state, a phrase coined by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. I wrote about it earlier this year:

In a 2021 essay on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision for people seeking to build a new utopia or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there were conventional ways to do this—forming a new country through revolution or war. But that would be, well, really hard, not to mention unpredictable. A cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing options, but both presented ­logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was “tech Zionism,” creating an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, tax structure, and, of course, startup-friendly laws.

Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could acquire actual physical property where people would gather and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders—a “reverse diaspora,” he called it—but that land didn’t even need to be contiguous. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online,” he said, “and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.” Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that it was also a serious proposition. “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many individual influencers”—himself included—“have more than 1M followers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world.”

A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.”

Trump has expressed some interest in this idea; on the campaign trail, he proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land.

Still, it’s not entirely clear why the American president would care so much about saving a special economic zone in Latin America. That is, until one takes a look at Próspera’s Trump-aligned investors. That list includes Paypal’s Thiel, a Trump campaign donor who also is said to have played a key role in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Another prominent Próspera investor is venture capitalist Andreessen, who made significant campaign contributions to Trump and has also served as an adviser. Both Andreessen and Thiel have investment companies that benefit from government tech and defense contracts awarded under Trump.

At any rate, Stone appears to be taking a victory lap for having engineered the pardon. “Thank you, President Trump, for doing justice and granting the presidential pardon in the case of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was framed by Biden for an alleged drug trafficking that never existed,” he posted last week. “For a long time, I have advocated for a pardon in this case.”

Indeed, as he put it in his January article:

Castro’s regime could be upended and Honduras liberated without firing a single shot or deploying a single troop in what would be a massive strategic victory for US interests in the region. May the Próspera experiment prevail, the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand of President Trump!