2025-06-24 18:00:00
Late last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Donald Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles could continue while a challenge by California Gov. Gavin Newsom moved through the courts. But by deploying more than 4,000 National Guard members and at least 700 Marines to the heart of LA, Trump is treading, at best, into a gray area.
“It’s a legal authority that is somewhat obscure and murky,” says Mark Nevitt, an associate professor of law at Emory University, who previously served twenty years in the Navy as an aviator and lawyer with the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Since 2016, Nevitt has been advocating for reform of the Posse Comitatus Act, the Insurrection Act, and presidential emergency powers.
The Posse Comitatus Act prevents federal military forces from operating as law enforcement—that is, other than the exceptions Congress and the Constitution carve out. The most recognized exception is the Insurrection Act, last invoked in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush in response to the Los Angeles riots over the beating of Black driver Rodney King and the acquittal of the officers who attacked him; before that, it was widely invoked in the 1950s and ‘60s against Civil Rights Movement protests.
“The Marines did what they thought was required— which was laying down covering fire into this person’s apartment in Los Angeles.”
While Trump may or may not invoke the Insurrection Act to squash dissenting protesters, Nevitt is also concerned about something far less well understood: federal 287(g) agreements, which—behind the lusterless name—give local law enforcement agencies authority to assist with federal immigration operations.
In other words, a shadow army of police working for ICE.
Nevitt and I spoke about the recent deployment of troops to LA, as well as his broader concerns surrounding Trump’s immigration crackdown.
What are your thoughts on the recent deployment of the military to Los Angeles?
Historically, this country has sort of an allergic reaction, for good reason, for having the military being overly involved in policing. So what’s happening now is concerning. It’s sort of an escalatory measure with the 4,000 National Guard as well as 700 Marines. What makes this somewhat unique is that the governor doesn’t really want the National Guard there, or at least the California National Guard federalized in that capacity—in most instances, the governor is consenting, or even requesting, the president to assist in enforcing the law in that situation. Most famously, you saw that in 1992, when [Republican] California Gov. Pete Wilson, at some point during the LA riots, essentially requested President Bush to sort of come in and help him out.
What is your main concern with Marines being deployed domestically?
The Marines are trained in more of a combat-type mindset. Rules of engagement for operating in a more hostile environment. The concern is that moving from more of that combat mindset to a domestic law enforcement mindset is a shift in culture, shift in training, just a shift in how you perform your operations. I would be surprised if any number of those 700 Marines had done anything like this before. There’s probably not a lot of internal unit expertise that you can rely upon. When you go to Iraq, when you go to Afghanistan, you rely upon the gunnery sergeant who has been there for one, two, three tours and kind of shows you the ropes.They’re doing the best they can, and they’re well trained—the finest fighting force in the world, the US Marines—but it’s a challenging environment and a very unique mission.
How else does training and terminology differ between law enforcement and the military?
“Rather than defending civil liberties and civil protections, you’re turned inward to potentially hinder [them].”
There’s different terminology and just different ways to think. We talked about [rules of engagement] vs. what’s called “rules for use of force.” In LA [in 1992], there were Marines who were accompanying the Los Angeles Police Department for a domestic situation and LAPD officers knocked on the door and they asked the Marines to essentially “cover me,” which means one thing in a law enforcement context. Essentially, it means take your gun off of safety and be ready to take action if needed. And in the military context, “cover me” means, essentially, lay down covering fire to cover the advancement of troops.
So the Marines did what they thought was required, which was laying down covering fire into this person’s apartment in Los Angeles. I think 200 bullets were splayed. Thank God no one was hurt or injured, but it just kind of shows a disconnect between the combat versus law enforcement. I don’t think that was ever known until much later.
Without Gov. Newsom’s approval, are these deployments even legal?
The legal authority that’s being used for this, it’s a legal authority that is somewhat obscure and murky. California Gov. Newsom is basically making an argument along the lines of, look, in this statute, there is a provision that says the president can federalize the National Guard if there was a rebellion. Gov. Newsom believes there’s not a rebellion in Los Angeles. By this scope, and what I’ve seen, it strikes me as not a full-blown rebellion or insurrection, but there is some lawlessness happening in parts with Molotov cocktails, and things along those lines.
So [Newsom] is arguing, essentially, that the trigger to federalize the guard has not been met, and [California] also has a really unique provision in the law, which essentially says that the orders to the California National Guard upon federalization flow through the state governor. So the law itself doesn’t even seem to contemplate a situation where the governor doesn’t want the guard federalized, right?
It’s just sloppy lawmaking, and Congress hasn’t updated the law. What do you do when the President is trying to act contra to the governor, but the governor has the statutory authority to issue orders to the newly federalized California National Guard? It’s just a mess.
What barriers are there to invoking the Insurrection Act as president?
The statute itself doesn’t define insurrection or rebellion, so as someone who wants to maximize their authority, you can likely find a legal basis to activate the Insurrection Act. The insurrection act is really the final tool. So once you do that, there’s really nothing else you can do as the president.
From a veteran’s perspective, how do you feel about the military taking part in domestic law enforcement?
I joined the military, a lot of my friends and colleagues joined the military, to protect Americans. Essentially being turned as a law enforcer or being used against your neighbor, that’s just a different role for the military. Rather than defending civil liberties and civil protections, you’re turned inward to potentially hinder civil liberties, civil protections. That’s just a different role, and I think that makes a lot of military members uncomfortable, because that’s not what they signed up for.
“You basically have a shadow immigration force happening in plain sight.”
What do you wish people would pay more attention to?
One thing I will say that has not gotten enough attention here is the use of what’s called 287(g) agreements. These are agreements that are negotiated as signed between the Department of Homeland Security and state and federal law enforcement agencies. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has signed over seven hundred 287(g) agreements with law enforcement agencies across 40 states, and this essentially supercharges and empowers these local law enforcement to have a major role in federal immigration enforcement. I wish more people would pay attention to that, because you basically have a shadow immigration force happening in plain sight. At the beginning of the Trump administration, there were maybe 100 to 150 agreements, and that’s quadrupled in four months. It’s going to be approaching a thousand here by the end of the summer—that is a stunning, stunning, increase.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
For more on this topic, listen to last week’s episode of “More To The Story” from Reveal.
2025-06-24 18:00:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In October 1978, two leaders of the Iranian opposition to the British-backed shah of Iran met in the Paris suburbs of Neauphle-le-Château to plan for the final stages of the revolution, a revolution that after 46 momentous and often brutal years may now be close to expiring.
The two men had little in common but their nationality, age, and determination to remove the shah from power. Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the secular liberal National Front, was a former Sorbonne-educated professor of law. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the leading Shia opponent of the Iranian monarchy since the 1960s. Both were in their 70s at the time.
Sanjabi had arrived in Paris with the draft declaration of goals of the coming revolution the two men were to lead. The document stated that the revolution would be grounded on two principles: that it be democratic and Islamic. Yet Sanjabi later recalled to historians that at the Paris meeting Khomeini in his own handwriting added a third principle to the declaration—independence.
Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense that it was the wronged partner.
That third principle, the primacy of independence, born of Iran’s history of exploitation by colonial powers, helps to explain what may seem otherwise mysterious in the current dispute between Iran and the US: Iran’s dogmatic insistence that it must have the right to enrich uranium. It has been the issue that dogged the talks between Iran and the west over Tehran’s nuclear program since the turn of the century and was the sticking point in the two years of discussions that were eventually settled in Iran’s favor when the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) was agreed under the Obama administration in 2015. It is the reason why Iran is being bombed now by Israel and, over the weekend, by the US.
Yet to many American eyes, this obsession with enrichment inside Iran, instead of importing, for instance, from Russia, is only explicable if it is accepted that Iran covertly wants to build a nuclear bomb. The fatwa against “un-Islamic” nuclear weapons twice issued by the supreme leader has to be a smokescreen, this US perspective goes.
On social media last week, Vice-President JD Vance largely took that view. He wrote: “It’s one thing to want civilian nuclear energy. It’s another thing to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And it’s still another to cling to enrichment while simultaneously violating basic non-proliferation obligations and enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium.
“I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. I’ve yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its nonproliferation obligations.”
The process for enriching uranium to make civil nuclear energy and a nuclear bomb is broadly the same. It is generally accepted that uranium enriched to 3.67 percent is sufficient for civil nuclear energy, while purity levels of 90 percent are required for a nuclear weapon. Once purity levels reach 60 percent, as in the case of Iran, it is not a lengthy process to proceed to 90 percent.
Iran, of course, argues there is no mystery why it has enriched to these high levels of purity. It was part of a clearly signalled staged escalatory response to Donald Trump unilaterally pulling the US out of the JCPOA in 2018—an act that that had deprived Iran of the sanctions relief it had negotiated. Moreover, Trump, by imposing secondary sanctions, made it impossible for Europe to trade with Iran, the second planned benefit of the JCPOA.
Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense that it was the wronged partner, and the US confirmed as inherently untrustworthy.
Centrist figures such as the former president Hassan Rouhani and the foreign minister Javad Zarif expended huge internal political capital to sign a deal with the west, and the west promptly reneged on it. Meanwhile, Israel, a country that is not a member of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty—unlike Iran—and which has a totally unmonitored and undeclared nuclear weapon, receives largesse and support from the west.
Nevertheless, Vance may have a point. As a casus belli, the right to enrich uranium to purity levels of 3.67 percent, the level permitted under the JCPOA, seems on the surface an implausible issue for the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to risk martyrdom.
Why did a country with large oil reserves feel such a need to have homegrown civil nuclear energy?
A persuasive new account by Vali Nasr, entitled Iran’s Grand Strategy, helps unlock the key to that question by placing the answer in Iran’s colonial exploitation and its search for independence.
He wrote: “Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or US sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or efforts to export the revolution, as well as the sordid legacy of Iran’s confrontations with the west, the future supreme religious guide and leader of Iran valued independence from foreign influence as equal to the enshrining principles of Islam in the state.”
Khamenei was indeed asked once what was the benefit of the revolution, and he replied “now all decisions are made in Tehran.”
It was the British and the Americans who introduced nuclear power to Iran.
Nasr argues that as many of the lofty ideals of the revolution such as democracy and Islam have been eroded or distorted, the principle of Iranian independence has endured.
The quest for sovereignty, he argues, arose from Iran’s benighted history. In the 19th century, Iran was squeezed between the British and Russian imperial powers. In the 20th century its oil resources were exploited by British oil companies. Twice its leaders—in 1941 and 1953—were removed from office by the British and Americans. The popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 due to his demand to control Iran’s oil resources. No event in contemporary Iranian history is more scarring than Mosaddegh’s toppling. For Khomeini it confirmed Iran still did not control its destiny, or its energy resources.
Although civil nuclear power and the right to enrich became a symbol of independence and sovereignty after the revolution, Ellie Geranmayeh from the European Council on Foreign Relations points out it was the British and the Americans that introduced nuclear power to Iran in what was named an “atoms for peace” program.
The shah of Iran, with US approval, embarked on a plan to build 23 civil nuclear power stations, making it possible for Iran to export electricity to neighboring countries and achieve the status of a modern state. Michael Axworthy, the pre-eminent British historian of contemporary Iran, said: “Using oil profits in this way seemed a then sensible way of investing a finite resource in order to create an infinite one.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger later admitted that as US secretary of state he raised no objections to the plants being built. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” he said. Work started on two nuclear reactors including one at the port city of Bushehr with the help of the German firm Kraftwerk Union a subdivision of Siemens and AEG.
The shah recognized the dual use for nuclear power, and in June 1974 even told an American journalist that “Iran would have nuclear weapons without a doubt sooner than you think,” a remark he rapidly denied. Gradually the US became more nervous that the shah’s obsession with weaponry might mean Iran’s civil program turning nuclear.
“In my view, Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be recognized as a regional power.”
After the Iranian revolution in 1979, progress on the near-complete two stations ground to a halt. Khomeini regarded nuclear power as a symbol of western decadence arguing bloated infrastructure projects would make Iran more dependent on western imperialist technology. He said he wanted no “westoxificiation,” or gharbzadegi in Farsi. The program was largely ended, to the disappointment of some nuclear scientists.
But within a year or two electricity shortages and the population boom put pressure on Tehran’s policy elite to start a discreet reversal of the shutdown. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran’s sense of diplomatic isolation in seeking international condemnation of Iraq’s repeated attacks on the incomplete Bushehr nuclear station, and finally multibillion-dollar legal wrangles with European firms over the incomplete nuclear program of the shah, together spawned a nuclear nationalism.
By 1990, Iran’s Atomic Energy Authority declared that by 2005, 20 percent of the country’s energy could be produced by nuclear electric power and 10 power vaults would be built over the next decade.
Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s speaker of the parliament during the 1980-88 war and then president from 1989 to 1997, made numerous appeals to Iran’s nuclear scientists to return home and build the program. In 1988 he said: “If you do not serve Iran, whom will you serve?” Suddenly Iran’s nuclear program had shifted from a symbol of western modernism to a source of patriotic pride.
By the turn of the century, the Iranian nuclear program was erroneously thought to consist primarily of several small research reactors and the nuclear light water reactor being constructed by Iran and now Russia at Bushehr.
Rafsanjani later admitted Iran first considered a deterrent capability during the Iran-Iraq war, when the nuclear program first resumed. He said: “When we first began, we were at war and we sought to have that possibility for the day that the enemy might use a nuclear weapon. That was the thinking. But it never became real.”
Rafsanjani travelled to Pakistan to try to meet Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program who later helped North Korea to develop an atomic bomb.
In mid 2002, a leak from a dissident group, possibly via the Mossad, revealed that Iran had two secret nuclear installations designed for enriching uranium at Natanz near Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. Iran said it was under no obligation to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency UN nuclear inspectorate of the existence of the plants because they were not operational. Iran added the nonproliferation treaty declared it was the “inalienable right” of all states to develop nuclear programs for peaceful purposes under IAEA safeguards. In itself, uranium enrichment is not a sign of seeking to make a nuclear weapon, but critics said it was hard to explain why Iran needed to make nuclear fuel at a stage in which it had no functioning nuclear reactor.
From then on, the diplomatic dance started and has continued at various levels of intensity ever since.
In October 2003 via the Tehran declaration, Iran under huge international pressure due to the leak, agreed to sign the additional protocol, which authorized the the IAEA to make short-notice inspections. In November 2004, under the Paris agreement, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment temporarily pending proposals from the E3 (France, Germany and the UK) on how to handle the issue on a more long-term basis.
But in deference to Iran’s sovereignty, the E3 recognized that this suspension was a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s populist president elected in June 2005, became more assertive, insisting Iran’s technology was the peaceful outcome of the scientific achievements of the country’s youth. “We need the peaceful nuclear technology for energy, medical and agricultural purposes, and our scientific progress,” he said.
Gradually the case for negotiation increased. With the US demanding an end to enrichment and Iran insisting on its legal right to enrich, the E3 were caught in the middle. All kinds of compromises were floated, including by Brazil and India. But western opinion was shaped by the then head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, Mohamed ElBaradei, who said: “In my view Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be recognized as a regional power, they believe that the nuclear knowhow brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the US engaging them.”
Rouhani made a similar point in an article in the Washington Post. He said: “To us, mastering the atomic fuel cycle and generating nuclear power is as much about diversifying our energy resources as it is about who Iranians are as a nation, our demand for dignity and respect and our consequent place in the world. Without comprehending the role of identity, many issues we all face will remain unresolved.”
Nevertheless, if Iran’s goal with its nuclear program was security and independence, and not something more sinister, the leadership has paid a huge and probably self-defeating price.
2025-06-24 00:26:07
When the US Supreme Court decided to overrule Roe v. Wade three years ago, the ruling had sweeping consequences for public health, making pregnancy much riskier, leading to the preventable deaths of pregnant women, and causing a spike in infant mortality. Now, research suggests the country has also suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses, with the ripple effects being felt in abortion-friendly and -hostile states alike.
A new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a DC-based think tank, estimates that the 16 states with total or near-total abortion bans have sustained more than $64 billion in economic losses annually since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. That’s enough to cover the average estimated health care costs related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period for nearly all of the 3.6 million births that occurred in the US last year, the IWPR fact sheet says.
Nationwide, the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe has led to a staggering $133 billion in economic losses each year, IWPR estimates. Beyond the 16 state bans, the loss of federal protections that Roe offered, plus restrictions in other states that reduce abortion access—such as mandatory pre-abortion counseling and waiting periods, restrictions on providers, and gestational limits—have had an enormous economic toll, the think tank says. The restrictions keep more than a half million women out of the labor force each year, with Black women and Latinas suffering the greatest impacts, according to IWPR’s analysis.
This is not the first indication that Dobbs has shrunken the workforce and stunted the economy. Recent research from both IWPR and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), for example, shows that young, highly educated people are moving out of states with abortion bans. And another recent NBER paper found that abortion restrictions increased rates of intimate partner violence by 7 to 10 percent, contributing to a projected increase of $1.24 billion in social costs, including health care and lost productivity for victims. But the new IWPR fact sheet provides some of the timeliest analysis of the economic impacts of Dobbs, and helps quantify the overall costs of rising abortion restrictions nationwide. “This is not just a women’s crisis, it’s really a national economic crisis of significant magnitude,” says Melissa Mahoney, senior research economist at IWPR and lead author of the report.
“This is not just a women’s crisis, it’s really a national economic crisis of significant magnitude.”
A new Harris poll published last week found that women on both sides of the political aisle already report being more worried about the state of the economy than men do. Even before President Donald Trump’s return to office, which has brought tariffs and fears of a recession, the skyrocketing cost of childcare and the lack of federal paid leave already made life difficult for working parents in the US. The latest data shows how abortion bans can exacerbate the problem, by driving women into lower-paying jobs or out of paid work entirely, Mahoney explains.
Yana Rodgers, a professor of economics at labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, who was not involved with the IWPR report but reviewed a copy of it provided by Mother Jones, said the findings are not surprising given ample research showing how abortion legalization impacts women’s economic standing. If anything, she added, the costs of Dobbs are likely even bigger than the estimates in the report, given other expected ripple effects, such as increases in child poverty and more families relying on public assistance.
Unsurprisingly, the report found that it is conservative states with the most restrictive abortion policies whose labor forces and economies have been most negatively impacted. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, which have total abortion bans with extremely limited exceptions, would see the largest labor force participation increases among women of reproductive age if their current restrictions were reversed; those states have also sustained an average of $1.8 billion in annual economic losses, IWPR estimates. More than a dozen states, including Arkansas, South Carolina, and West Virginia, would see their gross domestic product, or GDPs—the total value of goods and services produced within one year—increase by 0.8 percent or more without their current restrictions. These red states already “tend to have worse supports and protections for families,” Mahoney says, adding that abortion restrictions will likely make the situation worse in the long run. Without abortion restrictions, the national GDP would also rise by 0.5 percent due to women’s increased labor force participation, the IWPR report says. Rodgers, from Rutgers, says that’s “substantial,” given that national GDP growth has hovered around 2.5 percent in recent years.
The Trump administration has also been undermining women’s workforce participation in other ways—for example, by moving to dismantle the 105-year-old Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor, which has historically fought for working women. The administration also canceled congressionally-mandated grants administered by that office to get more women into trades, and is reportedly considering a slate of policies to encourage more mothers to opt out of paid work and stay at home to raise young children. The Trump-backed reconciliation bill Republicans are trying to push through Congress is also likely to harm women and families, through proposed cuts to Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, and food stamps, according to a brief from the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund.
In the absence of government support, business owners can implement policies to try to recruit and retain pregnant and parenting workers, Mahoney says. Among them: Offer paid family and sick leave, expand health care coverage and travel assistance to employees who need to access abortions out of state, and allow remote work to make it easier for people to manage families or avoid moving to states with abortion bans. Data suggests such policies are popular: A recent survey of 10,000 adults conducted by IWPR, Morning Consult, and the Center for Reproductive Rights found that the majority of employed adults believe companies should speak out in favor of reproductive rights, and nearly half say they would be more likely to apply for or accept a job if an employer provided reproductive health care benefits. Rodgers has also written about how facilitating employees’ access to abortion and fertility care, such as in vitro fertilization, saves money for employers, in part by reducing turnover due to parents leaving the workforce.
Unlike papers published in academic journals, the IWPR analysis is not peer-reviewed, a process that involves independent researchers’ extensive analysis of a paper’s methodology and findings. The authors of the IWPR paper relied upon assessments from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights, of the severity of state-level abortion policies as of last December. From there, IWPR researchers analyzed women’s labor force participation in those states and then estimated how labor force participation among women of reproductive age might differ without the abortion restrictions in place, using a methodology they previously developed. Then, they calculated the estimated impacts of women’s labor force losses on their earnings to estimate overall state and national economic losses due to abortion restrictions.
For anti-abortion Republicans who claim to be fiscally conservative, the new figures from IWPR may come as a shock. (Mother Jones shared a summary of the IWPR findings with spokespeople for the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has urged Kennedy to restrict access to abortion pills. None responded to our requests for comment.)
For Mahoney, that’s IWPR’s goal: to help GOP lawmakers see abortion restrictions as the economic catastrophe that they are. “Conceptualizing things in terms of dollars,” she says, “may have some meaning to them.”
2025-06-23 23:49:35
At the end of May, conservative radio host turned FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced on Twitter/X that the agency would reopen three Biden-era cases: an investigation into who planted pipe bombs outside the DNC and RNC headquarters in January 2021, another on who leaked the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, and—surely, the most pressing of all—the mystery of who dropped a half-empty bag of cocaine inside the White House in 2023.
Bongino and Patel are trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being in a position to provide it.
On June 3, FBI Director Kash Patel also said he would investigate whether previous, non-MAGAfied versions of the agency participated in “anti-Catholic targeting,” part of a wave of federal inquiries into whether the United States government has previously harbored anti-Christian bias. About a week later, Patel also told the far-right Epoch Times that he would investigate “possible Chinese influence” in what both he and the outlet called “riots” in downtown Los Angeles. (The Epoch Times is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, which opposes the ruling Chinese Communist Party.) For good measure, Patel also recently claimed on Fox News that one of his predecessors, James Comey, tried to rig the 2020 election. And he tweeted just days ago that the FBI has “has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP.”
“We’re now here to clean it up,” he tweeted in May, regarding Comey’s alleged role in the supposedly rigged election, “and the American people are about to see a wave of transparency.”
It’s unlikely, if not impossible, that any of these investigations will produce substantive new information. As the New York Times recently wrote, the conspiracy enthusiasts like Bongino and Patel who were tapped to be Trump Administration senior officials are running “what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.”
But their primary mission isn’t to actually prove these claims, but instead to keep rolling new ones out—preferably at such a pace that no one has time to track any previous promises. These ludicrous claims of sweeping disclosures and big reveals serve several functions: they’re a way to keep a conspiracy-minded base engaged and enthusiastic, and to distract from the ongoing outrages, embarrassments, and various failures of the second Trump term. They also preserve the propagators a place in the conservative media ecosystem, where each of these officials will, if nothing more lucrative emerges, inevitably go when their time in office concludes. Like a celebrity promising they haven’t forgotten their roots, making constant promises to uncover the rot and corruption within the government is a way to make clear where their loyalties still lie.
Many of the Trump administration’s most famous figures are deeply engaged in the right-wing and conspiratorial internet. Bongino, for instance, had a long career as a conservative talking head, while HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which pumps out largely false anti-vaccine, anti-5G, and anti-GMO content at a furious clip. In office, senior Trump officials have devoted a lot of time and attention to ideas that circulate mainly in those right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: whether hundreds of thousands of children went missing under the Biden administration, whether the September 11 attacks were in fact a “controlled demolition,” or whether there were two shooters responsible for the JFK assassination. In some cases, Trump administration officials are content to simply bring these ideas up in public forums, without much followup. At other times, they mention these supposed mysteries, coverups, and scandals to pledge that they are doing something about them.
But where the conspiracy rubber has met the doing-their-jobs road, the outcome has usually been disappointing. That pattern emerged early, at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s showy “release” of new files concerning dead billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, where a cadre of conservative influencers waved binders full of supposedly previously unreleased information. The stunt failed when it became clear the material wasn’t actually new. Bondi moved on to soon promise that, working with Patel, she would release an Epstein “client list,” which has not happened thus far, because such a concrete list likely does not exist. In May, Bongino and Patel also angered the MAGA faithful by declaring that Epstein died by suicide, contrary to years of conspiracy theories that Bongino himself helped promote. Bongino has since tried to placate his angry fans by promising there’s “more coming” from the Epstein files.
Making constant promises to uncover rot is a way to make clear where Trump officials’ loyalties still lie.
Before taking charge of the FBI, Patel worked as an advisor to Trump and a director at Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that owns Trump’s social media platform TruthSocial. (He’s one of several administration officials who have been tied to TMTG, as has Bondi.)
During his time at TMTG, Patel worked especially hard to capture the interest of the QAnon community as part of a strategy to attract users. As Media Matters has reported, he and TruthSocial CEO Devin Nunes both heavily promoted an account on the platform that tried to sound like it was operated by “Q,” the supposed intelligence operative at the heart of that conspiracy, who left breadcrumbs of purported clues about a fantasy battle that Donald Trump has secretly waged against a Deep State cabal of famous Democrat pedophiles and child-sacrificers.
Patel also went on various QAnon-promoting podcasts to urge their listeners to join TruthSocial, saying that they were exactly the audiences the company hoped to attract. “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences,” he said on one such podcast, “because whoever that person [Q] is has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.”
Gathering a “strong, dominant” and loyal following was the game all along: an audience hotly expecting new disclosures and revelations around every corner is an inherently loyal one.
As a term, “disclosure” actually originates in the UFO community: it refers to the idea that the government is preparing to finally reveal what they know about UFOs and extraterrestrials. The QAnon movement played a similar game at its height, promising that the secret battle Donald Trump was waging would soon be made public, with mass arrests to follow. Thousands of the faithful followed along, poring over every “Q drop,” every piece of dubious evidence, every new cryptic non-revelation. Like a soap opera that ended each episode on a cliffhanger, a constant promise of what could be coming next kept audiences engaged and ravenously steadfast.
QAnon as a discrete idea began to peter out when Trump left office the first time without frog-marching a single Hillary Clinton-supporting pedophile into prison. But QAnon’s traces remain everywhere, not least in the knowledge that it is a savvy marketing tactic to repeatedly promise that evildoers will, someday soon, be revealed.
Today, with the conspiracy world full of ever more competing storylines, theories, and hoped-for outcomes, the idea of disclosure remains a singular focal point of longing; that someone high up, somewhere, will finally tell us what we are desperate to know. Against that backdrop, Bongino, Patel, and other Trump figures are still awkwardly trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being the people in a position to provide it.
In the meantime, Bongino and other Trump figures are continuing to create content by churning out endless tweets, sending performatively verbose press releases, and making appearances on partisan news channels, all aimed at heightening their own profile and shifting blame from anything they have not yet achieved. Where before they cast themselves as independent investigators calling on a shadowy government to reveal its secrets, now they’re forced to play new roles, as dedicated and diligent public servants. This is, of course, boring: “I gave up everything for this,” Bongino lamented recently on Fox & Friends.
It’s still early enough in the second Trump term that these figures can act like brave truthtellers, and frame their efforts as digging through files that previous administrations were either too cowardly or too corrupted by Luciferian pedophiles to face. In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Patel claimed that upon taking office, he’d discovered a secret room inside FBI headquarters, a “room that Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building” filled with “documents and hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of.”
“My guys are going through that right now,” he said, adding that the room contained “a lot of stuff.”
“They’re so arrogant,” Patel said, referring to some unspecified evildoers. “They think, ‘No one’s going to catch us. I’m going to write everything down. We’re going to put it in a lock box. We’re going to put it in a vault, and no one’s going to find it. Well, guess what? I found the vault, and now I’m going to work.”
2025-06-23 23:40:37
Three years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority enabled states to severely restrict abortion or ban it outright. Since then, 17 states have enacted such limits; infant and maternal mortality have risen in many of them. But the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade extends far beyond medical catastrophes. It also appears in the quieter struggles—a myriad of small, compounding barriers that stand between individuals and their access to health care. Here are some of the stories of people who have stepped up to do what they can to provide care, and some of the women who found themselves trapped in a system increasingly difficult to navigate.
Back in 2022, I was 17 years old. A box of condoms was $15, and I could not easily afford it. I also didn’t have a car, and the closest place to get condoms was 2 miles away. Realistically, is a teenager going to walk 2 miles in the Texas heat to go pick up a $15 pack of condoms? Plus, we have laws around minors accessing birth control without parental consent—that was another barrier, especially because I lived with a single father.
I had also been dealing with a lot of health issues: particularly nausea and something called Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. It’s like bipolar disorder or post-partum depression, except that it happens every time you are about to menstruate. It could also be confused for pregnancy-related hormone changes. My cycle also is irregular but averages about 38 days long, so it takes more time for me to realize a missed period. All these factors stopped me from realizing I was pregnant as soon as I could.
When the test came back positive, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get an abortion in Texas. There was a six-week ban, and I was already past that.
Because of SB 8, a lot of abortion funds weren’t helping patients in Texas. There was that uncertainty about what was going to happen: “Are we going to be criminalized? Are our patients going to be criminalized?” It was a total pause while they were figuring out how to move forward.
I posted a couple of videos on TikTok, talking about having to travel, being pregnant, and what a horrible experience it was, especially as a teenager who was already chronically ill. I got over $400 in donations. Of course, I got hate, but so many people were kind.
My parents took money out of savings, and a few friends and family members contributed to cover the costs of gas, food, and motels. I was feeling a lot of shame, but my mom told me something that helped: “When you are ovulating, when you are fertile, your body is actively trying to get you pregnant. That is the biological purpose of your reproductive system. So, who are you to feel shame for your body working properly?”
Even though it was 700 miles away, my mom and I decided to go with New Mexico, because I have family there.
My mother, my boyfriend, and I left Texas late morning, and we got to New Mexico around 1 a.m. I was constantly nauseous and dealing with awful motion sickness on the 11-hour car ride. My appointment was the next day at 9 a.m.
Our motel was kind of shady—the room smelled weird, and I didn’t feel safe. It was also a quick trip. We left less than 12 hours after the procedure. On the car ride home, the pain and cramping came in waves. But after my procedure, I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders.
I want people in similar situations to know there are coalitions out there—people willing to provide legal services or funding. There is nothing wrong with asking for help.
—Dakota B, San Antonio, Texas.
2025-06-23 23:40:20
Three years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority enabled states to severely restrict abortion or ban it outright. Since then, 17 states have enacted such limits; infant and maternal mortality have risen in many of them. But the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade extends far beyond medical catastrophes. It also appears in the quieter struggles—a myriad of small, compounding barriers that stand between individuals and their access to health care. Here are some of the stories of people who have stepped up to do what they can to provide care, and some of the women who found themselves trapped in a system increasingly difficult to navigate.
People from the Midwest are often referred to us through their local abortion funds, which cover the clinical costs, but not the travel. That’s where we come in.
I’ve been working on our hotline since the fall of 2016. In the past, when nobody was messaging us, it was kind of nice to have a little break. Now, when there’s more need than ever and it’s calm, I feel anxious. “Why is it quiet?” I wonder. It feels like there’s an increase in people who don’t have funding for the abortion. Often, abortion funds in their state have hit capacity.
Sometimes people have their abortions already scheduled and just need money for gas, hotels, or flights. We might recommend a clinic depending on where they are and how far along they are in their pregnancy. If someone doesn’t know that information, we may suggest a state and clinic that provides care through the second trimester to better ensure they won’t be turned away.
Statistically, most people who have abortions already have children. I am so glad when we can refer parents to clinics with children’s areas. It’s such a relief to parents that they can get their medication abortion while their 2-year-olds are safe in the play place. We also know clinics that excel at advocating for Spanish-speaking folks.
I worry about new barriers to abortion. We have seen in the news immigrant communities reducing visits to doctor’s appointments due to fear of deportation. There’s absolutely no way that isn’t going to impact folks who are trying to travel for abortion care. But I trust that the reproductive justice community will keep finding ways. That’s what this is—people, on abortion fund hotlines, volunteer drivers and appointment companions, doulas and midwives, clinic escorts—people meeting their communities where they are at, and saying, “Yeah, I’m free this Saturday, and I want to help.”
—MJ, director of programs, Midwest Access Coalition
