2026-04-30 18:45:00
在美国，每当有人购买攻击性武器（如AR-15步枪），实际上都在为野生动物保护提供资金。这一现象源于一项鲜为人知的法律——联邦野生动物恢复补助法案（Pittman-Robertson Act），自1937年通过以来，该法案通过向枪支、弹药和弓箭设备征收11%（长枪和弹药）或10%（手枪）的税款，将资金注入州级野生动物机构。这些机构负责恢复栖息地、监测濒危物种以及管理狩猎和捕鱼活动。过去十年，该法案每年为州野生动物机构提供近10亿美元的资金，占其预算的约18%（2019年数据），成为其主要资金来源之一。
尽管狩猎人数近年来有所下降，但枪支销售却显著增长，尤其是用于自卫或射击场的枪支。如今，超过70%的枪支和弹药销售与狩猎无关。这一趋势使得野生动物机构的资金来源逐渐从狩猎者转向更广泛的枪支使用者。因此，这些机构开始资助或建设公共射击场和弓箭场，以维持资金流。然而，学者和环保组织对此存在道德争议，认为用暴力工具资助保护工作可能产生负面激励，甚至与暴力和伤害相关联。
尽管如此，许多专家认为，当前野生动物保护仍高度依赖这一税收。例如，美国鱼类与野生动物管理局（Fish, Wildlife, and Parks）利用该资金成功恢复了多种濒危物种，如大角羊和鹰类。此外，该法案还促进了跨政治立场的环保合作，因为枪支行业与保守派支持者共同推动了这一政策。尽管有提议通过对户外装备征税来替代枪支税收，但这些方案因成本和可及性问题遭到反对。目前，野生动物保护被视为跨党派的共同目标，但资金来源仍主要依赖枪支行业，这使得相关争议难以解决。
Here’s a weird fact: Every time someone buys an assault weapon in the US, such as an AR-15, they’re funding wildlife conservation. The same is true if they purchase a handgun, a shotgun, or any other kind of gun or ammunition.
That’s thanks to a law most people have never heard of: the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, commonly known as the Pittman-Robertson Act. Passed by Congress in 1937, the law channels revenue from a tax on firearms, ammo, and archery equipment to state wildlife agencies — government organizations that restore wildlife habitat, monitor threatened species, and oversee hunting and fishing. Levied on firearm manufacturers and importers, the tax is 11 percent for long guns and ammunition and 10 percent for handguns, and it sits on top of other common taxes.
Over the last decade, the law has channeled close to $1 billion a year into state wildlife agencies across the country, amounting to a substantial share of their budgets. One recent analysis found that Pittman-Robertson made up about 18 percent of state agency budgets, on average, in 2019. (License fees for fishing and hunting, along with a hodgepodge of other revenue streams, including a similar tax on fishing gear, make up the rest.) And revenue from Pittman-Robertson has been increasing, roughly doubling in the past two decades — in no small part because gun sales have surged.
Despite the dedicated tax revenue, wildlife agencies are still chronically underfunded. They oversee the bulk of the nation’s imperiled species — which now comprise more than one-third of all plants and animals in the US — and threats to biodiversity like climate change are only getting worse. These agencies need all the money they can get.
As a result, “wildlife agencies have a clear incentive to increase firearm use if they want to sustain themselves,” said John Casellas Connors, a researcher at Texas A&M University and one of the leading experts on the Pittman-Robertson Act. “There’s a desire to increase access to opportunities to shoot, to ensure that people keep buying guns and using guns.” Indeed, the purchase of firearms of any kind helps pay for staff, wildlife monitoring, and many of the other conservation tasks they do.
This raises an important question: Is it okay to fund conservation with tools of violence?
The link between conservation and guns is as old as the modern conservation movement itself. For a long time hunters were the movement.
In the late 1800s, elite and influential sportsmen like Theodore Roosevelt raised concerns about vanishing wildlife — deer, elk, bison, waterfowl, and other game species they liked to hunt. Ironically, rampant, unregulated hunting for profit is what threatened these animals in the first place. Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, market hunting drove now-abundant white-tailed deer populations close to extinction, and similarly eliminated all but a few hundred bison.
As much as Roosevelt and his peers recognized hunting as a problem for wildlife, however, they also saw sportsmen as conservation champions.
“In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen,” Roosevelt said. “The genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”
That sentiment gave rise to the conservation movement that we know today — and to state wildlife agencies, most of which first appeared in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Staffed with biologists and ecologists, these government divisions sought to preserve habitat and regulate fishing and hunting, a remit still reflected in many of their names (Arizona Game and Fish, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Pennsylvania Game Commission, and so on).
But they needed money.
That’s where Pittman-Robertson came in. The idea behind the law — named for its two Congressional sponsors, hunters Key Pittman and Absalom Willis Robertson — redirected an existing excise tax on certain firearms (and later, through amendments, all firearms) to state wildlife agencies. The law also prohibited states from redirecting revenue from selling hunting licenses away from those agencies.
The law put into practice what’s known as a “user-pay” model of conservation, the idea being that hunters rely on wildlife, so they should pay to preserve it — in this case through revenue from their hunting licenses and weapons. It also fueled the now-pervasive idea, perpetuated by hunters, that they pay for conservation.
That was largely true for a time, but over the last few decades the number of hunters in the US has slowly declined — from more than 14 million hunters who are 16 years and older in 1991 to fewer than 11.5 million in 2016. The share of people in that age range who hunt has fallen even more, from 7.4 percent to 4.5 percent over that same period.
This trend has been worrying for wildlife agencies precisely because they have relied so much on hunters for funding.
But here’s the thing: While hunters have declined, gun sales in the US have increased — dramatically so. Estimates from the Trace, a newsroom that reports on gun violence, indicates that gun sales have roughly doubled since 2000. That means people are buying more guns but for purposes unrelated to hunting, such as handguns and AR-style weapons for self defense or for use at shooting ranges. Indeed, more than 70 percent of firearm and ammo sales these days are intended for purposes other than hunting, according to a 2021 report from the market research firm Southwick Associates.
This has funneled more money overall to state wildlife agencies — just not from hunters. “The money that is going toward this largely is being borne by people who may never, ever step into the field, may never go into a duck blind, may never go out to a hunting stand,” said Mark Oliva, managing director of public affairs at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for the firearms industry. And that, in turn, has prompted wildlife agencies to cater to this growing population of firearm users.
State wildlife agencies generally have two main goals: to manage hunting and fishing programs and to conserve native species and their habitats. That often entails things like removing invasive species, reintroducing animals back into the environment, and studying the spread of zoonotic diseases. Bringing wolves back to Colorado, for example, was a project led by the state’s wildlife agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
But because of Pittman-Robertson and the ever-present crunch for funding, these organizations have become incentivized to encourage more gun and ammo purchases. Along with a handful of more recent amendments to the law — which make it easier to spend Pittman-Robertson funds on shooting activities — that incentive has led wildlife agencies to increasingly fund or build their own public shooting and archery ranges. Pittman-Robertson funding has supported more than 120 new ranges since 2019.
By promoting firearm use (and related ammo purchases), target ranges do indirectly support wildlife conservation. But they are of course not wildlife conservation, said Christopher Rea, a sociologist at Brown University, who’s studied Pittman-Robertson. This is an important point, considering the speed at which ecosystems and animal species are declining across the US — and considering that agencies are supposed to use their resources to stem such losses.
“Pittman-Robertson has drifted from preserving the biotic community and moved instead towards preserving firearms use,” Rea and Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, wrote in a 2022 paper.
Some environmental groups have argued that, by using their limited resources to support sport shooting, wildlife agencies are pulling back on their responsibility to safeguard native species. “During a global extinction crisis requiring an all-hands-on-deck effort to conserve and protect declining species, state agencies are instead abusing the nation’s largest pot of restoration funding to promote recreational gun use and other ‘shooting sports,’” the advocacy group Wildlife for All said in a post on its website.
Wildlife for All estimates that about a quarter of Pittman-Robertson funding for state agencies goes towards shooting and archery ranges, hunter education, and promoting shooting sports. But still, the group found, most of that money is spent on wildlife restoration and projects to safeguard animals and their habitats. And barring a resurgence in hunting, promoting other uses of firearms is a way for wildlife agencies to maintain as much funding as possible for increasingly essential conservation projects.
There is, however, a deeper concern about funding conservation with firearms, though it has more to do with the human animal. Casellas Connors, Rea, and many other researchers point out that guns and gun ownership rates are linked to a higher risk of homicides and suicide. That means conservation is also tied to violence and harm.
“As a matter of my own personal politics and moral preferences, I don’t think we should be funding conservation by selling [what are] essentially tools of violence,” Rea, of Brown, told me. “That’s really problematic.”
Oliva, with the firearms trade group, strongly disagrees with the idea that more firearms means more violence. National crime rates have fallen substantially, he said, relative to the late 1900s. The number of gun deaths has declined in the last few years, too, even though there are more guns in the US than ever. (One major caveat here is that gun deaths are still well above pre-pandemic levels, and suicide-related gun deaths have continued to increase.)
Gun laws are, of course, among the most contentious topics in US politics, and it’s unlikely that questions about funding wildlife agencies will change opinions on either side. But even if you think promoting or benefiting from the purchase of guns is morally wrong, it’s hard to argue that — under the existing budgetary circumstances — losing nearly a fifth of funding wouldn’t decimate wildlife agencies’ work. There’s no getting around the fact that any laws that have the effect of meaningfully reducing firearms sales would also likely eat into critical funding for conservation.
Proposals to repeal Pittman-Robertson have been floated before, most recently in 2022. That would be a disaster for wildlife, said Mark Duda, executive director of the outdoor market research firm Responsive Management and a former state biologist in Florida. Money made available by the law has helped bring back all kinds of once-rare species across the country, he said, from elk and turkeys to peregrine falcons and bald eagles. In Montana, for example, the state agency — Fish, Wildlife, and Parks — used funding from Pittman-Robertson to study and later bring back bighorn sheep.
Other people I spoke to agreed. “Wildlife agencies probably wouldn’t have been able to do almost any of the work they’ve done without Pittman-Robertson funds,” said Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, who’s currently working on a book about the law. Even with that funding, they often don’t have enough staff or resources they need to adequately monitor and restore declining wildlife populations, he said.
Jonah Evans, who oversees non-game and rare species at Texas Parks and Wildlife, the state’s wildlife agency, said that money from gun taxes funds staff salaries and research on a range of imperiled native species, such as the tricolored bat and the loggerhead shrike, a songbird. “Pittman Robertson is like the backbone of wildlife management at our agency,” Evans said. In Texas alone, there are more than 1,000 animal species in decline that need help. Trying to conserve them all with the limited resources that Parks and Wildlife has, Evans said, “is an overwhelming project.”
Disentangling the firearm industry from conservation could also have other, less obvious consequences. Beyond funding state agencies, Pittman-Robertson has also helped build a diverse political coalition of support for conservation, Rea says. The firearm industry — which tends to be much more conservative than the broader environmental movement — strongly supports Pittman-Robertson, in part because it helps sustain the animals that hunters want to shoot. And, by extension, the law gives the industry’s right-oriented constituency a stake in conservation. Even sport shooters and gun owners who don’t hunt support the excise tax, Duda told me, citing survey data.
“At a time when environmentalism is evermore polarized and left-coded, Pittman-Robertson helps continually reinject pro-conservation rhetoric into a right-leaning political sphere, via its links to hunting and guns,” Rea told me. “I strongly believe it’s one mechanism that helps maintain that long history of bipartisan support for conservation.”
The moral debate aside, most people agree that wildlife agencies need more money than they have now, even with Pittman-Robertson in place. And, over the years, lawmakers have proposed additional sources.
In 2022, the US House passed a non-partisan bill called Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would send $1.3 billion a year to agencies specifically to help them safeguard vulnerable species. But the bill never passed the Senate, because lawmakers couldn’t agree on how to pay for it. (For scale, the war against Iran has so far cost the US about $25 billion.)
Another idea that’s circulated for decades now is to place an excise tax on outdoor gear like backpacks and hiking boots that would, like Pittman-Robertson, go towards state agencies. The logic of a so-called backpack tax follows a similar “user-pay” model: Hikers, rock climbers, and birdwatchers are also using the outdoors, so they should pay in some way to protect it. And while hunting is declining, these outdoor activities are booming.
Nonetheless, the outdoor gear industry has successfully fought against putting such a law into practice, Rea said. “That’s really disappointing,” he told Vox. “That’s a way we could solve this problem.”
I asked the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, about this. Kent Ebersole, OIA’s president, told me that the group opposes a backpack tax, because it would make gear more expensive and, thus, make outdoor recreation less accessible. “You’re harming people by increasing the price of an already expensive product,” he said, adding that outdoor companies are already facing steep costs of production from tariffs. ‘We do care about conservation,” Ebersole said. There are other ways to fund conservation besides burdening the industry with another tax, he said. (Ebersole highlighted a law in Georgia that directs a large portion of existing sales tax on outdoor gear to state wildlife conservation.)
Wildlife conservation is one of the rare causes that people seem to value across the political spectrum. “I’ve done 1,200 studies on how people relate to wildlife, and that is the common denominator,” Duda said. “People care deeply.” And yet, somehow, it’s hard to get anyone but the gun industry to pay for it.
2026-04-30 18:00:00
多年来，互联网让我们相信，连接不必局限于本地也能有意义。人们可以与远在Discord服务器、跨地域的朋友群聊或TikTok评论区的人建立联系，地理因素变得不再重要。然而，如今越来越多的人开始重视身边的人：楼下的邻居、公园里的家长、以及网络列表中显示的WiFi用户。这种趋势不仅仅是渴望连接，更是寻求支持。育儿成本高昂、房租和食品价格居高不下、气候危机频发，对许多美国人而言，生活稳定与否往往取决于身边是否有可以提供帮助的人。这种现象被称为“邻里主义”（neighborism），即把地理位置视为一种资源。随着数字工具的普及，人们并未用它们取代本地关系，而是借助这些工具激活了邻里间的互动。例如，向同楼层的人打招呼、建立小区群聊、共享育儿资源、帮邻居照看植物等。这种连接也可以是政治性的，如明尼苏达州的社区在面对移民执法时，将日常关怀与组织抗争结合，形成了非正式但高效的互助网络。这种现象并非个例，而是更大范围社会趋势的体现。
邻里主义的兴起并非新事物，但其可见性却在增强。过去几十年，人们因工作和生活节奏加快而逐渐疏远邻里，转向线上社交。然而，随着对线上连接的依赖感减弱，人们重新认识到，社区在人们彼此关心时才能发挥最佳作用。社会学家埃里克·克林伯格（Eric Klinenberg）指出，60年前美国人更倾向于与邻居互动，而现在由于工作时间延长、互联网的普及，人们更倾向于通过线上平台维持联系。但这种模式逐渐显露出其局限性，即缺乏实际支持。因此，邻里主义正在成为一种更实际的连接方式。
邻里主义不仅关乎情感，更填补了制度无法覆盖的空白。例如，费城的Facebook群组“Good Looking Out”帮助居民互助，从洪水到走失宠物，提供紧急支持。社区组织者贾西娅·尼安多罗（Aisha Nyandoro）认为，邻里主义是“一种基于邻近的日常关怀实践”，人们相信身边的邻居不仅是陌生人，更是共同构建安全与幸福的伙伴。哈佛大学社会学家罗伯特·萨姆森（Robert Sampson）则指出，即使是最微小的互动，如邻里照看孩子或互相帮忙买菜，也能增强社区凝聚力。这种信任和责任感是社区运作的基础，而非依赖于高强度的亲密关系。最终，邻里主义的核心在于功能性的支持，而非单纯的情感寄托。在过度依赖线上社交的背景下，人们重新发现，当身边有人知道你的名字和日常动向时，生活会更加美好。即使他们不是最亲密的朋友，也会在关键时刻出现，有时笨拙，有时不完美，但始终在场。
For years, the internet sold us the idea that connection doesn’t have to be local to be meaningful. Your people could live anywhere: in a Discord server, a group chat of far-flung friends, or a TikTok comment section. Geography was optional.
Now, more people are turning toward the ones physically closest to them: the neighbor down the block, the parent from the playground, the person whose wifi shows up in your network list. It’s not just about wanting connection; folks are looking for support. Childcare is expensive. Rent and groceries are high. Climate emergencies are more frequent. For many Americans, the difference between stability and crisis comes down to whether someone nearby can help.
Call it neighborism: the growing practice of treating proximity as a resource. Increasingly, digital tools aren’t replacing local relationships — they’re helping activate them.
Sometimes it looks small: introducing yourself to the people on your floor, starting a group chat for your building or block, sharing babysitters, watering a neighbor’s plants. But it can also look overtly political.
In Minneapolis, community responses to ICE activity blurred the line between everyday care and organized resistance. As federal immigration enforcement ramped up this winter, residents organized patrols, filmed arrests, shared alerts, and trained one another to document potential abuses. What emerged was something bigger than “borrow a cup of sugar” friendliness. It was infrastructure: informal, fast-moving, and built on trust. And what happened there isn’t an outlier; it’s a large-scale example of a broader shift already underway.
Getting to know your neighbors isn’t new, but its visibility is. After decades of isolation and a slow drift toward digital, long-distance connection, people are embracing an old-fashioned idea: Communities function best when people feel responsible for one another.
According to Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University and author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Americans were more likely to socialize with neighbors 60 years ago than they are today. Some of this was due to the fact that it was far more difficult to keep in touch with people who lived in other areas. “Long distance phone calls were expensive! Email did not exist,” Klinenberg tells Vox by email. Most people’s lives revolved around their home base. And at the time, “women were less likely to be in the paid labor force, which meant they spent more time in and around the neighborhood, where they anchored the family’s social life,” he added.
“Today, Americans work longer hours than they did sixty years ago, and often in more than one job. Temp work, gig work, and full time jobs all demand a lot,” Klinenberg writes — as do the familial demands facing the “sandwich generation.” “One consequence is that Americans socialize at work more than they used to; another is that they have less energy to socialize when they get back home,” he continues. “Finally, of course, there is the extraordinary rise of the internet, social media, dating apps, and the like, all of which make it far easier to socialize online, or to stay close to people who live far away, or to be anti-social, but deeply entertained, while the algorithms do their work.” Platforms made it possible to find your people anywhere, leading many of us to build relationships around shared interests and history rather than shared space. As more of our social lives moved online, the everyday, in-person interactions that once structured daily life began to fall away.
“So many technological promises that were supposed to…make our lives better, make us feel more connected to each other,” says Garrett Bucks, founder of the Barnraisers Project, which has trained nearly 1,000 participants to organize majority-white communities for racial and social justice. “But the problem with that model is that most of us live where we are and we miss out on interpersonal human companionship face to face.”
Increasingly, that version of connection is starting to feel thin — wide-reaching, but not particularly reliable when you actually need help. As neighborism grows, social media isn’t disappearing, but its role is changing. Instead of replacing local relationships, apps are becoming a tool to facilitate them: a way to stay in touch with parents at the playground or pool, organize a bulk grocery run, or find out who lives down the block.
In that sense, this generation has something earlier ones didn’t: connective infrastructure at their fingertips. The same platforms that once promised limitless, frictionless, global belonging can now be repurposed for something smaller, slower, and more grounded, helping translate online awareness into offline care. As Bucks puts it, “We’ve tried everything else. Maybe we should try each other.”
For many people, not knowing your neighbors doesn’t seem unusual — it just feels like how life works now. You occasionally pass each other, maybe exchange a quick hello, and keep moving. The distance becomes routine. Until, eventually, it doesn’t.
“There was a certain point where I just realized how few of my neighbors I actually knew,” says Alec Patton, 45, who started a WhatsApp group in December 2024 for his neighborhood in South Park in San Diego. “It was kind of horrifying. I think I imagined that other people knew their neighbors better than I did, or maybe all my neighbors knew each other and…they just weren’t hanging out with me. But I just think the extent to which neighbors don’t know each other is pretty staggering. And so I was really feeling like I knew I wanted to do something to change that.” Patton says he read a Substack post about how to start a neighborhood group chat and thought, That seems worth trying.
Patton built his neighborhood group chat the old-fashioned way: He printed 50 fliers and dropped them in mailboxes on streets radiating out from his home. The effort paid off — today, the group has about 50 members and continues to grow organically. “I often drink coffee and read a book on the stoop in front of my house and sometimes, when I’m feeling unusually bold, I ask passersby if they’re on the chat,” Patton says. “I’ve got a QR code for the group set on a lock screen on my phone so people can scan it easily.” He also puts up a sign with the QR code at neighborhood gatherings. Others have started spreading the word too, turning it into a shared community effort.
The chat has already proven its value in both small and significant ways. In one instance, Patton realized he had lent the car seat he keeps in his car to a friend, and his wife had driven away with the other one. “I needed to take the kids to school in half an hour so I posted an urgent message on the chat — a neighbor responded in five minutes and saved the day!” he says. In a more serious moment, the group became a real-time information hub during an ICE raid at a nearby restaurant, helping neighbors understand what was happening and coordinate support. While Patton initially envisioned the chat as apolitical, he came to see moments like this not as politics, but as neighbors showing up for one another in times of need.
That kind of care, however, doesn’t emerge passively — it requires time, repetition, and a willingness to do the unglamorous work of showing up. There’s no app or shortcut that can replace the slow accumulation of trust. “Dude, I really do have to invite my neighbors over for a potluck — shoot,” Bucks, the community organizer, says. “I really do have to go to that annoying meeting that I don’t want to go to at 7 pm — shoot. I have to keep going back and forth with folks in the Signal group even if they’re getting on my nerves because it’s worth it.”
When that effort is missing, the absence is palpable — shaping not just how neighbors support one another, but how they perceive even the smallest everyday annoyances. “If you don’t know your neighbors, then all they can do is annoy you,” Patton says. “It’s just a sort of a sad and unpleasant situation.” He says he’s had instances where a neighbor was being loud and getting on his nerves, and finally had a moment where he realized that if he knew someone and had a relationship outside of the thing they do that bothers him, he’d be less irritated. “First of all, I could actually talk to them and say, ‘Hey, could you not do that?’” Patton says. “But also, I’d be less annoyed because I know who they are. It’s one thing if your anonymous neighbor is just being really noisy, and it’s another thing if you know that Mike is having a barbecue.”
Robert J. Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard University known for his work on collective efficacy, which is the process of taking social ties among neighborhood residents and activating them to achieve collective goals, says that getting to know your neighbors isn’t necessarily about building super-tight friendships. In his research, he’s found that neighborhoods function best when residents are loosely connected but willing to step in for one another, whether that’s maintaining a sense of order or simply helping out in small ways.” Any mechanisms that can bring people together, particularly in public spaces, I think, can create a certain kind of public good,” Sampson tells Vox. That level of cohesion doesn’t require intense intimacy or even liking everyone you encounter; it requires regular interaction and a shared sense of responsibility to the people around you.
Good Looking Out, a Facebook group started in 2014, connects West Philadelphia residents who use it to ask for help, share information, and flag urgent issues — everything from flooded basements to lost pets. At its core, it’s about neighbors taking care of each other.
For co-founder Gabriel Nyantakyi, 43, the group grew out of discussions about law enforcement and a desire to build something more community-led. “It emerged from conversations being had about police and policing and wanting to provide some support through community to fill some of those needs,” he tells Vox. “Just establishing some independence from the state.”
Since then, both the network and the broader culture around it have expanded. “Mutual aid culture has grown as a whole,” Nyantakyi says, pointing to the rise of community fridges and food giveaways across West Philly. The shift accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when digital tools became essential and institutional gaps became harder to ignore. “It was all a clear case of the government being inadequate in addressing people’s needs,” Nyantakyi says. “People in the community stepped up.”
Aisha Nyandoro, the founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit organization that helps support residents of federally subsidized housing, tells Vox that in the communities she works with, neighborism is not new or optional. It’s how people survive. It’s “a practice of radical, everyday care rooted in proximity,” she says. “It’s the belief that the people who live closest to you are not just strangers who share a wall or a street, but co-creators in your safety, your joy, and your ability to thrive. It is about reciprocity — not in a transactional sense, but rather a mutually helpful way.”
Nyandoro says that, in practice, it looks like “a neighbor watching a child when a parent’s shift runs long” or “moms texting each other to see if someone needs a ride to the grocery store.” Sampson, the Harvard sociology professor, notes that these kinds of interactions — even small ones — build the trust that allows communities to function.
Klinenberg sees neighborism as part of a broader shift back toward what he calls social infrastructure: the physical places that make connection possible. “If you live in a neighborhood with a great playground…a great library…sports facilities, green space,” he says, you’re “much more likely to have strong local ties.” Without those spaces, connection becomes “a lot harder and less likely.”
The emotional pull of neighborism is real, too. Juli Fraga, a psychologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, says that proximity-based relationships are easier to maintain and access in real time. Low-stakes interactions do wonders for our well-being. “Just being around other people can help us feel less isolated,” she tells Vox. Patton says that’s been the case for him — knowing his neighbors has improved his quality of life. Meanwhile, doing small favors for others, even strangers, cultivates positive emotions. Plus, these situations give people a chance to connect and know that others are experiencing similar struggles, which helps them feel less alone.
Ultimately, though, neighborism may be less about sentiment and more about function. After years of too-online hyper-optimized isolation, people are rediscovering that life is better when somebody nearby knows your name and your general comings and goings. They might not be your closest friend, but they show up anyway — sometimes awkwardly, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes just to stand there and witness.
As Bucks sees it, none of this is entirely new. “We’re not learning to do something that human beings haven’t done previously,” he says.
2026-04-30 02:15:00
2026年4月27日，美国司法部长代理托德·布拉恩奇（Todd Blanche）在华盛顿特区的司法部召开新闻发布会。本周对特朗普政府的司法部来说意义重大，先是周一发生了一起针对特朗普的未遂刺杀事件，随后司法部将调查目标转向了前FBI局长詹姆斯·科米（James Comey），他面临第二轮被指为“极其薄弱”的联邦指控，指控他通过用贝壳写的信息威胁总统。布拉恩奇作为代理司法部长，正面临考验，他此前是特朗普的私人律师。在司法部长帕姆·邦迪（Pam Bondi）被解雇后，布拉恩奇暂时接任这一职位，现在正争取成为正式司法部长。
CNN首席法律事务记者保拉·里德（Paula Reid）在本周与《Today, Explained》主持人诺埃尔·金（Noel King）的对话中提到，布拉恩奇在担任代理司法部长期间表现稳健，尤其是在处理特朗普司法部面临的诸多争议事件后。这些争议包括处理埃普斯坦（Epstein）文件的混乱、对案件的不当处理以及试图起诉他人等。而此次针对科米的指控则被视为一次新的挑战。
布拉恩奇的背景是纽约南区联邦检察官，后转向白领犯罪辩护，并于2023年加入特朗普的法律团队，处理了由杰克·史密斯（Jack Smith）提起的两起联邦案件以及纽约的“封口费”案件。尽管他的客户特朗普在纽约被判有罪，但布拉恩奇成功避免了其入狱，并最终使特朗普未在联邦案件中接受审判。因此，在特朗普眼中，布拉恩奇是“救他免于牢狱之灾”的关键人物。
关于布拉恩奇是否适合担任司法部长，有观点认为他“不够符合MAGA（特朗普支持者）的期望”，且未能摆脱特朗普司法部处理埃普斯坦文件时的“原罪”。然而，也有内部人士表示，尽管存在争议，布拉恩奇在代理司法部长职位上表现称职，且并非所有人都反对他担任这一职务。此外，埃普斯坦文件的处理问题仍是特朗普政府的污点，但布拉恩奇在这一事件中的角色可能不会成为他被任命的障碍。
目前，布拉恩奇是否能获得正式司法部长职位仍存在不确定性。尽管有其他潜在候选人，如哥伦比亚特区联邦检察官珍妮·皮罗（Jeanine Pirro），但布拉恩奇仍有机会。不过，特朗普政府的司法部长职位历来充满挑战，且过去所有司法部长都曾被解雇、替换或辞职。因此，布拉恩奇能否长期担任这一职位，仍有待观察。
It’s been a big week for the Trump Justice Department, beginning with the arraignment of an alleged would-be presidential assassin on Monday.
Just one day after charges were brought against Cole Tomas Allen, who prosecutors say attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the DOJ pivoted to a new target: Former FBI Director James Comey, who is facing a second set of incredibly flimsy federal charges — this time, for allegedly threatening the president with a message written in seashells.
It’s a lot to keep track of, and overseeing it all is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer. Blanche, the deputy attorney general, got the top job on a temporary basis after his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, was fired earlier in the month; now, he’s auditioning for the real thing.
CNN’s chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid told Today, Explained co-host Noel King earlier this week that the job is Blanche’s to lose. She explains how he got here, how he’s doing so far, and how Trump administration insiders and the MAGA movement feel about him as a potential attorney general.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Has [Blanche] done anything that has surprised you?
Todd Blanche has actually, I think, really met the moment perfectly, especially in the larger context of my reporting on his audition for attorney general.
[The Correspondents’ Dinner shooting] is the first thing that has happened to the Blanche Justice Department as opposed to being something they’ve done or what we’ve seen throughout the Trump Justice Department, which has been a lot of self-inflicted controversies: the handling of the Epstein files, the controversial firings, decisions they’ve made around cases and trying to charge people. That’s all self-inflicted.
But when you’re the attorney general, you’re going to deal with a Boston Marathon bombing or a San Bernardino shooting. This is not quite of that level, but it is certainly a massive event that they have to respond to. That is a real test for the attorney general, and so far it’s been a textbook response from him. He did the Sunday shows. He took questions. And then we heard from him again after Monday’s arraignment.
Pam Bondi, of course, was fired earlier this month. Tell me about how Todd Blanche ended up in this job.
He started out as a federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York for a long time. Then he went into white-collar practice, and then he joined the Trump legal team around 2023 when Trump was in the middle of those four major legal cases. Todd worked on the two federal cases brought by Jack Smith, and he also represented [Trump] in New York on the hush money case.
But what really distinguished Todd Blanche is that Trump lawyers come and go. I’ve probably talked to 40 of them over the past decade, right? Todd flourished. Yes, his client was convicted in New York, but he kept him out of jail, and ultimately their legal strategy on the federal cases resulted in Trump never facing trial on either one of those. In Trump’s eyes, Todd Blanche is the guy who kept him out of jail.
What has he been up to since he ended up in the acting role?
He’s been a busy bee. In my reporting, I talked to over a dozen high-level people inside DOJ. Some people I know don’t particularly care for Todd as a person. There was a general consensus, though, this is his job to lose, but in order to keep it, he’s going to have to deliver on weaponization for the president.
That means Trump wants his political adversaries to be prosecuted, and that is something that they have not been able to do yet. Judges and grand juries have to sign off on this. They’ve largely been reluctant, and so they’re getting tripped up by the checks in the system. But he’s made it clear this is what he wants. So ultimately, in order to get this job and to keep it, he needs to bring a case against the political adversary.
Does MAGA like Todd Blanche?
The two knocks on Todd Blanche are that “he’s not MAGA enough” and that he doesn’t get the Trump DOJ away from the “original sin” of how they’ve handled the Epstein files.
I have talked to officials inside the administration, including at least one White House official who said, yeah, we feel that Todd is not MAGA enough. He doesn’t do enough for the base. But even those people who in past stories have been pretty tough on Todd said, “When it comes to being the acting attorney general, he’s done the job. We’re not opposed to him having this job.”
When it comes to the Epstein files, one administration official told me that that is the original sin of the Trump Justice Department. And by that, they mean Pam Bondi’s repeated bungling of the rollout of those files, promising there was new information — those binders that she handed out that really had just a rehash of things that were already in the public domain, her saying that she had the client list on her desk when really there’s no client list.
Eventually, they just had Todd take over the messaging. He was also the one who went down and met with Ghislaine Maxwell. He was the one who oversaw the release of the documents. He has been front and center on this. So when he becomes the acting attorney general, the concern from some administration officials is, well, putting him in charge isn’t going to get us past our biggest embarrassment, which is Epstein. But I don’t think in Trump’s eyes that’s going to be disqualifying.
Is this job his if he wants it? Are there any other serious contenders?
My sources say this job is Todd’s to lose. Now, even if you get it, every Trump attorney general has been fired, replaced, or resigned. So we’ll see. But there are certainly other people nipping at Todd’s heels. But there are also some people in the wings. One is the US Attorney [for the District of Columbia] Jeanine Pirro.
It was funny — the night of the dinner and the shooting, Todd was at the White House. He did the press conference with the president, said there will be charges, there’ll be a gun charge, maybe a law enforcement-related charge. Thirty, 45 minutes later, Pirro did a press conference, and man, she was yelling the specific statutes into that microphone.
It felt a little like one-upsmanship — maybe it was just her enthusiasm, and I’m reading something into it, but her name has certainly been mentioned. We have two and a half more years. There’s probably time for everyone to be attorney general if Todd can’t or won’t stay in the job for two and a half years. It’s a tough job under any administration. But this one really brings some unique challenges.
2026-04-30 01:35:00
美国最高法院在2025年1月20日的国会就职典礼后，大法官塞缪尔·阿利托（左）和克拉伦斯·托马斯等待离开舞台。最高法院周三作出的“路易斯安那诉卡莱斯案”（Louisiana v. Callais）裁决，被认为是对联邦法律中保障少数族裔（包括黑人和拉丁裔）选民在某些州获得最低代表性的规定造成重大打击。阿利托的多数意见明确支持这一观点，但其意见还进一步强化了州立法机构有权根据党派利益划分选区的立场。
该裁决实际上消除了美国《投票权法案》（Voting Rights Act）中对种族选区划分的联邦法律限制。此前，该法案要求某些种族分裂严重的州必须设立额外的选区以确保少数族裔的投票权不被削弱。然而，阿利托在裁决中恢复了1980年“莫比尔市诉鲍尔登案”（City of Mobile v. Bolden）的标准，即要求原告必须证明州立法机构存在“种族歧视动机”。尽管国会于1982年修订了《投票权法案》，明确即使没有种族歧视意图，只要法律导致少数族裔投票权被剥夺，就可能违反联邦法律，但阿利托的裁决实际上使这一修订失效，至少在选区划分案件中如此。
此外，阿利托的裁决颠覆了1986年“桑吉尔斯案”（Thornburg v. Gingles）确立的框架。该框架要求判断州是否因种族隔离和政治极化而形成两个独立的政治群体，并据此要求设立额外选区以保障少数族裔的代表权。然而，阿利托的裁决使种族极化州获得更强的保护，允许这些州通过证明选区划分同时有利于执政党来规避诉讼。这意味着，种族极化最严重的州将最不容易受到针对种族选区划分的诉讼。
在实际操作中，这一裁决使此前受《投票权法案》约束的红州（共和党占优）得以重新划分选区，以最大化共和党的代表权。例如，2023年最高法院曾要求阿拉巴马州设立一个黑人多数选区，但如今该州可声称此举出于党派目的而非种族考虑，从而取消这一选区。未来，共和党可能通过将黑人和拉丁裔议员的选区替换为白人共和党人主导的选区，进一步削弱少数族裔的影响力。
总体而言，这一裁决是阿利托所在共和党派的重大胜利，也标志着党派选区划分在联邦层面的合法化，使得种族选区划分若能服务于党派利益，也将被允许。这将加剧美国选区划分的争议，并可能在未来几十年内进一步削弱少数族裔的选举力量。
Get yourself a man who loves you as much as Justice Samuel Alito loves partisan gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which was handed down on Wednesday, was expected to deal a mortal blow to a longstanding federal rule that guarantees Black and Latino voters a minimum level of representation in some states, and Alito’s majority opinion in Callais unquestionably deals such a blow.
But Alito, whose opinion was joined only by the Court’s Republicans, also goes much further. Callais is a cry of devotion to the idea that state lawmakers should be allowed to draw legislative maps that benefit their own political party, and that lock the opposing party out of power to the maximum extent possible.
Callais’s immediate effect is that it removes what was, until Wednesday morning, one of the few remaining federal legal checks on gerrymandering: the Voting Rights Act’s provision governing racial gerrymanders. Prior to Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act sometimes required states to draw additional legislative districts where a racial minority group is in the majority. Callais effectively neutralizes that provision. It does so in two ways.
First, Alito’s opinion effectively reinstates City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), which held that plaintiffs alleging that a state law violates the Voting Rights Act must show that the state legislature acted with “racially discriminatory motivation.” Congress repudiated Mobile in a 1982 amendment to the VRA, which clarified that a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” may violate federal law even if state lawmakers did not enact it with racist intent.
Though Alito denies that his opinion effectively repeals this 1982 law, his opinion rests on a fairly meaningless distinction. Though he claims that Callais “does not demand a finding of intentional discrimination,” he then writes that the VRA “imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” So the new rule is really the same as Mobile, albeit with the words “strong inference” tossed in.
Alito then makes an even deeper cut at anti-gerrymandering lawsuits, elevating the principle that states must be allowed to engage in partisan gerrymandering to a trump card that overcomes the VRA’s safeguards against racial gerrymanders.
Before Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act cast a particularly skeptical eye on legislative maps drawn in states where voters are racially polarized — typically meaning that white voters overwhelmingly supported Republicans while non-white voters voted for Democrats. Without the VRA, these states would tend to give racial minorities minimal representation because the white Republican majority could use race as a proxy to identify Democrats. And then it could draw maps that gave these non-white Democrats few seats in the state legislature or Congress.
But Callais demands that VRA plaintiffs “must ‘disentangle race from politics’ by proving ‘that the former drove a district’s lines.” Thus, if a state draws a map that does two things at once, minimizing both Black representation and Democratic representation, the map will almost certainly be upheld because it is exceedingly difficult to prove that the purpose of the map is to target Black voters and not Democratic voters.
As a practical matter, this means that states with racially polarized electorates will almost always be immune from racial gerrymandering suits, because they can defend against those suits merely by proving that their state’s maps were drawn to benefit the Republican Party.
Moreover, Alito handed this decision down in April, despite the fact that the Court’s most contentious cases are typically handed down in late June. That gives Republicans in red states that previously had to comply with the Voting Rights Act an additional two months to draw congressional maps that benefit their party. And even if those states do not redraw their maps for the 2026 election, many are all but certain to do so for future elections.
Callais, in other words, is a major victory for Alito’s Republican Party, and it is an even greater victory for the proposition that gerrymandering should flourish without federal regulation.
Broadly speaking, state lawmakers can draw gerrymandered maps in two ways. One way, known as “racial” gerrymandering, occurs when a state draws a map in order to maximize the power of voters of one race, and to minimize the power of voters of another race. Imagine, for example, a map that crammed all of a state’s Black voters into a single congressional district, while spreading out white voters to more efficiently elect as many white candidates as possible.
“Partisan” gerrymanders, meanwhile, occur when a state draws maps that try to maximize one party’s representation and minimize the power of the other major party.
In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican majority held that federal courts may not hear challenges to partisan gerrymanders. But the Voting Rights Act, as it was amended in 1982, still sometimes prohibited maps that dilute racial minorities’ voting strength. Recall that the amended VRA prohibits a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” A racial gerrymander abridges the right to vote by making votes cast by voters of one race matter less than votes cast by members of a different race.
The Court laid out this pre-Callais framework in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). While the Gingles framework is complicated, it primarily turned on two questions: 1) whether a state is residentially segregated by race; and 2) whether the states’ voters are racially polarized by political party.
Gingles recognized that, when residential segregation and racial polarization coexist, they produce two separate political communities who will consistently vote for opposing candidates — for example, white voters who vote for Republicans in one part of a state, and Black voters who vote for Democrats in another part of it. In such a state, the majority community will use its control of the state legislature to draw maps that leave the minority community with little, if any, representation. And so the VRA sometimes required these states to draw additional districts where a racial minority group was in the majority, in order to ensure that group was not unfairly denied representation.
Although Alito claims that his Callais opinion “does not require abandonment of the Gingles framework,” he’s not telling the truth. Gingles was the Court’s attempt to apply the 1982 VRA amendment’s command that a law which “results” in less representation for racial minorities is suspect. But, by reviving Mobile’s racist intent requirement, Alito effectively repeals the 1982 amendment — at least as it applies to redistricting cases.
On top of that, Alito’s Callais opinion turns Gingles on its head. Again, Gingles held that, because states that are racially polarized tend to produce unfair maps, those states sometimes had special obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Callais, by contrast, holds that racially polarized states enjoy enhanced protections against being sued for racial gerrymandering.
Under Callais, a state that is accused of racial gerrymandering may defend against that suit by demonstrating that its maps also benefit the political party that controls the state legislature. So the most racially polarized states will enjoy the highest level of immunity from lawsuits challenging their maps.
The most immediate impact of this decision is that red states that previously were bound by the Voting Rights Act are now free to redraw their maps to maximize Republican representation. As recently as 2023, for example, the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to draw an additional Black majority district in order to comply with the VRA. Alabama may now eliminate this district so long as it claims that it is doing so for partisan reasons, and not racial ones.
More broadly, Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering that it is likely to eliminate any remaining concerns political parties may have that the Supreme Court might push back if states draw maps too obviously rigged in their favor. Rucho already established that partisan gerrymandering is allowed. Callais effectively rules that racial gerrymandering is also allowed, so long as it also achieves partisan ends.
A less certain question is what happens to Black representation over the course of the next several decades. Callais will allow Republican state lawmakers to eliminate many congressional seats that are currently held by Black or Latino lawmakers and replace them with white Republican districts. One upshot is that many minority voters will now need to form coalitions with white voters in order to elect their preferred candidates. It remains to be seen whether such alliances will form in the future.
Unless and until that happens, however, Callais will increase the power of white Republicans and diminish the power of Democrats and voters of color generally. The gerrymandering wars are only beginning, and the Republican Party just gained a powerful new weapon.
2026-04-30 00:30:00
4月18日，美国威斯康星州麦迪逊市外的Ridglan Farms（一家为生物医学研究繁殖狗的公司）发生了一场激烈的抗议活动，数百名动物权益活动人士与警方发生冲突。此次活动是动物权益运动中“公开救援”策略的一次大规模尝试，旨在通过媒体曝光引发公众关注，推动改变。此前，3月15日的行动中，活动人士成功救出30只被关在笼中的狗，并引发全国性关注。然而，4月18日的行动遭遇了警方的强力镇压，包括橡胶子弹、催泪瓦斯和“蜂刺弹”等非致命性武器，导致28人被捕，其中四名活动人士面临超过十年的监禁指控。
Ridglan Farms因多次违反动物福利法规而备受争议，包括对狗进行无麻醉手术等虐待行为。尽管该公司曾与威斯康星州达成协议停止销售狗，但未要求其交出剩余的狗。活动人士认为，警方的过度反应可能反而会增强公众对动物权益的关注，并推动更广泛的行动。他们希望借此事件引发社会对动物苦难的共鸣，将动物权益运动与更广泛的公民不服从传统联系起来。
文章指出，动物权益运动近年来逐渐转向更抽象和数据驱动的策略，如有效利他主义（effective altruism），但同时也面临如何平衡渐进改革与直接行动的挑战。尽管此次行动未能成功解救狗，但其引发的媒体关注和公众讨论可能为运动带来新的动力，推动更深远的变革。活动人士强调，他们的目标不仅是救出个别动物，更是通过大规模行动改变公众对动物的普遍态度，将动物权益纳入主流政治议程。
It’s exceptionally rare that the tiny, perpetually marginal, and politically outmatched animal rights movement manages to capture national attention. A lack of attention is that movement’s core problem and central organizing question. How can it convince the public to make space in their minds for something they’d really, really prefer not to: the industrialized torture of animals by the billions for food, research, and other human ends?
One coalition of grassroots activists has offered one possible answer. It has recently mounted one of the most audacious and most news-making animal rights campaigns in recent memory, and, in the process, turned an obscure breeder of beagles for biomedical experimentation into an issue of national political significance.
On March 15, dozens of activists stormed Ridglan Farms, a dog facility outside Madison, Wisconsin, that raises beagles for research labs across the country and has been accused by state regulators of hundreds of animal welfare violations. The activists entered one of the company’s buildings and extracted 30 of the dogs held in cages there (who are, under the law, Ridglan’s property). Twenty-two beagles were driven off the site and have since been placed in homes, while eight were seized from activists by police and believed to be returned to Ridglan.
That event produced an arresting set of images seen by tens of millions of Americans in the news and on social media, and it reached the agenda of political leaders all the way up to Congress and the Trump administration. So, the group, a loose assemblage known as the Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs, sought to raise the stakes even higher: They would rapidly recruit and train hundreds of new volunteers and return to Ridglan within a few weeks to remove all of the nearly 2,000 beagles believed to still be confined there.
This next rescue attempt, on April 18, unfolded much differently, when more than 1,000 activists arriving at the facility were caught off guard by a major show of force from law enforcement. The police, primarily the Dane County Sheriff with help from other law enforcement agencies, tackled activists and deployed rubber bullets; pepper spray; tear gas; and, the sheriff’s office confirmed to me, stinger grenades, which are less-lethal grenades that release rubber pellets and are often used for riot control.
One woman had her nose broken. A 67-year-old Navy veteran was pinned to the ground, covered with tear gas, and struggled to breathe as an officer pressed a knee into his back. Another man trying to go through a hole in Ridglan’s fence was knocked unconscious by police and had a tooth knocked out. Police removed a woman’s protective goggles to douse her in the face with pepper spray. Numerous people ended up in the emergency room. Reporting from the scene, I found myself, for a minute or two, also choked by the tear gas.
Police force of this magnitude may be grimly familiar to human rights movements from Black Lives Matter to the recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but it is unprecedented in US animal rights activism. The day was a devastating defeat for the activists, who couldn’t come close to breaching Ridglan’s buildings this time — and no beagles were rescued.
But might there be a success hidden in this apparent failure? The activists now hope that the images of police repression that have turned the attempted rescue into national news can be leveraged into greater public support and momentum for their cause.
“We’ve created a new narrative that the animal rights movement has never had, which is that we’re getting the shit beat out of us by police, and we’re getting thousands of ordinary people to show up and get involved,” Abie Brauner, a lawyer and organizer in the action, told me. Scott Wagner, the Navy veteran who was tackled by police and who is still on crutches today after his leg was injured in that encounter, told me that “the PR does nothing but benefit the animal movement.”
Many casual observers will encounter Ridglan as an isolated story — one controversial facility subjecting dogs to lives of confinement and experimentation that would make dog-loving Americans recoil in horror. But it’s also part of a much grander strategy. “Ridglan is like a stand-in for all industrialized animal abuse,” Justin Marceau, a law professor at the University of Denver and head of its Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, told me.
The ultimate prize for the animal rights movement is to persuade people to connect the suffering of beagles to that of the many more animals raised for food on factory farms, whose exploitation is made possible by the same legal structure that treats animals as property with few limits on what can be done to them. It is a goal that’s always eluded the animal movement: Can the public’s empathy stretch beyond the animals we’ve chosen to love to reach cows, pigs, and chickens?
The recent actions at Ridglan represented the largest-ever iteration of a tactic developed by animal rights activists over the last decade, known as “open rescue.” Activists walk into factory farms, slaughterhouses, and other places of animal exploitation, remove animals, and then bring their stories to the media. When they face criminal charges for entering private property and taking animals, they then try to persuade juries that they were right to rescue animals from suffering. Their aim is not to liberate every exploited animal one by one, but rather to put a spotlight on the victims of factory farming, build a mass movement for animal rights, and create legal precedent in support of viewing animals as moral subjects rather than as mere property.
Open rescue, primarily associated with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), has mostly focused on animals raised for food on factory farms — newborn piglets, goats, turkeys, chickens raised for meat and eggs. It has notched jury acquittals and other courtroom victories for activists defending themselves against criminal charges. And it has given rise to a vibrant school of legal and philosophical thought on activists’ right to rescue animals — and animals’ rights to be rescued — from suffering and confinement.
Ridglan was first targeted by DxE in 2017, when a group of activists entered the facility, removed three beagles, and filmed the conditions there: dogs living beneath fluorescent lights in stacked cages above pools of their own waste, pacing from boredom. Three activists — Eva Hamer, Paul Picklesimer, and attorney and DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung — were later charged with burglary and theft and were set to face trial in 2024. But in a surprising reversal, all of the charges against them were dropped, after which the activists persuaded a judge to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Ridglan for animal cruelty — a testament to the movement’s legal sophistication. As I covered in a previous Vox story, at a 2024 evidentiary hearing for that case:
Former Ridglan employees said they’d performed crude surgeries on beagles without pain relief, including removing prolapsed eye glands and cutting out their vocal cords, a measure meant to reduce noise from the densely packed barking dogs. “It still haunts me every day,” testified Matthew Reich, who worked at Ridglan from 2006 to 2010.
Last year, Ridglan was cited by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) for 311 violations of state animal welfare regulations, including failing to handle dogs “in a humane manner that does not cause physical harm or unnecessary injury.” Between 2022 and 2025, the citations allege, Ridglan performed improper surgeries on hundreds of dogs without adequate pain relief; the company has disputed the allegations. By October 2025, Ridglan agreed to stop selling dogs by July of this year to avoid prosecution for criminal animal cruelty.
But that deal did not require Ridglan to surrender its remaining dogs. So, Hsiung, a longtime animal movement leader, incensed by the state’s refusal to seize dogs from a facility that it had probable cause to think had violated Wisconsin’s animal cruelty laws, organized last month’s open rescue at Ridglan. That also allowed him to do something else: to connect the radical spirit of direct action and open rescue to a species that Americans already love, and thereby recruit many new activists from beyond the limited group of true believers that normally turn out at animal rights events.
At the March action that followed, law enforcement’s response had been halfhearted and maladroit, all but allowing activists to drive off with vanloads of dogs. Videos of rescuers carrying vulnerable beagles out of Ridglan spread across TikTok and Instagram with a moral clarity that cast the activists not as trespassers but as liberators, helping the group recruit an unprecedented number of people ready to return and break out the rest of the dogs.
After the success of that rescue, US Rep. Mark Pocan, whose congressional district includes Ridglan, rebuffed the company’s request for assistance in countering the activists’ planned April action in a widely shared letter and urged the company to rehome its remaining beagles. “The documented treatment of beagles on your property is alarming,” he wrote. Earlier this month, Pocan also questioned US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the federal government’s funding of experiments on beagles purchased from Ridglan. That research “should not be happening,” Kennedy said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
I’ve covered the open rescue movement many times and know it intimately; I also happen to live in Madison and, by way of disclosure, I personally know some of the people in the city who have been involved in the campaign against Ridglan over the last decade, though I did not rely on those relationships to cover this story. In preparation for this piece, I conducted interviews with organizers, observed planning meetings, and had countless conversations with participants in the days before and after the attempted rescue. Over the last week and a half, I got a deep look into how this month’s action was planned and rehearsed and, ultimately, how it unraveled.
The first group of would-be beagle rescuers arrived on the morning of April 18 intending to cut through Ridglan’s fence and other barriers it had set up to thwart the activists — including a moat filled with manure. They came outfitted with boltcutters, sledgehammers, saws, Halligan bars — which are used by firefighters to pry open doors — and other tools, similar to what they had brought to the March rescue. But this time, their tools were quickly confiscated by police, who stood behind Ridglan’s chain-link perimeter repelling anyone who tried to enter, as if defending a fortress.
Activists standing outside the fence pleaded with law enforcement to put down their pepper spray and tear gas, maintained that they were nonviolent, that they were only here to help dogs. “There’s no need for weapons; none of us have weapons,” one activist entreated officers over a megaphone.
As the thousand-plus activists grew increasingly hopeless that they’d be able to save any beagles from the facility that day, they wandered around the large grassy area at the front of the property in search of anything useful to do. They helped clear noxious chemicals from each other’s eyes and tried to appeal to officers’ consciences, invoking dogs’ loyalty and guileless affection. A man thundered to a row of Wisconsin State Patrol officers dressed in riot gear: “These dogs will love you more than your best friend loves you!”
Open rescue is rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence, but the presence of scary-looking tools intended to breach Ridglan’s property might undermine those optics in the eyes of the general public. The sheriff’s office prominently highlighted the implements as “burglary tools” in a press release. “I want to be very clear: This is not a peaceful protest,” Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said in a statement while the event was unfolding. Barrett also asserted that activists had been trying to assault law enforcement. When I reached out to the sheriff’s office for evidence for that claim, public information and education officer Elise Schaffer pointed me to a folder of footage. In one of the clips, an SUV is visible hitting and driving through one of Ridglan’s gates, and in another an activist appears to grab a police baton and run off, though none of the footage involves what I’d characterize as assaulting an officer.
“I get it; the police see the dogs as property, so if they pepper spray me while I’m running at the fence with a saw, I can’t be too upset,” activist Mark Schellhase acknowledged to me a few days after the open rescue attempt. But, he said, “their violence extended far beyond people trying to get inside the facility.” Police could be seen in footage forcefully pushing people who were standing on public property, far away from Ridglan’s fence.
Brauner emphasized to me the distinction between destroying property for its own sake and damaging it for the purpose of saving the animals, comparing it to smashing a car window to free a dog overheating inside. “Our goal was not to cause property destruction. In fact, we wanted to minimize that as much as possible,” Brauner said, and “only do it to the extent that it’s necessary to save the dogs.” In past open rescues, gaining entry into factory farms has been relatively easy — activists are often able to simply walk inside. But this time, in large part because the group had openly declared its intent to take out dogs, Ridglan took extraordinary steps to lock down its facilities and create additional physical obstacles.
According to activist documentation, 28 people were arrested that day, four of whom — Hsiung, along with Aditya Aswani, Dean Wyrzykowski, and Melany Brieno — have been charged with conspiracy to commit burglary, which can carry more than a decade each in prison.
“If any break-in participants, supporters or police were injured during Saturday’s violent assault on Ridglan Farms, the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of Wayne Hsiung and other key leaders, who organized and led hundreds in the coordinated attack on a federally-licensed health research facility,” Ridglan wrote to me in a statement. Referring to the Ridglan’s deal with a special prosecutor to shut down its dog sales operation, which did not require the company to surrender its remaining dogs, the statement added: “Instead of respecting the rule of law and the results of a thorough investigation which led to a binding legal agreement between the state of Wisconsin and Ridglan Farms, Mr Hsiung and his accomplices decided to encourage lawlessness and vigilantism because they did not personally agree with the results of the legal process.”
The company didn’t directly answer a question about what will be done with the dogs that still remain in its facilities, saying instead that it “will fully comply with the October 2025 settlement with the state of Wisconsin.”
Now, activists are continuing to push a variety of angles to free Ridglan’s beagles. Many of them hope law enforcement’s repression will backfire — two Dane County supervisors have called for an investigation into the police’s use of force at the event — and escalate pressure to liberate the dogs. The coalition has urged Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul to facilitate the beagles’ release, and animal rescue groups have been negotiating with the company to buy the dogs, an opportunity that Lara Trump, the day of the attempted rescue, publicly urged Ridglan to accept.
Perhaps my favorite text ever written about animal rights is political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel’s The War Against Animals, a sweepingly ambitious book that argues the human relationship with nonhuman animals is a literal state of war, in which we are the aggressors. The foiled rescue attempt on April 18 felt like a rare in-kind, proportionally appropriate response to that war. “It looks like some sort of medieval battle,” Marceau remarked, an observation echoed by others who watched the weekend unfold. But will it be effective for animal advocates, persuasive to the human public that they must ultimately win over?
It feels like animal rights is in a new era, more intimately connected to other traditions of civil disobedience.
Here is the most positive read on that day: Overwhelming police force of the kind seen at the attempted rescue tends to be used on serious protest movements with the ability to turn out massive crowds of people. Past open rescues have been met with large police presence and certainly many arrests, but brutal suppression tactics hadn’t been used on animal rights activists before, and the action’s organizers didn’t adequately prepare to face them. In that sense, the movement may have underestimated its own growing influence and power to elicit such a response from law enforcement.
Now, it feels like animal rights is in a new era, more intimately connected to other traditions of civil disobedience — a connection that had been invited by Hsiung, whose trainings for activists leading up to the actions at Ridglan emphasized their continuity with the civil rights movement and others that have been on the receiving end of police brutality. Mansi Goel, whose 99-year-old grandfather had been jailed in the movement for Indian independence from Britain, told me that the experience tapped into “something ancestral” for her, and that she hopes the violence that she and others experienced at Ridglan will precipitate greater “solidarity across all movements seeking freedom.”
The Ridglan actions might also be interpreted as a reflection of shifting intellectual and political currents in the animal rights movement. Animal advocacy has, over the last decade or so, become increasingly abstract and numbers-driven, due in part to the influence of effective altruism, which has injected needed rigor into the movement by pushing advocates to prioritize interventions that can reduce the most suffering for the most animals. Often, that has meant incremental welfare reforms for chickens, who are raised and killed for food in greater numbers than any other land animal. But within EA, there has also been a growing sense that this calculus can miss the value of harder-to-measure work, like moral confrontation and mass organizing that can lead to more durable change in the public’s view of animals. Brauner, who himself shares an ideological kinship with EA, told me that “sometimes building towards social or political movements over a long period of time can lead to vast and transformative change, which is much more effective” than narrowly focusing on marginal welfare improvements.
Of course, nothing in animal rights advocacy has yet proven particularly effective. Even its triumphs, rare moments of breaking through to a world that is totally ignorant of the scale and severity of animal exploitation, can feel transient and ultimately curdle into disappointment. The movement has not managed to change the fundamental outlook for animals in the US and the world: We exploit, maim, and kill millions more of them with every passing year.
We can’t yet know what Ridglan will mean for animal rights’ momentum — the unprecedented scale of this rescue attempt, the ferocity of law enforcement’s response, and the seriousness of the criminal charges that movement leaders now face have been variously described to me by participants as electrifying and galvanizing for the cause, and also tragic and dangerous. It has been, if nothing else, a bold and bruising experiment in broadening the movement’s tent beyond the already converted, and carrying animal rights forward into the realm of mass politics.
2026-04-29 23:35:00
2026年4月20日，狮门影业（Lionsgate）在洛杉矶杜比剧院（Dolby Theatre）举办电影《Michael》首映式，该片聚焦被指控性侵儿童的“流行音乐之王”迈克尔·杰克逊（Michael Jackson）。尽管存在争议，该片仍创下首周末票房纪录。此前，2019年的纪录片《Leaving Neverland》曾引发广泛讨论，导致广告商停止使用杰克逊音乐，甚至《辛普森一家》（The Simpsons）也撤下相关剧集。然而，随着杰克逊遗产方通过法律手段让《Leaving Neverland》从HBO下架，电影《Michael》的上映再次引发公众对杰克逊的重新关注。
部分观众认为，杰克逊已去世，相关指控显得遥远，因此选择忽略伦理争议，欣赏其音乐才华。也有支持者坚信他无罪，认为司法系统存在偏见，尤其针对黑人男性。导演安托万·福夸（Antoine Fuqua）指出，早期版本的电影曾展现杰克逊在调查中被警方虐待的情节，但因法律问题被删除。他质疑部分指控者的动机，并承认无法确定指控是否属实。
文章进一步指出，美国司法系统对黑人存在系统性偏见，黑人男性常被错误指控性犯罪，如“斯科茨伯勒男孩”（Scottsboro Boys）和“中央公园五人案”（Central Park Five）等历史事件。同时，有色人种儿童在遭遇性侵时面临更多障碍，其证词常被忽视，母亲也常被指责。尽管杰克逊在2005年性侵指控案中被判无罪，但该案件仍反映了司法系统对黑人和儿童的双重歧视。
文章最后强调，面对杰克逊的遗产，观众更倾向于观看其音乐成就，而非直面指控背后的真相。真正的反思需要正视证据，直面司法系统的黑暗面，而非回避。
The new biopic Michael, about the tortured King of Pop, had a record-breaking opening weekend — despite the fact that the film celebrates the musical legacy of Michael Jackson, a man credibly accused of sexually abusing multiple children.
After the success of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, it was tempting to think that there was a permanent asterisk next to Jackson’s name. Advertisers stopped using his music, and The Simpsons pulled his episode from syndication. Now, however, Leaving Neverland has been wiped from HBO after legal finagling from Jackson’s estate, and Michael is an enormous hit. We have clear proof that audiences are ready to put that unpleasantness behind them and instead embrace Jackson’s inarguable musical genius.
Some audience members have doubtless made the calculation that with Jackson long dead, the accusations against him are distant, too, leaving them with no particular ethical reasons to deprive themselves of the pleasure of seeing a Michael Jackson concert recreation on the big screen. (“Forget what the ‘professional’ critics are saying theyve completely missed the mark on this one,” begins one audience review on Rotten Tomatoes. “If you want to experience the magic of the King of Pop, this movie delivers.”)
Other Jackson defenders have decided that Jackson was innocent. TikTok is full of videos laying out the basics of the case and asking “Guilty or innocent?”, with the majority of commenters saying “innocent.” “The world owes Michael an apology” is a sentiment that pops up a lot.
Then there’s a variation on that defense, rooted in the long, ugly history of racism in the criminal justice system in America. Some of his defenders — including Michael director Antoine Fuqua — believe that Jackson was unfairly smeared by a system looking to bring down a successful Black man, in the same way that so many other Black men have been wrongly accused and maligned before.
“When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua told the New Yorker. He added that an early cut of Michael showed Jackson brutalized by the police over the course of their investigation, “being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster,” before it was excised from the film for legal reasons. According to the New Yorker, he doubts the intentions of some of the accusers’ parents and says he doesn’t know whether the allegations are true or not.
“This may sound like an excuse, but what many don’t understand is how hard it is for older generations to square what has so often happened in the past — the fear that society is just tearing down another good Black man — with the reality that these men could have been, or are convicted of having been, harmful,” wrote Nadira Goffe for Slate, in an article about Jackson’s loyal older Black fandom.
Talking about Michael, then, requires pitting two marginalized groups against each other: Black men and abused children, neither of whom is served by the American justice system. It makes discussing the case even sadder and harder than it already is.
To be clear, the case against Michael Jackson really is extraordinarily strong. At least 10 people have publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them as children, in remarkably consistent and detailed stories. Only one accusation resulted in a criminal trial, in 2005, and Jackson was found not guilty. That, however, is par for the course when it comes to child sex abuse cases, even those in which the accused adult doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend in their defense. A 2019 study shows that fewer than one in five of all child sex abuse cases lead to prosecution. Of those, about half result in a conviction.
On the rare occasion that there is a trial, it is almost always a bad experience for the child at its center. There are persistent myths about how child sexual abuse — that children will always have physical injuries, that they will immediately tell an adult, that they can be manipulated into lying about accusations — that affect how their allegations are perceived. A 2017 study of defense tactics in child sex abuse cases found that “just as women are met with doubt when they report sexual assault, the justice system remains skeptical of children’s testimony.” Their mothers are often blamed for allowing the abuse to happen. In Jackson’s 2005 trial, his defense lawyer sarcastically referred to Jackson’s child accusers as “these little lambs,” suggesting that they were involved in “the biggest con of their careers” against Jackson.
At the same time, there’s a reason that a story about the American state attempting to take down a Black man at the top of his game resonates so deeply. It’s based on the real problem of how our criminal justice system treats Black people: unjustly.
According to the ACLU, Black people in the United States are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, while one in 81 Black adults in the US is serving time in state prison. There is also a long, long history in this country of Black men being falsely accused of sex crimes. That was the stated reason for the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys and the Central Park Five, the racist murder of Emmett Till, and thousands of monstrous lynchings. You can understand why someone would look at this history and cry foul.
But boys and children of color — the alleged victim in the Jackson case that made it to trial in 2005 is Latino — face unique barriers when they are sexually assaulted. “As Black and racially minoritised children are located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping structural inequalities, their specific experiences of victimisation are still largely overlooked in the criminological literature,” writes Aisha K. Gill, a professor of criminology and co-editor of the book Child Sexual Abuse in Black and Minoritised Communities. Both racism and culture affect whether they are believed and the support they receive.
All of these numbers and statistics and sad moments in American history represent groups of people whom the justice system bludgeons with the law as though it were a weapon, who are routinely humiliated and rarely protected. To put them in opposition to each other is a dark and uncomfortable thing. It is far, far easier to watch a glorified concert film of Jackson’s greatest hits and bask in the glee of it. But an honest reckoning with Jackson’s legacy would require facing the strength of the evidence against him, darkness and all, and not looking away from it.