2026-04-08 22:03:39
Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election received far less attention than a similar contest a year ago, when Elon Musk spent $25 million trying to flip the balance of power on the court. Back then, the world’s richest man—who, at the time, was also a key White House adviser—personally hand-delivered $1 million checks to voters while wearing a cheesehead hat.
This time, majority control of the state’s highest court wasn’t at stake. But the outcome was still hugely significant for politics in Wisconsin and nationally.
The massive 20-point victory by Chris Taylor, a former Democratic state legislator and appellate judge in Madison, expands the progressive majority on the court from 4-to-3 to 5-to-2. That extends a remarkable winning streak for Democratic-backed judicial candidates, who’ve now won five of the last six Supreme Court races in the swing state. It’s a stunning turnaround from a decade ago, when a conservative majority dominated the court and upheld much of then-Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) right-wing agenda, such as his efforts to crush unions, make it harder to vote, and gerrymander in the GOP’s favor.
In 2020, when conservatives on the Wisconsin court held a 4-3 majority, Donald Trump and his allies attempted to convince the justices to overturn the state’s presidential election results. They nearly succeeded. Just one of the conservatives, Justice Brian Hagedorn, sided with the liberals in narrowly upholding Joe Biden’s win.
Taylor’s victory on Tuesday means progressives are set to control the court’s majority through at least 2030. That will make it nearly impossible for Republicans to use the state courts to hijack elections. Taylor said during a debate last week with her opponent, Maria Lazar—a fellow appellate judge who previously served in Walker’s administration—that she was “very concerned that we might have efforts to suppress the vote” and that “this is why we need a strong Supreme Court that’s going to hold the federal government accountable.”
Taylor’s win also makes it likely that progressives will retain their majority through the post-2030 redistricting cycle. That will make it tougher for Republicans in the state legislature to engage in gerrymandering like they did after 2010, when they locked in lopsided majorities for a decade-and-a-half.
In 2023, the court’s new progressive majority invalidated the state’s GOP-drawn legislative maps, leading to competitive elections in both chambers of the legislature. And the court could soon decide whether to strike down the state’s congressional map, which gives Republicans a 6-to-2 advantage in its US House delegation.
Other recent decisions by the court have been similarly consequential. In July 2025, the court struck down Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban, which went back into effect after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It also restored mail ballot drop boxes and said the legislature could not fire the state’s top election administrator. The court might also soon revisit the legality of Walker’s law revoking collective bargaining rights for public sector unions, which has decimated labor’s influence in the state.
Wisconsin Supreme Court elections often serve as a barometer for national politics. When Musk’s attempt to buy the court backfired last year and progressive judge Susan Crawford won by 10 points, it sent a signal that democracy could defeat oligarchy.
Taylor won by twice that margin. If Crawford’s victory was a landslide by Wisconsin standards, Taylor’s was a tsunami. Taylor won at least 24 counties that Trump carried in 2024. Democrats also prevailed in the mayor’s race in Waukesha, the county seat of a longtime GOP stronghold in suburban Milwaukee. The results are another indicator that a blue wave is forming in November.
2026-04-08 19:30:00
A few months ago, I was in my living room, TV on in the background, when I heard the first few notes of a familiar song. It was “Fool” by Perfume Genius, a track about the tenuous, often exploitative relationship between gay men and straight culture. I’d listened to it hundreds of times before, always moved by how it evokes a complex world of human emotion—of feeling both venerated and cast aside, exalted and objectified. I looked up at the screen and my stomach dropped. It was an ad for ChatGPT.
The sheer cognitive dissonance—hearing a song so deeply human, so personal and reflective, used to advertise a chatbot—was unsettling. What was it doing in a commercial for a technology that I fear is only good for alienating us from ourselves?
The ad was part of a campaign by OpenAI that launched last year, each of its seven installments showing how ChatGPT might be integrated into daily life. In the spot titled “Dish,” a young, curly-haired white guy in an apartment makes dinner for a pretty brunette white gal, giving her a taste of pasta. The woman takes a bite, thinks for a second, brow furrowed, and says it’s “really good.” Then the music swells, and a single line is superimposed on the screen:
I need a recipe that says, “I like you, but I want to play it cool.”
Our protagonist’s prompt to ChatGPT is followed by a long answer extruded by the chatbot, directions we are meant to believe are now helping him impress his date. The other stars of OpenAI’s campaign take on similarly mundane challenges. One guy strains to do a pullup; a student tries to focus on her work; two teenagers attempt to fix their dad’s truck. Framed in close and shot on 35-millimeter film, wearing outfits cleverly lacking the trend markers of our moment, these people seem less like envoys from some AI utopia and more like old-fashioned main characters—it just so happens that their hero’s journey would not be possible without ChatGPT.
The campaign marks a shift in how AI companies are presenting their products. Older ads for chatbots didn’t shy away from showing the technology: In one, a man asked Google’s Gemini to write a letter from his young daughter to an Olympian the girl admires; in another, a woman asked Meta’s AI for help organizing a book club meeting to discuss Moby-Dick, which we come to understand she likely hasn’t read. But in OpenAI’s latest spots, the interaction with the technology itself is conspicuously missing. We don’t see the protagonists using a phone or a computer. We don’t see anyone struggle, stop, consult the bot, then return to their activity. The chatbot’s presence is unseen and entirely frictionless; it is an organic part of the process of trying to do anything at all.
Over the last few years, as the race to dominate generative AI has consumed an enormous amount of capital, companies have been trying to figure out how to market their products to a potentially vast consumer base. It hasn’t been a straightforward process. Google eventually pulled the Gemini letter-writing ad from the air because the reaction to it was so poor—why would anyone choose to outsource that kind of thing to AI, thereby robbing themselves of the opportunity to spend quality time with their daughter, and the child of the chance to express herself? That ad was mentioned in a New York Times article that asked, “Why Does Every Commercial for A.I. Think You’re a Moron?” We, it seems, don’t like being treated as if a computer program is smarter than we are, or the implication that every task is equally rote and mundane. Some things, like fostering your child’s burgeoning passions, hold deeper meaning, and the point isn’t merely to get them done—it’s to do them.
This technology, these campaigns say, is not at all like the technologies you fear. In fact, you have nothing to fear.
But audiences’ discomfort with AI marketing goes beyond feeling insulted. One recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that only 17 percent of Americans believe AI will positively affect their lives, while another found that 53 percent believe it will worsen creative thinking, and 50 percent think it will harm people’s ability to form meaningful relationships. Such qualms rest, in part, on the experience of the last dozen years, as the harms of social media have cast a pall on the unbridled techno-optimism of the early 2000s. A meta-analysis of 71 psychology studies, for example, showed that consumption of short-form video damages cognition, attention spans, impulse control, and overall mental health. This won’t be surprising to anyone who’s ever gotten sucked into a phone trance and emerged from it dumb and disgusted. Knowledge, both scientific and lived, of social media’s deleterious effects is finally prompting people to fight back—trading their smartphones for flip phones, bricking or gray-screening them, or developing ways to pay more attention.
This upswell of anti-tech sentiment feels like a backlash after the pandemic’s physical isolation led many of us to spend more time tethered to digital tools. And it’s being exacerbated by anxieties that generative AI will decimate the labor force far sooner than we can adapt. Even tech workers, as the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka reported, worry that AI will trap them in a “permanent underclass.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in a recent essay, speculated on ways that we might “buy time” before the possibility that AI enslaves or destroys humanity.
But meanwhile, AI companies have products to sell, and marketing campaigns that use a faux indie film aesthetic can make generative AI seem cozy and helpful, not predatory and dystopic. As Vauhini Vara, author of the 2025 book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, told me, “It can’t be coincidental that these ads that normalize AI use come at a time when people are talking a lot about how abnormal they find it all.”
It’s not just OpenAI: Anthropic recently produced a campaign for Claude that is both techno-optimistic and pseudo-humanist. It begins with a quick sequence of video clips—a falling piano, a city blacking out, an ambulance speeding through streets blaring its siren—as a voice repeatedly intones, “There’s never been a worse time.” But then this barrage of images gives way to a slower montage; now, people are running, playing music, fixing bikes, climbing in the desert, taking a dance class, launching a rocket into the air. Sometimes they look at screens—but overwhelmingly, they are engaged in the physical world. Claude is represented not by computers or phones, but by white line graphics tracing people’s routes up the boulders, the paths of their limbs as they dance, and the airflow coming in and out of their lungs. Now, the voice says, “There’s never been a better time…to have a problem, to be stuck, to be overwhelmed, to be impatient, to be out of ideas, to be out of your depth, out of breath.”
Alex Hanna, co-author with Emily M. Bender of the 2025 book The AI Con, told me these ads might signal a resurgence of the push for “ubiquitous computing.” This movement—spearheaded in the late 1980s by Mark Weiser, then the chief technology officer of Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center—sprang from the idea that technology would evolve only if its developers sought to make it an indistinguishable part of the environment. Anthropic has taken this concept to extremes; at a recent “zero-slop” pop-up in New York City’s West Village, the company disallowed phones, an attempt to further distance its product from things (slop, phones, screens) that carry negative connotations and to imply that, somehow, AI products are just in the air. Meta’s Super Bowl ad campaign gestured toward a similar concept, showing people engaged in various activities while wearing Meta-powered glasses, interacting with the chatbot without having to stop whatever they’re doing. (“Hey Meta, is it okay to eat mud?” asks a cyclist after she crashes on a dirt trail.)
This technology, these campaigns say, is not at all like the technologies you fear. In fact, you have nothing to fear.
We’ve been here before. In 1958, IBM asked designers Charles and Ray Eames to produce a short film about the computer. At the time, the company’s room-size computing machines were commonly associated with nuclear weapons systems. IBM needed a way to make its product more palatable, and the Eameses, with their modernist optimism in the power and possibilities of technology, were the ideal candidates to create such propaganda. They made a film titled The Information Machine, kicking off a partnership with IBM that lasted almost 20 years. Their films were odes to the computer; in the best-known one, Powers of Ten, the Eameses exponentially zoom out and then back in on a single point on Earth, illustrating and demystifying computers’ processing power. They were also paeans to the creative capacity of humans. They used decidedly approachable aesthetics—The Information Machine features animated characters with round, friendly faces—to explain, and explain away, something that scared people.
I see the clear influence of these films’ techno-positivist aesthetics in the line graphics in that ad for Claude. But the Eameses could be forgiven for not imagining the kind of existential damage digital computing would eventually cause. Today’s tech CEOs, who fret about what an all-powerful generative AI might do even as they do their best to hurtle us all toward it—not so much. Seeing ChatGPT ads that feature beautiful, vaguely nostalgic music (“Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” by Neil Diamond, “Someone Somewhere” by Simple Minds) playing over warm film shots of people outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot has the same disorienting effect I experience when I look at an AI-generated video: the sense that I’m looking at a hallucination rather than at something substantial. The feeling that I’m being sold not just a best-case scenario, but a total impossibility—and that the mere act of looking at it is corroding my relationship to reality.
Of course, ads are rarely realistic depictions of their products. No sales pitch is going to tout how, for example, AI may contribute to cognitive atrophy. Because AI companies are “not able to recoup the revenue that they need to keep up with capital expenditures now,” Hanna tells me, they’re using ads to drum up a market in hopes of arriving at an “iPhone moment” of widespread adoption. These ads are an attempt to make generative AI products seem indispensable; in order to do so, they have to destabilize our relationship with what we know—“Is it okay to eat mud?”—and thereby who we are.
What are generative AI companies really setting out to do? A clue might lie in the way they advertise their products to each other. In October 2024, Artisan, a company that builds AI programs for business automation, launched a billboard campaign in the San Francisco Bay Area with the slogan “Stop Hiring Humans.” Other business-to-business AI advertising campaigns are famously inscrutable, but here was an AI company admitting fully what many fear is the technology’s ultimate aim.
It’s not hard to infer a similar worldview from ads aimed at a general audience—even those cloaked in a humanistic veneer. If we follow the internal logic of those ChatGPT ads to their likely conclusion, no one will ever again consult a cookbook, work with a personal trainer, ask a teacher for advice, read a guidebook, or learn a trick or two from a friendly mechanic. The process of creating a market for AI might be as dehumanizing as the technology itself.
2026-04-08 19:30:00
Last week, in a prime-time speech that was confused and discursive even by his own standards, President Donald Trump attempted to justify the current war in Iran. US attacks, he assured the American public, were “an investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future,” adding for emphasis, “There’s no country like us anywhere in the world, and we’re in great shape for the future!”
Just hours after Trump spoke, Pope Leo XIV expressed skepticism about Trump’s triumphant speech. God, he said, “rejects the prayers of those with hands full of blood.” An escalation, he warned, would be a “tragedy of enormous proportions.”
Over the weekend, the conversation continued, with Trump posting on Saturday on Truth Social, “Time is running out—48 hours before all hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” Then, on Easter Sunday, the president became even more agitated and launched a profanity-laced post on Truth Social. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
In his Easter address, the Pope, unsurprisingly, preached a very different message: “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue!”
Pope Leo’s comments reflect the growing uneasiness that many Catholics feel with American aggression in the Middle East. Just days before, Leo XIV had warned, “We cannot remain silent before the suffering of so many people, helpless victims of these conflicts.” Prominent Catholic leaders—including Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy—have echoed those sentiments, arguing that the war in Iran doesn’t meet the conditions for the doctrine of “just war,” meaning one that, according to Catholic teachings, is morally defensible, such as, say, World War II.
“Conservative Catholics who spent years building an alliance with evangelical Protestants, are waking up to find that their allies consider their faith a species of paganism and their sacraments a blasphemy.”
Over the last few months, some right-wing Catholics who disagree with Pope Leo XIV on almost everything else have come to his side on the Middle East conflict. “There was an effort among church leaders in Rome and here in the United States to highlight the suffering in Palestine,” Michael O’Loughlin, executive editor of the progressive Catholic news outlet National Catholic Reporter, told me. “I’m wondering if that broke through traditional political barriers, if some Catholics on the right, who might generally be more sympathetic to Israel, if they heard those messages and started to look at the whole situation more critically.”
But what may have started as an intra-Catholic reckoning on Palestine has spread far beyond the confines of the Catholic faith. The conflict has emerged as the latest—and possibly largest—crack in a powerful religious alliance between pro-Trump evangelical Christians and Catholics that has defined the conservative movement for decades, one that McLoughlin noted may have always been uneasy, yet also “hugely important.”
In a Substack post last month about the complex interfaith dynamics surrounding the Catholic response to the war in Iran, religious and political commentator Christopher Hale put it in stronger terms. “Conservative Catholics who spent years building an alliance with evangelical Protestants,” he wrote, “are waking up to find that their allies consider their faith a species of paganism and their sacraments a blasphemy.”
Given the centuries-long divisions between Catholics and Protestants, the alliance between American Catholics and evangelicals has been a relatively recent phenomenon, one that was forged in the late 1970s largely over the groups’ shared opposition to abortion. Over the following decades, their bond as allies deepened in the fight against gay marriage; more recently, it further solidified in the anti-trans movement.
Yet evangelicals and Catholics have always been strange bedfellows; not only do fundamental theological differences divide the two groups, but in the political sphere, they often disagree on matters including immigration and the death penalty. “It was always a fragile and improbable alliance,” Robert Orsi, a scholar of American history and Catholic studies at Northwestern University, told me, because the bond was “born of [the] political, and not the religious.”
After the Hamas attacks of October 7, the fissures between the two camps began to deepen—and one major reason has to do with their differing visions of the end of the world, or eschatology. Many evangelicals—especially those who are part of the rapidly growing charismatic movement—are Christian Zionists, meaning that a victorious state of Israel plays a central role in their dramatic and troubling end-times scenario, which is, put simply, that Jews return to Israel, usher in the second coming of Jesus, and then convert to Christianity or perish.
Evangelicals and Catholics both believe that a special covenant existed between God and the Jews; one need only read the Old Testament to see that unfold. But for Catholics, the restoration of Israel predicted in the Bible is more symbolic than literal—they generally don’t believe that the state of Israel must prevail politically to usher in the second coming of Jesus.
Catholic teaching strongly rejects antisemitism and the insidious and pervasive old trope that Jews were responsible for killing Jesus. Yet embedded in the criticism by Catholics of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and, more recently, the war in Iran, some evangelicals see a threat to the very existence of Israel, the Jewish people, and their own deeply held beliefs about the end-times.
Last month, weeks after the US attacked Iran, an anonymous account on X called Insurrection Barbie posted a screed against traditionalist Catholics, or those who favor a return to Catholicism as it was before the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The post falsely claimed that Catholics see “Jews, Israel, and Protestants not as covenant partners but as adversaries of Christian civilization.” The post has been viewed 4.1 million times. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, an evangelical Christian and strong supporter of Israel, reposted it, urging his 7.1 million followers to “READ every word of this. It’s the best & most comprehensive explanation of what we’re fighting.”
Then there was the widely publicized incident involving Carrie Prejean Boller, a conservative Catholic activist and former Miss California who has vociferously opposed the war in Iran. Boller, who converted to Catholicism in 2025, served in Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission until February, when she was removed because of her comments during a hearing on antisemitism. “I’m a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism,” she said, “so are all Catholics antisemites?” Other members of the panel pushed back, but she was resolute.
At the same hearing, she also stood up for the far-right influencer Candace Owens, a recent convert to Catholicism who has defended Hitler and referred to Israel as a “synagogue of Satan” against allegations of antisemitism. “I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite,” she said. “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism, and that really has to stop.”
In response to Boller’s removal, Owens fired off a post on X. “You hosted a performative Zionist hearing meant to neuter the Christian faith,” she wrote. “Carrie spoke truth, as a Catholic, and Christians, the Truth cannot be defeated. Zionists are naturally hostile to Catholics because we refuse to bend the knee to revisionist history and support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers.” Last month, the right-wing group Catholics for Catholics held a gala to honor Boller “in recognition of her courageous defense of the Faith.”
Another recent flashpoint in the tension between evangelicals and Catholics came when Israeli police stopped Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, head of the Catholic church in Israel, from entering Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he was planning to celebrate mass on Palm Sunday. “That was shocking,” said Orsi, the Northwestern scholar. “I mean that that could really break something between Catholics and Jews.” And an affront to Israeli Jews could also strain relations between Catholics and the many evangelical Christian Zionists who support them.
“It was always a fragile and improbable alliance, born of [the] political, and not the religious.”
Israeli leaders said that safety concerns prompted their actions, but some Catholics saw the snubbing of Pizzaballa as retaliation for his strong condemnation of the war in Iran. Last month, Pizzaballa cited US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comparison of the war in Iran to the Christian Crusades as an example of abusing God’s name to justify war, which is, Pizzaballa said, “the gravest sin we can commit in this time.” Last summer, he called Israel’s actions in Gaza “morally unjustifiable.”
“Cardinal Pizzaballa was turned back because the Jews are at war with the Catholic Church,” tweeted E. Michael Jones, editor of the conservative Catholic magazine Culture Wars, to his 132,000 followers. “This violation of his rights as cardinal archbishop has nothing to do with ‘security concerns.’ If the Israelis were really concerned about their security, they would stop attacking Iran.”
Shortly after, radical right pundit Steve Bannon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, both conservative Catholics, discussed the incident on Bannon’s show. Palm Sunday, Posobiec said, “clearly holds biblical significance for so many of the believers. That’s why the outrage was so swift and so strong, by so many Christians all around the world.” Bannon called for a Christian uprising against the Israeli government. “We need the Christians to take control of the Christian sites, full stop—we don’t need to be supplicants to the Israel government to do this,” he said. He then took the argument a step further, lambasting US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz, both evangelical Christians who strongly support Israel. “And any Christian [like] Huckabee and Cruz and this crowd that doesn’t agree, that shows you what heretics they are.” (Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, later expressed regret over the incident, and Huckabee called it an “unfortunate overreach already having major repercussions around the world.”)
Against the backdrop of these tensions, far-right Catholic influencers have become emboldened in their criticism of one of the most politically prominent evangelicals in the Trump universe. In a clip that went viral last week, during a White House Easter luncheon, the president’s spiritual adviser, evangelical minister Paula White-Cain likened Trump to Jesus. White-Cain, a charismatic evangelical who has called Israel her “spiritual home,” noted that Trump has been “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that Our Lord and Savior showed us.”
The blowback was immediate and unsparing. Hard-right Catholic commentator Taylor Marshall, who has 235,000 followers on X, posted White-Cain’s remarks with the comment, “Paula White speaks blasphemy.” Boller posted to her 160,000 followers on X, “We were promised the golden age…now they are glorifying a genocide and justifying it as if it’s God’s will. Heretical teachers like Paula White are advising Trump for more war and destruction to fulfill their false end times fantasy.”
Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right Catholic former editor of Breitbart News, had choice words about White-Cain after the incident, which he shared with his 828,000 followers. He described her as a “heretic con artist who preys on the poorest, dumbest, and most desperate people in America.” He added, “God isn’t the only one using Donald Trump, is he, you vapid old hag.”
“What does matter is that this Pope has said that this war is bad, this war is sinful, this war is immoral. This papacy was not the dream papacy of the Catholic right.”
Candace Owens reacted to the fact that Bishop Robert Barron, a Catholic leader in the Minnesota Diocese of Winona-Rochester and a prominent theological conservative, was also present at the luncheon but offered no objection to White-Cain’s remarks. “I am a new Catholic, but I am deeply concerned about Bishop Barron,” she wrote. “Paula White is an unabashed heretic.”
The Catholic commentators I talked to for this article cautioned me against using fringe voices on the Catholic right—such as Steven Bannon and Candace Owens—as representatives of broad Catholic sentiment. As Michael Sean Winters, a journalist who covers politics for the progressive Catholic news outlet National Catholic Reporter, put it, “I just don’t think it’s your average Catholic in the pew.”
He’s right. The 1.4 billion members of the global Catholic Church are astonishingly ideologically diverse; along with all the doctrinaire traditionalists, there are also thriving strains of progressivism and social justice teaching. “Catholics are not a monolithic social or political group any longer,” Fr. James Martin, editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, noted to me via email.
Indeed, the fringe controversies obscure the more important fissure. “What does matter is that this Pope has said that this war is bad, this war is sinful, this war is immoral,” Orsi told me. “This papacy was not the dream papacy of the Catholic right.”
Out of the shambles of the evangelical-Catholic coalition, a new alliance is beginning to take shape. Today, some conservative Catholic intellectuals find they have more in common with a hard right group of Christian nationalist reformed protestants than with mainstream megachurch evangelicals. Christopher Hale, the progressive Catholic commentator, noted in his Substack post that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a disciple of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, a hard-line Calvinist protestant. Wilson is the de facto patriarch of the TheoBros, an extremely online group of mostly millennial, mostly Calvinist men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists.
Last week, I spoke to R.R. Reno, editor of the conservative Catholic publication First Things. Unlike the Pope, Reno is cautiously supportive of the war in Iran because he believes that it can be defended under the just-war doctrine. “Diminishing or neutralizing the war-making capacity of one’s enemy is the baseline cause pursued by nations that make war,” he wrote in a recent First Things opinion piece. Doug Wilson shares this cautious support, even though his Calvinist denomination does not believe that Israel plays a special role in the End Times. But beyond their agreement on Iran, Reno says that he and Wilson, who has written for First Things, get along because of their shared erudition. “You go down to your local Pentecostal church, and they typically want to engage on things just at the level of the Bible,” he told me. He noted that mass advertising was invented in America more than 100 years ago, and part of its genius “is to be able to bring things into focus in a kind of pithy way. And American evangelicalism is just so American.” In contrast, much like Catholicism, the kind of protestant faith that Wilson practices “has a very rich intellectual tradition,” says Reno. He refers to it as “single-malt Calvinism.”
The newfound bond between Catholics and TheoBros is not without tension—the main pressure point being that Wilson takes a dim view of Catholicism as a whole, calling the faith “priestcraft” and the authorities in Rome “not qualified to teach the saints of God.” Still, Reno told me, “I have a lot in common with the Doug Wilson crowd.” While the simplicity of evangelical messages may appeal to the masses, Reno says, his brand of Catholicism and Wilson’s single-malt Calvinism are “more likely to exercise influence at an elite level, and,” he added, “you’re not going to get Paula White exercising influence at an elite level.”
There is perhaps no better example of the elite influence of the TheoBros and Catholics than Vice President JD Vance, whose views have been shaped by both movements. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has written about how Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the philosopher René Girard have influenced his worldview. Yet he also has intellectual and social connections to the TheoBros, especially those associated with their unofficial publication, American Reformer. His assertion that children should be allotted votes managed by their parents, for example, echoes arguments against women voting made by Wilson’s church.
For Vance, a presumed 2028 presidential hopeful, harmony with Doug Wilson, who just planted a new church in Washington, DC, and recently spoke at the Pentagon at Hegseth’s behest, is an asset. One that may be more important than his harmony with the Pope, who, on the Iran War and several other key issues, happens to be opposed to the actions of Vance’s boss and the MAGA base. (Before he became pope, he also famously criticized Vance on social media for his remarks about the Christian concept of rightly-ordered love, saying he was simply “wrong.”)
On the war in Iran, Vance seems to have come around from initial misgivings to a position that reflects Trump’s rather than that of Catholic leaders. I asked Winters, the National Catholic Reporter journalist, if he thought Vance struggled internally to integrate the teachings of the Pope with the directives of President Trump. “I would be surprised if he sees it as a predicament,” Winters told me. “I just think the ambition is so raw there, that’s an easy call. Trump is going to win that every day and twice on Sunday.”
When a journalist asked him last month about his change of heart on Iran, Vance replied, “We have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated.”
2026-04-08 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The American buffalo—those ornery, hairy prairie beasts that reign as the official mammal of the United States—have joined wind turbines, electric cars, and climate researchers in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Acceding to anti-bison grumbling from cattle ranchers and Republican politicians in Montana, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in January proposed canceling leases for buffalo grazing on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
The BLM is part of the Department of the Interior, which, for more than a century, has celebrated its role in heading off the extinction of buffalo, which were killed by the tens of millions during white settlement in the West. The Interior Department still sports a buffalo on its official seal.
But the BLM, long nicknamed the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining,” has traditionally prioritized leasing the rangelands it oversees for cattle grazing.
Now, in the MAGA era, with Interior reversing the Biden administration’s determination that conservation is a use of BLM land on par with grazing and resource extraction, Burgum has ruled that since bison here in north-central Montana are not being raised for “production-oriented purposes,” they have no legal right to roam, wallow, or munch grass on land leased from the bureau.
If the ruling becomes final, which may occur this spring, more than 950 buffalo will be evicted from tens of thousands of acres of federal land, some of which they have been grazing on, behind stout electric fences and without major incident, for 20 years.
Cows will then mosey on in, and their owners will benefit from the hugely discounted grazing leases available from the BLM. It charges a per-animal fee that is about 90 percent cheaper than fees charged for grazing livestock on privately owned land in this state.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a friend of Secretary Burgum and a fellow Trump-supporting tech multimillionaire, gave voice to the joy that the prospect of buffalo banishment has generated among cattle ranchers who drive Montana’s agricultural economy and Republicans who dominate politics in the state.
“For years, we have raised serious concerns about the federal government’s failure to listen to the folks who live and work the land,” Gianforte said in a statement. “By proposing to cancel these [bison lease] permits, BLM is finally acknowledging that federal overreach cannot come at the expense of our local communities and the production agriculture that feeds our nation.”
Interior aimed its proposed decision at seven federal lease allotments held by American Prairie, a well-heeled nonprofit foundation that has long been a bête noire of local cattle ranchers and Montana Republicans. American Prairie—often with large donations from wealthy coastal environmentalists—has been buying ranches here in the depopulated outback of eastern Montana for nearly a quarter century. The foundation wants to revive the grassland ecosystem to create an “American Serengeti,” chock full of sage grouse, prairie dogs, and charismatic megafauna like bison, pronghorn, elk, wolves, and grizzly bears.
The anti-buffalo wording of Bergum’s proposed decision, however, is resounding far beyond this lonesome precinct of Montana. It is raising alarm and outrage from the Great Plains to California, where there are about half a million bison, many of which are raised for conservation and human consumption. Buffalo are grazing behind fences on scores of Indian reservations and on BLM allotments in Colorado, New Mexico, the Dakotas and elsewhere in Montana—and have been doing so without legal objection from Interior for more than four decades, until this year’s order overturning BLM’s 2022 decision to allow American Prairie to graze bison on seven allotments in Phillips County.
Particularly alarmed is the Coalition of Large Tribes (COLT), which manages 25,000 buffalo and represents more than 50 tribes, accounting for about 95 percent of Indian Country and half the Native American population in the US.
“Interior’s proposed ruling would put a chokehold on us being able to increase our buffalo herds,” said OJ Semans Sr., executive director of the tribal coalition and a member of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. “We should not have the federal government saying only cattle get affordable BLM leases. It is just so stupid the way they are doing this. It is DEI for cows.”
Coalition tribes run bison on reservation land but plan to shift some of their growing herds to BLM grazing lands, which total about 155 million acres. Much of this land is threaded through and around large reservations. Tribes raise buffalo for spiritual, ecological, and nutritional purposes—and sell buffalo meat (about 25 percent leaner than beef) for profit. Two tribes in California, the Pit River Tribe and the Fort Bidwell Indian Community, are actively seeking BLM grazing leases for their bison.
In a blistering notice of protest to Interior, the coalition’s lawyers said that “as the proposed decision is currently written, it is unlikely that any tribal government or tribal citizen buffalo herd would ever be eligible for BLM grazing leases.”
Non-tribal buffalo ranchers with federal land leases are also up in arms. Colton Jones, an owner of the Wild Idea Buffalo Company in Hermosa, South Dakota, said he fears that his lease for bison grazing on 26,000 acres of US Forest Service land, which is part of the Department of Agriculture rather than Interior, will be the next target of “politics and pressure from the current administration.”
“This action is not only unnecessary and politically motivated, but it also sets a deeply troubling precedent that threatens the livelihoods of family-owned bison operations like ours and the many ranchers with whom we maintain longstanding business relationships,” Jones said in a letter to the BLM state office in Montana.
Protest letters from American Prairie, the Coalition of Large Tribes, and private buffalo operations accuse Burgum’s Interior Department of concocting anti-bison language that distorts the meaning and purpose of the Taylor Grazing Act, a Dust Bowl-era law that governs livestock grazing on BLM land.
That 1934 law, written by members of Congress at a desperate time when wind-born topsoil from the Great Plains was raining down on Washington, DC, was intended to halt catastrophic damage to public lands from overgrazing, restore the health of the prairie ecosystem, and stabilize the livestock industry.
Interior’s primary rationale for booting buffalo off BLM land, according to its proposed decision, is that leases under the Taylor Grazing Act are “limited to cases where the animals to be grazed are domestic and will be used for production-oriented purposes.”
Pro-bison lawyers point out that the words “production-oriented purposes” do not appear in the grazing act and that Congress has never defined the words “domestic” or “livestock” to exclude buffalo. State law in Montana explicitly defines bison as livestock.
A novel argument made by Interior in its proposed buffalo ban hinges on “intent.” Burgum’s decision argues that American Prairie’s buffalo “are intended to be released into the wild or integrated into a wild herd in the future”—and therefore should not be “properly considered ‘domestic livestock.’”
Lawyers for buffalo interests mock this interpretation, arguing that nowhere in federal grazing law, agency regulations or case law is there an “intent standard” as regards the raising of buffalo. They also said that buffalo run wild nowhere in the US outside of Yellowstone National Park and a handful of other national parks and reserves.
Like cows, bison live and die behind fences, and many are slaughtered for human consumption. As the Coalition of Large Tribes explains, buffalo are “actively managed, marketed, sold, and traded like other livestock, and offered for commercial hunting.”
Nineteen years ago, when I first wrote in the Washington Post about American Prairie and its frosty relations with some of its ranching neighbors, the foundation’s leaders rhapsodized about vast open spaces where buffalo would run free—and where fences and cows would go away. American Prairie told the Department of the Interior that its mission was to develop the largest, most genetically diverse conservation bison herd in North America.
“This thing is huge,” Sean Gerrity, then-president of American Prairie, told me in 2006, “it will affect a tremendous number of people, and it will last a long time.”
Since then, American Prairie has indeed expanded. Its bison herd is up from 19 to 952; its land holdings have grown from about 60,000 acres to more than 600,000 acres, including property purchased outright and land leased from the state of Montana and the BLM. The foundation says it wants to buy more land and envisions eventually having about 1.7 million acres that, combined with the Charles M. Russel National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, would provide the amount of land researchers believe is required for a fully functioning prairie ecosystem. It would continue to expand its buffalo herd as a keystone of that habitat.
But the sobering realities of life in Montana have also set in, especially as the state’s politics have shifted in recent years from purple to hard-right red. Dozens of local ranchers have placed “negative bison easements” on future sales of their property that would prevent buffalo from grazing on them. The foundation has sued the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, claiming it has slow-walked the processing of American Prairie’s applications for leases that allow buffalo grazing on state land.
American Prairie has had to adapt.
It now has more than eight times as many cattle as buffalo on its land. And the buffalo herd is managed much like bison operations across the West, with $350,000 worth of BLM-approved fences, disease inoculations, ear tags and regular harvests for human consumption. Of the 2,000 bison that have grazed on American Prairie land in the past two decades, about half have been slaughtered for meat or shipped away to tribal buffalo herds, breeding programs or zoos. There is a building on the property for slaughtering buffalo.
“We are largely an operation like a ranch,” said Scott Heidebrink, director of landscape stewardship for American Prairie, as he drove me among bison herds on the foundation’s land and offered me snacks of buffalo jerky.
“Cows are not going away,” said Heidebrink, a South Dakota native who has worked on this land for a decade and has a degree in wildlife and fisheries science from South Dakota State University. “We have fences and roads and buildings, and of our 606,000 deeded and leased acres, only 46,000 acres do not have cattle on them.”
Phillips County, home to American Prairie and the focus of BLM’s proposed buffalo ban, is one of the more inhospitable places in the continental United States for making a living from agriculture. Rain is scarce, winters long, summers scorching and the soil is poor. Prairie grasses and sagebrush do well; row crops often do not.
Numerical proof of how hard it is to scratch out a living in Phillips County—a Connecticut-sized expanse of prairie lying between the Canadian border and the Missouri River—is the relentless decline in its number of human inhabitants. The high point was 1920, when the Census counted 9,311 residents lured in during the first two decades of the twentieth century by a series of increasingly generous homestead acts and by railroad advertisements promising that rain would follow the plow.
Census records show that since 1920, the population of Phillips County has declined every 10 years for an entire century. The 2020 census counted 4,217 residents; three people have died or otherwise departed the county since then.
“Their claim that bison are some kind of magical animal that grazes different is just ridiculous.”
What can and do thrive in Phillips County are cows—and bison. Before they were killed off, researchers believe that millions of buffalo roamed what became Phillips County.
Now, cattle ranching is the county’s dominant economic engine, usually producing about two-thirds of its total agricultural income. Cows outnumber humans by about 11 to one in what is one of Montana’s top cattle-producing counties.
But to raise cattle profitably, ranchers here—as across the Great Plains—have had to get bigger. They do so by buying out their neighbors. Purchase of more land usually comes with below-market grazing privileges on thousands of acres of adjacent BLM land. About half of the land in the county is federal- or state-owned.
As a result, fewer ranchers are raising more cattle per ranch—part of a nationwide trend. For the most part, management of these cattle has been sustainable, avoiding the destructive grazing practices that created the Dust Bowl.
Still, there is a growing body of scientific evidence showing that bison would be far better for the prairie ecosystem of Phillips County than cattle.
A Kansas State University study found that sustainably managed buffalo are twice as effective as cattle at increasing the diversity of native plants. Bison, which tend to move farther and faster while grazing, do less concentrated trampling of the land and spread seeds more widely, thus increasing the resiliency of grasslands to droughts, which have increased in severity with climate change.
Bison are less stressed by hot weather than cattle and spend less time lingering at ponds and wetlands, decreasing soil erosion and giving other animals access to water. In winter, buffalo slow their metabolism to conserve energy and eat less; while cattle increase their metabolism and eat more. And bison can survive on lower-quality forage than cattle.
Buffalo herds also increase the diversity of birds, amphibians, elk, deer, coyotes, wolves, and bears on the prairie.
Deanna Robbins, a third-generation cattle rancher and activist critic of American Prairie, is not persuaded by research that shows the benefits of buffalo over cattle. “They romanticize the bison,” she said. “Their claim that bison are some kind of magical animal that grazes different is just ridiculous.”
She said research funded by stockgrowers shows that properly managed cattle are just as eco-friendly as bison. Robbins, though, said that buffalo themselves are not at the top of her list of worries.
“My biggest concern is American Prairie’s planned takeover of federal grazing with their bison, and then the growth of the American Serengeti, which would bring in more apex predators,” she said. “If they surround me with those things [wolves and grizzly bears], it doesn’t matter what land I own. I am not going to have an economically successful ranch.”
To stop American Prairie, Robbins and other local ranch women created Save The Cowboy, which has placed anti-buffalo billboards and banners across Phillips County and neighboring Fergus County, where Robbins has her ranch. The organization, created nine years ago, objects to America Prairie’s nonprofit status and to its moneyed coastal donors who “have no idea of what life is like here in Montana.”
“I have accepted the fact that they are here, and I know they are not going anywhere.”
While Save The Cowboy has drawn support from Montana’s governor and congressional delegation, its concerns were largely dismissed by the Biden administration, which, in 2022, granted American Prairie’s request to graze buffalo on land leased from the BLM. Bison would be good for the land, water quality and wildlife, the administration stated.
All that’s changed during President Donald Trump’s second term. To the delight of Robbins and other supporters of Save The Cowboy, Interior’s proposed decision would void Biden’s bison leases and put cattle first.
“What the Trump administration did was understand what the rules really are for managing this land,” said Robbins. “We definitely feel like we are being heard. These are different times.”
Dusty Emond is a fourth-generation cattle rancher whose family has owned land in Phillips County for 107 years. For the past 15 of those, his herds have grazed across a fence—within easy snorting distance—of growing herds of bison managed by American Prairie.
Emond, 53, was opposed to American Prairie when its land agents first began sniffing around the county, searching for ranches to buy. He supports the Trump administration’s proposed cancellation of grazing leases for American Prairie bison on BLM land.
“The biggest problem I have with them is their money,” Emond said. “We can’t compete with it. When a ranch comes up for sale, they have unlimited money. They buy at the top of the market. The more land they buy, the less there is for farm families around here.”
Emond worried, when buffalo first moved in as close neighbors, that they would infect his cattle with brucellosis, an infectious bacterial disease that induces abortion in pregnant cattle, elk, and bison—and can infect humans. Billions of dollars have been spent in the United States to eradicate the disease, yet it persists in some buffalo and elk in Yellowstone National Park. Montana ranchers and politicians often issue ominous warnings about the heightened risk of brucellosis to the state’s cattle whenever they complain about buffalo on BLM land. American Prairie says that’s just a scare tactic.
Emond said that when it comes to the buffalo next door, he worried too much, and brucellosis has turned out to be a non-issue.
American Prairie has “done a better job than I thought they would” in tending to the health of buffalo, Emond said. There have been no cases of buffalo transmitting the disease to his cattle, nor from any managed buffalo herd to cattle anywhere in the country, according to the National Park Service.
American Prairie, for all his initial trepidation, has turned out to be a good neighbor, he said. So much so that he’s gone into business with the foundation, leasing about 20,000 acres of its deeded and allotted BLM land for his cattle.
“It hasn’t been a problem for me,” he said, referring to the day-to-day proximity of his cows and their buffalo. “I can think of about four times in the past 15 years that their bison have gone across the fence into my herds. It has been very minor—no worse than any other neighbors. And when I call them, they are right there to come get the buffalo.”
Emond said he’s learned that cattle and buffalo separated by strong fences can get along just fine. He would prefer that the buffalo herds not grow larger, but he believes they will over time and that his ranch will survive.
“I’m a realist,” he said. “I have accepted the fact that they are here, and I know they are not going anywhere. I’m willing to work with them.”
Scott Heidebrink, the American Prairie land manager, acknowledged that the Trump administration may soon force a major cutback in herd size.
If Interior’s proposed ban on leasing BLM land becomes final, he said, several hundred buffalo could be culled or shipped elsewhere. In the process, he said, cattle and the remaining bison will be shuffled around on American Prairie’s holdings.
“If we lose, we have deeded land where buffalo can go,” he said, while cattle now grazing on that private land would move to land leased from the BLM. The bison and their keepers will bide their time—and wait for a new president to reopen federal land.
“It is very evident that this administration is anti-bison,” Heidebrink said. “But we are here and we are not going away.”
2026-04-08 18:00:00
Earlier this year, parts of Minneapolis resembled a war zone. The Minnesota city had become the violent epicenter of President Donald Trump’s immigration raids as thousands of masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol roamed the streets in what was known as Operation Metro Surge.
“It felt like a siege,” says Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who sued the Department of Homeland Security to end the operation. “It felt like nobody was safe.”
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.Thousands of immigrants, many of whom had no criminal record, were detained. Children were arrested. High schoolers were pepper-sprayed. And two US citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—were shot and killed by immigration agents.
Following weeks of protests, the White House reversed course and ramped down immigration enforcement. But hundreds of agents are still there as state officials like Ellison are left to clean up the mess the federal government largely left behind.
On this week’s More To The Story, Ellison talks with host Al Letson about the economic damage from the Trump administration’s ICE raids and persistent fears within immigrant communities, his congressional confrontation with Sen. Josh Hawley over a Covid-19 fraud scheme, and why he refuses to back down from the what he describes as the “Trump onslaught.”
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
2026-04-08 02:00:24
On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump began a post on his social media platform Truth Social by writing, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Trump continued in the post, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
The president’s post and other recent threats come in the lead up to an 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline that he has imposed on Iran to reach a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz. The threats have led to concerns from figures including former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson and Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House communications director turned Trump critic, 0f a potential nuclear strike against Iran if the president is unable to open the strait through conventional weaponry and diplomacy.
I asked the White House Tuesday morning if the president is mulling the use of nuclear weapons and if his apocalyptic Truth Social post is intended to convey such a threat. Six minutes later, at 11:19 a.m. eastern time, the White House press office declined to rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Instead, an unnamed official wrote, “We refer you to the President’s TRUTH on this inquiry.”
In a follow-up email, I wrote that the Truth Social post in question is ambiguous and that I would write in this article that “the White House press office declined to comment on whether the president is considering a nuclear attack on Iran,” and that it instead directed me to a post that threatens the imminent death of an entire civilization.
I also asked if the White House would like to provide additional comments or a statement. Two minutes later, at 11:45 a.m., the White House shared a statement attributable to press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The Iranian regime has until 8PM Eastern Time to meet the moment and make a deal with the United States,” Leavitt said. “Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do.”
The responses from the White House press office were different from an earlier tweet from its rapid response team that criticized a Democratic account for saying that Vice President JD Vance had implied on Tuesday that Trump was considering using nuclear weapons. “Literally nothing [Vance] said here ‘implies’ this, you absolute buffoons,” the rapid response team wrote.
The threat by Trump on Tuesday is yet another escalation from the president in the lead up to his imminent deadline for opening the Strait of Hormuz. On Easter Sunday, Trump wrote that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one” before adding “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” The language of the post suggested that Trump is considering using conventional weapons to target civilian infrastructure, which is itself a war crime. Trump said on Monday about Iran, “The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.”
Some of Trump’s biggest backers, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, are now warning that the president is no longer fit to serve and should be removed from office by his cabinet. “25TH AMENDMENT!!!,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote in response to Trump’s most recent threat. “We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
