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2026-04-07 22:31:08

Trump threatened genocide against the people of Iran Tuesday morning, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

The Truth Social post in full: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

This warning comes as Trump’s latest deadline for Iran’s leadership to open the Strait of Hormuz expires on Tuesday night at 8pm Eastern Time and is a horrifying escalation of his threat over the weekend to commit war crimes by bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure, including power plants and desalination plants. 

But the president clearly doesn’t care. In a Monday afternoon press conference, he told reporters that he was “not at all” concerned about his threats violating the Geneva convention’s bans on attacking resources essential for a population’s survival. The prohibitions bind all United Nations member states. 

“I’m not worried about it,” Trump said in his dismissive Monday remarks. “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” 

2026-04-07 21:00:00

During the summer of 2020, as protestors rallied against racial injustice, at least two dozen monuments of Confederate soldiers and slave owners were “torched, occupied, or removed.” In Portland, protestors toppled a George Washington statue on the lawn outside the German American Society, erected to commemorate the sesquicentennial. Six years later, and the Trump administration is fighting in court to remove plaques in Philadelphia that commemorate Washington’s history of enslaving people.

These two sides of the argument over how we remember Washington are the inspiration for John Garrison Marks’s new book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory. 

Thy Will Be Done, released this week, explores how Americans have struggled to grapple with the complex role slavery plays in Washington’s legacy for 250 years. While revered for helping found the nation, Washington was a prolific enslaver, who owned 123 people, signed the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and evaded Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act by moving his slaves in and out of the state every six months so they wouldn’t have to be legally freed. Yet, Marks, a historian and American Association for State and Local History senior staff member,  notes that Washington’s feelings about slavery weren’t necessarily always positive. In private letters, Washington wrote about his “growing objection” to buying and selling enslaved people because it often broke up families. However, he still served as an active participant in the institution, and his slaves were only emancipated in his will after he and his wife died. 

To better understand how we’ve reckoned with this complicated legacy over our history, Marks searched through archives, newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, and books to track how debates surrounding Washington’s involvement with slavery have changed over time. What he discovered is that we’ve been having some version of the same argument over Washington and slavery since Washington was alive. 

At the center of Thy Will Be Done is a question of how understanding Washington’s relationship with slavery helps us better understand our nation. “What is it, exactly, that Washington left to us?” Marks asks in the introduction. “Our current struggle to make sense of George Washington and slavery reflects a broader struggle to understand our relationship to the American past and what it should mean for us in the present.”

In our conversation, Marks discussed the arguments that surround Washington’s involvement in slavery, how these conversations can’t happen in a vacuum, and why unpacking this history should be a community effort. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

In the book you talk about reviewing the past decade of commentary about Washington and slavery, and it being clear to you that little progress has been made over the past two centuries. 

I think it’s really remarkable to look at the historical record and to see that the criticisms that people are levying against Washington for his involvement with slavery today are no more intense—are no more vitriolic than what people were saying about him in the 19th century. 

Then likewise, the people who want to continue to celebrate Washington and who say that his involvement with slavery shouldn’t be a factor in our admiration for this person who did so much for the founding of the nation, that idea echoes what you see in these eulogies for Washington right after he died. 

So, the fact that you see both sides of this conversation so early on in our conversations about Washington is really remarkable and they remain consistent for more than two centuries. I think in part, that’s because the people engaging in those conversations, the people using Washington’s history with slavery, or ignoring Washington’s history with slavery, are rarely doing it with a desire for better historical understanding. They’re doing it to be able to score points in the present. They are wielding Washington’s history with slavery as a cudgel against the opponents in the political and cultural fight that they’re engaged in. 

What I’m trying to do in the book is to say, let’s understand the ways that our conversation about history right now is informed by this two centuries of history that preceded it, in order to kind of break ourselves out of that cycle, to embrace the ambiguity and complexity of Washington’s legacy with slavery, to stop trying to find one single answer that is going to settle this once and for all, to recognize that that’s impossible, and instead to decide what should this mean for us now in the present. 

That makes me think about chapter six, “Washington and Slavery in the American Classroom,” and how these conversations have been reflected there.  

That was a chapter that was difficult to write, but it was one that I knew had to be in the book, because so much of our conversation over the last couple of years about the history of slavery and its intersection with the founding, how people should encounter this history or not, how they should be shielded from this history, has revolved around how young people are taught this history in the classroom. 

It became one that I knew was going to be really important to understanding today’s debates about Washington and slavery. It was fascinating to see its history going back to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and see all the ways that just suggesting that there was a connection between Washington and slavery, or even just writing about the history of slavery and also writing about George Washington on pages near one another, was sparking this reaction from people who were furious about their heroes being debunked, when, in reality, that often wasn’t even part of the text. It was just the mere mention of Washington and slavery near one another that seemed upsetting for people. 

It begs the question of if you’re trying to erase something from history, that in itself feels like an admission that it’s bad, so why can’t we just say it was bad? 

I think that’s a big part of the reason why you’ve seen what the state of Florida has done. It seems they kind of recognize, “okay, we can’t just ignore and erase George Washington’s history with slavery, so instead, we’re going to acknowledge it, but all as part of his lead up to his decision in his will to free the people that he enslaved.” This lets them celebrate Washington as this great emancipator, as this liberator, as this person who delivered liberty, both to America and to the people that he enslaved. And it helps them kind of reconcile that contradiction and tell the story that they want to tell, while still sort of acknowledging that Washington was involved with slavery. 

It sets aside that he enslaved other people for the entirety of his adult life, and only in his will does he say, after both he and his wife died, can this subset of the people that he enslaved at Mount Vernon achieve their freedom. [Florida] uses [Washington’s emancipation of the people he enslaved] as this, like this end point to the story. 

You see this at various times throughout American history. You see it in some ways, in the way that Mount Vernon has told this story, where it always seems to lead to this moment of emancipation. You also saw it among some anti-slavery activists in the 19th century. Where they’re using the story of Washington emancipating the people that he enslaved as part of their effort to say, “what could be more American than ending slavery? If Washington freed the people he enslaved, clearly, this must be a fundamentally American value, and we should all try to emancipate all the people that are enslaved in this country.” 

So, they were able to use that story in one way in the 19th century, and now you have conservative education reformers trying to use it in a very different way in the 21st Century. The way that those two examples kind of speak to each other and don’t was really fascinating to me, and speaks to the way that Washington’s history with slavery has been used and abused throughout our history in ways that are really complex. 

There was a quote that stood out to me about social media. You write “it’s as if these conversations are happening in a vacuum—never more than inside the echo chambers of modern social media—sealed off from all the earlier iterations of these same ideas.” What role does social media play in disrupting any forward motion in these conversations? 

I think there is a tendency to use history, not to improve understanding, but to score points in the present, and that kind of point scoring is never more clearly on display than in the ways that people post on social media. 

Many of the people using the past in one way or another are more concerned with trying to support something that they already believe and that’s a problem. 

I don’t think I have to point out that often the people who are engaged in these debates or are commenting on Washington’s involvement with slavery and how we should or shouldn’t talk about it, probably think that they are presenting an idea that is novel. They probably think that now is finally the time to fully acknowledge Washington’s involvement with slavery, not realizing that there have been other Americans making that very same point for more than 200 years. 

Anti-slavery activists in the 19th century. Black activists during the Jim Crow era. Civil rights activists in the 1960s. Descendants of slavery at Mount Vernon in the 1990s and early 2000s. All the way up through Black Lives Matter, there have always been groups of Americans who are demanding that we confront this part of our history. It’s really striking that the legacy of these conversations, the broader historical context of these conversations, almost never figures in at any moment that it actually arises as part of the discourse.

Which then leads into what you were saying about the semiquincentennial being a space where we can have all these conversations, so we can start that first step of moving forward.

I think it’s a real opportunity to bring people together and have some difficult and complex conversations about our history. I’ve been working on Semiquinentennial initiatives since 2017, and my hope has always been that this anniversary can help us arrive at a more complete and more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of American history.

I hope that this anniversary is going to spark for people this idea that they want to know more about the nation’s past. Maybe people who haven’t thought about history since they were in high school or since the Bicentennial are suddenly reengaged in thinking and talking about history. And maybe that can help them encounter some history about Washington or other founders that they didn’t necessarily go looking for, but they find really interesting and rewarding, and can have that kind of conversation. 

In the book, you also emphasize the community effort of unpacking this history, that’s not just one person’s job to do it. 

Yeah, that’s important to me. That is certainly important to the museum and public history field is increasingly how we talk about it and talk about our work. If we accept that there’s no single answer here, if we accept that there’s always going to be this degree of ambiguity and complexity that we have to contend with, then I think the only way to really do that and the only way to truly benefit from a deeper engagement with this history is to do it together, to do it with other people, to decide, with members of your local community, or people in your state, or even thinking about it much more broadly, as a national community, is to do that process together and try to arrive at an understanding of why people think about this question in different ways, why different people might come to different conclusions and come to kind of a greater acceptance of what it means to reconcile Washington’s history with slavery. To accept that ambiguity as part of his legacy.

2026-04-07 19:30:00

Last August, citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation began hearing whispers of an AI data center coming to their reservation. Kenzie Roberts and Jordan Harmon, both Muscogee citizens, were immediately worried. It “didn’t seem like something that should align with our values as Indigenous people,” Roberts said. The center would be located on Looped Square Ranch, a 5,570-acre plot of land where the tribe runs its food sovereignty initiative, a program that allows the Muscogee Nation to directly serve its citizens’ food needs. At the ranch, the tribe hosts youth agricultural activities like 4H; citizens can visit for hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering; and the nation runs a fully functioning cattle ranch and meat processing center. The proposed legislation would rezone that land for industrial purposes—potentially taking that all away. “We give so much from the heartland, and then they still try to extract more from us,” Roberts said. 

As developers scope out land across rural America for the hyperscale data centers needed to power generative AI, Native lands have become the latest target for Big Tech—from the Arizona desert to the Great Plains in Montana to the hills of central Virginia. Often, when tech companies come into Indigenous communities, they promise jobs and economic benefits for the community, but community activists say those benefits rarely materialize. Instead, data centers bring a threat of land loss and displacement that feels all too familiar for Indigenous people. “It’s just layer upon layer of exploitation, of violence, of continued colonialism. All in the name of imperialism,” said Krystal Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne organizer who is the executive director of Honor the Earth, a national organization promoting Indigenous sovereignty that has been leading the fight against data centers. According to Honor the Earth, there are currently at least 106 proposed data center projects near or on Native lands. In western New York, a proposed $19.46 billion data center project would sit adjacent to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s territory, threatening an old forest that tribal citizens use for hunting, fishing, and gathering traditional medicine. In Reno, Nevada, an industrial park with a number of data centers planned threatens the water supply of Pyramid Lake, which is home to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and completely surrounded by the tribe’s reservation.

Companies attempting to construct data centers on Indigenous lands likely see it as an opportunity not just to access large plots of land, but also to use tribal sovereignty to bypass cumbersome state regulations that tribes don’t have to follow. Many tribal nations don’t have the legal codes or regulatory bodies in place yet to regulate utilities, Two Bulls said, so developers are moving quickly to begin data center projects while that’s still the case. Two Bulls also said that many developers see Indigenous communities as easy targets, especially poorer tribes that don’t have the legal or financial infrastructure to pursue litigation. “They don’t think they’re going to get a lot of pushback,” said Ashley LaMont, an enrolled tribal member of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the campaign director at Honor the Earth, who’s been organizing with Roberts and Harmon in Oklahoma. 

Two Bulls said that tribes with large land bases are open to the purported economic development that a data center could bring—because they need it. But tribal nations also need to consider whether they will be able to hold companies responsible for harm or depleted resources on their lands and whether they’ll have oversight of data centers. Community organizers and experts cite concerns about air pollution, electrical rate hikes, and the depletion of finite resources like water. “For Indigenous communities as a whole, water is going to be a continued worry,” said Lance Tubinaghtewa, a program coordinator at the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of Arizona. Tubinaghtewa, who’s Hopi, has been closely monitoring data centers that could threaten Indigenous communities in Arizona. 

The organizers I spoke with say that the concern about data centers mirrors other issues—oil and natural gas pipelines, uranium and lithium mining, rollbacks on environmental protections for sacred lands, and man-made dams—that some Native communities have been fighting for years. They see parallels to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016, when activists flocked to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where the pipeline was threatening sacred lands and water in the area. At the time, these protesters often referred to themselves as “water protectors” and repeated the Lakota phrase “Mní Wičóni” or “Water is life.” Today, as corporations attempt to place hyperscale data centers—which can guzzle up to 5 million gallons of water per day—on Indigenous lands, organizers are again taking up the water protector mantle. For them, the data center boom feels like yet another example of developers treating Native lands as an unlimited commodity for exploitation.

For months, Harmon and Roberts traveled all around the Muscogee Reservation—which covers 11 counties in Oklahoma—holding town halls to organize against the data center. Some Muscogee citizens they met were concerned about water or electric bill increases—a recent Bloomberg analysis shows that electricity costs were up by 267 percent in areas near data centers. Others wondered if a data center would bring jobs for local laborers. In one town hall, Harmon argued that while job prospects are an “alluring promise,” research shows that data centers aren’t providing the job opportunities that tech companies claim. Ultimately, those conversations paid off. “Our National Council reps were saying they were getting more calls about the data center than anything they ever had before,” Harmon said. 

One of those calls came from James Floyd, the Muscogee Nation’s former Principal Chief, who said every aspect of the data center proposal seemed in opposition to traditional Muscogee values. “Our citizens own this land,” he said. “We as a nation own this. It’s been our tradition—before removal—that land was held in common and we all had a say in how the land was going to be used. Fast forward 200 years later and we get into a situation like this. It speaks to how we disregard our own culture in trying to pursue something that will make somebody some money.” The specific legislation for this project was proposed by the tribe’s administration—its executive branch—but the decision about whether the ranch should be rezoned and used for a potential data center was ultimately left up to the National Council, the tribe’s legislative branch. But Dode Barnett, a member of the Muscogee Creek National Council, said council members looking for information about the project kept hitting a brick wall. 

Big tech companies and their developers often come with non-disclosure agreements in hand, and if they sign, officials are limited in what they can disclose about the projects. The NDAs can limit important information—like the amount of water and energy a data center would use and sometimes even the name of the company building it—in the name of protecting corporate secrets, leaving the public in the dark. In the case of the Mvskoke Tech Park legislation, the tribe’s administration had signed NDAs, meaning they couldn’t discuss any details about the project with members of the National Council who would ultimately make the decision. For Barnett and other members of the National Council, this made understanding the proposed project difficult—and ultimately led Barnett to vote against it. “There was just a broader sense of alarm for me, personally, around the NDAs,” she said. As a result, Barnett has drafted legislation that would make it illegal for certain Muscogee officials to sign NDAs in the future. She sees it as a chance to return the nation’s government to its values, echoing Floyd. “The Muscogee Creek Nation government was based on the citizens themselves having a lot of power,” she said. 

With all the secrecy surrounding data centers, actually knowing the locations of projects is no easy task. Honor the Earth recently launched a map compiled from crowdsourced information to help keep track of data centers on or within 30 miles of Indigenous lands. Once it has identified a data center project on Native land, Honor the Earth drafts a letter to the tribal communities that could be impacted to give them information about how the project will affect their community, and provides them support if they want to resist. 

Despite the downsides, the US Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs has encouraged tribes to get involved with the data center boom, calling the centers a “big economic opportunity” and downplaying their drawbacks. The department is offering technical, financial, and legal assistance for tribes who might want a data center on their land, including site evaluations, introductions to industry partners and subject matter experts, and consulting on regulations and deals.

Some Native people also see data centers as an opportunity for tribes. Last fall, a group of researchers at the Colorado School of Mines, two of whom are Indigenous, wrote a piece called “The Future of AI Runs Through Indian Country” arguing that data centers could be an opportunity to place “high-tech infrastructure on Native American lands.” The authors argue that, thanks to their unique assets—which include large land bases, water rights, and tribal sovereignty—tribal nations stand to benefit greatly if they get in on the data center game. Tribes can avoid the risks of extraction and exploitation by implementing the proper safeguards, they say, without spelling out what those safeguards are. 

When the Muscogee National Council voted on the data center bill last November, Roberts and Harmon were nervous. Sitting in the audience with other organizers, it felt like the decision could go either way. But the bill failed by a 4-11 vote. They were relieved—but the fight isn’t over yet. In addition to the four council members who voted in favor of Mvskoke Tech Park, Harmon thinks other council members might reconsider the proposal in the future if the NDAs aren’t in place and they can see more information about the proposed project. She also worries that the project might be approved if it’s moved to a less controversial location. Already, more bills are popping up in nearby city councils for data centers that would extend onto Muscogee land. To eliminate that worry, Harmon wants to see the National Council pass a full moratorium on data centers on Muscogee land. 

And Harmon’s concerns aren’t just limited to data centers in Oklahoma. Nearly 1,000 miles away in Twiggs County, Georgia, another developer has proposed a data center on Muscogee ancestral lands. Before the US government forcibly removed them in the 1830s, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had inhabited this part of Georgia for thousands of years, and the proposed data center could threaten the preservation of ancestral Muscogee mounds and villages that remain in that area. Some Muscogee citizens—including former principal chief Floyd—traveled down to Coweta County, Georgia, last fall to speak against a proposed data center there called Project Sail. Harmon and Roberts hope that moving forward, they can motivate more Muscogee citizens to pressure the tribal government to turn their attention towards their homelands before it’s too late. “It carries an extra emotional burden because it’s hard to be this far away from our homelands and to hear from white people, ‘We want to protect your sacred sites,’ and then to hear from our own tribal leaders that they’re not interested in that,” Harmon said. 

Seeing this fight play out on so many fronts could be discouraging for some. But for Harmon, it’s a motivator. “We should always oppose colonization,” she said. “We shouldn’t back down.” 

Harmon and Roberts have helped form the Stop Data Colonialism coalition, a national group founded by Honor the Earth, bringing together Native organizers working to halt data center projects in Indian Country. The Stop Data Colonialism coalition has also been organizing in other parts of Oklahoma. In the past week, the Tulsa City Council passed a nine-month moratorium on new data center construction, a data center project in Tulsa pulled its rezoning request, and another developer in Coweta pulled its data center proposal all together. The group also held a town hall with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which then unanimously passed a moratorium on hyperscale data centers on its land. “We’re hoping that tribes will…actually say, ‘We don’t want this here.’ There’s more work to be done,” Harmon said. 

2026-04-07 19:30:00

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

Utah has made it nearly impossible for residents to hold fossil fuel companies legally accountable for climate damages in a move one advocacy group described as putting “profits for the biggest polluters over communities,” with other states expected to follow suit.

The new state legislation comes as part of a push from Big Oil and its political allies—including groups tied to rightwing impresario Leonard Leo—for legal immunity in red statehouses and Congress, with a goal of winning state and federal legal immunity similar to the liability waiver granted to the firearms industry in 2005.

Such policies would shield major fossil fuel companies from a wave of litigation they are facing from states, subnational governments, and individuals who claim the firms knew their products would cause climate damages, but sold them to the public anyway. Four other red states are considering laws similar to Utah’s—with two close to passage—and federal legislation is seemingly in the works.

Signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, late last month, Utah’s new legislation shields any person or entity from civil or criminal liabilities related to planet-warming emissions, unless a court finds that the defendant violated the specific “enforceable limitation” on a greenhouse gas or the “express terms of a valid permit.”

Challengers would also have to provide “clear and convincing evidence that unavoidable and identifiable damage or injury has resulted or will result as a direct cause of the” violation. The language will make it virtually impossible to successfully sue polluters for climate damages, critics say.

“This is a surrender to wealthy special interests and an affront to the public good,” said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the science hub for climate litigation at the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. “Utah’s new law prioritizes profits for the biggest polluters over communities already suffering from climate impacts and constituents should be outraged.”

Set to be enacted next month, Utah’s HB 222 was sponsored by the Republican representative Carl Albrecht, who has received some funding from oil and gas interests. He was also formerly the CEO of a rural electric cooperative.

“That cooperative is substantially powered by fossil fuels,” said the Democratic Utah state senator Nate Blouin, who opposed the bill, which he said passed quickly and without much discussion. “He’s got a history in the industry, and continues to draw from that experience to push bills like this forward.”

Albrecht did not respond to a request for comment, but told Bloomberg Law that the policy aims to halt “frivolous” legal challenges from environmental groups and to protect the state’s coal-fired power plants. He also said industry trade groups gave him the idea for the proposal.

“To understand this bill you need to follow the coordination,” said Merner, noting that the Utah legislation closely mirrors a model policy called the Energy Freedom Act, circulated by the conservative group Consumers Defense.

Consumers Defense has financial ties to a group linked to Leo, the architect of the far-right takeover of the Supreme Court who helped select Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. In recent years, groups tied to Leo have launched an unprecedented campaign to thwart climate accountability litigation.

Asked about Leo’s involvement in the model legislation, Will Hild, president of Consumers Defense, said it was not attributable to “any individual figure.”

“The Energy Freedom Act is intended to clarify that carbon emissions should not automatically carry legal damages and to push back on efforts…to shape national climate policy through litigation rather than through elected lawmakers,” he said. “This ensures decisions remain with accountable representatives, prevents a small number of states from imposing their policies nationwide through judicial fiat, and protects consumers from economically disruptive policies.”

In an emailed statement, Leo said: “Preserving individual dignity and worth includes good stewardship of the environment as well as maintaining conditions for the financial wellbeing of hardworking consumers.”

“Getting this balance right can be very tricky, which is why we support enterprises that seek to ensure that decisions are made based on sound science and through an accountable and constitutional political process, rather than lawfare supported by unaccountable judges, trial lawyers, and dark money special interest groups on the left,” he said. He did not answer a question about his role in the liability waiver proposals.

Lawmakers in Louisiana and Oklahoma are considering similar legislation, and the state legislatures of Iowa and Tennessee have voted to pass climate liability-limiting legislation, though neither has yet been signed into law.

“In Tennessee they literally called the bill the Tennessee Energy Freedom Act,” said Iyla Shornstein, political director at the Center for Climate Integrity, which tracks and supports climate accountability litigation. “It’s a direct borrowing from the Consumers Defense language.”

The Utah bill’s passage comes as climate lawsuits against big oil companies inch closer to trial, and as states adopt climate accountability legislation.

In recent years, 70 cities, states and individuals have sued energy majors for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis. New York and Vermont have also passed climate “superfund” laws requiring major polluters to pay for damages caused by their past planet-heating pollution, with other states considering similar policies. “The oil companies clearly see these as an existential threat to their business model,” said Shornstein. “Their lobbying makes that clear.”

Earlier this year, the top US oil lobby group the American Petroleum Institute (API) said one of its top priorities for 2026 would be blocking “abusive” climate lawsuits targeting Big Oil. Months earlier, 16 Republican state attorneys general also called on the justice department to provide a “liability shield” for oil companies.

Lawmakers have also pursued narrower efforts, including a failed attempt to block Washington DC from the deployment of some legal theories against oil companies, and a 2025 Maryland bill that would have barred state and local climate lawsuits but never reached a vote. And last year, both API and energy giant ConocoPhillips also pressed Congress on draft legislation to limit climate liability.

Such a federal policy appears to be in the works: during a House committee hearing last month, the Wyoming representative Harriet Hageman, a Republican, said “Congress has a role to play” in defeating climate accountability lawsuits.

“To that end, I’m working with my colleagues in both the House and Senate to craft legislation tackling both these state laws and the lawsuits that could destroy energy affordability for consumers,” she said.

Hageman did not provide specific details about the legislation. She did not respond to a request for comment. The API declined to comment on the state of a federal liability waiver proposal.

Other industries have lobbied for liability waivers before. Since the firearms sector successfully pushed for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005, “not a single negligence case against a gun manufacturer has gone to trial,” noted Merner.

The pesticide sector is also currently pursuing state-level immunity bills, while its allies have unsuccessfully pursued a federal waiver. The tobacco industry, facing widespread litigation, also pushed for such immunity in the 1990s but failed, ending up paying $260 billion in settlements.

“It seems that the fossil fuel industry has learned from these precedents. If they can secure blanket immunity now, they can avoid the fate of tobacco, but if they fail, they face tobacco-level accountability,” said Merner.

Lawmakers, advocates and journalists have amassed mountains of evidence in recent years that oil companies intentionally covered up the climate harms of their products. Climate science, meanwhile, continues to warn that fossil fuels are the primary cause of dangerous global warming.

“I don’t see why industry would be pushing for immunity if they thought they could win on the merits of their case,” said Merner. “The evidence shows they knew about climate risks for decades and lied about it, so they’re trying to change the rules of the game entirely.”

2026-04-07 19:00:00

Trad wives have been baking, churning, scrubbing, and harvesting their ways through our social media feeds for several years now, praising homemaking and subservience to their husbands on countless dedicated TikTok channels. With her pristine makeup and prairie dresses and endless cheerful obedience, this internet persona—the trad as in “traditional” wife—seemed predestined to end up as a character in fiction or film.

But that in no way makes Caro Claire Burke’s new novel Yesteryear, starring a trad wife influencer, any less bracing. On the surface, Burke’s protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, has everything she dreamed of: an internet following and sponsorships to match it, hard won by turning her life into an 1800s pioneer fantasy with her strapping farmer husband Caleb and their gaggle of children on a farm in the foothills of Idaho. She hasn’t even really had to give up modern luxuries; her children are tended to by (off-camera) nannies; there’s a refrigerator hiding in a pantry off the kitchen (a possible nod to the most famous real-life trad wife influencer, Hannah Neeleman, who goes by the handle Ballerina Farm). Sure, there are hordes of angry online commenters out to get her, and yeah, Caleb may be sleeping around, but life is mostly perfect.

Then one day Natalie wakes up to everything a little off-kilter, and pieces together that she has time-traveled to the actual 1800s, an era of little medical intervention, no electricity, and low patience for female opinions. Darkness sets in early, and the food sucks. But small observations soon have her questioning whether she has really time-traveled—or whether she’s caught up in some kind of dark West World-like reality show. The narrative unspools from there, with detours into Natalie’s origin story, and there are more than a few satisfying twists that kept me reading late into the night.

Burke came up with the premise after watching too many trad wife videos on TikTok in the winter of 2024, she told me on a phone call—the phenomenon was something she “became very obsessed with very quickly,” she said. She was working for Katie Couric Media at the time but had a fiction MFA and had been hoping to also write a novel. One morning she woke up with the idea for the title of her book, Yesteryear, which felt “all-encompassing.” She’d never written a thriller; all her fiction until that point had been, in her words, “small, quiet, family interiority drama.” Perhaps because of that, she “was really able to go for it,” unencumbered by her own expectations.

The resulting book is juicy, vindictive, and loads of fun—and has already been optioned by Amazon MGM Studios, with Anne Hathaway planning to co-produce and star in the film adaptation. While Burke’s tale serves as somewhat of an indictment of conservative gender roles, it’s not without its nuances. “It was very important to me to be just as honest and hard-eyed at liberal culture,” she says.

Burke also co-hosts, with Katie Gatti Tassin, the podcast Diabolical Lies, which lends a feminist lens to all manner of culture and politics topics, including young conservatives and the manosphere. I spoke with Caro about her own political awakening and her thoughts on trad wives’ agency.

I read that you grew up conservative. Anything resembling tradwife conservative?

I grew up in a Republican household, and I was Catholic, I got confirmed. But I also went to liberal schools, and so I was never cloistered away. I kind of grew up in the Bush-Romney era of conservatism. It wasn’t as hard of a pivot as the ones that you might see in the book.

You told an interviewer that your life changed after watching the movie Captain Fantastic, and then wondering who Noam Chomsky was. Is it true you and your husband then ditched your jobs to live in an Airstream?

It was a little less romantic than that. It was the pandemic era. We bought this, like shit kicker 1967 Airstream, and he renovated it, and then we lived on the road for two years, off and on. The Captain Fantastic of it all was pretty inspiring for us. The van life craze hadn’t super kicked off, but we were definitely a part of that as it was happening. So, yeah, I bet we probably were Chomskied a little bit.

So much was happening in America at the time—I don’t know if I would have radicalized honestly if our country hadn’t been radicalizing too.

It struck me that the off the grid life depicted in Captain Fantastic, and the supposedly off-the-grid life of your trad wife protagonist, Natalie, might actually have some overlaps, like back-to-the-land hippie or back-to-the-land Christian conservative? It’s kind of this place where the far left and far right start to converge.

We talk about this a lot on our podcast, there is a lot of overlap there. I mean, anytime you have anyone who is trying to behave in any sort of heterodox way. Something appealed to us so much about being quiet and reading and trying to hold on to those kinds of traits in a time period where it feels like the world is hellbent on wrestling that out of you. Arguably, you have that quiet in Yesteryear, but there are no books, so I think that’s kind of the inverse: You do have this quiet, you have opportunities for revelation, but I don’t know if you have people who are equipped to receive the revelation.

Yesteryear is kind of a thriller-slash-horror book. Obviously there’s trad wife content on TikTok, but did you draw on anything else as inspiration for the novel?

You mean, for like, the horror element of it? It’s funny that I had never written horror because I’m obsessed with it. I loved The Witch, and I rewatched it in the final days of editing Yesteryear. And I remember being like, Oh my god, darkness. I added a few lines about how dark it can be in a house when there’s no electricity. And then obviously, Hereditary is a classic. There’s a movie that came out this year called Bring Her Back that I thought was one of the more terrifying things I’ve ever seen. If you like horror, highly recommend.

I grew up loving Little House on the Prairie, and I have almost like a primal yearning for a simpler life that many trad wives seem to advertise. Did you feel drawn to that life at all when watching their content and imagining the life of an 1800s pioneer woman?

I think all of it is kind of intoxicating. There is something natural about seeing stars, as corny as that sounds, or being alone and not hearing anything else. That’s incredibly soothing. But yeah, I mean, with the trad wife stuff and this vision of this aesthetic—I was obsessed with it. I’m so aware of how attractive it is, because I find it attractive, and I think that’s also why it was easy for me to write about it for two years. It does seem so beautiful. And I think the way that America fetishizes the Wild West and cowboys and Indians and this whole fantasy, it’s so intoxicating, and we’re so educated to fantasize about it, that I think it’s kind of unavoidable in a certain way.

How did you do research for the book, aside from, I’m assuming, watching trad wife TikTok videos?

The thing that I researched much more were patterns of behavior with women in these fundamentalist communities. You can interview people, but also there are Reddit chats of people who have left the Mormon faith, or left the Jehovah’s Witness faith, or left an evangelical community. There are whole podcasts dedicated to women who have left those communities. I kind of went through a period of just like waterboarding myself with that, and then you start to see, it’s all the same consistent behaviors.

There’s a point in the novel when your protagonist, Natalie, has just woken up in 1805, or she’s not sure. And her husband smacks her for talking out of line. There’s this moment of shock that she no longer has the power she had in the modern era. To me, that actually highlights how much power she did have in the modern era—she was kind of running the show, calling the shots. To what extent do you think that is true for many trad wife influencers?

I think it’s a question that could be asked more often. I see a lot of people assume that if women are wealthy, then they have the ability to leave. And I think that anyone who looks into this is like, that’s not even remotely true. Something that was important to me was having certain elements of financial abuse, where it’s like, Natalie does have a lot of power, but also she doesn’t have control of their finances. I don’t really have an answer for how much power Natalie has. As I was writing her, it felt like, like a pendulum swing with each chapter, where it’s like, you have a moment where she is totally in charge, and has figured her way out of some bind, or come to a solution or gotten what she wanted, and then the next chapter is like, Well, be careful what you wish for, because now you’re stuck in a new way.

I think that a lot of women can think or hope that they’re reaching a level of power if they play along within these communities, but you never actually have it, because women are not allowed to have power. It’s all really an illusion at the end of the day.

With the women who seek to fulfill these traditional roles, what advantage do they gain by pretending to be powerless?

I mean, I think they are powerless. I’m sure there’s an exception to every example. But, I would say 99.9—virtually all—of the women that I spoke with or I listened to on podcasts or that I was reading from, they were all born into these communities. When you’re born into this community, you are taught from childhood that there is one way to go to heaven, and that way is to perform as a wife and a mother. When every woman behaves the same way, then you have to start to wonder if any of them are making choices to begin with, or if it’s all been kind of cultured into them.

I know New York mag just did this big cover story: We never stop talking about Mormon women. But there’s a reason why they’re all over social media. It’s because they’re taught to be beautiful, to prioritize their looks and to evangelize and they’re also taught to work themselves to a bone and never complain about it. When it’s taught to you from birth, and when there are real punishments on the line of not doing it, like divorcing your husband is not an option in the same way that it is for me as like a totally secular person—these women usually don’t have access to their own finances. They often don’t even graduate from college. They usually have kids. If you have a child, I think it makes the idea of leaving pretty unattractive, let alone if you have, like, six kids.

I have a hard time with the idea of choice in these women, because I feel like when they’re all making the same decision and they all end up powerless—it’s hard for me to argue that they did really choose it.

There’s this internet idea that women are quitting the modern workforce to become trad wives, but it kind of sounds like what you’re saying is almost all trad wives were born into these communities.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that women who were not in these positions are now converting into these positions. There’s evidence that women are dropping out of the workforce, but that’s not because they’re about to bake bread. It’s because they can’t afford childcare. There’s this stat that this year, something like 400,000 women dropped out of the workforce, and it’s the biggest decline in modern history. It’s funnily timed, right? With the whole trad wife thing. But everything I can find from women who have reported leaving and who are willing to talk about it is caregiving responsibilities. It’s not them being like, I have chosen to reject feminism. I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that women are choosing this en masse. I think there are women who are already born into it, and then I think there are women who make a lot of money by pretending that they’re doing it online.

Are there that many women doing that second option who are basically completely pretending, or are they still from these communities, they’re just kind of amping up the back-to-the-land lifestyle?

That’s kind of the question. I have my suspicions. I don’t know. Obviously the most famous one is Hannah Neeleman, Ballerina Farm. I have no fucking clue what that woman is thinking. There are people who could argue that she genuinely believes the whole lifestyle she’s selling. And then I think there are people who go, this woman went to Juilliard, she lived in New York City, she knows what she’s doing. I think we always learn more after the fact, and I think we usually learn more about what is taking place with these people from their children.

So we just need to wait like, 15 to 20 years, and then all will be revealed.

Yeah, exactly. It’s like the Duggars—we have to sustain maximum damage, and then we will get, like, a sliver of truth at the end of it.

The Trump administration is trying to redefine, even from a legal perspective, the sexes in a way that reinforces this Christian conservative idea of traditional gender roles and hierarchy and how women should submit to their husbands. I heard you suggest on your podcast Diabolical Lies that this could be considered a form of voter suppression. Can you say more about that?

I think it is voter suppression. There have been efforts all over the country to suppress the abilities of women to go about their daily lives in a number of ways. There are a bunch of Republicans in the Midwest who are actively trying to return us to our teenage birth rates that we worked so hard to decrease. They’re like, no, actually, we want a lot of teenagers giving birth again. You have a lot of people trying to reverse no-fault divorce laws. I think that there are a lot of Republicans who think like, well, make sure that the last name for the woman matches the last name of her marital license. And if that all matches up, then maybe they can vote. And if not, you’ve got a problem.

Also, economically disenfranchising—there’s also something they’ve done to the Black community forever, like when election day isn’t a federal holiday, you are intentionally ensuring that poorer people will have less of a chance to vote than wealthy people. The same is true for women. When you are trying to encourage women to be at home and to be a primary caretaker, and to not rely on anyone else, and to not use daycare, you are creating a scenario in which women will not have access any number of things outside the house, and one of those is basically behaving like democratic citizens.

Who is your imagined audience for the book?

It’s kind of hard for me to visualize. I think practically, it’ll be women, and I hope it’s women of a wide range of ages. If men read it, that’s awesome. The idea of a married couple, or any sort of couple reading it together really excites me. And having conversations with each other about gender and how it plays a role in their marriage or partnership, that’d be cool.

With your podcast Diabolical Lies, I’m curious—there are so many podcasts out there. When you and Katie Gatti Tassin were planning to start it, what hole were you trying to fill in the podcast universe?

We had a few instincts about things that we craved and we weren’t seeing, and so some of them were, longform. Joe Rogan does a three hour podcast every day. So Katie and I had both been told separately, ‘Oh, well, you can’t really have a podcast that’s more than an hour. People won’t listen.’ And we were like, there’s no way that’s true. We don’t need 10 million listeners, but there’s no way that you can’t have a viable product that’s also longform. We just kind of felt, it sounds really corny, but there just weren’t many podcasts where women were talking about issues in the kind of way that we wanted to, which is kind of irreverent, but taking itself pretty seriously, and caring about a range of issues that aren’t just pop culture. The fun thing about a podcast is that it’s very inexpensive to try.

What does the name refer to?

It refers to a [Kansas City Chiefs kicker] Harrison Butker commencement speech, and he was telling all the women that the greatest lie they had been told was that they should seek purpose outside of the home. He said, ‘You guys have been sold the most diabolical lies,’ essentially being the tenets of feminism: that you can have fulfillment beyond being a mother or a wife.

Something that kind of nagged at me a little bit while I was reading Yesteryear was the modern career woman is also pretty miserable seeming.

It was definitely intentional. I think first and foremost, it was important for me to really imagine the alternative through Natalie’s eyes. I had spent so much time in these trad wife worlds that it was very easy for me to regurgitate their perspective of what it meant to be modern. And I also think I started to realize like, well, there are elements of that that are true. Women aren’t supported in the workforce. Women don’t get the type of leave that they deserve. It is very hard, probably impossible, to “have it all.” And I think in a book that skewers so much of conservative culture, it was very important to me to be just as like honest and hard-eyed at liberal culture. The argument against feminism, is that feminism and all that it came from has led to miserable lives. And so I think in order to embody Natalie fully, it was important to go there and to kind of be like, yeah, no, it’s not just conservatism that is a little bit of a joke. It’s also the half-assed liberal feminism that we’ve gotten that really hasn’t given us what we need.

If modern liberal feminism is not giving us what we need, what do we need—what do we deserve?

What do we deserve? Oh, my God, that’s like the million dollar question. I mean, the first step, the bare minimum, is an adequate social safety net. If there were one thing that I would have Yesteryear do, it would be give women maternity leave, for fuck’s sake. There are certain things that America is so behind on that it’s laughable. Every woman should have access to a minimum of six months maternity leave, let alone support for breastfeeding, let alone access to child care. Having a serious conversation about where our taxes are not going and how pathetic that is, given that every other developed nation has figured it out to a better extent than us, would be my starting point. And then from there, we could have more waxing poetic conversations about, like, how many hours should a person work. But we’re at triage right now.

2026-04-07 03:33:08

According to Donald Trump, Iranians want the US military to continue to bomb their homes. 

“We’ve had numerous intercepts,” Trump told reporters in a press conference on Monday afternoon. “’Please keep bombing. Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding.” 

When questioned on who sent these communications, the president responded, “I don’t know what they do. All I can tell you is that they want freedom.” Trump did not say when the intercepts were received—let alone any give evidence that they exist. 

The bizarre remarks came as a reporter asked Trump why he claims Iranians would be mad if he halted future military strikes, including those on civilian infrastructure: “Wouldn’t that be punishing Iranians for the actions of the regime?” 

For Trump, the war is the only way for the people of Iran to win freedom. Apparently, people’s lives are in “much greater danger” without it. 

“It’s amazing when I see some of the stupid people like AOC plus three, all that group. They talk about ‘oh freedom for Iran.’” Trump said. “They don’t tell you the real facts.” 

“Women, men, gays…They kill the gays. They throw them off buildings,” Trump continued, referring to the Iranian leadership’s violence toward the people residing in the country.