2025-12-17 23:37:12
It has been four days since a man entered a finals review session inside a building at Brown University—two miles from my house in Providence, Rhode Island—and started shooting.
The FBI, US Marshals, and police from across the state have descended on my neighborhood in a manhunt for the gunman. He killed two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, injured nine more, and then walked out of the building and into the city. For now, the best clue the public has is a video of someone who might be him, peering over the fence of the Rhode Island Historical Society on quaint, cobblestoned College Hill. How very New England.
I have lived in Providence for nearly a decade—first as a Brown student, and then when I returned in my 30s to make it my home—and I have never seen it like this, the energy sucked out if it by fear.
I can’t stop thinking about how Ella and Mukhammad will never get that second walk through the gates, and how it shouldn’t have been this way.
The city is suspended in a state of grief and unease, blanketed with snow and an eerie silence. Shops and restaurants are emptier than they should be during the holiday season. Some schools and daycares are still closed. The ones that are open, like my child’s, are sending worried parents reminders of security measures and not letting children play outside. There are whirring helicopters. There is a growing pile of flowers in front of the Van Wickle gates, which Brown opens just twice a year, in ceremonies meant to mark parallel transformative moments—when freshmen enter to begin their learning, and when seniors leave to make their mark on the world. I can’t stop thinking about how Ella and Mukhammad will never get that second walk through the gates, and how it shouldn’t have been this way.
Like millions of Americans, I’ve watched with growing despair as hundreds of children have died in school shootings and the country has repeatedly chosen to do nothing about it. Now I have a front-row seat to the latest chapter in this uniquely American horror. I am lucky to know a lot about this place—to have had the immense good fortune of going to Brown and to have ended up living in Providence, which I’ve long called New England’s best-kept secret. And as I sit here typing down the road from news crews and federal authorities walking our streets, I don’t think these beloved homes of mine will ever be the same, joining a long list of places, from Newtown to Parkland, forever transformed by gun violence.
For me and thousands of others, Brown changed my life. In 2005, I got into Brown in the first class of a new scholarship that covered full tuition for low-income kids. The place blew open my world and created paths that would never have otherwise been available to me.
It’s not just an intellectual safety or openness, but a physical one: The gates to Brown are always open, and anyone can stroll through campus, attend a lecture or event, or pop into one of several libraries and buildings that are accessible to the Providence community.
When I was a student, I internalized a way of thinking that is rampant at Brown: that idealism is good and that you really can become anyone. I’ve lived some more life now, and I could write a dissertation poking holes in that utopian idea. But it was imperative that I, a first-generation college student and child of immigrants who spent her early life worrying about stability and achievement, be surrounded by this slightly delusional positivity and allow it to propel my choices. It empowered me to take the risks that have defined the best parts of my life: Sure, I’ll quit my stable government job and be a barista while I try to get a journalism job in the middle of the Great Recession. Why yes, I will date the sweet guy I met at Brown over thousands of miles while we build careers in different cities.
Now I have a journalism job, and I’m married to that guy from Brown, with a house and a kid. I’m confident none of that would be true had I not been steeped in the idealism of College Hill.
Critically, though, this sort of dreaming and striving can only happen in a place that is safe, inclusive, and supportive. Brown embodies that. And it’s not just an intellectual safety or openness, but a physical one: The gates to campus are always open, and anyone can stroll through, attend a lecture or event, or pop into one of several libraries and buildings that are accessible to the Providence community.
In the wake of the shooting, I’ve been struck by the repeated interviews where current students who survived Saturday’s shooting have said something similar. Mia Tretta, a Brown junior who was shot in the stomach in 2019 by a gunman at her high school, said in an interview that “a big reason I chose Brown was because of the safety I felt on campus.” A master’s student told The Brown Daily Herald, the university’s student paper: “One thing that makes Brown unique in the world is its openness.” Annelise Mages, a freshman, said something similar to the New York Times: “I would say that Brown is the institution I would have thought least likely to have a school shooting.”
That safety and openness have long extended to Providence. The city’s nickname is “the Creative Capital,” because it is a place that embraces difference.
I heard from a friend who was hiding in her basement with her kids, and others who were sitting in their apartment three blocks from the shooting in utter darkness. Federal agents walked my street.
It is bursting with enormous murals and artist communities and underground music. Providence is one of the most ethnically diverse midsize cities in the country. Most weekends in the spring and summer, there is a huge festival celebrating a different one of the city’s immigrant communities, from Cape Verdean to Dominican to Armenian. Parks and institutions around the city are named after Roger Williams, a Puritan minister who founded Rhode Island and Providence as a refuge for “liberty of conscience” and a rebellious experiment, a defection from the strict Puritans in Massachusetts, and made it the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom.
On Saturday, as the details of the shooting were only just trickling out, I found myself wondering how much Providence and Brown will hold onto this openness in the future.
My dear friend’s son, a Brown sophomore, sheltered in a coffee shop in the Fox Point neighborhood next to the university. Her housemate was in the building where the shooting happened. I heard from a friend who was hiding in her basement with her kids, and others who were sitting in their apartment three blocks from the shooting in utter darkness. Federal agents walked my street.
How does a city forget all that? How do you forget thousands of terrified students locked down in libraries and bathrooms, or running around your house turning off lights and closing blinds while your toddler sleeps because what else should you do when a gunman might be strolling by? How do you forget two promising young kids, just beginning to live out the idealistic spirit of this school and the city around it, snuffed out?
The answer is: You don’t.
Everyone is trying to find meaning when there isn’t any, about why this happened, who is responsible, and what the future holds.
What I see now is a city trying to find moments of action and control when most feel helpless. To accomplish something as simple as leaving the house feels like a risk. City residents and alumni have been circulating forms and spreadsheets to coordinate aid to students who are trying to leave Providence—rides to the airport or the train station, food, and more. Locals have offered to house students who might need it.
I think back to the vigil I went to on Sunday at a local park, when it seemed like the authorities had the suspect in custody. In that moment, I saw what looked like the very beginnings of a community healing. Hundreds of bundled-up people stood in the park, snow flurries drifting off the trees, listening to speeches, a few singers, or simply hugging or standing quietly.
But now the city has retreated back into itself. Downtown looks like an empty movie set. Parking anywhere is a breeze. The governor canceled the annual event that opens to the community the state house and its holiday decorations, and additional police were sent to local schools. Everywhere from the mall to the convention center and even the zoo are adding security. There is virtually no one on the sidewalks in my neighborhood, save for the occasional dog on a bathroom break or a person scurrying from their car into the house.
With people unable to gather to process and heal, they’re instead congregating online, watching city officials’ daily press conferences and obsessing in text threads about the crumbs of information the public has about the shooter. Everyone is trying to find meaning when there isn’t any, about why this happened, who is responsible, and what the future holds.
“I go into the classroom to teach in the morning and try to reassure my students that they are safe,” texted one friend, a fellow Brown alum living in Providence and a teacher at a local school. “But I don’t fully believe my own words.”
2025-12-17 20:30:00
Not long ago, plagiarist-turned-MAGA-influencer Benny Johnson stood in a parking garage underneath Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem emerged; the two embraced, then loaded into SUVs to drive outside the city to ICE’s Broadview detainment facility. Johnson filmed the road in front of him for a video, which he posted to his 6 million subscriber YouTube channel, snapping his fingers in excitement. Upon arriving, demonstrators—whom Johnson referred to as “left-wing orcs”—were being watched by armed, masked agents who looked, he said admiringly, “ready to conquer Baghdad.”
Johnson seamlessly blends fawning Trump coverage, PR, rage-bait, and apologism.
When the video cut to a group of handcuffed protesters, looking glum, Johnson beamed: “These are exactly the kind of people we want to be pissing off.”
Johnson trailed Noem through the building as she spoke to underlings at their desks, “raising the esprit de corps,” he declared. Throughout his tour, Johnson repeatedly claimed that the facility had been “attacked” so many times that it had been necessary to install a “sniper’s nest.” A rooftop shot shows Noem, her mouth stretched into a deep frown, gazing at a turret-mounted gun aimed at the street. “These are very dangerous times,” Johnson added.
“What’s going on homie?” Johnson asked, turning to an ICE agent in a black balaclava and orange sunglasses, his face completely hidden. He shook the officer’s hand vigorously. “We’re here to support you guys.”
Johnson’s role that early October day was somewhere between adoring observer and fringe participant, as captured in a video in his typical style: reasonably professionally produced, with the jumpy, fast-talking, quick cuts beloved by influencers; studiously provocative; and slavishly devoted to the Trump administration.
In the journalism world, Johnson is best known for leaving two publications in disgrace after his plagiarism was discovered, and for taking—inadvertently, he has said—money from a Kremlin-backed media organization, and for being a hard partier, a difficult boss and colleague, and an almost surreally dedicated self-promoter. (“I met him once at a party,” says a colleague of mine. “His whole vibe is so weird that I thought at first he might be fucking with me.”)
Now, he’s something like the administration’s propagandist and content creator in chief, with his work seamlessly blending fawning coverage, PR, rage-bait, and apologism. While ostensibly an independent vlogger and podcaster, Johnson’s role is premised on access to—and lavish posts about—both administration initiatives like Noem’s raids or touring Alligator Alcatraz with the president, and more social engagements, like watching UFC fights ringside with Trump, smoking cigars at the vice presidential residence, and a Christmastime tour of the White House with his family. All of this more or less lives up to Johnson’s social media tagline: “Your front seat to the golden era.”
Reporters and others who have watched Johnson’s evolution aren’t exactly surprised by where he’s ended up, describing him as “a charismatic motherfucker,” as one former colleague put it, a political and social chameleon, and someone whose work seems untethered by normal moral and ethical considerations.
“It’s ended at the place where it was inevitable that he would end,” says one person who socialized with him in DC about a decade ago.
His politics then were “sort of a libertarian inflected conservatism,” another person who knew him at the time says, “skeptical of power and government. And it’s absurd to look at him now.”
“The thing you need to know about Benny is he’s a chameleon,” says a former colleague from BuzzFeed News. “Drop him into any environment and he’ll reflect that environment because he wants to be liked.”
Johnson’s particular notoriety is a useful key to understanding a core value of the Trump administration: shamelessness. The president’s circle is full of people with notable—and, in many cases, ongoing—public scandals. For Johnson, like so many others, not running from their past is a feature, not a bug.
“One of the great virtues to have is that you got caught doing bad things and not giving a fuck,” says John Stanton, a former DC bureau chief at BuzzFeed News, who was involved in the outlet’s 2014 decision to fire Johnson. “That’s the definition of Donald Trump’s career. He’s been caught over and over again. I think they value that greatly.”
“His whole vibe is so weird that I thought at first he might be fucking with me.”
Another thing Trump values is intense toadying, and Johnson today has no qualms about being in open alignment with power. He depicts himself as part of a battle for the future of America, one with Trump fearlessly at the helm and his fellow pro-Trump media members manning the guns. Their targets are Democrats, the mainstream media, LGBTQ visibility, political correctness, immigration, and any other object of hate the president might identify on any given week.
“True freedom is a functional, peaceful, orderly society where you can get a piece of the American Dream,” Johnson tweeted recently. “We must protect and fight for it at all costs. This is our generational battle. This is our Normandy and Iwo Jima. The enemy is already inside the gates.”
The results are making themselves felt. Johnson has cast himself as an heir to the throne of his former boss, slain Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk. Johnson’s wife, Katelyn Rieley Johnson, has bragged that he got Jimmy Kimmel pulled off the air after the late-night host discussed Kirk’s death. In a podcast within a week of the shooting, Johnson, who has said he was a close friend of Kirk’s, seemed to get FCC Chair Brendan Carr to endorse a claim that Kimmel’s monologue had been a “clear cut violation” of policy against “news distortion.”
“Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” ABC’s suspension soon followed.
Johnson is pushing the boundaries of even what the Trump wing of the Republican Party is willing to say. He’s launched an attack on H-1B visas, those granted to skilled workers in specialty occupations, and called for a halt to legal immigration too. He’s also one of the far-right voices amplifying unproven claims that welfare fraud among Somali immigrants in Minnesota has funded the terrorist group al-Shabaab.
“Your tax dollars are being stolen and shipped over to people who hate us and want us dead,” Johnson tweeted. “You should be furious. This is a direct result of careless immigration policies. We must ramp up mass deportations and halt all legal immigration.”
More and more overtly, Johnson is depicting nonwhite immigrants as an existential cultural threat, an increasingly stark and baldly racist us-or-them approach. And he’s using the tips and tricks of virality and traffic-mongering he learned at places like BuzzFeed to do it.
Johnson, 38, is trim and nondescript, with sandy brown hair, black-rimmed glasses, and an absolutely immobile forehead. His speaking style is usually bland, a mildly incredulous cadence and lowered volume that can be reminiscent of Tucker Carlson under light sedation. In what seems like an effort to sound younger, he sometimes greets his viewers with “yo,” or proclaims things to be “wild.”
Johnson’s company, Benny Media, produces an extraordinary amount of content: His YouTube channel churns out one to four videos a day. His five-day-a-week podcast, The Benny Show, interviews members of Congress, Cabinet members, various Trumps, and conspiracy peddlers back to back, an unbroken stream of boosterism and suspicion. Johnson tweets relentlessly (4 million followers) and posts versions of his YouTube content to Instagram (2 million followers) and TikTok (just over 325,000). The effect is a wall of content, a one-man Fox News.
Johnson’s value to the administration is rooted in his sycophancy; he reliably depicts them in the heroic, tough, battle-ready light they want to be seen. This has led to unintended consequences: In November, a 233-page opinion from Sara Ellis, a Chicago-based federal judge, cited Johnson’s videos eight times while demonstrating that Noem and Greg Bovino, the senior US Border Patrol official who’s become the face of Trump’s anti-migrant crackdown, illegally encouraged force against demonstrators.
“For example,” Ellis wrote, Johnson’s footage captured Noem as she “admonished agents at Broadview to go hard against people for ‘the way that they’re talking, speaking, who they’re affiliated with, who they’re funded with, and what they’re talking about…,’ statements that Bovino then echoed.” Ellis dryly noted that Noem stood for an interview with Johnson with a group of “arrestees as a backdrop,” people who were later released without charges. In a tweet, Johnson dubbed these people, falsely, “Democrat domestic terrorists.”
Johnson puts out videos that appeal to both racist and conspiratorial viewers.
Johnson also puts out videos that would appeal to both racist and more overtly conspiratorial viewers: a video mocking Black EBT recipients upset about losing SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, for instance, or one that expressed support for the baseless theory promoted by Candace Owens that France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, was born male. (The Macrons have sued Owens and others who spread the claim.) Johnson has amplified a similar false story about Michelle Obama, and also is not above making his own pure, grotesque outrage bait: After his visit to Chicago, he posted an AI-generated video of himself in a Batman suit, punching people in sombreros and an Asian woman. (Johnson later deleted the tweet.)
“He’s always on,” says Keith Edwards, a left-leaning YouTuber who has tracked Johnson’s rise. “It’s a superpower. It’s probably a bit of dysfunction as well.”
“He’s able to say and do things that I think are just kind of beyond the pale,” Edwards adds. “Going on ICE raids, saying things that are clearly not true…It’s a level of relationship with the truth that I just think is abysmal. He doesn’t really have one.”
The Trump administration and its allies have backed and promoted Johnson to new heights, and his enemies are also now the enemies of the state. In October, Attorney General Pam Bondi stood aside Johnson and helped announce charges against a 69-year-old San Diego man who allegedly sent him a letter expressing a wish that someone would murder him like Kirk. Bondi cast Johnson as an heir to Kirk’s legacy: “Benny is a well-known media personality carrying a message very similar to Charlie’s, grounded largely in faith and love of country.”
Ever on-message, he explicitly blamed the threat against him on the Democratic Party. “This is what happens when a party abandons faith and morality,” Johnson tweeted that day. “It is the same Godless hatred that threatened my family, murdered Charlie, attacked churches and ICE agents, and tried to assassinate President Trump.”
The White House gave Johnson a place of honor at an August press conference—the briefing room’s daily “new media” seat—from which he falsely claimed his onetime home in Washington, DC, had been set on fire in 2020, seeming to suggest it was a targeted attack. According to the New York Times, Johnson also claimed in a subsequent YouTube video that his house “was burned to the ground.” While there was an “intentionally set” fire on his block, according to DC’s fire department, firefighters contained the “blaze to [the] home of origin,” which was actually his neighbor’s. Johnson sold the supposedly destroyed house in 2021. At the press conference, Johnson also falsely claimed his security camera had captured murders on his block, when none had been recently reported. (There had been a nearby shooting the day before the fire, which left three people with non-life-threatening injuries. A suspect with a long history of drug-related crimes was later arrested for the shooting; his lawyer declined to comment.) Today, Johnson, his wife, and their four young children are based in Tampa. In a Newsmax appearance, he described moving to Florida as a personal escape from the “communist” leadership and lawlessness of East Coast cities.
Johnson fired back at the Times story on Twitter/X, sharing security footage of smoke emanating from a window of his old house and his wife fleeing, their baby in her arms. Johnson called the paper’s reporting “dehumanizing propaganda” and proof of the “Left’s goal…to never grant sympathy to regular Americans, even if they’re innocent children. Evil bastards.”
Alas, Johnson has complained that trouble followed him to Tampa. This month, he tweeted that a man showed up at his door “ranting about me” before going to the house of another Florida-based conservative figure, Phillip Buchanan, who goes by Catturd online. According to federal court records, the man, identified as Andrew Aiyar, has been charged with posting a threatening tweet saying he intended to kill the wife of another conservative podcaster, Matt Walsh, “with a meat cleaver.”
“I don’t like to speak publicly about this kind of stuff because it involves my family and their security. I’m sick over it,” Johnson wrote. “But I have an obligation to amplify this case as it is one of multiple ongoing criminal prosecutions for threats against my family. Over the past year I’ve watched my President get shot in the head and my friend get assassinated. Things are spiraling wildly out of control. There are real-world consequences for psychotic rhetoric and lies amplified online. Enough.” Aiyar’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Johnson was throwing back shots with the same mainstream media he now denounces as evil. Unlike many figures in Trump’s media ecosystem, Johnson’s early career included work at news outlets with track records of real reporting. After beginning as a blogger for The Federalist, in 2012 Johnson, then writing for The Blaze, started courting Ben Smith, BuzzFeed News’ founding editor-in-chief. As a form of flattery, Johnson told Smith during a conversation on the floor of that year’s Republican National Convention that he was, according to Smith’s 2024 memoir Traffic, “religiously copying our work” for The Blaze.
Johnson was active in a hard partying, ideologically diverse, and sexually libertine DC scene.
As Smith writes, he was looking to hire a right-leaning writer who would allow fellow conservatives to “see themselves in BuzzFeed.”
“Benny represented, to me, an untapped new well of traffic,” Smith wrote, “a new identity to plumb.” Smith, now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, writes that he allowed his eyes to “skate over” what he describes as Johnson’s “race-baiting” posts on the New Black Panther Party, an obscure group that Johnson implied had influence over President Obama. “I certainly didn’t run his work through,” Smith admits, “plagiarism-detection software.”
At first, Johnson’s presence at BuzzFeed was a hit. “He was one of the reporters who consistently drove a lot of traffic at a time when that really mattered,” a former DC friend says. “He’d do these buzzy stories,” they added, that didn’t necessarily push any ideology. A particularly popular one from 2013 focused on the “running of the interns,” a Supreme Court coverage ritual where young broadcast news workers sprint freshly issued opinions to on-camera reporters waiting outside the building, vying to be first. The listicle was heavy on photos, light on text, and undeniably charming.
At the time, Johnson was omnipresent on the DC circuit, knocking down drinks with an ideologically diverse group of journalists and political operatives, united in their mission of trying to get into the most exclusive parties. (When only a few people showed up to his 2013 birthday, he was devastated, one person remembers.) The scene was hard partying and sexually libertine, another person from those circles recalls, even among the more politically conservative figures. “There was a lot of sex happening,” they said, including right-leaning people who were somewhat openly bisexual. “A psychoanalyst would have a field day.”
Even then, though, Johnson didn’t let his guard down much, even with people he spent a lot of time drinking with. “He wasn’t a person that it felt possible to get close to,” one journalist who knew him then says.
Johnson was productive, racking up more than 500 stories in a year and a half at BuzzFeed News, earning the title of Viral Politics editor. There was, however, trouble in paradise: “Benny was always the target of progressives on Twitter,” Smith wrote in his book, “who saw him as a dangerous protofascist.” In July 2014, after Johnson accused the Independent Journal Review, a recently formed conservative site, of plagiarizing his work on former President George H.W. Bush’s socks, two pseudonymous Twitter users built a case that Johnson had himself been recycling text from Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. After their findings were picked up by Gawker’s J.K. Trotter, Smith initially defended him as “one of the web’s deeply original writers.” But BuzzFeed began investigating Johnson’s work and realized that at least 15 stories had been plagiarized, including some that relied on content published by other news outlets. As Stanton recalls, “that’s when it was like, ‘We’re gonna fire him.’” The number of plagiarized stories BuzzFeed uncovered ultimately reached 41.
BuzzFeed suspended Johnson while the investigation took place. “Unbeknownst to us he went to the beach with his girlfriend,” Stanton says, “and turned off his phone.” To deliver the news of his firing, Stanton resorted to calling his girlfriend. When she handed the phone to Johnson, Stanton recalls, he said his detractors were “jealous, and after him, and people didn’t like him because he was conservative.” Then Johnson said “YOLO” and hung up.
“Put aside the moral implications or reasoning that he has for being who he is, he was clearly attempting to make a name for himself and become famous, and he took a bunch of shortcuts to do that knowing that could have bad blowback on his colleagues—and it did. People questioned their reporting,” Stanton, now editor of New Orleans’ altweekly Gambit, says. “He never apologized to his co-workers for putting them in this tough spot.”
“He’s quite talented. He could’ve done good stuff,” says another one of his BuzzFeed editors. “But he was too lazy to do the work.”
Johnson was silent on social media for about a month before announcing that he’d taken a social media editor job at the National Review—one of the places he’d plagiarized from. The ironies compounded, when, within a year, he joined the Independent Journal Review as “content director.” In 2015, Ben Terris described the move in a Washington Post profile as a triumphant comeback, noting that Johnson had escaped what’s usually a journalism career death sentence. “Benny rebounded unusually quickly” after BuzzFeed, Terris wrote, “fielding offers within weeks of his dismissal from media organizations eager to get a piece of the addictive new breed of storytelling perfected by this 29-year-old.”
But by the following year, Johnson had precipitated what media reporter Oliver Darcy, then writing for Business Insider, called “a crisis” at IJR after being accused of plagiarism, again, by his colleagues; he also faced charges that he was mercurial, dictatorial, and verbally abusive to people working under him.
“I hadn’t been screamed at like that since I was probably seven years old on the playground.”
“Johnson—who once compared himself to Walt Disney, two people said—frequently berated the video team over what was characterized as minuscule details,” Darcy wrote. “Multiple sources said Johnson loudly hurled profanity at team members for small mistakes, fostering a distressing work environment. The behavior eventually led to Johnson receiving a formal verbal reprimand from the company’s human-resources department.”
Johnson was demoted after the Business Insider story, and, by 2017, had left IJR too, following his role in a story that baselessly claimed former President Obama was somehow behind a court ruling blocking Trump’s first-term anti-Muslim travel ban. By 2019, he made a clean break from news outlets by signing as chief creative officer at Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and, around 2020, co-founded Arsenal Media, a PR firm to help conservative politicians and media figures go viral. That job also produced bad press, when an investigation from The Verge again depicted him as “bullying and humiliating” staffers.
Johnson could be “very abusive, very toxic, screaming at people, like using profanity, vulgarity, making women cry, like pushing them to the edge,” one anonymous worker told The Verge, elaborating that they “hadn’t been screamed at like that since I was probably seven years old on the playground.”
While Arsenal Media still exists, Johnson is no longer part of it or Turning Point USA, relying instead on his own eponymous media company to make money. At least one major source of Johnson’s funding, however, has dried up. In September 2024, two Russian nationals were indicted for allegedly bankrolling Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based company that, as part of a plot to stoke domestic division, funneled nearly $10 million to conservative influencers, including Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.
The Justice Department said the content creators who had ended up as part of the foreign influence operation hadn’t been told of the company’s Russian funding, and Tenet Media’s talent said they were unaware of the true source of their hefty paychecks. In a statement at the time, Johnson said he and the “other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme. My lawyers will handle anyone who states or suggests otherwise.”
These days, Johnson has fashioned an identity as a conservative dad and devoted husband, a model of traditional values. (“Benny is a man of simple tastes,” his website bio reads, one who “enjoys sitting down with a glass of whiskey and a pipe, preferably after a meal featuring as much meat as he can fit on the grill.”) For the last few years, his wife has made her own efforts to become a social media personality, using her previous career as a registered nurse to rebrand as “Nurse Kate,” “a health and wellness advocate” who also promotes vaccine suspicion and what she’s called a “trad wife” lifestyle; she recently appeared on Fox News to call for an end to infighting in the MAGA movement.
Johnson has become more overtly anti-LGBTQ over time, complaining in a June YouTube video about Pride Month “shoving rainbow-colored vomit down your throat,” as he put it. This has raised eyebrows, given that a former BuzzFeed colleague of Johnson’s, the author Saeed Jones, has posted online that the two men once “made out” at a booze-soaked 2013 company Christmas party. (Jones did not respond to requests for comment.) “I’m not naming names,” Jones added, but “I wasn’t even the only guy Benny made out with THAT night.”
“I personally believe Benny Johnson should get as much conservative dick as he wants, and I’m happy for him.”
At least two gay men in progressive media have commented on this apparent hypocrisy. In September, Keith Edwards made a video, which has amassed more than 600,000 views, rounding up evidence of Johnson’s bisexuality or homosexuality. In addition to Jones’ tweets, it includes allegations from far-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos and a 2017 incident where Johnson complained about an ad on Military Times’ site promoting a gay cruise, seeming not to realize it was likely targeted based on his own web browsing history.
“I’m allergic to hypocrisy,” Edwards says. “I personally believe Benny Johnson should get as much conservative dick as he wants, and I’m happy for him. But you have to be truthful about who you are. Otherwise you’re damaging people like you who don’t have the ability to hide.” Progressive talk radio host Michelangelo Signorile, who’s written a book arguing for outing closeted political figures, responded to Edwards’ video on his blog, writing that “if this is true, it’s certainly relevant for the media to confirm it and report on it, as Johnson is part of a movement doing enormous damage to the LGBTQ community and is a powerful player who helped elect a president who is promoting vile hatred against queer people.”
Rumors about Johnson’s sexuality have also become ammunition in a fractious battle, as the MAGA movement has been convulsed by a power struggle kicked off by Kirk’s death, the lack of a clear successor to Trump, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s emerging apostasy. In December, Johnson and his wife appeared to threaten to sue Yiannopoulos—a self-proclaimed “ex-gay” man—for repeatedly tweeting that Johnson is closeted. In return, Yiannopoulos tweeted that “I have receipts, and the truth is a total defense against any claim of defamation or libel.”
For anyone who might wonder about the gap between the stories they’ve heard about Johnson and the image he now presents, Johnson has credited Charlie Kirk with helping personally set him on the straight and narrow.
“I was unmarried,” Johnson said during an October speech at a Moms for Liberty summit that he posted to TikTok. “I was a degenerate. I was every bit addicted to alcohol and some very bad things. And through Charlie’s example in my life, he Christ-centered me.”
As Johnson continues his Trump-and-Kirk-and-Christ-aided comeback, some observers have questioned the authenticity of his social media followings. Progressive YouTuber David Pakman, for instance, accused him in August of using “artificial inflation strategies” to boost his subscriber count far beyond what his videos’ viewership would suggest. (A YouTube spokesperson told the Times it “did not find any evidence of inauthentic traffic, including inauthentic channel subscriptions.”)
But what can be discerned about Johnson’s audience from the comments they leave on his videos is that they skew older—baby boomers who found their way online and eventually into the deeper end of the conspiracy pool. His content is still packaged, more or less, as news, and it is accessible on platforms that they can find; he focuses heavily on issues those viewers care about, like alleged voter fraud and the perceived unfairness of previous prosecutions against Donald Trump.
One of the few times Johnson ever showed signs of going off-message was during the first round of controversy over the Trump administration’s failure to release the Epstein files in full, even as he repeatedly insisted that Trump was not in the files himself. But at the same time he suggested he was unsatisfied by the administration’s lacking disclosure, Johnson was running cover, assuring his audience on July 14, for instance, that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—who’d threatened to quit over a feud with Bondi over releasing the files—was working hard on something “very important.”
“Trump Team is ‘back together and locking in,’” Johnson wrote, putting his words in quotes without making it clear whose words he was quoting.
But Johnson has mostly worked to echo the administration’s evolving line on the files. When Trump, under growing public pressure, ginned up a new Epstein investigation targeting prominent Democrats and said the House GOP should back a bill demanding their release, Johnson was on-message, writing that “every shred of evidence points directly at Democrats.”
“He has a ten or 15 year career to make a lot of money, and then you’ll watch him get crazy.”
He’s been rewarded for that loyalty, again, by both the Trump administration and the larger MAGA sphere. Johnson, whose podcast is sponsored by an online home mortgage lender, recently announced that he’ll be partnering with a conservative property developer as a spokesperson for “Make Housing Great Again.” (The Trump-linked America First Policy Institute, sponsor of the initiative, did not respond to a request for comment on whether he will be paid. Johnson also did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.) In Johnson’s words, the “fight for homeownership” is a “fight for the survival of our culture and civilization.”
“The average first-time homebuyer in America is now 40-years-old. That is far beyond the optimal age to get married and start a family,” Johnson told Fox News. “This is a generational betrayal, and we must reverse it for our children and for their future. This was the final policy priority of Charlie Kirk. We will deliver and save the American Dream.”
Many people who know Johnson ponder his longevity should the Republican party ever move on from Trump.
“Some of these influencers in DC are getting so close to the administration it’s backfiring on their brands,” a person familiar with conservative media told me while discussing Johnson.
“He has a ten or 15 year career to make a lot of money and then you’ll watch him get crazy,” someone who knew him in conservative media predicts. “At a certain point that becomes useless to people in serious political circles. Assuming that the Trump thing is a blip in history, I don’t see the classic Marco Rubio type using Benny for distribution. The candle burns bright and then it burns out.”
“I don’t know that anybody will have any kind of good reason to be nice to Benny if and when the worm turns and all the authoritarians are out of favor,” agrees Stanton, the former BuzzFeed editor. “I don’t think he’s got that kind of shelf life. But I’m not sure that matters anymore.”
2025-12-17 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Flood, storm, and fire survivors gathered in Washington, DC, on Monday to express their alarm over a leaked report from the FEMA Review Council that proposes halving the agency’s workforce and scaling back federal disaster assistance.
Holding images of the devastation wrought by disasters in their communities, more than 80 survivors from 10 states and Puerto Rico gathered at a press conference in the historic Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.
There, Brandy Gerstner tearfully recounted the flash floods that destroyed her home and family farm in Sandy Creek, Texas, in July. With little help from the county or state, Gerstner said she and her family were left to navigate the flood’s aftermath on their own. “From the very beginning, it was neighbors and volunteers who showed up. Official help was scarce,” she said.
It took search and rescue three days to arrive in Sandy Creek. “By that time, it was search and recovery,” said Gerstner.”
Weeks later, after being told that FEMA could help pay for costs not already covered by a small flood insurance payout, her application for federal assistance was denied.
“‘Passing disaster management to the states’ is code-speak for letting people suffer and die.”
In DC, Gerstner was one of several survivors to condemn the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink FEMA’s scope. “We know what it feels like when emergency systems fall short. Proposals to weaken FEMA should further alarm every American,” said Gerstner.
Trump has repeatedly expressed his intention to shift FEMA’s responsibilities to states. In June, he told reporters assembled in the Oval Office that the administration wanted to “wean off of FEMA,” and move many of the agency’s responsibilities to the state level, “so the governors can handle it.”
Just weeks into his second term, Trump created the FEMA Review Council, calling for a “full-scale review” of the agency and citing “serious concerns of political bias in FEMA.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth co-chair the council, which is composed almost entirely of Republican federal and state officials.
After nearly a year of deliberation, the committee was poised to vote on its final recommendations for the agency’s future at a meeting on Thursday in DC. But the meeting was abruptly cancelled after a draft of the council’s report leaked to news outlets.
The White House has not yet set a date for a rescheduled meeting, but the leaked report, which calls for sweeping reductions to FEMA’s staff and scope, sparked immediate backlash from advocacy groups, disaster survivors, and emergency management experts.
“This is absolutely appalling, and it makes an already difficult disaster process even more arduous.”
In addition to shifting greater responsibility for disaster response and recovery to the states, the report’s recommendations include cutting the FEMA workforce by 50 percent and moving employees out of Washington, DC, over the next two to three years.
The report also outlines a block grant system that would streamline the delivery of disaster aid to states within 30 days of a major federal disaster declaration, expediting cash flow while requiring a higher cost share from states.
However, fewer disasters might qualify for such federal assistance in the reimagined FEMA. “Federal assistance should only be reserved for truly catastrophic events that exceed [State, Local, Tribal and Territorial] capacity and capability,” the report states, according to CNN.
Restricting federal aid could have dire consequences to states already struggling to support disaster victims, said Amanda Devecka-Rinear, executive director of the New Jersey Organizing Project and senior at Organizing Resilience, which hosted the Monday press conference. “‘Passing disaster management to the states’ is code-speak for letting people suffer and die,” said Devecka-Rinear in a statement.
This weekend, tens of thousands of residents in Washington state were ordered to evacuate their homes amidst historic rainfall and flooding. Gov. Bob Ferguson declared a statewide emergency and has announced meetings with FEMA to expedite a federal disaster designation and secure critical funding and resources.
If the current precedent holds, that may take weeks. On average, it’s taken more than a month to approve requests for federal disaster designations during Trump’s second term, the Associated Press found.
Even once a federal disaster designation is granted, there’s no guarantee of rapid response under the current agency administration, said Abby McIlraith, an emergency management specialist at FEMA.
McIlraith has been on administrative leave since August, when she, along with current and former agency employees, signed the Katrina Declaration, condemning FEMA practices interfering with disaster recovery, including Secretary Noem’s policy of personally reviewing and approving all expenses over $100,000.
“This is absolutely appalling, and it makes an already difficult disaster process even more arduous for the people it serves,” said McIlraith at the Monday press conference.
McIlraith, Gerstner and other survivors called for a fully independent FEMA not based within the Department of Homeland Security.
“Disasters don’t discriminate, but disaster recovery does,” said Michael McLemore, a St. Louis-based electoral justice organizer and survivor of a deadly May 16 tornado.
During the St. Louis tornado, sirens failed to sound across northern parts of the city. The tornado caused $1.6 billion in immediate damage, yet was not declared a major federal disaster until nearly a month later, said McLemore.
“You’re here today because this building and this government have failed you,” said New Jersey senator Andy Kim, speaking to the assembled survivors. “There should be accountability, there should be change, there should be real effort. What is more important for our government than to be there for our people in their time of great need?”
2025-12-17 19:00:00
For many Americans, proper sanitation and clean water seem like issues for developing countries. But much of rural America—and even parts of US cities—still struggles to provide the basics we all need to survive. And as infrastructure ages and strains under the threat of climate change, the problems will likely get worse.
Environmental justice activist Catherine Coleman Flowers has been on the forefront of these issues for decades. And she says that while a lack of sanitation is often found in poor, Black regions, especially in the Deep South, these basic environmental issues cut across racial lines.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“We have to expand the definition of environmental justice, because we can’t let people think that because if you are not Black and poor, you are not going to be victimized by this,” she says. “That’s not true.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Flowers sits down with host Al Letson to talk about her years working to achieve “sanitation justice” in the South, how biblical lessons apply to climate offenders, and her book of personal essays, Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: So I want to zoom back a little bit because I think that if you do not live in a rural area, you can kind of not think about these issues. It feels like it’s a world away and not something that is happening in the United States, but in the United States, we are actually dealing … And not just in rural areas, but all across the United States. We’re dealing with issues with clean drinking water, open sewage, all of those things. As an environmental justice activist and someone who works in this field, can you kind of lay out big picture like what’s going on in America that we just don’t talk about enough?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, first of all, let me just expand to talk about what’s happening in urban America. A lot of our wastewater treatment systems, the big pipe systems, have only been built to last for 50 years, and they’ve already gone beyond where they should be in the first place. So a lot of places are having problems now with sewage raining back in people’s homes. That’s true in Detroit. When it rains a lot in Detroit, people are having problems with sewage backing up in their basements.
We saw the same thing in Mount Vernon in New York, outside of New York City. We’ve been told, we’ve been contacted by people in the Bronx that talk about when weather events, they have sewage running back into their homes as well. So it’s not just in rural areas. Our infrastructure has not been designed to keep up with the demands of a changing climate. And some of them haven’t been built to keep up with the demands of population growth, and that’s a problem as well.
So we’re finding sanitation issues around the country, and we’re not just hearing from poor people in Lowndes County. We’re hearing from people in Malibu. We’re hearing from people in affluent areas in Florida. There are people in Atlanta metropolitan area that are on septic tanks. So a lot of people in metropolitan areas that are not deemed rural communities are also on septic tanks. But not only are we finding that as an environmental justice issue, but we recently went to East Palestine and Ohio where a train derailed two years ago, the area is probably about 95 to 97% white, but they’re poor. They’re powerless. And consequently, a lot of people that were exposed to the toxins from that derailment are complaining about their health. They’re complaining that they still feel that the land and air and water is contaminated. So what we saw there were people screening for help. They want the same kind of help that people in Lowndes County are asking for.
We talk about what’s happening in Memphis and what is happening there when they build a data center that did not deal with the environmental harms that is causing in that community. I think that we have to expand the definition of environmental justice because we can’t let people think that because if you are not Black and poor, you’re not going to be victimized by this. That’s not true. We all drink the same water. The people in Flint, when I went to Flint and I understood that environmental justice, we can’t narrowly look at environmental justice. If you’re white in Flint, you drank the same water. It didn’t treat you differently because you were white. Everybody is impacted by it. It’s just that the communities that have the greatest impact tend to be those communities that are poor.
And maybe if you’re not a billionaire and you only have a few meetings, you could be marginalized too.
Can you tell me, how did you come to this work?
I came to this work, it was kind of an evolution. Initially, I was a teacher. Well, first of all, I was an activist in high school, and at that time the issue was education, my education.
But can you take me back to where you were in high school? Because I feel like that’s an important part of it. It’s not just that you were an activist in high school. You were a Black girl who was an activist in the deep South.
Yeah. Also, I was living in Lowndes County, Alabama, which is between Selma and Montgomery. And my principal at the time would stop school at 12:00 so that we could have parties. And everybody was happy about that because that meant there was no class. I was unhappy about it because I wanted to go to college and I felt like my education was being short-changed. So I was approached by a group that was organized by the American Friends Service Committee who was at that time looking at education in the South because there were a lot of issues around the desegregation of public schools. And they approached me and started teaching me what the Alabama law was. And based on the Alabama law, I was documenting things in my high school that were in violation of that law. Based on the documentation of those violations, we were able to bring charges against the principal, saying that he had violated the Alabama code as related to education. And ultimately he was removed.
And then later I became a teacher. And then after I moved back to Alabama, I didn’t teach in Alabama. I started working doing economic development and found out it was not easy to do without having infrastructure. You can’t recruit businesses into a community that don’t have water infrastructure, sewage infrastructure. In some cases, natural gas, that’s one of the requirements. So in that process, I met a gentleman named Bob Woodson who was helping me with the economic development side. When he came to visit for the very first time he came to Lowndes County, a county commissioner called me and said,” You should take him by this family’s home. “When we went there, we saw raw sewage running down the side of the road from their compound where they live, and we found out that the husband and wife had been arrested because they could not afford onsite septic that worked. And that’s how I came to this work around sanitation. That was the beginning.
So sanitation isn’t sexy. When you’re talking to people about the sanitation issues in rural counties, specifically like in Lowndes County, how do you get people to engage in this?
Well, the way I get people to engage in sanitation issues, you’re right, it’s not sexy, but everybody has to use a bathroom. So whether it’s sexy or not, it’s a requirement that no matter where we go in the world, people, this is one thing we all have to do. And when we talk about it and we’re talking to rural communities, whether they’re rural communities of people that are Black, rural communities, people that are Hispanic, or whether we are talking to people from more affluent communities that are using septic, we hear the same complaint. It doesn’t work well, and nobody likes it coming back into their homes. Straight piping is one thing. Straight piping is when you flush your toilet and go straight out onto the ground, there’s no kind of treatment whatsoever. However, there are a lot of people that have paid for onsite septic and it doesn’t work.
And so can you just give me, before we dive deeper into that subject, can you give me an understanding of what Lowndes County is like right now?
So Lowndes County is still very rural. And when we talk about rural, I think when people think about a rural community, they think about people living five miles from the nearest house. That is not true. What we find in a lot of rural communities is that the settlement patterns are, if you look in Lowndes County right now, we were recently, last week we were in Lowndes County and we were on Macpherson Street. Everybody on Macpherson Street is related to each other. So the settlement patterns in these rural communities is that a lot of people that live in these areas, they know each other. They’ve been there for years. So there’s a special kinship to the land. There’s also pride in land ownership. There’s pride in the history of Lowndes County in that the original Black Panther Party was founded there. People there are very prideful, but they’re also very poor.
You have people there that are very poor and the septic systems that we were looking at while we were there last week averaged around $26,000 each.
Yeah. I used to be on a septic system in the house, an older house that I had, and maintaining septic systems are hard, but also just getting a septic system put in is really cost prohibitive, especially if you’re in an economically depressed area.
Yes, it is cost prohibitive. We’re trying to figure out ways in which we can fill that void that has been a void since I’ve been doing this work since 2002. It’s figuring out how to make sure families not only have access to septic systems, but septic systems that work because I think the popular narrative has been when they fail, the families are blame. So what we’re seeing is that it is that the climate change is impacting these septic systems, but the septic systems haven’t changed in terms of the designs to deal with the fact that the climate is also changing, that we’re getting more water.
In Lowndes County, what’s the regulation? Because earlier you said that you went to a house and you saw the sewage coming down and the family, the husband and wife were arrested because they did not have a septic tank. So what is the regulation? How long has that been in place and why hasn’t the state been able to help people get into a septic system?
Well, first of all, the regulations are written by the state and the state enforces them. The state is also responsible for training the installers. They train the people that pump the septic systems. The state is involved in every step of the process and it’s not free. You have to pay for it. And then the tank itself is a completely different animal that’s separate, but you have to pay for that as well. When we first moved to Lowndes County, people had outhouses and they went from outhouses to sex pools and from sex pools to septic tanks. And what we are finding is that the septic tanks, even if you have a septic tank, they fail. But when the septic tanks fail, it’s not the onus is on the homeowner. The liability is transferred to the homeowner. And I think that is part of what the problem is.
Now, the state itself, in Alabama, they don’t have money to put in septic systems, but we found that in other states they have revolving loan funds and so forth where they actually help people get septic systems and then they pay it back and then they help someone else get septic systems. That was not the case in Alabama. It was left up to the homeowner. And what we tried to do, first of all, is bring this to the attention of people beyond the state that forced the state to do something, which led to our filing the complaint. That was one of the reasons why we filed the complaint with DOJ and Health and Human Services against the State of Alabama over this issue.
And how did the State of Alabama respond to that?
We did a parasite study in 2017, and once it was peer reviewed and published in 2017, the Alabama Department of Public Health responded by putting on their website that our parasite said it was not valid because we used PCR technology, which had not been approved by the FDA. Now, keep in mind, three years later, PCR technology was used to diagnose COVID. I guess they were trying to minimize our findings. And we found during this parasite study, we found hookworm and other tropical parasites that were associated with raw sewage. And it was that that led to us filing this complaint because they get their funding. A lot of their funding came from Health and Human Services. And instead of them trying to mitigate the problem, they instead were trying to minimize our study that raw sewage was on the ground. And that led to an investigation by DOJ.
I got a call from them saying that they would investigate our complaint, which they did. And there was a resolution that was signed between the Department of Justice, Health and Human Service Services and the Alabama Department of Public Health. What was noteworthy about the complaint that this was the first time DOJ had used civil rights law to investigate environmental justice issues. It was also the first time ever in history that there was a mitigation of this where there was a resolution in that regard. And when that happened, the state started allocating funding to deal with as part of the resolution, allocating funding to deal with the problem in Lowndes County. That ended in February of this year when the current administration took office and put on their website for DOJ that they were backing out of the agreement because it was illegal DEI.
So the people in Lowndes County who desperately need this sanitation work done were denied it because the Trump administration has deemed this as DEI.
Yes, but I have to also give the state some credit because what the state’s response was, as long as we still have money, and I don’t know how much money they received, but they said as long as they still had money, they would continue to try to work on resolving the problem. So I have to give them credit for that.
I want to pivot back to your latest book, Holy Ground, and this book is a collection of very personal essays. What inspired you to write it?
When I wrote Holy Ground, I wanted to lead people with positive messages to talk about my own experiences and for people to know that at the end of the day, I was still hopeful because a lot of times people give up, especially young people. They give up when they run into adversity instead of trying to push through it. And that was the point. And also to show people that if you make a bad mistake, you don’t have to wally in it. You change, you move on. And I did that by showing examples of people in history that made mistakes, but they changed. And I wanted people to know that we didn’t have to stay in a state of wrongdoing or unrighteousness.
And the first chapter really struck me because it’s actually something I think about a lot, and that is the 30 pieces of silver. So I should say that I am the son of a Baptist preacher. I’m a PK.
So I know it resonated.
Exactly. Exactly. So the things that you were talking about how, for those of our listeners who are not preacher’s kids, Judas Iscariot took 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus Christ in the Bible. He took the 30 pieces of silver and he betrayed Jesus with a kiss. And you take that metaphor at the beginning of your book to talk about the place that we are in America, not just in environmental justice. You focused on the problem of America, which I loved. Can you talk to me about that? Why does that metaphor seem to fit in so many different ways when we think about the issues that are plaguing America today?
The whole point of it was when I talked about America, not specifically about environmental justice, because sometimes when we talk just about environmental justice, people think we’re only talking about Black people when that’s not true, where the environmental injustices that are impacting people’s lives are happening around the country. And the one thing that they tend to have in common is that they’ve been marginalized primarily because they don’t have money. So I thought the best way to help people to see this was to use that common understanding of the story of Judas and then try to get them to apply it to what’s happening today.
Yeah. How did you feel on election day watching the country decide to put President Trump back in office?
I was confused. I was confused. But then I think back to the Old Testament where Moses led the Jewish people out of bondage, but they wandered in the desert for 40 years. Hopefully we won’t be wandering for 40 years, but maybe in the next four years, we decide we don’t want to be in the desert anymore.
I think that we have taken a lot of things for granted. We took democracy for granted, we took freedom, we took the right to vote for granted, and now people are seeing that we can’t take it for granted, that we can’t stand on the sidelines and let things happen. We thought we would never have a king. We thought that you could go to the courts for justice all of the time, but now other people are saying that it’s not just that when we talk about justice, you’re not just talking about black people, we’re talking about being an American citizen.
On the flip side, I think that a lot of people that voted for Trump would say the opposite, that they believe that Trump is acting on behalf of God, that he is the divine intervention that this country needed.
Well, I would tell them to read Revelations. I would also tell them that everybody that cloaks themselves in God are not of God. So I believe that a lot of those people now are questioning their own faith. They’re questioning their own decisions because it has not been consistent with the things that are Christlike. And recently we were in Italy and a lot of the conversations were around how we treat migrants. And it made me wonder, I’ve said it numerous times that if Christ were to come across the southern border right now, would ICE place him under arrest? And clearly, when I speak to people that are supposed to be part of the Christian family, I call upon them to question their faith if they believe that this is the right thing to do and the right way to do it.
In your opinion, what does environmental justice look like under the Trump administration? Is this a partisan issue under Trump?
I don’t think that environmental justice is a partisan issue. I think that environmental justice under the Trump administration is going to help people to understand why it’s not a partisan issue because a lot of people that will be impacted by no regulations will be those same people that thought that they would benefit from this presidency and the decisions that they’re making. I believe that we are going to see more people protesting environmental harms because they’re going to see the effects of making decisions without regulations being in place to protect the communities that they live in.
Who or what industries do you consider to be the biggest offenders against environmental justice?
Oh, wow. There’s so many of them. It depends on where you are in the country. Who are the biggest offenders? It depends on where you are. If I was in Eastern Carolina, I would say the factory farms, because they’re polluting the air, the water and the soil. If I was in Cancer Alley, I would say the multinational corporations that exist there that are producing lots of chemicals that are also contaminating the air to water and the soil. So it depends on where you’re located and the new kid on the block are the data centers. I don’t even think we know the impact of the data centers yet because that’s a new thing. So we’re going to have to revisit that to see. Unfortunately, we don’t really seem to wake up until the harms are already done and they’re irreversible.
Exactly. I think with the data centers, the only thing that may shine a little bit of light on it is that people are beginning to notice that their electric bills are significantly higher wherever these data centers are. And a lot of times when the middle class or when people who have money, their pocketbooks are affected, suddenly those issues kind of move to the forefront.
Yes. I think that whenever people’s, as you said, their pocketbooks are impacted, then of course they start asking questions and complaining because I read recently that the power that’s used to power a data center could power 80,000 homes. But I’m also seeing that there’s not an equal way in which they’re being built because there’s a data center that’s being built in Alabama where a lot of the power is being generated by solar.
That’s not what’s happening in Memphis. They’re using technologies differently based on who is negotiating, but apparently whoever was negotiating on behalf of the people in Memphis were the people that were living in those neighborhoods that are being impacted by it. And consequently, that’s why we got it. And I think that what’s going to be very important going forward in the future, no matter who’s in the White House is community engagement so that the communities can be a part of designing what it looks like. The communities would know firsthand what kind of jobs are coming out of this or are there jobs beyond construction jobs? Because the way they generally sell it to the community is all the jobs that are coming. But how many people are actually going to be employed working at these locations? And who’s going to pay the bill? As you’ve mentioned, in a lot of communities, people are seeing that their power bills are going up. Why? Why are they paying for this?
And if a data center is making your electric bill go up and they’re getting to make all the money off of it, they should be breaking you off. You should get a check as well. Why should they get all the profits and you get nothing?
Well, and again, it goes back to how we need to redesign what economic prosperity looks like. And part of that should go to the communities. I think they could still make billions of dollars and communities can prosper as well too.
2025-12-17 02:10:48
Hours after a Vanity Fair piece in which President Donald Trump’s chief of staff made a series of damaging, on-the-record remarks about the president, his policies, and allies, Susie Wiles appears to be attempting damage control.
“A disingenuously framed hit piece,” she said on X, claiming that it had been “done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.
But in disavowing the piece, Wiles did not specify which parts she took issue with. Nor did she deny or refute any of the many, oftentimes disparaging remarks she told Vanity Fair over the course of 11 interviews.
Condé Nast did not immediately respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment on Wiles’ complaint.
The embarrassing remarks include Wiles’ assessment that Trump, who doesn’t drink and whose older brother died of complications of alcoholism, “has an alcoholic’s personality.”
Wiles also had choice words for other members of the Trump administration. She called Elon Musk an “avowed” ketamine user who slept in a sleeping bag in the Executive Office Building during the day. US Attorney General Pam Bondi? “Completely whiffed” on the Epstein Files, Wiles told the magazine, referring to Bondi’s handling of the Epstein investigation. As for Vice President JD Vance, Wiles claims that he’s been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
Wiles’ candor also extended to Trump’s policies and legal actions, calling Charlie Kirk’s assassination the catalyst for Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution against his perceived political enemies. Wiles also claimed shock when Musk, who led DOGE as a “special government employee,” shut down USAID. (The decision has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.)
The two-part interview has since prompted speculation that Wiles could be planning her own exit from the White House amid tanking approval ratings and growing GOP dissent. Still, prominent people in the Trump administration condemned the interview and defended Wiles—including FBI Director Kash Patel, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
2025-12-17 01:19:07
A version of 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.
Every school shooting is horrific—a reminder of the worst form of American exceptionalism and one more infuriating occasion to question why so many of our neighbors and citizens accept this perverse violence and choose not to cry out for measures that might counter or diminish the mass murders that plague our land. When Donald Trump responds with the usual tut-tutting—“It’s a shame; just pray”—it’s a sign that doing nothing is just fine. Which is especially aggravating when gun violence devastates your own community.
I am a graduate of Brown University. As an alum, I have organized and held panels there. I know professors, administrators, and recent students. And many times, I have walked past or near the site of the Barus and Holley building where a gunman on Saturday burst into a lecture hall and shot 11 students, killing two of them. I mourn the lives lost, ache for the families of the dead, hope the best for the survivors, and grieve for the community, concerned for how this will impact the university’s students, teachers, and workers, and the people of Providence. We have all become too accustomed to such tragedies. They can seem faraway occurrences; that’s obviously a survival mechanism. It’s different when it’s close.
As my blood boiled in the aftermath of this horror, the usual context kicked in: In this level of gun violence, the United States stands alone among Western democracies. And the math is simple: We have more guns than other nations—500 million total firearms or so, by some estimates—and few restrictions on guns. Thus, more gun deaths. There’s nothing incomprehensible here.
One of the most aggravating elements of the so-called debate over gun violence is the despicable falsehood pushed by Republicans and conservatives: They are coming to confiscate your guns.
Nor are the politics difficult to understand. In the 1970s, as Republicans searched for cultural wedge issues with which they could coax white working class and ethnic voters from the Democrats, they landed on abortion, race, religion, and guns. Democrats might be fighting for workers’ rights and protections, better pay, the expansion of civil rights and personal liberties, and fewer handouts to the wealthy—but, hey, the Ds favor gun control. So they must be defeated. And for the Republicans—backed by the NRA—this strategy worked.
Shootings like this one are political inconveniences for them. They prompt the usual denunciations of Republicans’ do-nothingism and scorn for their hollow thoughts-and-prayers offerings. Republicans, though, only need to wait out the storm, and then they can get back to blocking and thwarting gun safety measures, deploying their silly arguments against any and all gun control. And one of the most aggravating elements of the so-called debate over gun violence is the despicable falsehood pushed by Republicans and conservatives: They are coming to confiscate your guns.
For years, this has been the mantra for the GOP: It’s not that Democrats merely champion restrictions on guns and assorted safeguards; they also want the government to forcibly take your weapons away. Certainly, gun safety advocates have proposed numerous ideas that would impose limitations and regulations, such as licensing guns, banning specific weapons and ammo, implementing waiting periods for buying a gun, tracking gun sales, passing red flag laws, restricting certain types of purchases, and so on. Yet right-wing and Republican foes of gun safety measures routinely claim that all of this is a prelude to total confiscation—that the ultimate objective is prying all guns from your cold live hands.
During a 2019 speech to a NRA gathering, Trump said, “Far-left radicals in Congress want to take away your voice, your jobs, your rights, and they especially want to take away your guns. You know that. They want to take away your guns.”
This has been the Big Lie of the NRA and the Republican Party for decades. In a 1975 commentary in Guns & Ammo, Ronald Reagan warned against handing government “the power to confiscate our arms.” Half a century later, during last year’s election, Trump repeatedly assailed Vice President Kamala Harris with this charge. “She supports mandatory gun confiscation,” he declared at a campaign rally in Atlanta on August 3. He added sarcastically, “Would anybody mind if they came into your house and took away your gun?…She’s for taking away all of your guns.” Five days later, at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump exclaimed, “She wants to take away your guns.” Later in the campaign, during a speech, Trump bellowed, “They’re going to take away your guns, you saw that, they’re going to take away your guns. She’s going to take away your guns.” Fact-checkers noted these were false assertions.
This was not new rhetoric for Trump. During a 2019 speech to a NRA gathering, he said, “Far-left radicals in Congress want to take away your voice, your jobs, your rights, and they especially want to take away your guns. You know that. They want to take away your guns.”
Confiscation has become the standard line for the Republican Party and the right. Some examples:
Marco Rubio, then a senator running for president, in 2016: “I am convinced that if [President Obama] could confiscate every gun in America, he would.”
Ben Shapiro, right-wing commentator, in 2016: “Of course Hillary Clinton is coming after our guns. There’s a reason she has consistently over and over again cited gun confiscation in England and Australia as her.”
Sen. Josh Hawley in 2021: “[Gun control] is really about confiscating weapons…ultimately to take away firearms from law-abiding citizens.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a congressional candidate, in 2020: “All this talk about gun confiscation has me thinking…no one is taking my guns away!”
Cars are registered. Can they be confiscated by the government?
Then–NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre in a 2023 fundraising email: “NOTICE OF GUN CONFISCATION…You’ll soon face the threat of having your guns confiscated with your right to self-defense.”
I’m sure there are some Democrats who, if they could snap their fingers and make all guns disappear, would do so. But confiscation is not on the agenda. This notion that gun restrictions are a steep slippery slope to confiscation is paranoid bunk. Cars are registered. Can they be confiscated by the government?
The goal of the pro-gunners is to discredit all discussion of gun safety proposals. And with this rhetoric, they sidestep any serious policy debates (does limiting the sale of assault weapons make us safer?) and delegitimize their political foes. As Trump presents it, his opponents are not only radical, communist lunatics; they are also gun grabbers who want to round up all guns so they can impose tyranny on the American people.
During the nightmare at Brown, a student texted her mother: “Mom, there’s a live shooting on campus. I’m going to run. I love you.” It’s stunning—or maybe the better word is “disgusting”— that an entire political party is willing to live with this.
As I write this, there are no details publicly known about the Brown University shooter. There’s no telling what, if any, possible gun laws might have prevented this terrible crime. But the passage of gun safety laws—and reforms in mental health care—would likely decrease the number of such horrors. And the fewer school shootings there are, the less encouragement there’ll be for the next one.
During the nightmare at Brown, a student texted her mother: “Mom, there’s a live shooting on campus. I’m going to run. I love you.” It’s stunning—or maybe the better word is “disgusting”— that an entire political party is willing to live with this and, worse, exploits sincere efforts to prevent gun violence in order to demonize political rivals and hang on to power. They fuel their political campaigns with the blood of innocents and disregard the fear created by our guns-over-all culture, including, most troubling, that experienced by our children.
The reasonable among us know the thoughts-and-prayer routine is bullshit. But the Big Lie—gun safety means confiscation—ought to also be deflated. The cynical deployment of this canard protects a status quo of violence and death. And that’s the goal of Republicans and MAGA. They will tolerate the killing of our fellow citizens and our children. For them, it’s good politics. And power is more important than blood.
