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2025-02-28 19:01:00

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

In December, Popular Information reported that Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLF), a new venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family. Sun’s purchase resulted in a cash windfall for Trump. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Sun sent a joint letter to a federal judge, asking for a stay of Sun’s case. Today, the judge granted the SEC’s request.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.

A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF’s largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.”

Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump—75 percent of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor. While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely.

Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported. Sun has also continued to shower Trump with praise. On January 22, Sun posted on X, “if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”

Now, the SEC seems poised to negotiate a favorable settlement with Sun or drop the case entirely. Yesterday, the SEC and Sun filed a joint request for a 60-day stay in the case against Sun to “allow the Parties to explore a potential resolution.” Sun seems pleased. He responded to news of the request for a stay on X, posting three handshake emojis.

Last week, Brian Armstrong, CEO of the crypto trading platform Coinbase, announced that the SEC was dismissing its lawsuit against the company. The move came after Coinbase boosted Trump’s crypto meme coin, donated $75 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC, and chipped in $1 million to Trump’s inauguration celebration.

2025-02-28 19:00:00

“In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority in 1927’s Buck v. Bell, the state could—and should—”prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Forced sterilization, the court held, was not only legal but laudable.

In 1924, 17-year-old Carrie Buck was institutionalized, having been deemed “feebleminded” on the grounds of “promiscuous” behavior. In reality, Buck was raped by her foster family’s nephew. Three years later, with the Court’s blessing, Virginia’s “State Colony of Epileptics and Feeble Minded” sterilized Buck against her will. The decision, passed at the height of the 20th-century eugenics movement, has never been overturned.

To this day, 31 states and Washington, DC, still have laws on the books that allow for the practice—and just two, Alaska and North Carolina, have laws that fully ban the nonconsensual sterilization of disabled people, according to a 2022 report from the National Women’s Law Center. There’s no official account of just how many disabled people have been sterilized under those laws.

Some of these laws aren’t even that old. In 2019, Iowa and Nevada passed new forced sterilization laws that applied to people under guardianship. Both bills passed unanimously, and the end result is consistent with laws on the books in other states. There was no discourse among politicians—let alone objections—about the ethics of sterilizing disabled people without their consent.

Sterilization and Social Justice Lab co-director and founder Alexandra Minna Stern said that early IQ tests, which sought to measure intelligence in part on the basis of class- and culture-based questions involving Beethoven’s sonatas, the early United States, and college athletics, were “used to categorize people who would then be targeted for sterilization,” generally those who were “marginalized or maligned in some way”: in California and the Southwest, often Mexican Americans; nationwide, Black, Indigenous and poorer white Americans, particularly women. The people behind the tests, Stern says, were “white, elite men who wanted to create a certain type of society in their own image.”

NWLC senior counsel for health equity and justice Ma’ayan Anafi, who is also disabled, told Mother Jones that “forced sterilization laws are a really powerful example of how violations of disabled people’s bodies and rights are baked into our legal system today.”

Plenty of Democratic-led states, including Massachusetts and Oregon, continue to allow disabled people to be sterilized against their will. “In many states, we’re seeing laws that generally affirm reproductive rights existing side-by-side with these forced sterilization laws,” Anafi continued. “There’s a very different standard that’s being applied to disabled people’s autonomy.”

Stern says the political climate is ripe for "another wave of sterilization abuse" under Donald Trump, who is preoccupied with "good genes," and his advisor Stephen Miller, who is preoccupied with white nationalism. "We have to be really vigilant," Stern added.

Eugenics already figured into Trump's first term, particularly in his and his advisors' rhetoric criminalizing migrants of color. Trump has, moreover, reportedly expressed support for letting disabled people die. But eugenics is now taking center stage even more, with Trump emboldened by his "mandate" to punish immigrants without papers while welcoming, specifically, white South Africans. The addition of productivity-obsessed Elon Musk, who espouses harmful rhetoric about "abuse" by disabled Medicaid users and has an ugly record on disability, further reinforces Trump's eugenicist turn.

Efforts to rectify the harms of forced sterilization have also often fallen flat, both historically and in the present day. Following a 2013 Reveal investigation showing that incarcerated women in California were being sterilized without their consent, the state passed a bill to ban the practice behind bars. However, Victoria Valenzuela reported for Bolts, around four in five applications for compensation from people forcibly sterilized in California prisons were rejected.

Importantly, nonconsensual permanent contraception still has some backing from the American medical establishment, at least as an option. An October 2024 clinical report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, for instance, calls nonconsensual permanent contraception a "violation of [the] interests" of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities—unless a court finds that they lack decision-making capacities. In that case, the authors argue, sterilization could still be chosen by guardians (though it is not the only option). But even the most experienced judges, as Holmes demonstrated in 1927, can fail appallingly in making that call.

Disabled attorney Marissa Ditkowsky of Tzedek DC does not believe anyone should be sterilized without their consent, and says that "people who are legally deemed to lack capacity can still express their wishes or personal values"; she hopes appointed guardians will also support people under guardianship who do seek permanent contraception. Additionally, Ditkowsky says, "courts routinely fail to understand disability and the spectrum of capacity, and they may act in a paternalistic manner"—again on display in Buck v. Bell.

Monika Mitra, Brandeis University’s Lurie Institute for Disability Policy director, believes that opposing forced sterilization means reckoning with how disabled people are viewed as parents. After all, more than 40 states allow disability to be used as grounds for parental termination, and disabled parents are at a higher risk of being monitored by Child Protective Services.

“If you can call out eugenics, and if we can call out sterilization [and] institutionalization,” Mitra said, “we can think about how we as a society view whether disabled people should be pregnant and whether disabled people should be parents.”

This story was published with the assistance of the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) Health Journalism Fellowship, supported by the Commonwealth Fund.

2025-02-28 19:00:00

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

In the open grasslands of South Dakota, not far from the dramatic rock formations of Badlands National Park, lives one of the continent’s cutest, fiercest, and rarest animals: the black-footed ferret.

Black-footed ferrets, weasel-like animals with distinctive dark bands around their eyes and black feet, are ruthless little hunters. At night, they dive into burrows in pursuit of juicy prairie dogs, their primary food source. Without prairie dogs, these ferrets would not survive.

From as many as a million ferrets in the 19th century, today there are only a few hundred of these furry predators roaming the Great Plains, the only place on Earth they live. That there are any black-footed ferrets at all is something of a miracle. In the 1970s, scientists thought black-footed ferrets were extinct, but a twist of fate, and an unprecedented breeding effort led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brought this critical piece of the prairie ecosystem back from the brink.

This success—one of the greatest of any wildlife revival program—is now at risk.

Earlier this month, as part of the Trump administration’s purge of federal employees, Tina Jackson, the head of the FWS’s entire black-footed ferret recovery program, was fired. FWS also fired two other permanent staffers who were involved in keeping captive ferrets alive at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center, the nation’s main breeding facility. Those cuts amount to more than a quarter of the center’s permanent, non-administrative staff, Jackson said. The center also has a vacant biologist position that Jackson said may not be filled. Additionally, FWS fired a staff biologist who led black-footed ferret conservation in Wyoming.

The staff changes imperil the tenuous success of ferret recovery and the very existence of these animals, several experts including current and former Fish and Wildlife Service employees told Vox. Critical funding has been restricted, too: Two organizations that rely on federal money for ferret conservation on public and tribal lands told Vox that funds for this work were frozen.

Experts who have spent decades trying to save black-footed ferrets say these impacts threaten the broader prairie ecosystem. Efforts to conserve ferrets and their prey sustain this important American landscape, a home for insects that pollinate our crops, plants that store carbon in their long roots, and streams that provide us with fresh water.

“Right now, the recovery of the species is dependent on captive populations,” said Jackson, who started her role with the Fish and Wildlife Service last spring, after more than two decades with Colorado’s state wildlife agency. “Without people to take care of those captive populations, we will potentially lose the species. The hardest thing is to think about them blinking out on our watch.”

Few species demonstrate the power of conservation quite like the black-footed ferret. In the late 1800s, there were as many as 1 million living among prairie dog colonies in the plains, as far north as Saskatchewan and as far south as northern Mexico. But in the 1900s, extermination programs bankrolled by the US and state governments started killing off prairie dogs, which were viewed as pests that competed with cattle for forage.

These government-sanctioned exterminations collapsed prairie dog populations, in turn devastating black-footed ferrets. Without prairie dogs, ferrets had nothing to eat. Around the same time, fleas began spreading plague—yes, plague—in the Great Plains. That killed even more prairie dogs and ferrets, both of which are highly susceptible to the disease.

By the late ’70s, ferrets had vanished, and scientists considered them extinct.

But in the fall of 1981, a dog named Shep changed everything. Shep, a ranch dog in Wyoming, brought a carcass of a small mammal to his home near the northern town of Meeteetse. His owners didn’t recognize the animal and took it to a taxidermist, who identified it as a black-footed ferret. The carcass ultimately led wildlife officials to a nearby ferret colony—the last known one on Earth, home to about 130 animals.

With that, the extinct black-footed ferret was officially brought back from the dead. But just a few years after Shep’s discovery, all but 18 ferrets had died from plague and other threats. So with the specter of extinction looming once again, wildlife officials took them out of the wild and into captivity.

With those 18 ferrets, the Fish and Wildlife Service, along with Wyoming state wildlife officials, launched a captive breeding and recovery program in the late ’80s, determined to keep the species alive. The goal of the program, among the first of its kind in the country, was to breed ferrets under human care before eventually releasing them back into the prairie landscape. In a way, it was the reverse of the government interventions that had initially helped push the ferrets toward extinction.

The bedrock of this program is the Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center near Fort Collins, Colorado. The center breeds most of the black-footed ferrets in the US today. It’s a painstaking process that involves carefully pairing individuals to make sure their babies will boost the population’s limited genetic diversity. (Officials use a genetic registry called a “studbook” to figure out the best pairs.)

Remarkably, the center has also led groundbreaking efforts to clone black-footed ferrets that died decades ago. The cloning program, which is the first of its kind, is another way to inject new genetic diversity into the population to ensure its survival.

The ferret center is also critical for the survival of ferrets once they’ve been released. Researchers condition the animals for life in the wild—running them through what is essentially a predator bootcamp. Workers put the ferrets in outdoor pens with burrows and introduce live prairie dogs, typically once a week, for them to kill. After about 30 days, ferrets that have passed bootcamp muster get the okay to be released into the wild.

“The importance of the captive breeding center to the survival of the species is pretty huge,” said Steve Forrest, a biologist who’s long been involved in black-footed ferret conservation.

The recent job cuts will hamper the center’s breeding and training efforts, experts told Vox. The two technicians who were terminated cared for captive ferrets, which involved raising kits, preparing food, and observing them during preconditioning. Jackson, meanwhile, was the connective tissue across a wide range of partners, including the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the nonprofit environmental group Defenders of Wildlife, which are all working to conserve black-footed ferrets. She led budget and staff meetings and made sure the breeding center had what it needed to keep running, Jackson said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Breeding black-footed ferrets is only half the challenge. The next step is making sure they survive once they’ve been released into the wild.

The main threat they face there is still plague, which is relatively common among prairie dog colonies in the Great Plains. It’s also a minor threat to humans. So across many of the more than 30 sites where ferrets have been reintroduced, workers from a range of organizations kill fleas in prairie dog burrows and vaccinate wild-born ferrets against plague. Captive-born animals are vaccinated before they’re released. This approach works, but it’s labor-intensive and costly: technicians have to treat burrows and trap wild-born ferrets across thousands of acres, year after year.

The bulk of funding for this work comes from the federal government, and much of that money is currently on ice. In the Conata Basin of South Dakota—home to the world’s largest wild population of ferrets—efforts to rid the landscape of plague are funded in part by the US Forest Service and the National Park Service, according to Travis Livieri, executive director of Prairie Wildlife Research, a nonprofit. That funding is currently frozen, Livieri said, adding that treating burrows typically starts as early as April.

“If we’re not able to do plague mitigation, it’s very possible that over the course of three or four or five years we could lose the wild ferret population,” a current Fish and Wildlife Service employee told Vox. (The employee requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.) “Having a disruption in established plague mitigation programs is really problematic and an existential threat to wild black-footed ferret populations.”

Some federal funding for tribal nations to conserve black-footed ferrets has also been put on pause, according to Shaun Grassel, CEO of Buffalo Nations Grasslands Alliance (BNGA), a Indigenous-led conservation group, and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. Last year, BNGA won a $1.1 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit that routes both private and federal funding to environmental groups. The money was to help several tribes, such as the Cheyenne River Sioux, kill fleas, monitor ferrets, and oversee their reintroduction into the wild. At least half of that grant is funded by federal dollars, Grassel said, and now the whole thing is frozen.

“A freeze in certain federal funds will keep tribes from implementing their plague mitigation work,” Grassel said. If the freeze lasts much longer, “several tribal biologists are likely to lose their jobs,” he continued, “because all tribal work is funded by some grant program or another.”

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

What’s especially frustrating to people involved in ferret conservation is that funding and staff resources were already limited heading into 2025. “So much conservation work is happening bare-bones right now, so when cuts come in there’s nothing left to cut,” Jackson said. “There’s no fat on the bones.”

And the sorts of dollar amounts for this work—for wildlife conservation, overall—are almost imperceptible compared to other federal line items. Last year, the budget for the entire Fish and Wildlife Service, which works to conserve all endangered plants and animals, was roughly $4 billion. That’s less than 3 percent of what the Department of Transportation spends, for example. Livieri says conservation practitioners are also working to make it cheaper, such as by using more innovative insecticides.

Concerned employees at the Fish and Wildlife Service are now scrambling to keep black-footed ferret work moving forward, the current employee told Vox. One idea is to bring in staff from other departments to care for ferrets at the breeding center, they said.

Yet the national coordination that the Fish and Wildlife Service provided will be hard to maintain without Jackson and uncertainty around funding. A number of meetings on the calendar will likely be canceled, Jackson told me. Plus, the service is supposed to carry out a federally mandated five-year review of the black-footed ferret’s conservation status soon, which Jackson was meant to lead. It’s unclear who will now do that.

“It’s literally a matter of life and death [for these animals],” the current employee said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to keep the lights on.”

People within the conservation community are deeply concerned about the fate of endangered species under the Trump administration. But if there’s one thing that gives them hope for animals like the black-footed ferret, it’s the dedication they see in their colleagues.

“If at one point in this remarkable journey [of the black-footed ferret], somebody just decided that this isn’t worth it, they could have gone extinct,” the current employee said. “But there have always been enough people who care, and we’ve soldiered on. It could have failed so many times, but enough people cared that it didn’t.”

2025-02-28 04:13:11

In the fall of 1984, when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, the protests at the South African Embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador of South Africa on Thanksgiving Eve. Timed for maximum press coverage, that meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were protests at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest.

Area high school kids like me got in on protesting the embassy too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Specials in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was rolling into a boil. The DC music scene was pretty wild then—a bouillabaisse of go-go, R&B, punk, New Wave; there was breakdancing in the hallways during lunch hour—and for some of us, ska was sort of a unified field theory. Musically but also culturally. (If you have a racist friend / now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.)

But it wasn’t just kids who cosplayed in checked socks or porkpie hats. In 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt’s “(I Ain’t Going to Play) Sun City”—essentially the music world launching its own boycott on South Africa. The song was not (like, at all) great, but the wild cross-genre supergroup—DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis to name but a very, very few—guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.

We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who’d been directly resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So, suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions on South Africa and banned direct flights to it. Coca-Cola became the first major company to pull out of South Africa. Sports teams joined the musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and boardrooms for the rest of the ’80s. And they worked. South Africa’s economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to wind down apartheid began. By 1994, free elections were held and Mandela became president.

I found myself reconstructing this history recently, as the protests and boycotts against Tesla began. Do you need a reminder as to why? Okay: Tesla CEO Elon Musk—the world’s richest man, and Trump’s biggest campaign donor; an unelected, ketamine-happy, video game cheating, transphobic, subsidy–guzzling, deadbeat dad—is leading a bunch of scythe-wielding mini-me shitposters through innards of the federal government, harvesting and compromising the most essential data of every taxpayer, government contractor, and NGO in America. Oh, and he’s also supporting fascists, using apparent Nazi salutes, and blasting antisemitic and racist theories to his millions of followers.

Anyway, the dude is bad news. And he’s threatening to use his hundreds of billions—again, money he would not have without US subsidies—to take out any politician, foreign or domestic, who opposes his and Trump’s agenda, which is a mix of toxic masculinity, grift, and a seeming desire to return to a gauzy form of racial apartheid.

Words like “apartheid” and “Nazi” shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. Musk has denied he’s a Nazi, and that his salute was a Nazi salute. But clear-eyed commentators aren’t buying it, and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes are downright jubilant: “That was a straight up, like, Sieg Heil, like loving Hitler energy.” And then there’s Musk’s history. His maternal grandparents were, according to Musk’s own father, members of the Canadian neo-Nazi party who decamped to South Africa because they were fans of racial oppression. Musk has been pretty mum about what it was like to grow up in South Africa and the influence that had on him. (Today he holds US, Canadian, and South African citizenship.) But the fact is that many white South Africans who left at that time did so because their position of privilege was coming to an end.

In any case, once in the States, Musk joined forces with fellow South Africans Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha—grandson of former South African leader Pik Botha; now the head of venture capital giant Sequoia Capital—to form PayPal. And they revealed themselves to be racial reactionaries. Thiel (who, according to his biographer, once called critiques of apartheid “overblown”) and Sacks wrote “The Case Against Affirmative Action” for Stanford Magazine in 1996. They’ve led concerted, organized attacks on DEI. Musk, who was under federal investigation for racial discrimination in his Tesla factories—that is, until Trump took over—is supporting extremist movements across the world, using Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell Germans they should no longer feel “guilt” over it, and echoing South Africans who claim they’re victims of “white genocide.”

So yes, some people are too quick to label people they don’t like as Nazis. But also, people who don’t want to be called Nazis should avoid giving Nazi salutes.

Now I want to talk about something else that was happening in the mid-’80s. Something else that gathered up musical supergroups and was big on MTV.

It was famine. In Ethiopia, between 1983 and 1985, maybe a million people died. The nightly news was full of images of dying skeletal children, all the time. The causes were complex, but the immediate answer was simple: food. Again, it was musicians who rallied the world to the cause, with huge concerts like Live Aid, famous for Freddie Mercury’s last transcendent performance, and cross-genre protest song collaborations. The Brits, led by Bob Geldof (who also produced Live Aid), went first with “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” And then Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, and Harry Belafonte gathered up a who’s-who of American singers for “We Are the World.” And yes, some of that plays as very cringe these days—Ethiopians are mostly Christian, for starters. And we weren’t totally blind to it back then either, as someone who played Cyndi Lauper in a high school send-up of “We Are the World” can attest. 

But when you’re trying to rally the world to the cause of dying children, corny works. All these efforts did raise millions for food relief, and, more importantly, focused the world’s attention. In 1985, the United States Agency for International Development created the Famine Early Warning Systems Network so the world would never be caught so flat-footed about famine again.

Until now. Musk has gutted USAID, and its early famine warning system specifically, even as starvation stalks the people of Sudan. Thanks to his DOGE bros, almost 80 percent of emergency food kitchens in Sudan have been closed, and “people are screaming from hunger in the streets,” reports the BBC.

What does the world’s richest man have against the agency that helps the world’s poorest people? Well, it was investigating his satellite company Starlink’s contracts in Ukraine. But also, in their quest to cut trillions from the federal budget to finance tax cuts for billionaires like themselves, Musk and Trump have to believe they can get that money from things other than Social Security and Medicaid. So they’re tapping into Americans’ collective misbelief that we spend about a quarter of the budget on foreign aid—in actuality, it is about 1 percent—to claim they can square that math. And they’re flooding the zone with disinformation with claims of USAID “waste and abuse,” because this is their playbook. Never mind that they clearly don’t know what USAID does, or that gutting it is also having devastating impacts on US farmers, who grow a lot of the food we provide as relief.

Who benefits from eviscerating USAID? Basically foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, who hates that this “soft power” was part of America’s Ukrainian relief effort, or Xi Jinping, who sees our food aid to African countries as a plot to undermine China’s “belt and road” program of development. We don’t just lose moral stature when we renounce foreign aid, we lose our competitive advantage in global relations too. So when Trump states in an executive order that USAID efforts “destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” please realize that this is echoing the talking points of Putin and Xi.

But no matter, Musk and Trump wanted to start with what they saw as the weakest, wokest government agency, to slaughter it and hang it on a pike as a warning not to disobey the king.  Slashing USAID scratches a racist itch central to the MAGA cause. Let’s not forget how Trump slurred “shithole countries.” Trump, who says Hitler did some “great things,” and says he wants generals like Hitler had. Trump, who believes he has “good genes.” Trump, you know the list: housing discrimination, Central Park Five, birtherism, Mexican “rapists,” “very fine people,” “go back” where they “came” from, “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”

In the ’80s, the American public had a much more rudimentary understanding of colonialism’s dependence on racism than it does today. But even kids in high school knew that apartheid was wrong, and famine was wrong, and that these two things happening in Africa were somehow connected, and connected to America’s dark racial history, and to the music we listened to and the future we hoped we represented. Our parents didn’t have childhood friendships across races and sexes—that would have been mostly impossible. But we did. We were naive (the white kids far more than the Black kids, it must be said) but not wrong in feeling that, even as we eye-rolled and camped it up when we sang along, that we are the children…we’re saving our own lives / It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me.

On Valentine’s Day, Sheryl Crow put her Tesla on a flatbed and donated the sale’s proceeds to NPR. The following day, I went to the local Tesla dealership to witness the first in what has become an ongoing series of protests in San Francisco and across the country. The “Tesla Takedown” movement is, as such movements usually are, organized by an oddball coalition of folks, including documentary filmmaker Alex Winter (also “Bill” of Bill & Ted fame) and disinformation scholar Joan Donovan, who alleges that a donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative prompted Harvard to cancel her research on Meta’s role in online extremism. The goal is to get people to protest at dealerships, sell their cars, divest from any stock. Indivisible has joined the effort, organizing “Musk or Us” protests.

There’s a real strategy here: essentially that Tesla’s stock is wildly overpriced—it’s both an automaker and a memestock, as John Herman notes—and were it to approach a more reality-based level, Musk, who’s super leveraged, could see his fortune decline precipitously. That could push a shareholder revolt and also weaken his threat to use his vast fortune to fund a primary against anybody who opposes Trump. And in any case, people need a place to locate their anger and fear.

There are signs this is working. Tesla sales in Europe are catastrophically down—50 percent lower in January than from a year earlier, even as EV sales overall rose 34 percent. January sales were down 12 percent in California, and that’s before DOGE started playing havoc with the country. Tesla’s stock price has fallen 37 percent since its peak in December, knocking tens of billion off of Musk’s wealth; 23 percent of that is in the last few weeks. And people are taking their rage out on individual Teslas, stickering and even vandalizing “swasticars,” especially cybertrucks, which were already performing horribly, in terms of sales and just…performance.

Talking to protestors at the San Francisco dealership, I was struck by how many of them had never been to any kind of protest before. Some of them were Tesla owners. One guy told me he wasn’t able to sell his car right now, but he was posting to Tesla owner forums to tell people to turn off features so as to deny the company revenue, or to be an activist shareholder if they were one.

In less than two weeks, such protests have spread all over the country. The news is full of tales of Tesla owners with buyer’s remorse. Etsy shops are selling bumper stickers that say things like: “I bought this before I knew Elon was crazy.” On a walk through my neighborhood last weekend, I saw a woman purposefully lead her dog over to pee on a cybertruck, and a Tesla sedan with a handwritten sign that said: “Hi! I also think Elon sucks. I bought this car 5 years ago. Please stop keying my car for your protest. I agree with you [heart].” Less than half a block later I came across another Tesla sedan, freshly keyed. “We hate him too,” read a sign hung from the offices above the Tesla dealership showroom.

We are in early days. Trump has been in office just over a month. “Big Balls” and the rest of the DOGE marauders have only been at it a few weeks. Tesla protests are even newer. It’s possible that even if a boycott were to wipe out some of Musk’s wealth, sketchy government contracts for things like $400 million in armored Teslas, or a $2 billion FAA deal for Starlink, will more than make up for it. Mass movements require mass awareness, and we’re not collectively tuning into the same newscasts or music videos, and Musk meanwhile owns a disinformation factory. Boycotts rarely have the kind of impact activists hope for; they tend to be too diffuse or too hotly contested.

But opposition movements always seem hopeless until they’re not. Apartheid existed for decades and then came crashing down rapidly. We didn’t know that its heirs would be wreaking havoc on this country four decades later, but history isn’t an unbroken line that goes up and to the right. Some of the bad stuff comes back and has to be fought again.

The South Africa apartheid regime was defeated. Maybe one South African oligarch can be too.

2025-02-28 01:35:38

Trump appointee Lori Chavez-DeRemer found herself facing a tight committee vote Thursday morning to head the Department of Labor. The question: was she too pro-worker for the job?

Apparently not.

On Thursday, the same Senate committee where the bill repeatedly died—Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)—voted to move forward her nomination to lead the federal Labor Department. Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) joined Republicans in support, offsetting Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) “no” vote. The Democratic support in committee means Chavez-DeRemer will almost undoubtedly pass the full Senate floor vote.

Chavez-DeRemer seemed to allay many of the Republican committee members’ fears during her Senate confirmation hearing last Wednesday—taking pains to demonstrate that she regretted her cosponsorship of the labor-friendly PRO Act, rhetorically turning her back on workers and suggesting that she’d fall in line with Trump’s anti-worker agenda. To Paul, she called state “right-to-work” laws a “fundamental tenet of labor laws, where states have the right to choose,” and disowned the bill’s limitations on such laws. 

In fact, Chavez-DeRemer said, she only backed the PRO Act to better represent her congressional district—and to be part of the conversation in Congress about labor. “I recognize that that bill was imperfect,” she told Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the chair of the HELP Committee. “If confirmed, my job will be to implement President Trump’s policy decisions and my guiding principle will be President Trump’s guiding principle, ensuring a level playing field for businesses, unions, and, most importantly, the American worker.”

When Democrats introduced its first iteration, in 2019, the PRO Act—Protecting the Right to Organize—was the culmination of many labor advocates’ attempts to empower workers through increased union membership. Since unionization rates peaked at around one-third of the workforce in the 1950s—mostly due to legislation passed during the New Deal—those figures have steadily decreased, as waves of legislation have added obstacles to union participation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a body within the US Department of Labor that collects data on workers and the economy, union membership was down to 9.9 percent in 2024.

That first version of the PRO Act would have strengthened workers’ rights to organize by, in part, banning retaliation for labor-related whistleblowing and strikes, including sympathy strikes (now illegal), preventing many employers from countering organizing drives through strategies like mandatory meetings meant to intimidate employees into voting against unions, and establishing penalties for employers who flout the National Labor Relations Board.

Many Republicans, unsurprisingly, hated it. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) called it “radical, backward-looking legislation” that would “diminish the rights of workers and employers while harming the economy.” The National Restaurant Association said the bill was “essentially setting fire to billions in taxpayer dollars.” The PRO Act even split Democrats, including opposition by both of Arizona’s senators at the time—Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema—among others. “The way I make decisions on behalf of Arizona and for our constituents is by listening to the business leaders,” Sinema said to members of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. 

After passing the House in February 2020, the bill died in committee. So did a second version the next year. But Lori Chavez-DeRemer, then a first-term GOP representative from Oregon, was one of just three Republicans to support its third version, in 2023-24, making her an altogether surprising—and, to some Democrats, promising—pick for Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor.

The vote results were largely down to Chavez-DeRemer’s backers pitching her as a rare pro-labor Republican who could reach across the aisle and speak with both workers and employers. Her story was promising for some worker advocates—she is both the daughter of a Mexican-American Teamster, and the owner of a medical business that earns between $1 million and $5 million a year, according to congressional financial disclosures. Although Chavez-DeRemer lost her 2024 House reelection campaign in Oregon’s fifth district, which includes parts of Portland and Eugene, she received support from at least 17 labor unions—more than the eventual Democratic winner, Janelle Bynum.

Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination frightened some Republicans—especially because the PRO Act would have overridden states’ so-called right-to-work laws, designed to limit union membership and defund labor, in part by easing the nonpayment of union dues. Her most prominent conservative naysayer was Paul, who said last month that he would vote against her in committee, and predicted that Chavez-DeRemer would “lose 15 Republicans” in a full Senate vote for being “very pro-labor.” 

But Teamsters Union General President Sean O’Brien, who has tied himself to Trump, was a fan—it was reportedly O’Brien who put Chavez-DeRemer forward as Labor Secretary to the Trump transition team. And when her nomination was announced in late November, O’Brien posted on X, calling it a significant demonstration that Trump was “putting American workers first.” The Teamsters—along with many other unions—backed Chavez-DeRemer, specifically citing her 2024 endorsement of the PRO Act.

As my colleague Serena Lin noted last July, O’Brien, who had previously called himself a “lifelong Democrat,” drew controversy in labor circles for his move toward Trump:

O’Brien’s critics from within the union argue that his appearance at the RNC will set a dangerous precedent at a potential turning point for American labor. Teamsters vice president at-large John Palmer has repeatedly publicly rebuked O’Brien’s involvement with Trump. In a recent op-ed in New Politics, he wrote that O’Brien’s speech at the RNC “only normalizes and makes the most anti-union party and President I’ve seen in my lifetime seem palatable.”

Palmer’s concerns came to pass, as a small but vocal faction of the GOP, including the likes of J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, leveraged the nomination to burnish their images as supporters of certain workers’ rights. As Mother Jones’ Noah Lanard observed, this “small subset of Republicans who want to be seen as class warriors” pits American labor against imaginary enemies.

Immigration is one of them. During Chavez-DeRemer’s confirmation hearing last week, Sen. Hawley (R-Mo.) lobbed the nominee a friendly softball on whether Trump’s border crackdown was “pro-worker.” She agreed—in fact, Chavez-DeRemer had already said earlier in the hearing that “mass immigration…has hurt the American worker, and we want to make sure that we’re supporting President Trump in his endeavor to support the American worker at all costs.” 

Pinning labor issues on immigration is nothing new. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, many Republicans pushed that message during the 2024 election campaign.

Samantha Sanders, the Director of Government Affairs and Advocacy at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, says such rhetoric “is based on racism, xenophobia, and misinformation.” What does more to depress working conditions and wages, Sanders told me, is the large number of workers who—whether due to deportation concerns or other fears—are not able to push against exploitative labor conditions.

“If you want to make sure that immigrant workers are not pushing wages down and contributing to a race to the bottom,” Sanders says, “give them legal status to work, to be able to work above board, and, ultimately, have a pathway to citizenship.” She pointed to a report from the Immigration Research Initiative, another nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, and some of her colleagues at EPI, which found that immigration enables the US to experience continued economic growth despite an aging American-born population and a decreasing number of working adults. 

A separate EPI report detailed the damage wrought by a “two-tiered” system of workplace rights, especially among immigrants who only have temporary status through a work visa.

Hawley and Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), who stated during the hearing that he, along with the Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien, presented Chavez-DeRemer to Trump as a potential nominee, framed her as the candidate to make both sides happy: a nominee “uniquely positioned in the center.”

He also referred to his newfound friendship with O’Brien as an example of “bipartisanship.” (Mullin—a former MMA fighter—bizarrely challenged O’Brien to a fight during a HELP Senate committee hearing in November 2023 when the Teamsters president questioned his “self-made” business background.) 

But that’s simply not what the Labor Department is, Sanders explains. Just as the Department of Commerce, and employer-focused federal agencies like the Small Business Administration, engage the demands of employers, the Department of Labor “protects and promotes the interests of the American worker.”

Sanders told me she was “disappointed but not surprised” at Chavez-DeRemer walking back many of her supposed pro-worker positions to align with the Republicans on the committee. The nominee avoided giving a clear answer when Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) asked whether her vision of “putting American workers first” was compatible with the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and many employees having jobs without paid leave. 

She also sidestepped Sens. Murray (D-Wash.) and Murphy’s (D-Conn.) questions about Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly getting access to the Labor Department’s data systems to search for supposed waste and fraud. According to NBC News, the information likely includes investigations into Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla, both of which face labor violation accusations, as well as confidential data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on topics like economic health and employment. 

The Democrats’ questioning seemed like an attempt to determine whether Chavez-DeRemer would be the pro-labor Republican that she was touted as or just another cabinet member who would fall in line with Trump. 

“Two months ago, before we saw how this administration was operating, it might have been more of a question of whether this is a place where an agency has some more leeway to make a case for positive changes,” Samantha Sanders said. “Now I think it’s pretty clear that they’re all supposed to do whatever they’re ordered to do.” 

One telling exchange for Sanders occurred during Murray’s questioning, where the Democratic senator asked Chavez-DeRemer what she would do if facing illegal instructions from Trump, noting that offenses have been “seen across the board since he was put into office.” Throughout the hearing, Democratic senators referred to attacks on workers like mass firings at the Labor Board and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that damaged and slowed both federal agencies. 

“I will commit to following the law, and I do not believe the president is going to ask me to break the law,” the nominee replied. 

“Well, okay,” Murray responded, visibly annoyed.

For Samantha Sanders, this was a significant departure from the promise of a supposed pro-worker Republican—and meant many Republican committee members’ calls for collaboration and bipartisanship from Democrats came off as bad faith. 

So what does Chavez-DeRemer’s ascent mean for labor under Trump’s second term? For unions, there may be immediate uncertainty. O’Brien acknowledged that the Teamsters disagreed with Chavez-DeRemer’s support of right-to-work in a Fox News interview hours after last Wednesday’s hearing. 

“But there is an opportunity to work bipartisan,” O’Brien told co-anchor John Roberts. “I’m working with senators like Josh Hawley to come up with a form of the PRO Act that may not include that.” He then echoed those Republicans’ new favorite words: “That’s the beauty of having conversations with people on the other side where you can collaborate.”

And regarding Trump’s dismantling of the federal government: “Let’s take a look at the hundred-and-first day and where we’re at at that point in time.” 

Trump has moreover nominated Keith Sonderling, who reportedly backs a pro-employer, deregulatory agenda, to serve as Deputy Secretary of Labor. His confirmation hearing took place immediately after the HELP Committee voted on Chavez-DeRemer. 

Sanders says that expectations have changed amid Trump’s all-out attacks on the state: The essential questions are now larger than Chavez-DeRemer’s voting record or even policies within the Department of Labor. The senators appear to also be interested in what nominees will do about the integrity of the federal government, she says. 

“It’s not just, ‘are you going to be allowed to carry a pro-worker agenda forward,’” Sanders said. “It’s also, ‘are you going to be compliant with an anti-worker agenda or even an anti-federal government agenda.’”

2025-02-27 22:30:00

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Talk about a good ROI. Vladimir Putin’s investment in Donald Trump is sure paying off.

In recent days, Trump has promoted Moscow’s horrendously false talking points, excoriating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and blaming Ukraine for the brutal war that Putin, a real dictator, launched. He also kicked off talks with Russia to end the war and left out Ukraine. It’s hard to imagine a better scenario for Putin. And at the United Nations, the Trump administration proposed a resolution on the war that declined to hold Russia responsible for the conflict. (It was amended to include language blaming Moscow and then passed, with Washington abstaining.)

Plus, the chaos caused by Trump and Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg against US government agencies could well redound to the Kremlin’s advantage. With national security agencies—the CIA, the FBI, and others—and the Pentagon under siege due to this assault, their capabilities to defend the nation from threats posed by Russia or other adversaries will be diminished. All the Trump/Musk-generated conflict is in sync with Putin’s long-standing aim to sow discord in the United States.

Moreover, on her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which sought to counter secret operations waged by Russia, China, and other foes to affect US elections. She also cut back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a tool used by the feds to neutralize malign influence and disinformation operations. And now the FBI is being run by Kash Patel, a MAGA provocateur who has hailed the January 6 rioters and who has echoed Putin’s phony claim that Moscow did not clandestinely intervene in the 2016 campaign and assist Trump.

What a good deal for Putin: Trump siding with him on Ukraine, legitimizing his tyrannical reign, and breaking with Western allies. The US government and national security community in turmoil. Washington undermining its standing throughout the world and diminishing its global influence. And a US administration opening the door for more Russian covert attacks and holding Moscow blameless for its previous assaults on American democracy. No wonder Putin did what he could to help Trump win the presidency—not once but thrice. 

The Trumpers will tell you that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax, a witch hunt and a diabolical Deep State plot. That’s another con that Trump whipped up, with a boatload of help from Patel. But as the Trump-Putin relationship returns to prominence and as an American sellout of Ukraine looms, it’s important to keep in mind that Trump sits in the White House partly because of Putin’s skullduggery and his own betrayal of America.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Marco Rubio, who’s now Trump’s secretary of state. As I’ve pointed out before in this newsletter, in August 2020, Rubio, then the GOP chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a bipartisan 966-page report on the Trump-Russia scandal. It’s the most comprehensive public account of Putin’s attack on the 2016 election. It concludes that Putin “ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president” and that he did so “to help the Trump Campaign…and undermine the US democratic process.”

The report points out that “the Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia”—that is, Trump helped cover up Putin’s culpability. The report also reveals that Paul Manafort, the chief executive of Trump’s 2016 campaign, secretly met with a Russian intelligence office who was possibly connected to Russia’s hack-and-leak operation and shared private campaign information with him. (Does that sound like possible collusion?)

So no hoax. Putin schemed to place Trump in the White House, and Trump aided and abetted the operation by falsely denying its existence.

The Russian operation helped Trump win in 2016. In the final weeks of a tight election, it produced a steady stream of damaging leaks about Clinton that impeded her campaign. The Kremlin also ran secret projects that tried to assist Trump in 2020 and 2024. What’s the source for that? The first Trump administration. In 2020, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center and the Treasury Department each publicly disclosed that Russia was conducting a disinformation campaign spreading false information about Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine to smear the former vice president and Trump’s main rival. Rudy Giuliani, then a lawyer for Trump, peddled this phony, Russia-generated propaganda to try to undermine Biden’s presidential campaign.

Such bunk became the basis for the long-running and false GOP narrative that Biden was corrupt. This line of attack failed in 2020, but the Republicans stuck with it. After they won control of the House of Representatives in 2022, they hyped the Biden allegations cooked up by Russian agents and used this disinformation to try to discredit Biden with the false charge that he headed a “Biden crime family.” They cited this bogus claim as the basis for an impeachment investigation. That probe went nowhere, but for years, the Republicans and MAGA-aligned media used the Kremlin-orchestrated smear to advance the impression that Biden was crooked—a sham that Trump enthusiastically promoted and exploited in the 2024 campaign.

Russia’s effort last year to help Trump was not a secret. In the spring of 2024, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines publicly testified before Congress that Russia was once again waging information warfare to influence the presidential election, obviously to benefit Trump. This would come to include a host of disinformation projects. But none of this became major news stories—a true failure of the media. And, it would turn out, one of the key false allegations the Republicans and their media mouthpieces pushed—that Biden and his son had covertly pocketed $10 million in bribes from a Ukrainian energy firm—originated with an FBI informant with ties to Russian intelligence officers. (In December, this informant, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty to lying to the bureau about this supposed scheme.) 

There’s been no good review of the operations the Kremlin implemented to swing the 2024 election to Trump. And with Trump in charge, Patel at the FBI, John Ratcliffe (another Trump loyalist) heading the CIA, and Tulsi Gabbard serving as the director of national intelligence, there’s as much chance of one being ordered as Trump attending a racial sensitivity seminar. Whatever the Russians did last year to help Trump will be buried by what we can now call the Trump Deep State.

There’s certainly a lot more to the Trump-Putin connection than this brief rundown. In 2013, when Trump announced he’d be holding his Miss Universe contest in Moscow, he tweeted about Putin becoming “his new best friend.” (Putin was already recognized at this point as an antidemocratic thug.) While in Moscow for the event, Trump was obsessed with meeting Putin—which never happened. But the Miss Universe pageant netted Trump $2.3 million—mostly because his partner in the endeavor, a Russian oligarch who was close to Putin, paid Trump a very generous licensing fee and absorbed millions in losses. (Was this a sweetheart deal with a pro-Putin billionaire?)

During the 2016 campaign, Trump tried to set up a megadeal to develop a tower in Moscow and requested help from Putin’s office. (He never told voters about this.) And his top campaign aides met with a Russian emissary after being informed the Kremlin wanted to secretly help his campaign. Of course, Trump has a long history of fawning remarks about Putin, and top administration officials during his first term wondered about his unending and bizarre affinity for Putin. (This past week the Mirror reported that a former Kazakh intelligence chief, who claimed he had served in the KGB, said that Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987. There is no way to evaluate this claim.)

The Trump-Russia tale has largely been smothered by Trump’s endless screams of “witch hunt” and “hoax.” But as Trump moves to help Putin obtain an advantageous end to the cruel and criminal war he initiated, the full context of their relationship ought to be center stage. Yet it’s not been.

One example: Last week, the New York Times published a story reporting on Trump’s “familiar pattern” of “elevating Kremlin talking points”—an accurate characterization. But not until halfway into the piece did it refer to Putin’s attack on the 2016 election. The article said that the Senate Intelligence Committee report had concluded that the Russian government “engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” But the Times did not point out that the committee declared that this operation had been conducted to help Trump triumph. The newspaper noted the Russian endeavor had “damaged” Hillary Clinton’s campaign but said nothing about Trump’s attempt to cover up Russia’s role. The Times also did not mention Putin’s secret efforts in 2020 and 2024 to assist Trump. It downplayed the whole Trump-Russia saga.

Trump’s love affair with Putin has been something of a mystery. Less mysterious is the basic fact that Putin helped Trump reach the White House initially and mounted covert actions in 2020 and 2024 to boost Trump’s chances. What could be more relevant at a time when Trump is demonizing Zelenskyy and trying to broker a resolution of the war that will favor Putin and his regime over a democratically elected ally of the United States?

Putin wanted Trump in the White House, and he screwed with American elections to make that happen. Now Trump is acting like Putin’s handmaid—and pursuing policies and creating discord that could well undermine American democracy and fray, if not shatter, the Western alliance. MAGA refuses to see this. Congressional Republicans won’t face it. And the media doesn’t fully cover this all-important backstory. Whether or not there are secrets to the Trump-Putin relationship that we don’t know, it’s clear that Putin made a clever bet, and it looks like he’s about to cash in.