2025-11-20 20:30:00
Recently, Clifford “Buzz” Grambo decided to upgrade his electric scooter. The old one he had purchased online only reached 16 mph and wasn’t cutting it anymore. He needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he chases around Baltimore. So, Grambo bought a Segway MAX G3, which features a 2,000-watt motor and can get up to 28 mph.
“The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew who I was,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. “They had seen me before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ‘Ha ha, bitches, I got a new scooter!’”
Grambo’s nickname comes from the buzz cut he has sported ever since a drunk driver crashed into his childhood bedroom, hitting him in the head and sending him to the hospital. Of late, he has earned another moniker, according to the Baltimore Banner, from fans of his mission to warn neighbors of ICE presence: modern-day Paul Revere. At the No Kings rally in the Charm City last month, Grambo dressed up as the Boston silversmith and revolutionary patriot, mostly because of his wife’s encouragement. (He also did it for Halloween, but trick-or-treating kids mistook him for Alexander Hamilton.)
“I told everybody: ‘I’m retired, I sit home all day. If we get any reports of ICE in the neighborhood, somebody text me and I’ll run over on my scooter and go yell at them.’”
“A lot of people are worried about being under the spotlight of this regime,” Grambo told me. “I figure I’m already in their spotlight.”
At 43, Grambo is one of countless everyday people across the country stepping up to repudiate the descent of federal law enforcement agencies onto their cities and the violent abduction of their immigrant neighbors in broad daylight. In the face of increased threats of repression and at risk of retaliation, their displays of defiance, however small, show that resistance can surface anywhere.
These acts of peaceful disobedience look like the dozens, if not hundreds, of rapid response networks and neighborhood watch groups cropping up to bear witness to raids. It is the Chicago teachers blowing whistles outside of schools when immigration agents are in the vicinity or someone is in the process of being detained. It is the Los Angeles “soccer mom” who drives after ICE cars and documents sightings on TikTok, raising more than $122,000 in donations. And it is Grambo on his scooter.
The work started a few months ago, after Grambo and his wife, Mandy, came across a post on social media about community members who had taken to the streets to protest ICE agents stopping an immigrant. The pair got in the car and drove over to join, shouting at the officers until they left. Afterwards, Grambo and others got together to discuss what seemed to have worked and what more they could do. A lose network formed.
“I told everybody: ‘I’m retired, I sit home all day,’” he said. “‘If we get any reports of ICE in the neighborhood, somebody text me, and I’ll run over on my scooter and go yell at them.’” Grambo soon started being notified about immigration enforcement activity, sometimes three or four times in a day. At first, when he went out on patrol in Highlandtown, a Latino-heavy neighborhood just east of Patterson Park that has seen a spike in immigration enforcement activity, residents seemed wary. But with time, he said, people came to recognize him as an ally.
“We’re not going out and getting rapists and murderers,” he said. “We’re hunting people that support my community. I just want people to be treated like human beings.”
Grambo is cautious when it comes to sharing information or insights about his sources and tactics, in case ICE is paying close attention. It is sufficient to say that, by now, he knows what models of cars federal agents tend to drive and to be on the lookout for.
His goal is straightforward: He wants to make ICE agents uncomfortable. The way Grambo sees it, it’s a numbers game. If he can draw the attention of officers to himself, perhaps fewer immigrants will get swept up, and that’s a win. “I know I can’t stop them,” he said, “but if I can suck up their time, then at least I can help some people.”
While he’s at it, Grambo also hopes to deflate the agents’ spirits. It’s a lesson he has taken from his days in the military, having joined the Navy shortly after 9/11 and served as an aircraft mechanic with tours in Japan and Guam before retiring as a chief petty officer in 2022. “I want their morale as low as possible,” he said, “because a team with low morale is ineffective.”
On Veterans Day, I met up with Grambo as he braced the first bone-chilling cold temperatures of the season to join other former military service members at Baltimore’s War Memorial Plaza in protest against the Trump administration’s threats to send troops here and amid their deployment to other American cities. “Our people aren’t enemies, they’re neighbors,” Tim Eppers, an Army veteran, said. “Our communities aren’t combat zones, they’re homes filled with stories, families, and dreams.”
Grambo was up next. “In America, we’re supposed to welcome the stranger, not hunt them,” he told a small group of reporters and supporters. He urged MAGA followers to turn off Fox News and realize they’re being lied to. He called for the dismantling of “concentration camps” on US soil. He urged Democrats to listen to their voters over their donors. “Veterans have done our part for democracy,” he concluded. “We should be at home watching sports and taking naps, not fighting fascism.”
Grambo was raised in a conservative part of Calvert County in southern Maryland. In 1995, when he was 13 years old, he got kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America for admitting to being an atheist. That disciplinary episode made the pages of the Washington Post and, according to Grambo, caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who wanted to have him on her show.
He described himself as “Republican by zip code.” But by the time President Donald Trump came into the national political scene, Grambo had grown disaffected with the party. For a moment, he thought a businessman like Trump could be the answer. Then Trump descended the golden escalator to announce his presidential candidacy, and Grambo thought, “Hell no.” (He said he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and instead remembers having written in John McCain.)
By then an anti-Trump Republican, Grambo said Trump’s first term led him to break with the GOP. The infamous travel ban targeting immigrants from several Muslim majority countries was too much. “None of the Republicans spoke up about it and that was my breaking point,” Grambo said. “I was just like, this judging people based on their religion, that’s not America.” He decided then that the Republican party was “irredeemable.”
While Grambo doesn’t identify as a Democrat, he has chosen a side. “I look at it as I’m fighting for democracy,” he said. “We don’t have a conservative and a liberal party right now. We have a democracy party and a fascist party.” Grambo will tell anyone who listens exactly what he thinks is at the root of the deterioration of American democracy: a conservative media ecosystem that traffics in disinformation and feeds the “cult” that is MAGA. “I realized Fox News is completely full of shit, and that you can put on the record,” he said.
Grambo is chatty and gregarious. He curses a lot, and he knows it. At times, he seems to get overwhelmed and loses his train of thought. (He attributes some of it to head injuries and memory issues.) At the “Refuse Fascism” protest in Washington, DC, in early November, it wasn’t hard to spot him—in a Navy hoodie and Baltimore Ravens hat with a “Human rights are not political” pin—hanging out in front of the 24/7 sit-in tent outside at Union Station, where a group of veterans have been protesting the deployment of the National Guard to the capital.
Grambo said he tries to come support them once a week, but he makes it clear he isn’t exactly thrilled about it. “I’m supposed to be retired,” he said once more. As we’re chatting, two women wearing the Handmaid’s Tale red outfit overheard us. “Thank you for being here,” Carrie Salamone from Cincinnati told him. “You’re the kind of people we want to hear from.” Right then, CNN’s Manu Raju walked by and Grambo ran off to take a selfie with him. “My wife is going to be so jealous,” he said.
His wife, Mandy, wasn’t surprised when he started to go on patrols; Grambo seems to have a penchant for good trouble. “It’s just part of who he is,” she said. If her work in corporate benefits for an international company allows it, she joins him by car so they can cover more ground and report back to each other.
“When he runs out the door sometimes, I’ll say ‘I have a meeting in 30 minutes and won’t be able to bail you out right away,’” she said half-jokingly. “I was with him probably for the last 15 years of his military career, and it has been scarier to watch him go out the door with some of the things going on now than it was seeing him off to go to deployment.” She has managed to convince him to wear a helmet, which he does begrudgingly.
The couple, who has been together for 16 years, has discussed scenario planning in the event that something goes truly wrong. Back in September, Grambo said, he had a run-in with ICE agents who stopped him and threatened to take him to jail. He protested, asserting he was exercising his First Amendment rights, and continued to follow one of the cars while yelling that ICE was in the neighborhood. “If you’re going to tell me I can’t do it,” said Grambo, who carries a whistle on his keychain and has since bought a body camera to document future interactions, “I’m going to do it even louder.”
That wasn’t his only encounter. On a recent Sunday morning, Grambo and Mandy drove to an intersection in southeast Baltimore where they had gotten word that ICE had been spotted. He called other activists on his network to come to the area and hopped out of the car with a megaphone in hand. Unmarked vehicles lined up the residential street. “Hey, we don’t want you here!” Grambo shouted as he walked toward a group of agents with black vests marked as “police” and some wearing face covers, a video his wife recorded shows.
Next, Grambo said one of the agents, dressed in a hoodie, pointed him to move to the sidewalk and shoved him more than once. (Grambo said he called the Baltimore police and reported the incident. A police department spokesperson confirmed that officers responded to a reported “assault by a federal agent on a 43-year-old male” and would forward the information to the “proper federal agency” for investigation. ICE did not respond to a request for comment before publication.) Mandy yelled at the man not to touch her husband and told him he was being recorded. “I don’t care,” the agent said, moving toward her until another officer took him away.
“Hey, don’t run, we got you on camera,” Grambo shouted as the agents appeared to get ready to leave. He stood in front of one the cars and told the men to take their masks off. “You have an oath to the Constitution,” he pressed. “What did you take an oath to?” The car then raced away with its sirens on. For a little while, Grambo continued to follow them, this time on foot.
2025-11-20 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In a dramatic twist of political defections and contentious concessions, the longest ever federal shutdown came to a close last week as Congress finally managed to agree on a deal to reopen the government. Federal agencies are now beginning to resume operations, employees are returning to work, and payments are beginning to flow once again.
Experts say, though, that the shutdown has left behind fractures on the nation’s food system that are only beginning to appear. These cracks will only widen with time as they join with all of the other major food and farming policy changes enacted by the Trump administration—which altogether are affecting who eats what, where that food comes from, and which communities get left behind.
“The United States was definitely the leader in agricultural research in the entire world, and that’s slipping out of our grasp.”
“When agencies like the USDA or FDA halt or scale back operations, there are ripple effects through the supply chain because of the effect on crop payments, insurance, inspections, and nutrition programs,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist studying food insecurity and climate change at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “These, along with unpredictable policies, can erode public trust and market transparency, weaken these support systems, and increase vulnerabilities to shocks like disease outbreaks or extreme climate events.”
Grist spoke to federal workers, farmers, economists, recipients of food benefits, and analysts throughout the country to piece together how the longest shutdown in US history is likely to affect America’s food system in the weeks, months, and years to come.
Among the furloughed federal staffers was Ethan Roberts, who represents the employee bargaining unit at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president and also works for the Department of Agriculture as a physical science technician. After six weeks out of office, Roberts returned to work at the Agricultural Research Service in Peoria, Illinois, on Thursday.
Going into the shutdown, Roberts said his lab “mothballed” nearly all of their projects, including their work on fungal diseases, such as fumonisin toxin and wheat scab blight, in addition to finding new uses for crops: “Basically, we just lost, like, a month and a half worth of progress and work, and a lot of those things will have to be restarted.”
Some of Roberts’ colleagues had to file for unemployment to pay their bills. Many were forced to look for other work. More still might not return to the USDA at all. The losses only add to the cuts that the Trump administration made before the shutdown. Upward of 20,000 USDA staffers, or roughly a fifth of the agency’s workforce, have lost their jobs this year. Only a small group of staffers in Roberts’ lab stayed on through the shutdown to continue work that the USDA considered critical, including the cryogenic preservation of the largest publicly available collection of microorganisms in the world.
Without adequate federal financial support, “the nation’s food is on track to become more expensive and more limited in supply.”
The consequences of the lab’s dwindling administrative capacity will eventually reach the country’s ranchers and farmers. “It is our job to find new products, new uses, new everything for the crops that farmers produce,” said Roberts. “So if we’re not working on that for a month and a half, that’s time we weren’t working on solutions and implementations to assist these farmers.”
Fewer employees at labs like Roberts’, of course, also means that the USDA will fall further behind on agricultural research. “The United States was definitely the leader in agricultural research in the entire world, and that’s slipping out of our grasp,” he said. “In terms of ripple effects, it can’t get much bigger than that.”
This growing exodus of federal workers doesn’t just compromise research capacity, but also food safety oversight, putting Americans’ health at risk. Leading into the shutdown, federal food safety agencies had already faced significant staff losses threatening their ability to ensure the safety of the national food supply. Between January and April, the Food and Drug Administration lost around 4,000 staffers to mass layoffs, according to government data. Operational slowdowns during the shutdown then limited routine inspections, facility oversight, and ongoing food safety investigations.
Quietly tucked into the stopgap funding bill that will keep the government open through January 30 was a one-year extension of the 2018 farm bill and an annual USDA funding bill.
The two bills will get essential services—think farm loans, conservation assistance, and local food grants—operating after weeks of disruption. But the appropriations bill also cut more than $75 million from conservation technical assistance programs, while the farm bill extension removed payment limits for cost-sharing conservation programs. Combined, this is both bad news for climate-weary farmers and could result in inequitable distributions of those funding pots, according to Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
All told, farm bankruptcies are soaring, and farm debt is set to hit a record high this year. Farmers are currently being squeezed by low commodity-crop prices, spiking interest rates, struggles following several successive federal funding cuts, blowback from the president’s tariffs on markets, and stubbornly high costs of energy and fertilizer, among other inputs. Livestock producers are confronting supply chain constraints, persistent droughts, and rising production costs. Climate change and extreme weather have been amplifying all of these existing issues—as has the shutdown. “When the government is closed for 43 days, it really does stunt the possibility of federal policy to provide more timely solutions,” said Lavender.
“When SNAP shrinks, the whole food economy shrinks.”
“The negative effects of the shutdown on the US agricultural industry, coupled with climate change-driven disruptions to agriculture in the US and globally, could create crop deficits and contribute to rising prices of food,” said Alla Semenova, an agricultural economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Other typical effects of delayed climate adaptation include rising food production and transportation costs, falling nutritional quality of foods, and deteriorating population health.
The shutdown also further exposed the US agricultural sector’s high reliance on federal financial assistance, such as farm subsidies and loan programs. That reliance, warned Semenova, is at risk of only increasing over the next two years because of climate change.
“As the government shutdown froze financial assistance to farmers during the critical harvesting and crop-planning season,” Semenova said, it has created “potential risks to the US food supply chain in 2026 and 2027. Without adequate financial assistance from the federal government, the nation’s food is on track to become more expensive and more limited in supply.”
On Monday, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden announced that the administration will release another tranche of the billions in emergency assistance to help struggling farmers authorized by Congress last December. According to Vaden, the agency is now opening up applications for another installment of a $16 billion pool for weather-related aid.
The effects of the shutdown have already begun reverberating throughout the supply chain. Nearly 42 million Americans who rely on programs like SNAP spent weeks waiting on their supplemental grocery stipends, while the Trump administration fought a series of legal battles to hold off on paying those benefits during the shutdown.
According to Parker Gilkesson, a senior policy analyst who researches SNAP at the Center for Law and Social Policy, every $1 in SNAP benefits generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Even a single week’s suspension of the food stamp dollars, said Gilkesson, can drive lasting effects on everything from supplier relationships to business revenue.
She’s also near certain it will further inflate America’s rising food insecurity problem. New SNAP work requirements taking effect, alongside historically unprecedented program funding changes—now coupled with USDA warnings of an imminent program overhaul—threaten to push the nation’s food safety net to a breaking point. But tracking the fallout on food access will be close to impossible. That’s because, preceding the shutdown, the Trump administration got rid of the nation’s primary tool that would do so. “When SNAP shrinks, the whole food economy shrinks. And it doesn’t just affect households who receive SNAP. It affects every household,” said Gilkesson.
Jared Grant, an agricultural economist who specializes in food security at Ohio State University, said that the shutdown exposed vulnerabilities throughout the nation’s supply chain that could shift consumer behavior in the grocery stores and slow overall consumer spending. A new preliminary report from the University of Michigan found that consumer confidence dropped to its lowest point since June 2022 this month, largely driven by the shutdown.
“The government shutdown is going to affect consumers in their perception and behavior,” said Grant. “They might think they see higher prices on certain items.”
2025-11-20 19:00:00
This story was produced in partnership with the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. Watch the accompanying episode below or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
At a White House ceremony last February, before President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund schools if they permit transgender girls to play girls’ sports, he turned and looked over his shoulder. Behind him stood former college swimmer Riley Gaines, wearing suffragette white in a crowd of young female athletes and conservative activists. “You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Trump told the 24-year-old.
Almost three years, to be exact. Since tying for fifth place in a March 2022 championship race against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, Gaines has used the story of their matchup to leap to the vanguard of the anti-trans movement, campaigning not just to ban trans women from women’s sports, but to end public acceptance of transgender people.
Gaines joined the political fray just as 14 states had already enacted restrictions on trans athletes and four more were on the verge of doing the same. With backing from GOP donors like the Amway billionaire DeVos family, she has crisscrossed the country with a simple message: Women’s sports need “saving” from “men”—that is, transgender girls and women.
No matter that the NCAA president said in 2024 that less than 0.002 percent of college athletes at the time were openly transgender (the percentage of Olympians is about the same). Gaines and her allies argue that trans athletes are stealing opportunities from every woman and girl who competes with them. Alongside other athletes, she filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to ban trans girls from girls’ school sports nationwide, arguing that trans-inclusive policies are a form of discrimination against women.
“She’s a perfect message,” says Ronnee Schreiber, a political science professor at San Diego State University who studies women in the conservative movement. Even voters who generally support transgender people, Schreiber adds, are “still a little anxious about the trans athlete thing.”
Indeed, before Gaines arrived on the scene, right-wing politicos had sought for years to draw attention to transgender women in sports—a poll-tested wedge issue to stoke anti-trans outrage among voters across the political spectrum. Lia Thomas, tall and unapologetic, was the villain they’d been waiting for, and Gaines—feminine, poised, outspoken—the ideal victim. Within months of her race against Thomas, Trump was summoning Gaines onstage at CPAC: “Where’s our beautiful, great swimmer?”
Thanks in large part to Gaines, trans athletes became the reddest of red meat issues during the 2024 presidential election, with the Trump campaign pouring money into a brutally effective attack ad declaring, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” During the executive order signing ceremony, Trump declared, “This was one of the big reasons that we all won.” He added later, “I want to thank Riley. She really has been in the forefront.”
Interviews with former teammates and competitors at the fateful 2022 championship, as well as a review of Gaines’ public statements, legal documents, nonprofit filings, and other records, reveal how she transformed herself from captain of a deeply troubled swim team to one of the leading conservative activists of her generation.
Today, Gaines serves as a real-life Regina George figure in the MAGA universe, with her online dustups receiving celebrity coverage in the right-wing press. A Fox News darling and social media bomb-thrower affiliated with some of the country’s most influential right-wing advocacy groups, she broadcasts the pictures and names of trans middle and high schoolers to her 1.6 million followers on X, encouraging younger athletes to boycott and shun trans competitors. For her, this cause is “spiritual warfare.”
Meanwhile, she’s cashing in: Between recording sessions for her podcast, Gaines for Girls, she reps an anti-trans clothing line and slings a student debt refinancing plan, herbal supplements, and ivermectin. In 2024, she released a children’s book and a memoir. Her speaking fees run as high as $25,000.
By multiple measures, Gaines and her allies have largely prevailed in their original quest to rid women’s sports of trans athletes. Twenty-nine states have now banned trans girls and women from participating on the school sports teams that match their gender identity (though some of those bans are blocked as they work their way through the courts). And after Trump’s executive order, the NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee both changed their policies to categorically exclude trans women.
But Gaines, who did not respond to interview requests and questions for this story, shows no signs of stopping. After all, sports is just a stepping stone to a more sweeping goal.
“The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she told the New York Times last August. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Riley Gaines opens her 2024 memoir, Swimming Against the Current, with a formative experience from her childhood. When she was 8, she writes, her father, Brad, led her to the edge of an outdoor pool in the middle of winter and told her to jump in. “No shaking or chattering,” he commanded. She needed to learn “mental toughness.”
As she grew up in a conservative Christian family in the suburbs of Nashville, the daughter of two college athletes, her father’s lesson served her well. Especially when she was recruited to swim at the University of Kentucky, a Division I school with a women’s swim team rising in the national rankings under a mercurial head coach, Lars Jorgensen.
Gaines was a repeat Tennessee state champion and had qualified for the Olympic trials at age 15. Despite such accomplishments, during her recruiting trip to campus, Jorgensen told her she was “okay” and “walk-on material,” she’d later tell a local sports reporter. She committed to UK anyway. “You could look at his comments as hurtful and mean, but I know it was just tough love,” she said. “He would trash talk you, but that was part of what makes this special for me.”
During her first year, she writes, Jorgensen often called her a LOFT—for “lack of fucking talent.” But she was not offended. “He didn’t actually think I was a LOFT,” she explains in her book. “This was just his way of seeing how we liked to be motivated.”
Jorgensen “definitely had this cult of persona around him,” recalls Trinity Ward, a teammate one year behind Gaines. “When he was singing your praises, at least for me, it felt like you were on top of the world. And when it felt like you were disappointing him, that felt horrible.”
Ward, as well as two more of Gaines’ teammates—who requested anonymity to avoid backlash from Gaines’ fans and followers—are speaking publicly for the first time. They say Jorgensen often screamed at swimmers, told them they weren’t worth coaching, and tried to force them to swim when sick or injured. According to a 2023 investigation by UK’s athletic compliance office obtained through a public records request, swimmers reported that “voluntary” practices weren’t really optional and that Jorgensen imposed grueling extra swims for transgressions. “We had a punishment where we had to swim with our snorkels for two hours and we weren’t allowed to stop,” one of Gaines’ teammates remembers. The NCAA eventually suspended Jorgensen for violating limits on practice hours.
“It’s been really weird to see [her] completely transform. If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump at CPAC, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy.’”
Swimmers say Jorgensen mocked teammates’ weight and pressured them to lower their body fat percentage to extremes. “Lars is the biggest reason that an alarming number of the Women’s Swim Team suffers from Eating Disorders,” one former swimmer wrote to UK officials. “The damage from Lars’ words and remarks about female bodies last long beyond the four years of collegiate swimming.”
“It was hard to know until we got out of it that he was crossing the line,” Ward says. Teammates who complained were treated as “not tough enough,” one of the anonymous teammates adds. “They didn’t have what it takes to be a D1 athlete.”
Ward maintained a friendship with Gaines, who she says was generous with her car and could party hard. Even when Ward, who is queer, started dating a woman, Gaines was “friendly and respectful.” Once, as they drove together to a team retreat, they chatted about their respective experiences of being raised in religious conservative families. It was the summer of 2021, Trump had recently left office, and Ward remembers Gaines saying she didn’t like Trump. “It’s been really weird to see [her] completely transform,” Ward says now. “If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump at CPAC, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy.’” Gaines, who was seen as one of Jorgensen’s favorites, seemed to weather the pressure on the team better than most. “I never saw Riley cry because of something Lars said,” Ward recalls. “I never saw her have like a mental breakdown or show that any of this was getting to her.” In her book, Gaines writes that, despite his “utter savagery,” Jorgensen “became, and still is, one of my best friends.”
Jorgensen wasn’t the only swim coach creating a toxic environment. In the fall of 2019, Gaines’ sophomore year, the university started looking into the behavior of one of their assistant coaches, Laurence “Chip” Kline, based on complaints from swimmers who had graduated. “We all felt uncomfortable about Chip,” one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates remembers. According to records from the ensuing investigation, Kline allegedly touched a swimmer’s leg under her towel, forced her to hug him before letting her enter the team room, and made sexual comments about team members, comparing their bodies to meat and saying, “With a butt like that she ought to be a good swimmer.” The school eventually determined that Kline violated its harassment policy and suspended him, then declined to renew his contract; it also suspended Jorgensen for six days for failing to report what he knew about Kline’s conduct. (Kline declined to comment.)
The problems on the UK team reflect widespread issues in women’s athletics. One in 5 NCAA athletes experience some form of abusive supervision by coaches, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Sexual misconduct is distressingly common: A 2021 World Players Association survey of female professional athletes worldwide found that 1 in 5 had experienced sexual abuse as children in connection with sports. And coaches are the most common perpetrators of unwanted sexual contact, according to a survey by the US Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit authorized by Congress to investigate and prevent abuse and misconduct.
Still, despite everything, the UK team was getting faster. In 2021, they won the prestigious Southeastern Conference Championships for the first time in the school’s history. At the NCAA national championship that year, Gaines came in seventh in the 200 freestyle and was crowned an All-American. “As soon as I placed seventh in the country my junior year, I immediately made it my goal to win a national title my senior year,” she writes in her memoir. “It was all I could think about.”
But by the next year’s NCAA championship, the world of swimming had become fixated on Lia Thomas. The transgender competitor at the University of Pennsylvania had been breaking pool, school, and conference records since that fall, generating a flood of news coverage that began in right-wing media—Fox aired 32 segments about her in six weeks—and spread to virtually every major news outlet.
Thomas had competed on the men’s team at Penn for three years, winning three silver medals at the 2019 Ivy League Championships. She’d come out as transgender to her family and a friend after her first year of college but delayed her medical transition until after she completed her sophomore season. “I did HRT [hormone replacement therapy] knowing and accepting I might not swim again,” she told Sports Illustrated.
But when she returned to school after taking a year off during the Covid pandemic, she was eligible for the women’s team under NCAA policy, which at the time allowed transgender women to compete after 12 months of testosterone suppression. There was just one problem: She was winning. Her race times, though slower than before her transition, qualified her among the country’s best female swimmers that season.
The science around trans women athletes is sparse and extremely contested. Though it’s well established that their athletic performance declines after hormone therapy, the data varies on how much. A 2024 International Olympic Committee–funded study of 23 transgender women athletes found that participants on hormone therapy tended to have greater handgrip strength compared to cis women, but lower jumping height and aerobic capacity. A pair of studies analyzing military fitness test data from the Air Force in 2020 and 2023 found that after two and four years of hormone therapy, respectively, trans women’s performance was comparable to that of cis women on two out of three measures.
Thomas declined an interview request, but, in a radio interview, said she returned to swimming after Covid feeling “confident and happy in my body”—a stark contrast from the depression and hopelessness she’d experienced the previous season. “I was way, way weaker. My muscle mass had decreased so much, and I had way less endurance, but I could put my full energy into swimming again because I wasn’t putting most of it into dissociating just so I could get through the day.”
By the start of the 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming championships, held at Georgia Tech’s aquatic center in Atlanta, the attention on her had become a frenzy. Protesters held signs outside the facility. Leading up to the championships, the UK swimmers had been obsessing over Thomas, says one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates: “I do remember, as we were training for NCAAs, people being like, ‘Oh my gosh, is she gonna be there? Is she gonna compete? Is she gonna be in our locker room? I’m gonna look at her when we’re in our locker room,’ stuff like that,” she says. “[Gaines] and Lars and some of the other coaches would just talk about how disgusting it was, and unfair, and they just couldn’t believe it was happening.”
When Thomas won the 500 freestyle, receiving the national title—albeit with a relatively slow time for that race—the swimmers reacted with despair, the teammate says. “I think there was this idea in everyone’s heads that, ‘She won the 500, she’s about to take them all,’” she recalls. “People were acting insane over this, like she’d done this jaw-dropping, Katie Ledecky–rivaling time, and that’s just not what happened.”
The next day, members of the UK team stood on the pool deck to cheer as Gaines lined up for the 200 freestyle. It was one of the team’s best shots at an NCAA title. But when the results appeared on the scoreboard, Gaines and Thomas had tied for fifth, at 1:43.40—a full 2.28 seconds slower than the first-place finisher.
Seeing the numbers appear, the teammate felt a sense of dread. “I remember looking over at [another member of the UK team],” she says, “and we were like, ‘Fuck, this isn’t good.’”
The story of what happened next appeared five days later in the conservative Daily Wire. After tying her race, Gaines and the other swimmers went behind a curtain, preparing to take the podium. There, an NCAA official informed her that he had already given the fifth-place trophy to Thomas, Gaines recounted to the reporter. Her own fifth-place trophy would come in the mail. In the meantime, she could pose with the sixth-place trophy.
Gaines was indignant. “I told the guy, ‘I don’t think that’s right, and I don’t think that’s fair,’” she said. But the official insisted. “The more I thought about it, the more it fired me up,” she remembered. “Who are we trying to protect here?”
Sharing the podium with Thomas, “aghast that no one was standing up for female swimmers,” changed the trajectory of Gaines’ life, she writes in her memoir. “I decided I was no longer willing to cower and lie.” In an interview years later, she’d say, “I thought of it as a tragedy. I thought to myself, no one, no girl, no woman should ever have to face” that “level of humiliation.”
The Daily Wire article catapulted her into the feverish world of right-wing media. On March 28, 10 days after her race with Thomas, she appeared on the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show; on April 1, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn hosted Gaines on her podcast; on April 6 she was a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where Carlson lauded her for “bravery.” “I’m just fortunate enough to where I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky, whether that be from the athletic director all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen,” she told him.
“I’m going to save the world woman,” Gaines texted her mother. “Martyrs have to be willing to put themselves out there if you want to make change.”
As she made more media appearances, Gaines’ rhetoric grew sharper. In her initial Daily Wire interview, she’d said of Thomas: “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that, because there’s no doubt that she works hard too, but she’s just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place, and that’s the issue.” Yet by the following spring any empathy she once had for Thomas had vanished: “He is an arrogant, cheat who STOLE a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman,” she tweeted.
Soon the locker room became a central theme, as she accused the NCAA of having “forced” the swimmers to change with Thomas and allowing “any man” to walk in—though both the men’s and women’s locker rooms had been opened to the competitors at the women’s championship. “If you walked in and saw Lia and you didn’t want to be in there, you could walk next door to the other locker room, or go in the stall,” says one of Gaines’ teammates. Though a handful of swimmers at the meet also went public to say that Thomas’ presence in the locker room made them uncomfortable, Gaines’ version of the story was more lurid: “We turned around and there’s a 6-foot-4 biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia,” she told Fox News. “Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.”
But other swimmers who saw Thomas in the locker room say she changed facing a corner, wrapped in a towel. “She was just in the corner, changing normally, keeping to herself,” says one competitor.
Gaines fit seamlessly with a right-wing strategy that dated back to 2015, when the Supreme Court recognized the right to same-sex marriage and when Christian conservatives, fearing they were losing the culture wars, began searching for issues to fire up their political base. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” Terry Schilling, the president of the socially conservative American Principles Project, later told the New York Times. His group polled voters on a range of messages and found that trans people in women’s sports struck a nerve, including among conservative Democrats and independents. Thus began an effort to transform the debate about trans athletes into a political lightning rod.
Then Gaines came along. Within weeks of the NCAAs, she started collaborating with the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group that would later bring her aboard as a spokeswoman. Its savvy operators helped her “understand the logistics of the political sphere as well as tools to increase my effectiveness in spreading my message,” she writes in her memoir. The month after the championship, she appeared in the Kentucky Legislature as the guest of a Republican state representative, successfully urging lawmakers to pass a trans sports ban over the governor’s veto. She would go on to testify for anti-trans bills in at least 10 statehouses and appear in ads for Republican candidates including Kristi Noem, Rand Paul, and Herschel Walker (as he fended off domestic violence allegations). Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign paid her, at one point, for “political strategy consulting.”
Online, she started to toe the line between earnest advocate and troll. She stirred up conflict with prominent female athletes who supported trans people in sports, including Megan Rapinoe and Brittney Griner, then reveled in the ensuing coverage. In speeches, she tried out a religious tone: “I feel like we’re in this battle of really spiritual warfare,” she said at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2023. “It’s no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.”
In July 2023, the Fox-owned sports website OutKick announced the launch of the weekly podcast Gaines for Girls, whose first episode promised to expose “the truth about transgenders in women’s sports.” She would interview not only fellow anti-trans athletes, but also powerful anti-LGBTQ Republican lawmakers and officials, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and former Oklahoma public education superintendent Ryan Walters.
Meanwhile, the Leadership Institute, a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit that trains conservative activists, launched a project it called the Riley Gaines Center. In fundraising materials, it promised to send Gaines to speak on college campuses and recruit other student athletes who had been “harmed by zealots of transgender ideology.” The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation—one of the biggest funders of the conservative movement—donated $100,000 to the project in 2023. In the first five months of the center’s existence, the Leadership Institute paid Gaines more than $126,000, according to tax filings. As more student athletes began to forfeit matches with trans players, Gaines awarded them medals stamped with the Leadership Institute logo and emblazoned with the name of her center.
She also signed on with Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk. Following Kirk’s model, she gave speeches on college campuses, then debated students who disagreed with her. In April 2023, she took her message to what was sure to be a hostile crowd at San Francisco State University. In a third-floor classroom, Gaines spoke to about 75 students, some with slogans written on their bodies in marker. Scores of protesters chanted in the stairwell, and more gathered outside.
When the event finished and the classroom door was opened, protesters rushed toward Gaines. She tweeted that she was assaulted by a man—“a guy in a dress,” her husband later clarified to Fox News—though the university police later said in a statement to the student newspaper that “claims of crimes committed were unfounded.” “We had four different cameras, and we reviewed all of the footage, we asked all the reporters, we interviewed a majority of the people, everyone we could identify we reached out to and interviewed. Nobody saw that happen,” says Josh Carter, the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. “We scoured the video pretty religiously…We confidently could say, 100 percent beyond the shadow of a doubt, that she was not hit.”
But Gaines was forced to stay in a separate classroom for about three hours while campus police guarded the door against furious protesters. At one point, as an administrator tried to calm them, a protester shouted, “Tell her to pay us, then she can go—10 bucks each,” and was met with laughter. Eventually, more police arrived, formed a protective escort, and whisked her downstairs and out the back, to her car parked behind a police line. “I literally had to run from the middle of the diamond formed around me and into the car to avoid being slammed to the ground by protesters,” she writes in her memoir. “It was like a scene from Black Ops-Zombies.” (Two student reporters present say there were no protesters nearby as she got into her car.)
Gaines had a new story of victimization—this time by a “woke mob.” In the following days and weeks, she embarked on a media tour, claiming she’d been “punched,” “hit multiple times,” and held for “ransom.” The next month, testifying before a House Homeland Security Committee hearing titled “‘Mostly Peaceful’: Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence,” she described the episode as “kidnapping.”
After the event, Gaines texted her mother. “I’m going to save the world woman,” she wrote. “Martyrs have to be willing to put themselves out there if you want to make change.”
By early 2024, Gaines was preparing to take her fight to the legal arena in partnership with the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, a new nonprofit known as ICONS. Like Gaines’ activism, ICONS was born from the furor over Lia Thomas. Its founders—Arizona backstroke champion Marshi Smith and swim mom Kim Jones—have said that they were first introduced by Gaines herself in the spring of 2022, not long after the NCAA championship.
Smith had co-authored a letter to the NCAA protesting Thomas’ inclusion. Jones—a Stanford tennis player in her glory days—had been concerned about Thomas since she first spotted the swimmer’s meet results early in the 2021–2022 season. Her daughter, who swam the 200-meter freestyle at Yale, placed second to Thomas at a meet and missed the Ivy League Championships final by one spot while Thomas swam to victory.
In 2022, they formed ICONS, which the New York Times has called the “pre-eminent organization in the trans sports ban movement.” By the end of 2024, ICONS had grown to a million-dollar operation, according to tax filings. Aside from an early $54,000 infusion from Jones and her husband, a tech executive, their donors are largely anonymous.
“I feel like we’re in this battle of really spiritual warfare. It’s no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.”
One exception is XX-XY Athletics, a sports apparel brand launched in 2024 by former Levi’s marketing executive Jennifer Sey, which blends open transphobia with glossy girl-power messaging to sell T-shirts, shorts, and hoodies. The company, which intentionally misgenders trans people on its social media, offers endorsement deals to students who denounce trans athletes and says it has donated revenue to ICONS, the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute, and Gays Against Groomers. Gaines, who released a clothing line with the company last summer, serves as a brand representative, as does her younger sister.
Initially, ICONS hosted press conferences and events where Gaines and other athletes delivered speeches. But the group soon shifted its focus to lawsuits, arguing that trans-inclusive sports policies discriminated against women. For help, it turned to Bill Bock, the former general counsel of the US Anti-Doping Agency, whose legal bona fides include nailing Lance Armstrong for using performance-enhancing drugs and representing Donald Trump in his bid to overturn the 2020 election results in Wisconsin. (Bock’s son also worked for Trump for a time as a fact-checker in the White House speechwriting office.)
Bock, too, has said that Thomas was the catalyst that made him shift his focus to transgender athletes. “Bill has made this a life cause,” says a lawyer with knowledge of Bock’s cases. In 2024, he resigned his position on an NCAA committee and authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed accusing the association of having “regressive, discriminatory, antiwoman policies.”
One month later, funded by ICONS, Bock filed Gaines v. NCAA. The class-action lawsuit retold the story of the NCAA 2022 women’s swimming championships, arguing that the NCAA—and, by extension, the Georgia state university system that hosted the meet—had violated Title IX, the federal law that forbids sex discrimination in education, including school sports.
The NCAA “imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports, reinterpreting Title IX to define women as a testosterone level, permitting men to compete on women’s teams, and destroying female safe spaces in women’s locker rooms,” the lawsuit argued, adding that the NCAA’s previous rules were unfair because they allowed trans women to have testosterone levels higher than cis women could achieve without doping. In practice, according to the 2024 IOC-funded study, the testosterone levels of transgender women athletes on hormone therapy are equivalent to those of cis women.
Bock wasn’t the first to bring the fight over trans athletes to court. Alliance Defending Freedom—the conservative Christian legal nonprofit behind major anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion Supreme Court decisions—filed an early case in Connecticut in 2020, arguing that two trans high school runners deprived other girls of championship titles and potential scholarships. (After being quashed and later resurrected in appeals, the case is currently stayed, pending a Supreme Court decision on trans athletes.)
In 2020, as Republican state legislators started passing trans sports bans, LGBTQ rights groups began to fight back with lawsuits of their own. In West Virginia and Idaho, for example, the ACLU sued on behalf of a trans middle schooler and a college student who wanted to join their schools’ women’s cross-country teams. They won in the circuit courts, with judges ruling that sports bans counted as a kind of illegal sex discrimination. The Supreme Court agreed to review both cases at the request of Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers representing the states. A decision is expected by summer 2026.
“Once you chip away at trans people’s rights, and you see them as not being entitled to the same protections as everyone else, then it’s easier to attack their rights in other ways.”
Gaines v. NCAA is even more sweeping than the current Supreme Court cases. Rather than arguing over whether states can ban trans athletes from teams matching their gender identity, the case argues that trans girls and women must be banned from women’s sports, starting with the NCAA and Georgia. The case contends that “trans inclusion is sex discrimination against cisgender women,” summarizes Jess Braverman, legal director at Gender Justice, a Minnesota nonprofit. In September, a judge dismissed the claims against the Georgia state university system but allowed Gaines’ Title IX case against the NCAA to continue.
ICONS is also funding two more Bock-led cases making similar arguments. One, filed in November 2024, involves college volleyball players who opposed a trans player at San José State University; Gaines reportedly helped recruit the lead plaintiff, Brooke Slusser, who previously had been close with her trans teammate. The other accuses the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League Council of Presidents of violating Title IX by letting Thomas compete three years ago, and calls for Thomas’ name to be erased from public record books.
The underlying goal of ICONS’ lawsuits is much bigger than Thomas and bigger than athletics. Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, says the cases “could have a huge impact beyond sports,” affecting trans people’s rights under Title IX and potentially their constitutional protections. “Once you chip away at trans people’s rights, and you see them as not being entitled to the same protections as everyone else, then it’s easier to attack their rights in other ways,” Patel explains. “And that’s what’s happened here. It began with sports five years ago, and then it went to bathrooms, gender-affirming care, or other aspects of education and life.”
ICONS, for its part, isn’t hiding this strategy. Sports “is the public arena of the difference of the sexes,” Jones said in an Instagram video in 2024. “If men can’t be women in sports, and we win there, they can’t be women anywhere.”
With Donald Trump back in office, Gaines’ political influence has reached new heights. She recounted a story recently that highlighted her access to the new administration. Right after Trump’s inauguration, she contacted the incoming director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, with a complaint. Her husband, a British swimmer whom she had met at the University of Kentucky, had been unable to get a green card due to a requirement that he receive the Covid vaccine. Within a couple of days, Edlow’s office had dropped the requirement, which the immigration official confirmed personally while appearing as a guest on Gaines’ podcast.
“It would be an absolute privilege to swear him in personally to be a citizen,” Edlow gushed.
Meanwhile, Trump’s White House immediately started using its power to target trans athletes. Under President Joe Biden, the administration had interpreted Title IX to forbid discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Trump promptly reversed that policy. He signed his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order the day after ICONS filed its lawsuit against Penn. The day after that, the Education Department opened Title IX investigations into both Penn and San José State University, using the same arguments ICONS made in its legal cases. Soon, the administration announced it was withholding $175 million in federal funding for Penn over its trans athlete policy.
“I think it’s very telling,” says one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates. “She’s very, ‘Protect women’s sports.’ But not when it comes to our team.”
Penn folded under the pressure. Last summer, Gaines returned to the White House, along with Bock and Smith from ICONS, for the announcement of a resolution between the administration and Lia Thomas’ old university, putting an end to the Title IX investigation. The school had agreed to wipe Thomas’ records from its books, ban trans women from women’s teams and locker rooms, and send “a personalized letter of apology” to each “impacted female swimmer.”
“The most prolific offender of Title IX in collegiate sports has bent the knee,” Smith declared on Gaines’ podcast soon after. “But,” she added, “it’s definitely not enough.”
What would be enough? Thomas’ name is still on the record board at an Ohio university, Smith pointed out. The NCAA hasn’t erased her national title either. And then there’s every other trans athlete to go after: “There are many other sports affected and many other schools aside from just Lia Thomas, over the past few years, that need to be rectified.” ICONS, she told Gaines, will keep pushing for anti-trans court rulings that will outlast their allies in the Trump administration. “I feel really secure for the next three years or so, but we don’t know who’s coming next,” Smith said.
As her clout within the MAGA universe grows, Gaines has expanded her repertoire beyond anti-trans advocacy. On her podcast, she now decries the gamut of right-wing bugaboos, from Planned Parenthood to the “deep state.” Nor is she the only Gaines making her presence known in politics. Her dad, Brad, is running for Congress in Tennessee.
As of last June, she’d clocked 118 Fox News appearances since the NCAA championship, according to Media Matters. She’d appeared on the network nine times that month alone, amid an online skirmish with Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who had slammed Gaines on X for misgendering a transgender high schooler. “You’re truly sick,” Biles posted. “All of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser.” In response, Gaines posted a video of Biles testifying that she was sexually abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. “Simone Biles when she had to endure a predatory man Vs Simone Biles when other girls have to endure predatory men,” she quipped, equating trans women in sports to sexual abusers.
Since Biles had compared Gaines’ body to a man’s—Biles later apologized—Gaines unveiled her baby bump and ultrasound photos onstage at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit put on by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. “How many men do you know that have this?” she beamed at a crowd of shrieking young fans.
It was a crowning moment for Gaines, who had consolidated her position as one of the country’s most prominent female conservative activists. Fordham University associate professor Zein Murib compares her to an internet-era Anita Bryant, the singer and Miss Oklahoma turned anti-gay activist in the 1970s whose “Save Our Children” campaign overturned anti-discrimination ordinances. Gaines, Murib says, is similar to Bryant in “the ways that she is working to create hysteria around a vulnerable group of people for her own political purposes and profit.”
Her rhetoric about protecting women, Murib adds, “is part of a long history of whiteness and femininity being deployed, under the logic of protection, to advance a very particular political project.”
After Kirk’s assassination in September, Gaines was floated as a possible successor. The night after the shooting, she filmed a video in her pajamas, calling him a friend and a mentor. “I would have been there with him this week when he was fatally shot if I weren’t this far along,” she said, indicating her pregnancy.
Gaines pledged to continue touring with Turning Point USA. “I would be lying to you if I said there wasn’t any apprehension on my end to go back onto these college campuses,” she said. “I have seen with my own eyes and my own experiences the violence…especially from Transtifa,” she added, using a term used to falsely portray trans people as violent extremists.
Then she went a step further. Anyone who believes that people can be transgender is crazy enough to commit murder, she argued. “If you’re insane enough to believe that men can get pregnant and that women need prostate exams, and that tampons belong in boys’ bathrooms or whatever other crazy stuff that they believe, you’re insane enough, clearly, to pull a gun and shoot someone.”
While Gaines continues blasting her message, another lawsuit is making its way through the courts more quietly. In the spring of 2024, two former members of Gaines’ University of Kentucky swim team filed a lawsuit alleging that Lars Jorgensen, their coach, had sexually assaulted them.
Both swimmers are former students whom Jorgensen hired as assistant coaches. In their complaint, they allege he groomed them by pressuring them to lose severe amounts of weight, emotionally abusing them in front of team members, and making sexual comments to them. The assistant coaches, who believed their careers were dependent on Jorgensen, allege he invited them to his home and sexually assaulted them.
One swimmer alleges Jorgensen forcibly raped her multiple times between 2019 and 2023, telling her he would “ruin her reputation” if she told anyone. The other says that in 2022, he groped and kissed her despite her protests. Their complaint also alleges that Jorgensen raped a third assistant coach at his home after a coaching staff Christmas party several years earlier. They claim that university employees were aware of some of Jorgensen’s abuse and discouraged them from reporting it when they came forward. (“UK has consistently acted upon and investigated allegations when they were known and when complainants have opted to pursue allegations and participate in the investigative process,” a university spokesperson says.)
One of the assistant coaches who filed the complaint now identifies as transgender. (In court documents, he uses she/her pronouns to refer to the period before his transition.) When news of the lawsuit first broke in April 2024, Jorgensen’s attorney at the time claimed the allegations were politically motivated, fabricated to punish Jorgensen for supporting Gaines. “This all has to do with NCAA woke philosophy and his support of his swimmer, Ms. Gaines,” the lawyer, Greg Anderson, told the Lexington Herald Leader. “The timing of it, in light of her statements publicly, is extremely suspicious.”
Gaines—who had once declared her trust in and affection for Jorgensen—posted a long message on social media a few days after the lawsuit was reported. “I never saw or heard any of these claims taking place, but it isn’t difficult to say I vehemently condemn all violence, especially sexual violence against women,” she wrote. “While I spend most of my time speaking to the harm and severity of allowing men into women’s sports, we can’t neglect or condone other issues that are far too common in female athletics like sexual abuse from authority figures. It’s my mission to defend women (really, humanity) and this falls in line.”
But in the year and a half since then, Gaines has been quiet in public about the lawsuit. Two UK swimmers told me they’re disappointed and frustrated that she has not used her platform to talk about the problems that affected her teammates. “I think it’s very telling,” says one of her anonymous teammates. “She’s very, ‘Protect women’s sports.’ But not when it comes to our team.”
“The reality is that there are much bigger problems that women face in sports,” Ward says. “Society has ignored these problems for decades. And now, all of a sudden, we’re pretending to care about women in sports in the name of banning trans people?”
In October, following an investigation, the US Center for SafeSport permanently banned Jorgensen from coaching, citing sexual and physical misconduct, sexual harassment, and other findings. The lawsuit against Jorgensen has not yet gone to trial; a judge ruled last February that some of the allegations were too old to sue over. Jorgensen did not respond to a request for comment; in court papers, he has denied the claims. Ward says she believes them. “When I wear my UK swimming gear out,” she says, “I’ve had three times where somebody’s approached me and asked me about Riley Gaines. And I’ve said, ‘Well, do you know about Lars Jorgensen?’”
“Every single time, they’ve said no,” she continues. “And I just say, ‘You know, it’s hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates.”
2025-11-20 02:33:35
Even in the house of horrors that is vaccine-preventable illnesses, polio stands out as particularly terrifying. Before the rollout of the vaccine in the 1950s, the disease paralyzed or killed more than 500,000 people worldwide every year. The disease was especially catastrophic for children, some of whom were confined for years to wheelchairs or a mechanical breathing chamber known ominously as the iron lung. Older people remember being forbidden to play outside during summer outbreaks for fear that they would catch the disease.
The darker chapters of public health history do not seem to faze anti-vaccine activists, who have long claimed that measles, a catastrophic disease, is no big deal. Now, it’s polio’s turn to be downplayed.
Over the last few months, a handful of influential anti-vaccine activists have dabbled in polio denialism. In September, for example, Larry Cook, founder of the anti-vaccine group Stop Mandatory Vaccination, falsely claimed to his 137,000 followers on X that polio “was cured with high dose vitamin C” and that “the polio vaccine NEVER stopped polio. We’ve been lied to for decades and decades.”
Then, in October, Suzanne Humphries, a holistic medicine practitioner and anti-vaccine activist, appeared on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. “The early injection caused more paralytic polio than it prevented,” she told Rogan. “And that’s the part that people don’t understand when they say, ‘What about polio? Because there’s no more iron lungs, there’s no more crippling, there’s no more of these poor little kids walking around with their casts.’ Well, that’s not true because the iron lung is now called a ventilator.” She went on to argue that “we still have polio that we had in 1953” because many of the cases back then weren’t technically polio but rather paralysis triggered by vaccines, tonsillectomies, and exposure to toxic substances like arsenic.
To call those claims dangerously misleading is an understatement, so let’s briefly dispense with them. The early injections were, in fact, remarkably effective, with cases declining by 90 percent within the first three years of the vaccine rollout; ventilators are not the same as iron lungs; polio was a distinct virus that scientists successfully isolated in stool samples.
Humphries isn’t the only one spreading misinformation about polio on Rogan’s show. A month after her appearance, Gavin de Becker, a security specialist, megadonor to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s failed presidential campaign, and anti-vaccine activist, made similarly specious claims on the show. “Here’s the reality of polio, right from the CDC website: 99 percent of people who get polio never have any symptoms,” he said. What’s more, he said, polio killed just 500 people last year and paralyzed an additional 500, and many of the cases were actually caused by the live virus contained in vaccines. He went on to claim that historic cases of polio paralysis were actually caused by exposure to the pesticide DDT.
Again, a real grab bag here. First off, let’s address the outright falsehoods: Polio paralysis, as PolitiFact and Factcheck.org confirm, was never caused by DDT. Now, for the more slippery assertions: Yes, it’s true that 99 percent of polio cases are asymptomatic and that only 1,000 people last year died of or were paralyzed by the disease. True as well that today, most polio cases are caused by the live virus in the vaccine.
What de Becker conveniently ignores is that all these current realities are actually strong arguments in favor of vaccination. The fact that the yearly death toll and paralysis numbers are so low is because of widespread vaccination efforts, which have resulted in polio infection decreasing by 99 percent worldwide since 1988 and led to it being considered as eradicated in all but two countries (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Even a paralysis rate of one percent is catastrophic at scale—let’s remember that the disease killed or paralyzed half a million people every year before vaccines. As for vaccine-derived polio, ironically, it is much more likely to spread and mutate in undervaccinated populations.
Anti-vaccine advocacy groups were quick to amplify Humphries’ and de Becker’s claims. Children’s Health Defense, the organization Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy founded, jumped at the chance, as did the MAHA Institute, a group that focuses on fundraising and policy around Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again initiative.
Then, earlier this week, a video of a man holding a baby while talking about polio made the rounds. In addition to repeating Humphries’ and de Becker’s dubious talking points, he claims that modern sanitation could stop the spread of polio. “You have to literally put the feces of a polio-infected human being into your mouth to contract polio,” he announces. “And that sounds more like a sanitation issue rather than a vaccination issue.” (Presumably the baby this guy is holding does not attend daycare, where the fecal-oral route of disease transmission is, uh, robust.) The video has been viewed 376,000 times on X and counting.
Only a generation or two back, someone who claimed that polio wasn’t so bad would have been swiftly shouted down—because most people knew someone for whom polio had indeed been very bad. It is precisely because of the success of vaccines that polio misinformation can now find a foothold. Last month, infectious disease doctor Neil Stone tweeted a photo of an iron lung. “This is an iron lung for polio victims,” he wrote. “Remember these? Me neither. It’s now in a museum…where it should stay. Why? Because vaccines work.”
2025-11-19 23:21:16
The entrepreneurs who are part of the booming school safety industry face a cruel irony: they are dependent on the uniquely American epidemic of school shootings.
“Every time there is a shooting, we see an uptick in business,” says one, featured in the new HBO documentary Thoughts and Prayers, who sells bulletproof wall art and skateboards. “Every time there is a tragedy, it economically benefits my family. That’s not what I wanted. We could be a $300 million company by the time this documentary airs.”
There are, as the documentary shows, bulletproof desks that can double as shields, blackout shutters to block visibility into classrooms, and video game simulations that test how teachers respond to a fake threat of a school shooter. The school safety industry has become an estimated $4 billion juggernaut, aided in part by a $1 billion infusion from Congress in 2022 to support mental health services and infrastructure upgrades, instead of meaningful gun reform.
Despite the documentary’s critique of the American gun culture that has given rise to mass shootings, political debates and depictions of gun violence are absent from the film. Instead, there are sit-down interviews with teachers reluctantly learning how to shoot guns and kids learning to live with the looming threat of mass shootings. The filmmakers were also present for lockdown drills and a highly realistic mass casualty simulation at a school district in Oregon that included volunteer students portraying gunshot victims. For co-directors Jessica Dimmock and Zackary Canepari, the goal of making the documentary was to “look at what people are trying to do” to combat mass shootings, Dimmock told me, “and ask the audience to consider whether or not this is going to work. And do we want to live like this?”
I spoke with Dimmock and Canepari by Zoom on Monday to discuss their approach to making the film, the limits of the products they highlight, and what they learned from the kids they spoke to.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.
The film implicitly critiques these school safety products while also taking an earnest look at how they’re being used and why they were created. Why did you feel it was important to take this approach?
Jessica Dimmock: We wanted to make a gun violence film where gun violence doesn’t happen. I think we’ve all seen so much of it, and it’s so hard to take, so we knew we wanted to make a film where no one actually gets hurt, and everything you see is a simulation. There is, of course, some skepticism on our part that any of these products are going to be the way that we actually get through this issue. But that being said, a lot of people that are making products and programs are trying to come up with a solution in the absence of real gun reform.
One of the people you interviewed, a self-defense trainer and ex-Green Beret who goes by the name Thrasher, says he doesn’t think guns are the root cause of our country’s mass shooting epidemic, and that “family structures [and] the lack of tribalism” are, instead, to blame. Was this the view of most of the people selling these safety products who you interviewed, or were their assessments more mixed?
Zackary Canepari: Yeah, I think for the most part. It’s interesting—I don’t know if they would have brought up guns if we didn’t ask. I think one thing that we tried to do in the film was point out that a lot of the trainers and people running the programs have police and military backgrounds, so they’re already coming from a place in which violence is much more present than what we experience as civilians.
JD: They’re bringing that kind of militarized approach into a non-military setting.
ZC: Thrasher’s response was kind of intense, but very much in line with what we heard, which is that mental health crises, family structure issues, things like that, are the reasons that this is happening with such frequency. And the only group that had a clear response were the kids. For the most part, the kids just understood what the problem was. They were the ones who were experiencing it. They’ve all grown up in this world where gun violence is the norm and lockdown drills are something they’ve always done. They’re the ones who say to the audience that guns are the number one killer of kids in this country. It’s not the adults that are saying that.
What else did you learn from the kids you spoke to for the film about how they cope with the threat of school shootings?
JD: I think what’s so tragic, and the thing that we’ve heard over and over again, is that they are thinking about it all the time—when they are in school and out of school. Obviously, shootings don’t just happen at schools; they happen at supermarkets and churches and nightclubs and all types of places. We would hear over and over again, kids are preparing. They’re sitting there thinking about what the safest exit would be when they’re in a confined space. When they’re in theaters, they think about where they could run away. It’s just a mental noise going on all the time, and that’s very tragic. And then when you also think about what else could and should be filling that brain space, it’s really awful.
In the mass casualty simulation you follow, volunteer students become actors who scream for help while wearing makeup to depict fake gunshot wounds. It’s hard to watch. What kind of rationale did officials provide for why they felt it was important to do these reenactments, given that leading groups of gun safety and education advocates, and psychologists, say that drills should not simulate actual events and that children should not routinely be part of them? Who or what did you get the sense they were for?
ZC: I think they’re mostly for two groups. One is actual first responders. I think the second group is the more important one, which is that it’s training civilians to be first responders. In the case of our film, that’s teachers. It’s really about getting adults prepared, mentally and even physically, for what to do in an active shooter event.
The people that are there fastest are going to be the civilians, and so in order to save lives, those civilians need to be prepared to run, hide, fight, and also stop the bleeding and barricade and all these different skills that are being taught across the country.
The kids are there because the belief system amongst most of the people in this space is that—and this is literally the slogan of one of the companies—’your body can’t go where your mind has never been.’ The idea is that if you drill and there’s not this level of intensity and blood and screaming, the drills won’t be effective. So the kids are there to give that extra push to the participants, and they’re there also because they’re part of these communities as well.
Did your own perceptions of the simulation change after watching them unfold?
JD: It took a while for it to dawn on us that everything that we were seeing is practice and not prevention, and I think that was kind of a mental switch for us. At a certain point, you realize that everything you’re seeing is about practicing what to do when it eventually happens, and that’s so defeatist, and yet, that’s where we’re at.
ZC: A crazy byproduct of this is that often these communities are united in these drills. They do feel empowered by them because they’ve done it together, and that makes a lot of sense. I think they could do a lot of other things together besides this, but this is the void that they’re trying to fill.
One of the most chilling parts of the documentary for me was the footage, during the simulation, of school shooters in Parkland, Florida and Nashville, Tennessee entering the schools where they ended up killing nearly two dozen people combined. Viewers may not even realize what they’re watching. Why did you integrate those clips in that way?
We’re talking about a very real American thing, and it’s probably the most shameful part of our national makeup.
JD: It’s meant to be subtle. You want the audience to remember that after all of this theater, this is a reference to the real thing. We really wanted to make sure we made a film in which no one ever gets hurt, in part because we want audiences to actually be able to sit down and watch it. And yet, at the end of the day, we’re talking about a very real American thing, and it’s probably the most shameful part of our national makeup.
Lawmakers don’t really feature much in the film at all, other than a few clips early on of some of them debating assault weapons bans. Can you talk about this choice?
JD: I think we just knew that if we approached this politically, there would automatically be this whole section of an audience that just wouldn’t watch it. They don’t want to be told what to think, they don’t want to hear from one type of politician or the other.
We didn’t want to preach to people. We felt like if we did that, we’d be probably preaching to the choir. I want parents to see this film. I want teachers to see this film. I want students to show this film to their parents. I don’t want to get in a red or blue, Democrat or Republican debate here.
ZC: It’s one of the reasons why the film is kind of built around the statistic about guns being the number one killer of kids in America. We didn’t need politics to argue over that.
2025-11-19 20:30:00
Imagine: You are at a baseball game, but something is off. When the blue team is at bat, the umpire calls every pitch a strike. But when the red team is up, the umpire won’t call a single one. When a red batter hits the ball into a blue player’s glove—out!—the umpire sends him to first base anyway. You can’t believe what you are seeing. This is crazy, right? This is crazy. You look around. Does everyone else see what is happening?
Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law. The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy. But those decisions were always the exception. Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.
Trump needed Roberts to win—and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts.
The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way. In a matter of months, the court’s 6–3 GOP-aligned majority has permitted a long list of lawless actions, including firing independent agency commissioners, using racial profiling in immigration sweeps, disappearing immigrants to authoritarian and war-torn nations, and defying Congress’ power of the purse. But the court’s acquiescence to an antidemocratic America didn’t start in 2025. Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.
“You really can trace, in so many ways, the moment we’re in to critical decisions surrounding our law of democracy,” says Ryan Doerfler, a Harvard Law professor who studies the judiciary’s role in a democratic system.
Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.
In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.
Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires. His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not “lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return.
The chief justice didn’t wait till he was on the Supreme Court to empower Republican presidents—he auditioned for the job by showing his willingness to break the rules and come through for his team. In 2004, as a DC appeals court judge, he landed on a panel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s attempt to circumvent both the Geneva Conventions and the US justice system’s protections to try enemy combatants in military tribunals. As he considered the case, Roberts attended a series of secret meetings with top administration officials about joining the Supreme Court. Rather than recuse, and in violation of a federal conflict of interest law, Roberts signed on to a sweeping victory for Bush the same week his nomination was made official—a decision that endorsed vast new executive powers. His opinion went too far for his future colleagues on the Supreme Court, who soon struck it down. But it wouldn’t be the last time Roberts made such a bargain with the leader of his party.
The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way.
Nor was it out of character. When Reagan entered the White House, Democrats controlled the House, and Roberts pitched in on Justice Department efforts to increase the president’s powers by cooking up the unitary executive theory—the idea that a president has absolute authority over the entire executive branch. Once he reached the high court, Roberts began to write the theory into law, usually by expanding the president’s power to fire officials Congress vested with independence. But even with the Roberts court’s increasingly radical record—from its elimination of the right to reproductive choice to allowing businesses to deny services to LGBTQ clients—many legal analysts argued that Roberts would draw the line at saying the Constitution protected presidents from criminal liability. As Trump’s lawyer conceded in a lower court, such a ruling would mean a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival with impunity. But the assertions that the Roberts court wouldn’t go so far as to give the president the power of a king proved to be wishful thinking. On July 1, 2024, Roberts’ infamous decision in Trump v. United States granted presidents criminal immunity for official acts. Legal scholars were aghast. But University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq notes that the decision is the capstone to a chain of Roberts’ opinions endorsing the unitary executive theory, thereby granting “the presidency the option, essentially, to opt out of statutory laws.”
Upon regaining office in January 2025, Trump immediately put this to the test, firing inspectors general, dismantling agencies created by Congress, withholding spending appropriated by Congress, removing regulators protected by Congress, and defying numerous other laws. As if to underline his lawyer’s courtroom admission on assassination, Trump has had boatloads of civilians killed over his baseless accusations that they were trafficking narcotics.
We are now operating under a Robertsian reimagining of the separation of powers, in which laws passed by Congress are mere suggestions for a monarchical president. “By creating out of whole cloth this ‘presidents can commit crimes with immunity’ doctrine that is anathema to the Constitution and rule of law, the Roberts court validated Trump’s view of himself as above the law, beholden to no one,” says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, which advocates for adding justices to alter the court’s makeup.
Long before Roberts and his colleagues assented to Trump’s lawless second term, they helped him get one. Not since 2000, when the justices put George W. Bush in the White House, has the court done so much to pick a president. In March 2024, the court overruled Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off its ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars oath-breaking insurrectionists from office. Given that Trump had sicced an armed mob on the US Capitol, Colorado’s Supreme Court found that he fit the bill, but the justices disagreed that the state could remove his name. In an unsigned decision, five conservative justices invented new law by saying only Congress could enforce Section 3, and only in the specific way the court dictated. Meanwhile, as special counsel Jack Smith waited to move Trump’s election interference case forward that spring, the court delayed reaching a decision on presidential immunity that could have allowed a trial. When it did, four months after the Colorado ruling, Roberts’ opinion instead effectively halted the prosecution. That November, Trump won.
By then, the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law. These unexplained rulings have befuddled judges charged with applying the high court’s precedent. That’s because Roberts has totally replaced the rule of law with partisan loyalty—for example, ruling that ICE can consider race when seizing people off the street while colleges can’t when admitting students, which is consistent only insofar as both outcomes are supported by Republicans, or letting Trump withhold funds appropriated by Congress in defiance of the legislature’s spending power. In the birthright citizenship case, the 6–3 majority used the shadow docket not only to overrule lower courts’ orders blocking an obviously unconstitutional policy, but to more broadly strip them of authority to fully stop any lawless president—rigging the underlying system of checks and balances to help Trump.
“This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic.”
Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts. The court’s increasing radicalism had been fueling a movement for reform by adding justices or enacting term limits. The court had also spent the past year under an ethical cloud, beginning with the revelation that Justice Clarence Thomas had secretly taken millions of dollars in gifts, vacations, and loans from a handful of billionaires with interests before the court. Thomas also refused to recuse himself from January 6–related cases, even though his wife had fought to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss. Justice Samuel Alito also didn’t recuse, despite flying flags outside his homes that valorized Trump’s failed coup. Congress was demanding answers, and calls for an enforceable ethics code were growing. Moreover, Thomas and Alito were in their mid-70s, raising the odds that if Trump lost, the court could flip to a liberal majority. So Roberts did what he had done for Bush in 2005—he gave the president broad new powers, and in so doing secured them for himself.
His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation. “The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP,” Doerfler says. As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast. “It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” Doerfler says. Beyond likely finishing off the VRA this term, the court is weighing one of the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule.
At this point, the court is in a love triangle with Republicans and billionaires, facilitating a jurisprudence that subordinates workers’ rights and responsive democracy to the whims of the ultra-rich. Beyond Thomas, Alito, too, has accepted private trips from Republican billionaires and recently began hobnobbing with a right-wing German princess. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, both from well-off families, enjoy summer jaunts in Europe paid for by the same billionaires who bankroll the conservative legal movement and its Supreme Court recruitment process. Roberts appears to have avoided such overtly compromising relationships, but he hasn’t needed them, with his wife bringing in millions as a legal recruiter for top law firms, including some that have argued cases before her husband.
The ethics scandals could explain some of Roberts’ and his colleagues’ recent decisions, like how they’ve consistently torn down public corruption law on the premise that bribery is just a part of politics. “The eager embrace and encouragement that you’ve seen from the Roberts court for Trump’s lawlessness is just marinating in the right-wing justices’ belief that rules don’t apply to them either,” Lipton-Lubet says. “Justices who are comfortable taking essentially undisclosed bribes from fellow ideologues end up deciding that the president they support is above the law. They’ve created this culture for themselves of accountability-free corruption, and that extends, I think, to the way that they view the administration.” She adds, “You can only live in a rule-free environment for so long before it cooks your brain.”
The question lingering over this mess is how it will end. The past may be instructive. “This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic,” Doerfler says. In 1857, the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that Black people could not be citizens. The decision helped spur the Civil War and was overturned by the Reconstruction amendments, which ended slavery and aimed to extend political equality to the newly freed. When President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration fought the Depression, the Supreme Court struck down his initiatives, most notably attempts to regulate industrial policy and stabilize farming, as well as a minimum wage law. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court cowed the justices, who permitted New Deal legislation like Social Security and labor laws to endure.
In the 1930s, the court itself changed. The justices chose to preserve the institution, with four retiring in quick succession, allowing Roosevelt to appoint new ones. But in the postbellum era, the opposite had occurred. Attempts to guarantee equality under the law and Constitution were rolled back by a Supreme Court that, by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, officially gave Jim Crow the Constitution’s blessing.
Today’s court is on the same trajectory, bent on retrenching white political dominance. But it will go further. It will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only.
Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.
