2026-04-22 01:31:38
Two lawmakers—Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—resigned from office last week amid unrelated House Ethics Committee investigations over alleged sexual misconduct. And yesterday, the Committee stated that since 2017, they have initiated no less than 20 misconduct investigations against members of Congress, most of whom have not ended up resigning.
Sexual misconduct is pervasive in America’s statehouses, too, according to a new report by the National Women’s Defense League, a group focused on preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. The group started reporting on accusations against state lawmakers in 2023, tracking accusations going back to 2013.
NWDL has found credible sexual harassment allegations against 162 sitting state officials, in 424 incidents between 2013 and 2026. Six of those lawmakers were accused in 2025 — Ryan Armagost (R-Colo.); Ron Weinberg (R-Colo.); Jeremy Dean (D-Mo.); Dan McKeon (R-Neb.); Jeremy Olson (R-N.D.); and Solicitor General Judd Stone (R-Texas). Of those 162 lawmakers, 17 are still in office.
“The public record is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Sarah Higginbotham, NWDL co-director. Higginbotham noted that the report only includes public-facing accounts from people able to withstand the fear of retaliation from their bosses. “These numbers understate the harm.”
The problem is bipartisan: at the statehouse level, accusations against Republicans and Democrats happen at near-equal rates. The vast majority of victims are women, and 93 percent of accused officials over the past decade are men.
For Aftyn Behn (D-Tenn.), this isn’t surprising news. “Old-school sexism is absolutely back,” Behn said at a virtual press conference Tuesday morning, before offering a recent example. “Yesterday, a Republican female colleague of mine walked to the lectern on the Tennessee General Assembly House floor to present her bill. A member whistled at her. We all heard it, but nobody said a word, and we just moved on like nothing had happened.”
The problem may also be growing worse. In the years following the #MeToo movement, NWDL co-director Emma Davidson Tribbs said, the number of people reporting workplace sexual misconduct has decreased. “The recent dip in public reporting is a warning sign. It signals distrust in accountability systems,” she said. After Swalwell and Gonzales’ resignations, advocates hope they can push this issue back into the spotlight.
“This moment can, hopefully, give us momentum,” Republican Pennsylvania state representative Abby Major said at Tuesday’s press conference. This past year, five states enacted laws addressing sexual harassment in state legislatures—but most states still have relatively few protections in place. In practice, those protections might look like a confidential sexual misconduct reporting system, transparency around misconduct investigations, and other reforms. “We have to ensure that no one has to choose between their safety and their livelihood,” Major said.
2026-04-22 01:27:22
Tucker Carlson would very much like you to forgive him for backing Donald Trump all these years.
“It’s not enough to say ‘I changed my mind’ or ‘this is bad, I’m out,'” Carlson said on his news podcast The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
Carlson said he will “be tormented for a long time” for promoting Trump in his campaign for presidency. The podcast episode featured his brother Buckley, who, according to the show’s notes, wrote speeches for Trump in 2015 and “can fully understand how painful the current betrayal is.”
Carlson, it must be noted, claimed his support for Trump “was not intentional.”
But it certainly looks intentional. Carlson consistently misled over 3.5 million viewers on his Fox News show. During the lead-up to the 2020 election, Carlson boasted a nightly audience of over 5 million.
Carlson repeatedly spread Trump’s propaganda, including unsubstantiated claims of “meaningful voter fraud” in Georgia following the 2020 election. He also made racist and anti-immigrant remarks, including voicing support for the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which promotes the fictional idea that nonwhite people are brought to the US to replace white voters and decimate the GOP fundraising base.
Carlson’s breaking point came when Trump invaded Iran and went on a genocidal online crash out by posting a series of religious posts on religious Truth Social posts earlier this month. Carlson said the whole ordeal made “a mockery of Christianity.”
Carlson has been sowing the seeds of redemption for weeks now. After Trump went on several verbal tirades against Pope Leo XIV, who himself criticized the US’ role in the Iran War, Carlson condemned Trump publicly saying on his April 15 show: “Could this be the antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion.”
So here is my conclusion: Carlson is one of many conservative commentators who now want you to believe they were sold a fake bill of goods. From Marjorie Taylor Greene to Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, right-wing commentators see Trump’s MAGA base defecting. Are these right-wing ideologues suddenly principled defenders of conservative values? Not a chance. They’re all just hucksters who sense a good business opportunity.
These fake outrage artists are even using Trump’s playbook to do it. Call it the latest iteration of the art of the deal.
2026-04-21 19:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Democrats should get louder in championing clean energy’s affordability and resilience from global shocks, according to some of the party’s leading voices on the climate.
As the Iran war roils economies by raising the cost of oil and gas, countries are aiming to accelerate their shift to cleaner energy. But in the US, Donald Trump has sought to kill off any alternative to fossil fuels while opposing Democrats have been reluctant to tie the conflict to any action on the climate crisis.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally travels, in the wake of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran caused energy costs to spike around the world. In the US, gasoline has soared above $4.10 a gallon nationally, with Trump admitting the costs could even be “a little bit higher” by November.
During the first month of the Iran war, the world’s largest oil and gas companies made more than $30 billion every hour in unearned profit.
Democrats have pointed to this as further evidence of the US president’s broken promises to lower the cost of living for Americans. But there have been few calls for a pivotal switch away from the volatility of fossil fuels in favor of clean energy in response to the conflict, to the frustration of those who support action on the climate crisis.
“There’s a timely clash on climate and costs that Democrats can win, as long as we have the nerve to actually show up to the fight,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, who added “true energy independence will be achieved by powering our economy with renewable energy, the fuel sources for which are unlimited, free and independent of geopolitical events.”
“Democrats will continue to lose the righteous and winnable fight over the future of clean energy if we cede the battlefield to fossil fuel liars and our own party’s misguided climate-hushers,” Whitehouse said.
Climate “hushing,” in which politicians and businesses downplay or ignore the need to cut planet-heating emissions, has been prevalent in the US during Trump’s second term. A bruising 2024 election loss and ongoing inflation concerns—polls show gasoline costs are Americans’ top concern about the Iran war—have left Democrats wrestling with a critique of affordability rather than the imperiled livability of the planet, despite the clear link between the two.
The Iran war provides a “unique moment of opportunity” for Democrats to extol the advantages of lower-pollution options like electric cars but the focus should be on “reducing consumer costs, which should’ve been the message over climate protection all along,” according to Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House.
“I don’t think they’ve grasped the political opportunity yet,” Bledsoe said. “They have to stay really focused on how these next-generation technologies will provide a consumer benefit. When you pitch clean energy as cutting consumer costs first and improving the overall economy second, people are happy to cut emissions third.”
Translating this into a winning political message has been a struggle for Democrats who in Joe Biden’s administration passed sweeping climate legislation to spur new jobs in the clean energy sector, only for the bill to be gutted by Republicans now in control of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has proposed a partial resurrection of incentives for clean energy should his party regain power.
But Democrats must do better to pitch solar, wind, and battery technologies as a way to reduce US exposure to international fossil fuel costs dictated by global events, according to Ro Khanna, a leading Democratic member of Congress. “I really believe we missed a moment to do that with the Ukraine war,” he said. “We should have been linking the clean energy agenda to Americans’ economic security and our national security, and we should do that again.”
Longer term, Khanna added, the US needs to “wean ourselves off the petrostates. We need a moonshot for clean technology.”
Such a shift from fossil fuels, which scientists say is imperative if the world is to avert catastrophic climate impacts, has been stymied by Trump, who has implemented a “drill, baby drill” approach to oil and gas extraction and has taken extraordinary measures, even amid the Iran crisis, to halt domestic clean energy generation that he has called a “scam” and a “con job.”
“Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits.”
The soaring price of oil may even be beneficial, Trump has suggested, because “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” This money is mostly flowing to large fossil fuel corporations, with the world’s largest 100 oil and gas companies making more than $30 billion every hour in unearned profit during the first month of the war.
Trump’s approach differs starkly from that of other countries that have sought to rapidly reduce their exposure to a faraway conflict. Electric car sales have boomed in South Korea and Malaysia, while in Pakistan electric rickshaws have been selling out. “This is a wake-up call,” Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto said recently. “We will convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric.”
The European Union, too, plans to accelerate clean energy deployment to help alleviate electricity bills. “Every delayed investment in the energy transition risks greater cost for society at a later stage,” a draft European Commission proposal states. The plan comes ahead of a conference in Colombia this month where representatives from 85 countries will gather to craft a roadmap on how to move beyond the fossil fuel era.
The Iran war is a case study for the need to make this transition, according to the United Nations. “Clean energy is the antidote to fossil fuel cost chaos, because it is cheaper, safer, and faster to market,” said Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief. “Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits.”
The mounting toll of the climate crisis, though, is the primary reason to ditch coal, oil and gas, advocates argue. Such impacts are increasingly apparent in the US, as well as the rest of the world, with the country enduring its hottest and driest start to a year in recorded history, with record-breaking March heat and punishing bouts of drought, heat and wildfire strafing much of the US west.
Despite the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate science, two-thirds of Americans are worried about global heating, polling has shown, with most people in the US underestimating how concerned others are about the topic as it has receded from coverage in many media outlets.
There has been “a surprising silence” from Democrats and climate activists on how clean energy is cheaper, inexhaustible and more locally controlled compared with fossil fuels, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, an academic at Yale University who studies public perceptions of the climate crisis. “And, oh by the way, it reduces the carbon pollution causing global warming,” he added.
2026-04-21 06:57:24
Last week, the publishing conglomerate Condé Nast shuttered Self, a women’s health publication that in recent years had turned to publishing service journalism on chronic health conditions that was both practical and normalized living with chronic illness. Amid a trend of unrealistic articles on longevity and ambiguously defined, MAHA-coded writing on “wellness,” Self was a breath of fresh air.
“SELF has played an important role in shaping conversations around health and wellness,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said in a memo published last week. “However, as audience behaviors shift, we have not seen a path for SELF to continue in its current form as a digital publication.” Lynch’s memo said that health and wellness content would “be integrated into our other brands, including Allure and Glamour.” Self had already gone digital-only and ceased print publication in 2017.
I spoke to chronically ill women who had been dedicated readers of Self about what the magazine, and its closure, meant to them. Self may not have been a revenue driver for Condé, but its work was transformative for readers, quietly shifting away from the typical fare of women’s magazines in the 2000s and 2010s—like problematic weight-loss content—to a more progressive vision of women’s health and wellness.
Self‘s conversational style of writing about health topics made the publication more accessible, said Jaime Seltzer, scientific director of the myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome nonprofit MEAction, who was interviewed by then–editor-in-chief Rachel Miller for a 2022 article that Seltzer said sparked more awareness around ME/CFS and Long Covid and had a major impact on people who were trying to figure out what is happening to their health.
“The more people who know they have a disease, the more they can get the clinical care that they need,” Seltzer said. “A really good article like this is a great way to show a friend or a relative what you’re going through.”
Beth Morton, a migraine care advocate said she appreciated Self‘s non-stigmatizing articles on the condition by people who lived with migraines themselves. Self “still had an impact,” Morton said, lamenting the decision to shutter the magazine.
Myisha Malone-King, a chronic illness advocate living with Crohn’s disease, said Self made her feel seen and supported when she struggled with getting medical care for an ovarian cyst. “I felt extremely lonely when I was diagnosed,” Malone-King said, calling the publication’s folding “a huge blow.”
Condé Nast hasn’t announced what will happen to Self‘s digital presence and archives, and representatives for the company did not respond to a query about whether the site would stay online—or whether it would follow other folded media outlets, like the feminist publication Bitch Media, which also engaged frequently with chronic illness and disability, into digital oblivion (though some articles from Bitch are being republished in The Flytrap).
Vivian Delchamps Wolf, a disabled and chronically ill professor of English at Dominican University of California, told me how much she valued Self’s ability to capture the social dimensions of chronic illness, as with a piece by its former staff writer Katie Camero on how to navigate friendships with people who don’t seem to get what life with a chronic illness is like.
Reporting in that vein, Delchamps Wolf said, “clearly comes from an authentic space and refuses to present chronic illness as pitiful.”
“It’s so important that journalists address issues like medical racism and other systemic barriers that worsen people’s experiences of chronic illness,” Delchamps Wolf said. “In addition to talking about medical concerns, we have to acknowledge chronic illness as a politically, culturally, and socially marginalized category to bring about substantive change.”
Now, there’s one fewer publication where that can happen.
2026-04-21 05:15:00
“If it works, it’s not great for the US. And if it doesn’t work, it’s also not great for the US.”
That’s what Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and director of the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University, told me last week about the US naval blockade on Iranian ports.
The Trump administration’s stated intention was to stop Iran from profiting off the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. At the time, Iran’s government only allowed its own ships, and those of some of its allies, safe transit in the waterway. Iran was also reportedly charging tolls for at least some other ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway in the Persian Gulf through which approximately 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flowed before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran starting in February. Much of that oil went to Asian countries, with China, India, and Japan as the primary importers.
The US military implemented the blockade last Monday in response, saying last Tuesday that global sea trade with Iran had “completely halted.” But as Colgan says, “there’s this kind of Catch-22”: the more effective the US military blockade is, “the more it ripples out to global energy markets and affects everybody,” including voters “who are not going to be pleased with higher prices.”
Since I spoke with Colgan on Wednesday, oil prices have risen even further. Despite the ceasefire between the US and Iran established earlier this month, few ships have been able to cross the strait. As I recently reported, Iran reportedly shot at two Indian-flagged ships on Saturday and Trump said on Sunday that Marines stormed and seized an Iranian cargo ship trying to run its blockade “by blowing a hole in the engineroom.”
On Friday, Trump said that the naval blockade would “remain in full force” until Iran agreed to a deal, while Iran has vowed to not open the strait until the US withdraws its blockade, which it argues violates the ceasefire agreement.
In short, although the US and Iran now appear set to continue peace negotiations in Islamabad, don’t count on significant advances anytime soon.
Many reports on the fight for control of Hormuz hinge on national governments’ claims about poorly documented conflict at sea; tracking individual ships in the region is overwhelming, and verifying the bulk of military statements is nearly impossible.
That’s partly the usual “fog of war,” Colgan says, but it’s exacerbated by what he calls the Trump administration’s “casual relationship with truth.”
Oil markets, ship transits, and other bellwethers of the ceasefire are fluctuating wildly. As a way of tracking what’s going on, Colgan says those types of assessments are doubtful at best.
But one measurement that remains palpable for American consumers is the gas pump. According to Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, Americans have spent $23.4 billion more on gasoline and dieselsince the start of the war on February 28. That comes out to $178.43 per household in the US, as the national average price of gasoline has increased by more than a third to $4.04 per gallon and diesel prices have risen by just over 50 percent.
2026-04-21 05:07:25
The Trump administration has officially begun the process of repaying up to $175 billion in illegally collected tariffs, following a February Supreme Court ruling. It’s the biggest such repayment program in history, and over 330,000 businesses stand to benefit. But American consumers—that is, the people who ended up shouldering higher prices thanks to these fees—likely won’t see the cash anytime soon.
Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, told Mother Jones the tariffs—a vast set of taxes Trump imposed on imports—“haven’t achieved what they were meant to achieve.”
“They were meant to onshore manufacturing—it’s continued to shrink. They were meant to lead to new factories being built—that hasn’t happened. They were meant to lead to an increase in government revenue—but the government’s about to write a whole bunch of checks. They were meant to lead to the US having leverage and signing new trade deals. We have effectively done none of that. So at a minimum, it achieved nothing positive.”
The refunds, then, might seem like a step towards minimizing the economic damage of “Liberation Day.” But Wolfers said that’s not how he’d put it in his Economics 101 class. “Often in economics, what we’ll do is we’ll try to subsidize something that we want more of, or we’ll tax something that we want less of”—a basic incentive structure. These tariff refunds don’t incentivize much, because “they’re purely tied to what you did in the past, which means [companies] have no incentive to do anything.”
“This is more like when your grandma sends money for your birthday,” he said. Smaller companies that folded entirely after the onset of Trump’s tariffs—think women selling handmade earrings on Etsy from their living rooms—won’t be refunded. Consumers, too, will likely miss out.
In February, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at the Economic Club of Dallas, “I’ve got a feeling the American people won’t see” the money. “My sense is this could be dragged out for weeks, months, years, so … we’ll see what happens there,” Bessent added.
“So, nothing here has helped American consumers,” Wolfers said. “If Costco raised the price of olive oil, I paid that higher price, and now I’m poorer. Costco, now, gets a refund. So what we did is, we took money out of the government coffers and gave it to Costco. Costco is not going to write me a check, it has no reason to. And now there’s less money in the government coffers, so eventually they’re going to tax me some more.” Theoretically, shoppers could benefit from lower prices after the tariffs—but the Budget Lab at Yale suggests that’s not the case, and that corporations haven’t stopped passing costs on to consumers.
One group of Costco-shoppers is attempting to sue the supermarket chain for collecting tariff prices from consumers, “while simultaneously seeking refunds of the same tariff payments from the federal government.” So, they’d be repaid by the government for costs that have already been passed on to shoppers.
“Costco stands to recover the same tariff payments twice” if the court doesn’t intervene, the customers wrote in their complaint. As of April 9th, over 56,000 importers had already completed the necessary steps to get an electronic refund—but they aren’t required to pass any of that money onto consumers.
