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2025-08-01 00:59:11

Nearly a decade ago, Darryl Cooper, then a little-known amateur historian, agreed to appear on Rebel Yell, a self-described “Southern Nationalist podcast of the Alt-Right.” Cooper’s decision to come on the show was not the norm. The show funneled donations to Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And, as one of Rebel Yell’s co-hosts told Cooper in May 2017, potential guests “usually” refused their invitations after concluding the show was run by “a bunch of fucking Nazis.” 

But Cooper had a different perspective. “You guys do a great job,” he said about the show’s place in the far-right media ecosystem. “You class the place up a little bit.” 

Over the last decade, Cooper’s ideas have not changed much. The throughline of his career is his abiding interest in reshaping people’s understanding of two groups: Jews and Nazis. But he has cleaned up his act enough to build a major audience. Instead of appearing on a neo-Confederate podcast, this year Cooper went on Joe Rogan, where he subtly shifted the story of the Nazis into a more flattering light for millions of listeners. 

With more than 170,000 subscribers, Cooper has the most popular history newsletter on Substack—beating out Adam Tooze, the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. On X, he has nearly 350,000 followers; one is Vice President JD Vance. Cooper has been profiled by the New York Times (“The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History’s Villains”) and held up as an author for understanding the modern right by a guest on The Ezra Klein Show. Tucker Carlson has claimed that Cooper is the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.” 

Cooper is most famous for his ongoing project titled “The Martyr Made Podcast.” The first podcast in the series was a critical history of Zionism. The slant of his current series, which purports to tell World War II from the perspective of the Germans, is not hard to discern. The trailer Cooper is using to promote the series has clips of a thundering Hitler speech, delivered in English, as metal music plays in the background. It depicts regular Germans suffering while Weimar cosmopolitans enjoy their cabarets, and Nazi soldiers marching triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées in occupied Paris. There’s barbed wire, but German prisoners of war are the ones behind it. 

Compared to overt Holocaust deniers, Cooper is subtle—even shifty. He has not, like Richard Spencer, Sieg Heil-ed at a public event. His references often require research. Cooper, for example, wrote “Guten morgen” to a user on X last August, along with a picture of himself holding a coffee mug. It might take a moment to realize the user is a self-identified Nazi, and the mug Cooper holds is sold on a website where you can buy a T-shirt in which a Nazi SS sword plunges through the Star of David. Cooper implores his followers not to fall into the morass of “low-IQ vulgar antisemitism.” He leaves his views on high-IQ sophisticated antisemitism more ambiguous. 

Last year, Cooper posted two photos alongside each other on X: One was of drag queens imitating the Last Supper during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics; the other was of Hitler standing in front of the Eiffel Tower in conquered France. As a caption, Cooper wrote, “This may be putting it too crudely for some but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.” (Cooper deleted the post after backlash, then later wrote that he stood by the “overall point.”) 

For fans who do not closely follow Cooper on social media, his far-right sympathies might be harder to discern. On his podcast, he shows empathy for a wide range of historical victims—including Jews. He does not sound like an Alex Jones. One of his greatest talents as a podcaster is coming across like an earnest nerd who just wants to share some indisputable facts. As Cooper put it earlier this year in the introduction to his Nazi Germany series, “My audience trusts me to be honest with them. And even when they disagree or get uncomfortable, they will give me the benefit of the doubt that I am coming from a place of empathy and a desire to genuinely understand people at the extremes of human experience.”

This self-presentation has been shockingly successful. In March, Rogan, a committed fan, told his audience that there is “no fucking way” Cooper is an antisemite “in any way, shape, or form” and that he is as “charitable as possible” to his subjects. They could see for themselves, Rogan said, by listening to the first hour of Cooper’s Zionism series, which opens with harrowing accounts of the violence Jews faced in turn-of-the-century Europe.

But previously unreported information found by Mother Jones, including posts under a username affiliated with Cooper, cast doubt on this narrative. It raises a more sinister possibility about his attempts at even-handedness: That Cooper may have deliberately downplayed his extremism as part of a carefully plotted effort to bring his hard-right ideology into the mainstream.

In 2016, a user going by the name “Juggernaut Nihilism” left a comment on a transparently white nationalist website called Counter-Currents.

Public records show that “Juggernaut Nihilism” is part of an email address associated with Cooper. When Juggernaut Nihilism asked goldbugs in the online forums of the TF Metals Report in 2013 whether he should buy a house, the personal details he supplied about his work history and where he lived matched those of Darryl Cooper. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, once attacked Cooper in a Twitter post that began “You go by juggernaut nihilism.” (This was an apparent reference to Cooper’s username on the site at the time.) “No time for scrotes who live in shit & won’t work a shovel,” Simon added.

Cooper did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent to him by Mother Jones, including whether he wrote the comments from Juggernaut Nihilism.

The article Juggernaut Nihilism was responding to on Counter-Currents was written by Colin Liddell. Previously, Liddell had wondered about what the “best and easiest way to dispose of [Blacks]” would be in an essay titled “Is Black Genocide Right?” In the reply, Juggernaut Nihilism took him to task for attacking allies on the far-right who chose not to publicize their racist views. 

“A movement like this needs to operate at various levels, from the intellectual core (that remains terrifying and offensive to the general population right up until the big shift), on up to covert supporters slipping occasional language and subversive information into conversation and normie media,” Juggernaut Nihilism wrote. “Think of how most people you know got here. It wasn’t from basic American ideology to reading Mein Kampf and then, boom, they’re onboard. It’s a process, and you have to initiate people without scaring them off (and without blaming them for being scared off…the human mind works the way it works, and the enemy studies it carefully, controls the education system, and dominates the media).”

Juggernaut Nihilism’s comment reads as an almost perfect encapsulation of Cooper’s work as an amateur revisionist historian. He is highly attuned to when he can operate at which level. He makes it known that he is largely “onboard,” but leaves it up to his followers to surmise just how much. He has read Mein Kampf but is patient with those who have not. 

Two months after the comment appeared, Greg Johnson, the founder of Counter-Currents, posted an interview in which he argued for a white America and aligned himself with the “judeo-critical” wing of the far right on the “Jewish Question.”

“Wow, really great,” Juggernaut Nihilism wrote in response. 

Nine days later, Johnson shared a new interview. It was a podcast with Darryl Cooper. 

Cooper has no formal credentials as a historian. After a largely isolated youth in California, during which he attended as many as 40 schools, Cooper did some college, dropped out, and enlisted in the Navy. After, he became an electronics technician. After Cooper left the service in the early 2010s, he went on to work as a Department of Defense contractor. (Cooper explained his biography in response to questions from a New York Times journalist that he published on his Substack.) 

In 2014, he became obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict amid an earlier war in Gaza. A friend suggested he create a podcast. And, surprisingly, his hours-long episodes took off. Much of the show focused on the kinds of critical depictions of early Zionists in Palestine that can be found in the work of Israeli historians like Benny Morris. But Cooper’s tics were apparent as well. He had a habit of noting Jews’ prevalence in the left-wing political movements he counts among his enemies.

Cooper’s claims about World War II in recent interviews raise more serious questions about his biases. During his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last year, Cooper argued that Winston Churchill was “primarily responsible” for World War II “becoming what it did,” while making unsubtle and ahistorical insinuations about Churchill’s alleged ties to “financiers” and a “media complex” supportive of Zionism. He later specified that his source for this claim was David Irving, an infamous British antisemite and Holocaust denier. 

Irving, who also lacks formal training as a historian, has been discredited for decades. In 1991, after denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, he used the acronym “ASSHOLS” to refer to “The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars.” In 1996, he unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history at Emory University, for defamation in the United Kingdom after Lipstadt depicted him in her book Denying the Holocaust as a Nazi apologist who distorted the historical record in support of Hitler. 

Lipstadt and Penguin Books prevailed after assembling a group of experts who showed it was accurate to label Irving a Holocaust denier and a Hitler apologist. The cornerstone of that effort was a more than 700-page evisceration of Irving written by Sir Richard Evans, the Regius Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cambridge. “Not one of [Irving’s] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject,” Evans wrote in his report. “All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about.”

Cooper has defended his decision to cite Irving in a Substack post in which he said he was “not yet in a position to adjudicate the various disputes.” But his defense distorts and waters down Irving’s views, while falsely implying that even Evans respects Irving as a historian. In Cooper’s telling, Irving believed that “gas chambers were not a primary method of killing” at Nazi death camps. Irving put it much more bluntly: “I’m a gas chamber denier.” Cooper went on to say in the post that Irving accepted that millions of people were killed in the Holocaust, that Hitler took no action to stop it, and that he bore ultimate responsibility. After reviewing the post, Evans told Mother Jones that this summary of Irving’s work contained a “collection of falsehoods and half-truths.” 

During his appearance on Rogan in March, Cooper offered another piece of revisionism that bore a striking resemblance to Irving’s pseudoscholarship. This time, it involved Cooper minimizing Hitler’s role in Kristallnacht, the infamous 1938 pogrom during which around 1,000 synagogues in Germany burned down. “Hitler had to actually get on the phone with [Joseph] Goebbels and say, Cut this shit out. Like, This is not good,” Cooper claimed. “And not because he loves the Jews all of the sudden obviously. But because this is bad propaganda.”

Evans, one of the world’s foremost experts on Nazi Germany, reviewed a longer version of Cooper’s Kristallnacht comments on behalf of Mother Jones. His response left no doubt that Cooper—like Irving before him—severely distorted the historical record. “The order to local Nazi bosses was given by Propaganda Minister Goebbels, after a confidential conversation with Hitler, observed by eyewitnesses, in which the Nazi dictator had clearly sanctioned the action,” Evans said via email. “In addition Hitler personally ordered the arrest of 30,000 Jewish men, who were taken off to concentration camps where they were beaten and intimidated until they agreed to leave Germany. The following morning, Hitler and Goebbels brought the action to an end, since it seemed to have achieved its objectives.” 

Taken together, Cooper’s many elisions are reminiscent of something else Evans wrote in his trial report about Irving: “Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own ideological ends in the present.”

Last year, one of Cooper’s claims garnered national headlines. During the appearance on Carlson’s show, he said that the Nazis were “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war” and “local political prisoners” they captured after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As a result, Cooper continued, the Nazis “just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.” Cooper’s remarks implied that the killing of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and Jews was, in essence, a logistical oversight. 

In doing so, he ignored countless massacres of Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime, as well as the extensive record showing that the Nazis intended to starve millions of people to death after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As University of Toronto Professor Timothy Snyder makes clear in Bloodlands—a book Cooper has cited—the Nazis’ initial plan was to kill about 25 million people by starvation. 

Evans made a similar point to Mother Jones after reviewing Cooper’s comments about Soviet prisoners of war. “The Nazis regarded ‘Slavs’ as racially inferior and deliberately killed 3,300,000 prisoners taken from the Red Army by starvation, neglect and untended disease,” he wrote. “The Nazi ‘Hunger Plan’ was based on a conscious choice to use the large food supplies present in Eastern Europe to feed their own troops.” 

Cooper’s suggestion that many Jewish deaths during the Holocaust had been unintentional ended up provoking the largest backlash of his career. Then-President Joe Biden’s White House called the interview a “disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans.” Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, said that Carlson and Cooper had “engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years.”

But the response to Cooper on the right said more about his place in the world. Vance refused to condemn the Holocaust revisionism on the grounds that Republicans “believe in free speech and debate.” A backlash to the backlash temporarily sent Cooper’s show into the top spot on the podcast charts. 

Since the incident, Cooper has grown bolder. In a Substack post in response to the criticism, Cooper left no doubt he was also talking about Jewish victims of the Holocaust—not only Soviet POWs. He stated that one of his sources was a letter written by Rolf-Heinz Höppner, a senior Nazi official, to Adolf Eichmann in July 1941. “There exists this winter the danger that all the Jews can no longer be fed,” Höppner wrote about 300,000 Jews under his authority, whom he planned to send to a concentration camp. “It should be seriously considered if it would not be the most humane solution to dispose of the Jews, insofar as they are not capable of work, through a quick-acting agent. In any case it would be more pleasant than to let them starve.”

Höppner continued, in a section not included in Cooper’s Substack post: “In addition the proposal was made to sterilize all the female Jews in this camp from whom children could still be expected, so that with this generation the Jewish problem is in fact completely solved.” Nor did Cooper mention the subject line: “Re.: Solution of the Jewish Question.”

The letter from Höppner makes clear Nazi leaders’ willingness to exterminate Jews. But, in Cooper’s telling, it is evidence of how millions of people “ended up” dead and that, as Cooper put it on Substack, a senior Nazi official did not seem “overjoyed at the prospect of mass killing.”

In the first episode of his new series on World War II Germany, released this January, Cooper proves far more willing to depict American soldiers and concentration camp survivors as eager to kill than Nazis. He describes how, after the liberation of Dachau, American GIs “rampaged through the camp, murdering dozens of surrendered German soldiers.” The survivors, Cooper adds, “were given free reign to torture, humiliate, and murder” Germans. As evidence, he extensively from an interview in which Jack Hallett, a US Army veteran, described the anti-Nazi violence he witnessed after the camp’s liberation. But he does not include what Hallett said immediately before describing the revenge taken: “Control was gone after the sights we saw.”

Also missing is any mention of what those sights were. “The first thing I saw was a stack of bodies that appeared to be about 20 feet long and about as high as a man could reach, which looked like cordwood stacked up there,” Hallett stated earlier in the oral history Cooper quoted from about what Nazis had done. “And the thing I’ll never forget was the fact that on closer inspection we found the people whose eyes were still blinking maybe three or four bodies deep inside the stack.”

This is not an anomaly. Cooper provides not a single detail in the episode about the horrors that American soldiers encountered at Dachau, or what the victims they liberated endured. Instead, at Cooper’s camp, the victims worth mentioning are German. 

“The goal is not to get you to sympathize with the Germans, much less the National Socialist regime,” Cooper declares toward the end of the episode. “The goal is to understand. And if a side effect of understanding is sympathy, then so be it.”

As a forum-dweller named Juggernaut Nihilism once wrote, “It’s a process, and you have to initiate people without scaring them off.”

2025-08-01 00:35:19

Last month, as the moderators of the final debate in New York City’s Democratic primary began a section asking candidates about antisemitism, I was reading the breaking news that the Trump administration, using Israeli intelligence (that our government doubted) had just bombed Iran. It was a familiar dissonance.

In the world around me, there were plenty of debatable consequences from our tight partnership with Israel. In Democratic politics, the assumption was that questioning the relationship—responding to these events—was tantamount to hate.

Over the past two years, voters have seen the US’s lonstanding alliance with Israel lead to the US aiding indiscriminate bombings and killing in Gaza; mostly silence on apartheid enforced by settler violence in the West Bank; and, now, the implementation of mass starvation—children, emaciated, dying in their mother’s arms—created by an Israeli blockade on aid and a US-backed humitarian firm. Horrified, Democrats look up. And they watch on TV their party, still seemingly living in another era of politics, ask its candidates: Do you condemn Hamas?

Years of this has been disorienting. But the tone, it seems, is changing.

Since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in New York City, and as the famine in Gaza becomes more acute, there has been a shift. “Between the carnage in Gaza and the apartheid in the West Bank, it is virtually impossible to exist firmly on the American left,” Ross Barkan wrote in New York and argue Israel’s actions are “defensible.”

Even some moderates are finally critiquing Israel. Former President Barack Obama called for the “cessation of Israel’s military operations.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York), an arch defender of the Jewish state, has begun to speak about the suffering of Palestinians. In perhaps the clearest sign of a potential shift, on Wednesday, 27 Democrats voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) resolution to block the sale of thousands of guns to Israel. This included swing-state politicians up for re-election in 2026, like Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.).

This is not a full-blown evolution. One should not expect to see the Democratic Party suddenly shed its past. It was not even a year ago when a Palestinian speaker, who was eager to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, was disallowed from speaking at the DNC. And it is impossible to forget just how fiercely President Joe Biden backed Israel—both in the White House and before that as a senator.

But it does seem that, even among centrists, some memo has come down to change course. Suddenly, one can see a flock of insiders in the party eager to say that what is happening in Gaza is wrong. (Their ability to blame Israel for this horror? Well…)

If liberal American sentiment continues to rapidly change at this pace, it is not impossible to imagine that the Democratic Party, especially in its most left-leaning races, would litmus test its candidates in the exact opposite manner as it has in the past. “Do you condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza?” a moderator may ask. Or, more pointedly for the 2028 presidential primary, “Do you believe Palestine has a right to exist?” Canada, France, and the United Kingdom have all taken steps to recognize a state. Would you? Will you?

It is worth stopping a moment to realize how radical a shift that is from the past. The Democrats are catching up with the reality of the past few yers. Somehow, finally, even politicians cannot deny death.

Still, I would not hold out for such a massive upheaval of norms. The dissonance of the base demanding something from Democrats and the party half-listening before shifting to election year doom (we must band together to stop Republicans, pipe down and get in line—but only our moderate line, we won’t change!) is still the standard. I am sure there is a way to make statements of anger at children’s deaths—18,000 of them—without condemning Israel. But, then again, for how long? The truth is beating back. And, as Democrats ask about antisemitism alienating voters on TV, many are looking down at their phone to show many more Palestinians have died.

2025-07-31 23:01:36

Over and over again, Democratic members of Congress have attempted to enter Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities to investigate the conditions inside—and again and again they have been turned away, even though federal law guarantees them access to ICE detention facilities in order to conduct oversight. The Trump administration’s decision to keep lawmakers out created a Constitutional showdown.

Now, the issue is heading to court. On Wednesday, 12 Democratic House members sued for access to ICE detention facilities, in accordance with the law. The case is important to US immigration policy, and to the Trump administration’s goal of detaining immigrants without oversight into conditions in those facilities. It also raises a larger question: Can the executive branch turn off an oversight duty that is not just implicit in Congress’ powers but that it specifically inscribed in law?

Since 2019, Congress has included language in its bills funding the Department of Homeland Security that guarantees members of Congress access to inspect ICE detention facilities without prior warning, so as to get an unvarnished view of conditions inside. This came as a direct result of members of Congress being turned away from DHS facilities holding minors during the first Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents.

As detailed in Wednesday’s lawsuit, over the past few months ICE has come up with new reasons to deny entry to members of Congress and their designated staff. Though federal law allows for unannounced visits by lawmakers and 24 hours notice for their staff, ICE unilaterally instituted a seven-day notification requirement. But even when lawmakers provide a week’s notice, they have been turned away. In June, for example, despite giving seven days notice, New York Reps. Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman found themselves denied entry to a detainee holding space in Manhattan by an ICE official wearing a novelty Guinness shirt with the top buttons undone—an indelible image of an agency with no respect for the first branch of government.

According to the lawsuit, filed by the legal groups American Oversight and Democracy Forward, Goldman and Nadler were turned away because ICE insisted the 10th floor of its New York field office was not a detention facility. Even though ICE was holding people there, some for more than two days, the agency claimed that it fell outside the scope of Congress’ authority to enter ICE facilities “used to detain or otherwise house” detainees.

The lawsuit alleges multiple legal violations on the part of DHS and asks a federal district court in Washington, DC to compel the agency to comply with their oversight requirements.

This case could determine whether ICE, which will receive $45 billion in additional funding under President Donald Trump’s new budget bill, will operate its ballooning detention schemes in increasing darkness. As the Trump administration seeks to detain and deport millions of people, congressional oversight provides a critical window into how detainees are being treated. Reports of overcrowded and inhumane conditions are already prevalent.

The case will also test the checks and balances that each branch can impose upon the other. In this case, members of Congress are relying not only on their historical oversight role, which is critical to its legislative function, but also on an explicit ability to investigate ICE detention facilities that it has repeatedly written into law.

When administration lawyers respond to the suit, they could argue that the lawmakers are misreading the statute, or they could swing big and argue that immigration is an executive function where Congress has no constitutional role. It could also argue that individual members of Congress cannot sue to vindicate their rights, and instead that only a suit brought by a majority of Congress—now controlled by Republicans—would have standing. Finally, they could argue that the current oversight ability, enabled by a portion of a congressionally-appropriated funding bill, does not carry the necessary force to require ICE compliance. If accepted, any of these arguments would diminish Congress’ role in our scheme of checks and balances.

At the Supreme Court, the GOP majority has moved toward a maximalist view of executive power in recent years while curtailing Congress’ own powers—a change in the law that has accelerated upon Trump’s return to office. That has included skepticism of Congress’ ability to issue requirements through spending bills, as if some of the laws Congress passes carry less force than others.

The justices may quickly be asked to respond. Over the past six months, the administration has rushed to the Supreme Court for emergency relief when lower courts rule against them, where the Republican-appointed majority has generally given them what they want.

2025-07-31 18:00:00

“What does it mean? What is it, exactly? Is it real?”

That’s what Joe Rogan asked Dr. Gabor Maté about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder when he hosted the Canadian family physician and bestselling author on his podcast in 2022. A health and wellness influencer known for his nurturing approach to healing from trauma and addiction, as well as his penchant for challenging standard medical advice, Maté had recently published his fifth book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, and was making the publicity rounds.

ADHD is real, Maté replied; after all, he, too, has been diagnosed with it, as have two of his children. But then he offered the kind of anti-establishment response tailor-made for Rogan’s massive audience: It’s just not what the medical establishment claims it to be. “A lot of the so-called experts think about it as…another one of these inherited diseases,” he said. “I say it’s neither an illness nor is it heritable.”

Instead, Maté argued, hyperactivity and poor impulse control develop in particularly sensitive babies who are adapting to stressed parents, especially mothers. Absorbing that stress in infancy causes the child to “tune out,” he told Rogan, and “that tuning out is then programmed into the brain.”

Maté has pushed this idea in interviews with celebrity hosts who together have tens of millions of followers. Clips are shared by Instagram parenting accounts and in Reddit forums, where some therapists praise him as their go-to resource, and some parents express confusion or shame over having triggered their child’s ADHD.

But many experts say there’s one big problem with his theory: It’s wrong.

Researchers have more to learn about the nature of ADHD, found in 1 in 9 American children, but one thing is clear: It is highly heritable, with genetic differences accounting for as much as three-quarters of its prevalence. Low birth weight, brain injury, or severe neglect may sometimes be factors, but evidence that typical parental care causes ADHD is lacking. Researchers generally attribute the rising rate of the diagnoses to better awareness of symptoms, particularly in previously ignored populations like girls.

Maté frames his ideas about ADHD as “pure science,” as he told podcaster Mel Robbins last November. But none of the research papers he cited in The Myth of Normal make a causal link between parental stress and a child’s ADHD, nor do they discount genetics.

Instead, in his writing and in his replies to my queries by email, Maté pointed to a constellation of studies detailing child brain development or identifying correlations between parental stress and various child outcomes. “I rely on literature research, which I cite extensively, on hundreds of patient interviews, and on my clinical observations,” he noted.

Others say that Maté has taken leaps of logic not supported by the science he cites. The claim that this disorder is, as Maté’s website states, “a reversible impairment” with “origins in infancy” is “profoundly ignorant,” said Russell Barkley, a retired clinical neuropsychologist who is among the most prominent voices in the field. Not only does it show Maté doesn’t know the literature, Barkley told me, “he doesn’t care to know the literature.”

But Maté isn’t just wrong about ADHD. The theory he presents fits a familiar, pseudoscientific argument about a woman’s proper role in society and the dangers to her children should she deviate from that path—an argument long deployed by those who want to enforce conservative family values.

This particular blame-the-mother thesis first appeared around the diagnosis of autism in the decades following World War II. Early autism researchers believed that by not loving their children properly, mothers caused what child psychiatrist Dr. Leo Kanner, one of the first to identify autism, described as children’s “inability to relate themselves” to the people and circumstances in their lives. He maintained that autism was biological and innate and defended mothers as being victims of unfair professional contempt.

That didn’t last long, as other psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, steeped in Sigmund Freud’s theories of the mother as the absolute arbiter of emotional development and wellbeing, weighed in. They decided that a specific kind of warm maternal love was an essential nutrient for healthy development, according to Marga Vicedo, a historian of science at the University of Toronto. With the nuclear family positioned as the best defense against the dangers of technological advancement and global instability of the Cold War, working mothers were often the target of their criticism.

Kanner eventually fell in line with other psychoanalysts in the 1940s and articulated what later became known as “the refrigerator mother” theory, in which autistic children were seen as having been “kept neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost” by mothers devoid of “genuine warmth.” In response, the child withdrew, “to seek comfort in solitude.” Bruno Bettelheim, once a legend of child psychology and later accused of having abused children in his care, popularized this theory in the 1950s with a distinctly “guilty until proven innocent” approach, Vicedo notes in her book Intelligent Love. Worried mothers who arrived in doctors’ offices with detailed notes about their child’s development were dismissed as obsessive and overly intellectual—not a resource, but a vector. Imagine, Vicedo told me, “your child is struggling and you’re struggling…then you go to a doctor, and he tells you that not only is it quite a dire situation, but it’s also your fault.”

By the late 1970s, as research on twins began to document the high heritability of autism, the refrigerator mother theory became a black mark on the history of psychology and child development. But a willingness to blame moms never really went away.

Fast forward to 1999 and the publication of Maté’s first book on ADHD, Scattered Minds, which claims “a disruption in the relationship between the caregiver and the sensitive infant” is the cause. “All the behaviors and mental patterns of attention deficit disorder are external signs of the wound, or inefficient defenses against feeling the pain of it,” Maté writes. As for his ADHD diagnosis, he says, his mother faced extreme stress as a Hungarian Jew during the Holocaust.

In recent years, the rise of wellness influencers and the popularity of similarly dubious, sweeping theories about trauma found in books like The Body Keeps the Score have paved the way for a resurgence of Maté’s message. In his 2022 work, The Myth of Normal, written with his son Daniel, Maté further concedes some role for genetics, though a narrow one: Children with ADHD inherited a sensitivity from their parents, he argues, but it’s the stress of the family environment that unlocks the condition. “If there was only the sensitivity and optimal conditions,” he told Robbins, “they’d never have ADHD.”

What are those optimal conditions? How perfectly must they be maintained in the context of a family in which some amount of stress is inevitable? He doesn’t say.

In an email, Maté rejected the parallel between his theory and that of the refrigerator mother, which he called “nonscientific and misogynistic.” But while his work delves into breakdowns in the social fabric of capitalist societies and leaves room for the effects of fathers and other caregivers on child development, he repeatedly positions mothers as the ultimate arbiters of “optimal development.”

In The Myth of Normal, Maté points to research—again, with correlational findings that don’t control for genetics—linking stress during pregnancy or postpartum depression to a child’s risk of ADHD. Those studies make correlational findings that don’t control for genetics, and they broadly overlook the fact that the mother may have ADHD, which her child could have inherited. Indeed, researchers have found that some women with ADHD are more likely to face mental health struggles during and after pregnancy.

He cites “voluminous research” linking ADHD to stress in early childhood, referencing a 2017 study that connects ADHD and adverse childhood experiences, such as neighborhood violence, familial mental illness, abuse, or poverty. But the authors of that study and others noted that their evidence does not support a strong causal claim. ADHD can also predict adverse childhood experiences; families in which children or parents have the condition are more likely to experience adversity. Trauma may not be the cause of ADHD, but its consequence.

Stephen Faraone, professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University and president of the World Federation of ADHD, a research and education organization, described Maté’s approach as “cherry-picked science.” It’s not a cohesive theory, he said, but one with the potential to do real harm if it dissuades families from seeking evidence-based treatment, including effective medications.

Crystal Britt, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in California who specializes in working with neurodivergent adults, worries about the effect Maté has on mothers who may have undiagnosed ADHD. Women with ADHD often struggle with low self-worth, and the message that it’s caused by parents inflicts “further emotional strain on an already vulnerable population,” Britt said.

Similar concerns prompted Barkley, the ADHD researcher, to create a series of YouTube videos deconstructing Maté’s argument and calling him “worse than wrong” on ADHD. “We’ve been through this before in the history of psychiatry and psychology,” Barkley told me. “The harm that we did to families back then can’t be undone, but we can make sure we don’t repeat it again.”

Maté often hears from people who credit his work with transforming their parenting and their child’s trajectory. “That does NOT, of course, make me right in theory about anything,” Maté told me. “But it does speak to why I am confident about the value of my work.” Blaming parents for their child’s ADHD is “unscientific and cruel,” he continued, and anyone who sees his work as doing so has misunderstood his writings. The wellness industry often conflates personal failings with health conditions that are strongly connected to genetics and shaped by social determinants of health, said Andrea Love, a biomedical scientist who writes about health misinformation, noting, “It is easy to create a simple villain that people can band together and foment outrage about.” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said ADHD symptoms are caused by chemical exposures. The New York Times wrote about those who see him as a “supporter of mothers,” citing a quote “crunchy conservatives” often attribute to him: “The last thing standing between a child and an industry full of corruption is a mom.” Provided she’s the right kind of mom. On a March episode of the podcast The Diary of a CEO—which was viewed 1.8 million times in its first three weeks on YouTube—Erica Komisar, a clinical social worker and contributing editor at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, said it is an “inconvenient truth” that parents can cause their child’s ADHD by subjecting them to stress, including divorce, day care, and the muddling of traditional gender roles.

The conservative vision for the future relies on more women choosing to be “mothers that matter,” says Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “Part of what you’re seeing is a campaign to convince women and others that these old ideas of gender roles are not only popular, they are better,” meaning that “comfort may be found if you narrowed your economic, political, and social equality.”

Maté told me that he rejects conservative policies that “generate untold stress” by undermining community and emphasizing dependence on the nuclear family, which he considers an “evolutionary aberration.” Yet, intended or not, when Maté points to mothers as a potential agent of harm, the implications extend beyond ADHD. By focusing on mothers to explain a complex diagnosis, he further undermines trust in science and revives a harmful anachronism. Ultimately, by fueling maternal blame, Maté robs parents of something he generally champions: a chance to see their children and themselves clearly and to get support in being the very caregivers their kids need.

2025-07-31 18:00:00

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

On a Friday evening this July, the Trump administration announced it would lay off all of the health research scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Hundreds of investigators who try to understand how toxic pollution affects the human body would be gone.

That wasn’t a surprise. The EPA—which had a founding mission to protect “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” as President Richard Nixon put it—has been busy dismantling policies that are in place to ensure environmental and public health.

This week, the agency announced it would seek to repeal its recognition of climate change as a threat to human health, potentially limiting the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has relaxed existing standards for mercury and lead pollution—two toxins that can lead to developmental problems in children. And the EPA has postponed its implementation of new Biden-era regulations that were supposed to reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals Americans are exposed to.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are attempting to grant widespread liability relief to pesticide companies and restrict EPA regulation of PFAS “forever chemicals” through provisions that have been tucked into the spending bills currently moving through Congress. (Democrats, for their part, have offered opposing legislation that would protect an individual’s right to sue over any harm from pesticides.)

This collective assault upon America’s environmental regulations targets not just the environment, but human health as well. Which means it sits oddly with the work of another Trump official whose office at the Department of Health and Human Services is just a 15-minute walk from EPA headquarters: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement seeks to, obviously, make Americans healthier.

But Kennedy hasn’t spoken up about these contradictions—and his supporters are beginning to notice.

In response to the pro-pesticide industry proposals in Congress, MAHA leaders wrote a letter to Kennedy and Zeldin voicing opposition to a bill that they believe “would ensure that Americans have no power to prevent pesticide exposure, and no path to justice after harm occurs.” In the letter, they also urged the EPA to ban two pesticides—atrazine and glyphosate—that have been linked to birth defects and liver and kidney problems.

“These toxic substances are in our food, rain, air, and water, and most disturbingly, in our children’s bodies,” the MAHA letter says. “It is time to take a firm stand.”

Kennedy is no stranger to these issues: Earlier this year, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission report, which sought to document and explain the dramatic increase in chronic diseases like obesity among US children, identified both chemicals as health risks. Zeldin, however, has been working to deregulate both atrazine and glyphosate in his first few months leading the EPA.

“It is completely contrary to MAHA to relax regulations on PFAS and many different chemicals. We are calling upon them and to reverse some of these actions that [the administration] is taking or seemingly may allow,” said Zen Honeycutt, one of the letter signers and the founder of the MAHA-aligned group Moms Across America. “We are extremely disappointed with some of the actions taken by this administration to protect the polluters and the pesticide companies.”

“In the case of Kennedy, you have someone that has spent his life thinking about public health, but seems unable or disinterested in stopping what’s going on.”

MAHA burst onto the political scene as part of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign. It has become a vehicle for public health concerns, some exceedingly mainstream (like addressing America’s ultra-processed food and reducing pollution) and some of them very much outside of it (such as undermining the effectiveness of vaccines). After dropping his own candidacy, Kennedy joined forces with Trump, and ended up running the nation’s most important health agency.

But now that he’s in office, he and the movement he leads are running into the challenges of making change—and the unavoidable reality that MAHA has allied with a president and an agenda that is often in direct opposition to their own.

“In the case of Lee Zeldin, you have someone who’s doing incredibly consequential actions and is indifferent to the impact on public health,” said Jeremy Symons, senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network and a former adviser to the EPA during the Clinton administration. “In the case of Kennedy, you have someone that has spent his life thinking about public health, but seems unable or disinterested in stopping what’s going on.”

Kennedy has successfully nabbed voluntary industry commitments to phase out certain dyes from American food products. He has overhauled the government’s vaccine policy, and one state has already followed his lead in banning fluoride from its drinking water. But his ambitions to reduce the sheer number of toxins that leach into America’s children in their most vulnerable years are being stymied by an EPA and a Republican-controlled Congress with very different priorities.

“Food dyes are not as consequential as pesticides for food manufacturers. The ingredients they put into the food contaminate the food,” Honeycutt said. “That issue is a much larger issue. That is the farmers, and changing farming practices takes longer.”

To Kennedy’s credit, these are issues he’d apparently like to tackle—if he could. His HHS report earlier this year pointed out that “studies have raised concerns about possible links between some of these products and adverse health outcomes, especially in children.” Specific ingredients in pesticides have been associated with cancer, inflammation, metabolic problems and more. But the EPA, meanwhile, has reversed regulations and stymied research for those same substances.

The EPA has proposed easing restrictions on the amount of the herbicide atrazine that can be permitted in the nation’s lakes and streams. Human and animal studies have associated exposure to atrazine with birth defects, kidney and liver diseases, and problems with metabolism; the evidence, however, remains limited and the MAHA report called for further independent research. The EPA has also moved to block states from putting any new limits on or requiring any public disclosures for glyphosate, a herbicide that the MAHA report says has been linked to a wide range of health problems. Zeldin also postponed Biden-era plans to take action on chlorpyrifos, a common insecticide increasingly associated with development problems in kids.

The EPA has also been slow to move on microplastics and PFAS, both substances of growing concern among scientists and the general public. These invisible but omnipresent chemicals are a priority for the MAHA movement, singled out in the White House report for further study and policymaking. The EPA, though, has delayed implementing a new standard to limit PFAS in drinking water and announced it would consider whether to raise the limits of acceptable PFAS levels in community water systems, while also slashing funding for more research on the substance’s health effects.

Bisphenols (also known as BPA) and phthalates are two other common materials used in plastic production and food packaging, which have also been identified by researchers as likely dangerous because of their ability to disrupt hormone and reproductive function. The MAHA movement singles them out for further study and possible restrictions, but the EPA has delayed safety studies for both.

The US is even moving backward on pollutants like mercury and lead, for which the scientific evidence of their harms is undisputed. They are toxins that regulators have actually taken steps over the decades to reduce exposure, through banning the use of lead paint, strictly limiting mercury levels, etc. Yet over the past few months, the EPA has moved to grant exemptions to coal power plants and chemical manufacturers that would allow more mercury pollution, while cutting monitoring for lead exposures.

This is a long list of apparent contradictions and we’re barely six months into Trump’s term. How long can the contradictions pile up without Kennedy challenging Zeldin directly?

We reached out to HHS to see if we could get Kennedy’s perspective on any of this. In response, an agency spokesperson sent a written statement: “Secretary Kennedy and HHS are committed to investigating any potential root causes of the chronic disease epidemic, including environmental factors and toxic chemicals,” the spokesperson wrote. “The Secretary continues to engage with federal partners, including the EPA, to ensure that federal actions align with the latest gold standard science and the public health priorities identified in the MAHA report.”

But as the EPA continues to roll back environmental protections despite the reassurances that the administration is aligned on MAHA, Kennedy’s constituents are growing impatient.

“Our children’s lives and futures are non-negotiables, and claims from the industry of ‘safe’ levels of exposure ignore the impacts of cumulative exposure and the reality of serious, evidence-backed risks,” the MAHA movement’s recent letter says. “The industry’s call for delay or inaction is completely unacceptable—immediate and decisive action is needed now and is long overdue.”

The conflict between the two agencies’ agendas has been striking: The EPA, under Zeldin, is allied with the industries it regulates and plans to deregulate as much as possible. HHS, on the other hand, is focused on its vision of making the environment safer in order to improve people’s health—a goal that will inevitably require more regulations that require companies to restrict their use of certain compounds that prove to be dangerous to human health.

Trump himself has said the two sides are going to have to work together and figure things out, Honeycutt noted—words that she is taking to heart for now. And the movement’s leaders recognize that they are now in the business not of outside agitation but of working within the system to try to change it. “We’re not always going to be happy,” Honeycutt said.

But Kennedy may be playing the weaker hand: Zeldin and his agency hold obvious advantages, and in a fight between HHS and EPA, EPA will likely win—unless, perhaps, Trump himself steps in.

The biggest reason is a matter of authority: The EPA has the responsibility to regulate pollution, while Kennedy’s HHS does not. The federal health agency can offer funding to state and local health departments to advance its policy goals, but it has effectively no regulatory authority when it comes to the dangerous substances identified in the MAHA report’s section on chemical toxins. The EPA, on the other hand, has broad discretion to regulate the chemicals that industries pump into the American environment—or not.

The difference between the leadership at the two agencies is also stark: Kennedy is a former lifelong Democrat who has never held a government position; Zeldin is a seasoned GOP operator who served four terms in the US House. Kennedy has brought in an assortment of unconventional personnel at HHS, many with skepticism about mainstream science and who are viewed dubiously by the industries they oversee. At the EPA, representatives of long-entrenched polluting interests have commandeered powerful positions: Nancy Beck, a former scientist at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical manufacturing industry’s trade association, for example, is now holding the position overseeing chemical safety and pollution prevention.

The perception within the industry, according to insiders who spoke with Vox, is that Kennedy is, well, a lightweight. “From the perspective of the polluter takeover of EPA, Kennedy is largely seen as inconsequential and ineffective. He’s playing wiffle ball,” Symons said. “Kennedy talks a good game, but watch carefully what’s happening at EPA and all the favors being given to corporate polluters that are going to do far more damage than anything.”

“The food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe are going to get more toxic and more dangerous because of what’s happening in EPA,” Symons told Vox.

When it comes to jockeying for influence, Zeldin also enjoys more powerful friends in the Republican Party. He has relationships with conservative politicians and advocacy groups across the nation. Almost all of the Republican state attorneys general, for example, are motivated to roll back environmental regulations because it’s compatible with their priorities in their respective states.

“A lot of this is being driven by polluter states, red states with Republican attorneys general,” Symons said.

And, as evidenced by the pesticide liability relief legislation in Congress that prompted MAHA’s letter to Kennedy and Zeldin, Republicans in the House and Senate remain much more allied with corporate interests—an alliance that has stood for decades—than with the public health movement that has only recently been brought inside the broader Make America Great Again coalition.

It is a bitter irony for a movement that has often called out corporate influence and corruption for the government’s failures to protect public health.

The White House’s own MAHA report cites the influence of big businesses to explain why the chronic disease crisis has grown so dire; in particular, the report says, “as a result of this influence, the regulatory environment surrounding the chemical industry may reflect a consideration of its interests.”

MAHA’s leaders aren’t running for the hills yet; Honeycutt said she urges her members not to vilify Kennedy or Trump for failing to make progress on certain issues. But they sense they’re losing control of the agenda on the environment, forcing difficult questions onto the movement just a few months after it attained serious power in Washington.

“As for MAHA organizations, they must decide whether they are to become appendages of the Republican party or coalesce into an effective, independent political force,” Charles Eisenstein, a wellness author who was a senior adviser to Kennedy’s presidential campaign, wrote for Children’s Health Defense, a once-fringe group with ties to Kennedy. “To do that, the movement must hold Republicans accountable for undermining public health with policies like liability shields. It must not sacrifice its core priorities to curry short-term favor with the Republican establishment.”

The MAHA-MAGA political alliance is new and tenuous—many MAHA followers voted for President Barack Obama, Eisenstein points out—and it may not be permanent.

And some fractures are already apparent: Honeycutt, the leader of Moms Across America and a signer of the MAHA movement’s letter to Kennedy, told Vox that her own members have told her directly that they are considering voting for Democrats in the next election. Even as she urges MAHA to keep the faith, Honeycutt said that Republicans risk alienating this enthusiastic part of their coalition by going hog wild on environmental deregulation. Her group is in the process of pulling together a legislative scorecard to hold lawmakers to account.

“There could be dire consequences for the midterm elections, if they don’t realize,” she said. “We don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democrat. We will support whoever supports us.”

2025-07-31 05:33:23

On June 6, Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year US Army veteran and Green Beret, found himself facing a daunting logistical problem. He had been recruited as a security contractor for UG Solutions, a partner of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—the Israel-backed American nonprofit now overseeing food distribution in the devastated Palestinian territory. His challenge: finding a way to feed the local Palestinian workers assisting with GHF’s efforts. “Nobody could figure out how to get food there,” he says.

So Aguilar says they settled on a workaround: ordering stacks of Domino’s pizzas via an Israeli delivery app and picking them up at the Gaza border themselves. “We then took those 27 pizzas in an armored convoy,” he says, to a GHF distribution site within the strip.

For Aguilar, it was a striking example of systemic failures at GHF, “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning,” he says. “It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic.”

Aguilar has been speaking out about what he witnessed while working with GHF in May and June, adding to the controversy about the organization’s role in Gaza’s emerging famine. Recently, he sat down with France 24’s Jessica Le Masurier, who, along with Mother Jones, is publishing excerpts from an on-camera interview with Aguilar about his experiences.

The United Nations accuses the private organization of militarizing aid operations. Its Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that between May 27 and July 21, 766 Palestinians were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites. As Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy recently pointed out, what GHF provides after Israel has blocked most other aid represents a massive reduction in help for starving Palestinians: “Instead of the approximately 400 aid sites and mobile clinics that the humanitarian community was operating, GHF set up just four sites in southern Gaza, far from the north where most of the population is concentrated.”

“Palestinians are getting hurt,” Aguilar tells Le Masurier, recounting episodes in which he claims his fellow personnel were “utilizing nonlethal munitions and lethal munitions in unauthorized ways.” In one instance, he says he saw a contractor throw a stun grenade that detonated, its metal top hitting a woman’s head and rendering her motionless before she was wheeled away by a donkey cart. (France 24 and Mother Jones could not identify the woman or determine whether she was killed.)

In an incident on May 29, Aguilar says he witnessed two contractors firing rifles “in bursts” from vantage points around a GHF distribution site “into the crowd.” In video footage supplied by Aguilar, someone can be heard yelling, “I think you hit one.” Another shouts, “Hell yeah, boy!” 

“There was catcalling and celebrating,” Aguilar says. “They were cheering.” (The video was previously reported by the Associated Press.)

In a statement to France 24 and Mother Jones, UG Solutions confirmed that its personnel fired warning shots near GHF facilities but denied they “have ever directed” them toward civilians, rather “upwards, in the air and towards the coastline.” The group also states on its website that the contractor heard in the video was “encouraging IDF [Israel Defense Forces] fire” and has since been terminated. GHF also said gunfire heard in the video “originated from the IDF, which was outside the immediate vicinity of the GHF site,” and called Aguilar’s descriptions the event “categorically false.”

More broadly, UG Solutions denies Aguilar’s allegations, calling him a “disgruntled former contractor who seeks revenge.” Aguilar adamantly disputes the characterization. Safe Reach Solutions, a UG contractor that Aguilar says was involved in the pizza incident, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, the IDF said: “Following incidents in which harm to civilians who arrived at distribution facilities was reported, thorough examinations were conducted in the Southern Command and instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned. The incidents are under review by the competent authorities in the IDF.” Israel announced last weekend that it would pause fighting in parts of Gaza for 10 hours a day to allow, in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the entry of minimal humanitarian supplies.”

One memory remains especially haunting to Aguilar. He showed Le Masurier video of a shoeless boy approaching him alone at a distribution site, who kissed his hand. In the chaos that followed, amid warning shots and tear gas, Aguilar was struck by the child’s innocence: “This young boy had nothing to do with what Hamas did on October 7th.”