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

The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran has caused an unprecedented disruption in global energy markets, bottlenecking 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. We don’t yet know exactly what this means for the fight against climate change. But, thanks to two new reports released last week, we now have the clearest picture yet of the path the world was on before the conflict sent the price of oil soaring—and it was a path where the fossil fuels threatened by the war were less central than ever to meeting growing global energy needs.

“The economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily—and still all that demand growth was met with renewables.”

The world is entering an “age of electricity,” according to the reports, which come from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental organization that publishes the world’s most authoritative analyses on the global energy sector, and the think tank Ember. That’s because core economic activities that traditionally involve burning oil and gas—driving cars, heating buildings, and even running industrial processes like steelmaking—are increasingly powered by electricity instead. And, most importantly for the climate fight, an ever-larger share of that electricity is coming from renewable sources. 

The two new analyses confirmed that 2025 was a banner year for renewable energy. Solar power was the single biggest source used to meet humanity’s growing appetite for electricity. New power generation from the broader suite of carbon-free sources—including wind, nuclear, and hydropower—actually exceeded the overall rise in electricity demand, meaning renewables began to displace fossil fuel sources. If this trend sticks, it would mean that the so-called energy transition meant to shepherd humanity out of the climate crisis is no longer theoretical.

“This was a year when the economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily—and still all that demand growth was met with renewables,” said Daan Walter, a lead researcher at Ember. 

In 2025, renewables edged out coal in global electricity generation for the first time in more than a century. This progress was fueled by China and India, the world’s two most populous countries that together comprise 42 percent of global fossil power generation. The nations both saw electricity generated by fossil fuels fall in the same year for the first time this century. Like other countries around the world, China and India have been rapidly building out solar, wind, and battery infrastructure. (The cost of batteries fell 45 percent in 2025, an even steeper decline than the 20 percent drop in costs that analysts tracked in 2024.)

There’s another sign that 2025 marked a turning point in the energy transition, according to the Ember report: Unlike in past years, the plateau in fossil fuel use was not tied to a recession. Global economic growth last year was normal, which indicates that renewable energy is driving a structural trend away from fossil fuels when it comes to generating electricity. 

But that doesn’t mean that oil, gas, and coal use are nearing extinction. When it comes to the broader energy economy, rather than just electricity generation, the IEA’s report finds that renewables still aren’t displacing fossil fuels fast enough to force a sustained decline in the world’s use of greenhouse-gas-emitting energy. (This is because not all energy—for instance that which currently powers jets, cargo ships, and many motor vehicles—is generated from electricity.)

Many people in developing nations, are “leapfrogging” gas-powered cars and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle instead.

As a result of complications like these, global carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high last year, rising 0.4 percent from 2024 levels. The pace of the increase, however, is declining as renewables rise. For years, emissions declines were driven by developed countries like the United States and European Union member states. Last year, however, emissions from advanced economies grew faster than emissions from developing countries for the first time since the 1990s, according to the IEA. 

The trend reversal was driven by the US, where coal demand rose 10 percent last year. Rising natural gas prices prompted power producers to switch back to coal, which had been displaced by fracked natural gas in recent years. Plus, electricity use rose thanks to a harsh winter across much of the eastern part of the country, as well as the rollout of industrial-scale power customers like the data centers needed for new artificial intelligence applications.

But trends in the opposite direction in developing countries played a role, too. In Indonesia, for example, electric cars now comprise more than 15 percent of new car sales—a larger share than in the United States and up from virtually zero in the early 2020s. Many customers are “leapfrogging” gasoline-powered cars altogether and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle.

“The energy transition was conceived as something that is led by the developed world, and the developing world kind of hobbles after at a slower pace,” said Walter. “We’re now seeing ‘leapfrogging’ across the world where actually developing economies are going faster in many ways than developed economies.”

Today, the Florida Legislature will vote on a bill that would make it significantly easier for parents to skip their children’s routine childhood vaccinations. The bill would allow exemptions “based on the parent’s religious tenets or practices or conscience,” meaning essentially that parents would no longer need to demonstrate medical or religious reasons for exemptions. Any ideological objection would be considered a valid reason to forgo shots that prevent potentially deadly diseases such as polio, tetanus, and measles.

The proposed changes are the latest salvo in Florida’s war against public health doctrine, from its chafing against pandemic restrictions to its flouting of guidelines around water fluoridation, restrictions for SNAP benefits, and erosion of vaccine requirements. The driving force behind this crusade is state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, whom I wrote about with my former colleague Julianne McShane last year.

Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism.

During the pandemic, Ladapo quickly made a name for himself with his contrarian approach. On his first day in office in September 2021, he formalized a rule that allowed parents to choose whether to follow school mask guidelines. Later that year, he issued a report recommending against Covid vaccines for healthy children, which flouted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. In 2023, he asked the Food and Drug Administration to stop all Covid vaccines, components of which he claimed could “transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.” (The FDA called those statements “misleading.”) In 2024, during a measles outbreak, he issued a statement announcing that the state would be “deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance” instead of following the CDC’s 21-day quarantine guidelines. Last fall, Ladapo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced their goal to eliminate vaccine mandates from state laws.

Ladapo, who didn’t respond to our request for comment for this story, became surgeon general after a career in public health that included MD and PhD degrees from Harvard and tenures at prestigious hospitals. But as our previous investigation uncovered, his approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism. In his memoir, he chronicles his ongoing relationship with a charismatic guru and former Navy SEAL named Christopher Maher, whose treatments profoundly influenced Ladapo’s worldview. In 2019, Ladapo’s wife, Brianna, urged her husband to sign up for sessions with Maher. “Thank the Lord I listened,” he writes in his memoir, “because after working with him, I finally became truly free.” 

[Maher’s] online bio says he has training in traditional Chinese medicine, but the treatments he offers appear to be something else entirely. He describes one of them, “Body of Light,” as “a verbal, energetic, transmutation process that allows the body, brain, and nervous system to locate, transmute, and discharge negative generational stress, tension, and distortion-inducing patterns.” 

Another, which he calls “Sha-King” medicine, “directly addresses complex stress patterns by improving subtle energetic health by shaking (‘sha-king’) the entire body in random, non-specific movements that are out of syncopation.”

Ladapo writes that some of his sessions with Maher consisted of Maher marching up and down his back.

The discomfort I experienced as he stomped on me was intense, and I went from feeling acute pain to feeling a sense of enjoyment, and—as incredible as it must sound—at one point, I even felt like a tiger. Christopher explained that this was my spirit animal. As I learned from him, Ma Xing engages the urinary bladder channel, which is the master channel in Chinese meridian theory. Further, he explained that this channel has access to every aspect of a human being’s behavior and thoughts, including their mind, brain, physical being, spiritual energy, and emotional intelligence.

The sessions were, Ladapo recalls, “the closest thing to a ‘miracle’ I have ever experienced in my life.”

Ladapo writes that his wife is another profound influence on his life and work. She once described herself as an “Energetic Healer, Certified Naturopath, Movement Therapist, and Integrative Health and Wellness Coach.” Brianna has also written a memoir in which she recalls her own journey of transformation with Maher.

The “most profoundly important” lesson she learned from Maher, though, was the revelation that people choose all the things that happen to them, both positive and negative, to fulfill the divine purpose of their soul. “I chose to incarnate into an unhappy family,” she writes, because “that situation best supported the lessons my soul was seeking this time around.” Her family, she realized, “volunteered to play their respective roles in my life for the purpose of triggering my reawakening.”

Even children, she writes, choose the harm that they experience. In fact, some children opt for “lives of sacrifice,” an insight that emerged from a vision she had of herself as a young mother with three children, each of whom she was forced to watch get burned alive at the stake. She and her daughters had chosen for that to happen to them “in that specific way, in order to highlight the atrocity of that practice [of burning people at the stake] and encourage its retirement.” 

As Julianne and I wrote, Brianna’s beliefs offer a possible explanation for Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy.

If you believe that people—including children—choose their own suffering for obscure reasons connected to reincarnation and energetic vibrations, you might not be so concerned with the potential harms of ushering in a new age of infectious disease. Ladapo’s book also helps explain his thinking. If vaccines and masks are not considered prudent treatment and prevention efforts but, instead, manifestations of fear, it’s much easier to disparage them.

It’s impossible to know for sure what informed Ladapo’s thinking on parental exemptions and vaccines. But it’s clear that the policies he’s helped shape could transform the state’s, and country’s, relationship with preventable illnesses. Florida’s bid to loosen restrictions on vaccine exemptions comes as cases of measles are increasing across the country. Nationwide, there were 1,792 confirmed cases as of last week, making this the largest outbreak of the disease since the US declared it eradicated in 2000. With 153 cases this year and last, Florida has the fourth-highest case count of all states, behind South Carolina, Utah, and Texas. That number could surge if the Florida Legislature passes its new bill and more parents opt out of vaccination.

First Lady Melania Trump kicked off the backlash against Jimmy Kimmel on Monday.

Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt soon followed. 

Then came the Trump administration’s army of right-wing supporters. 

In a skit that aired last Thursday, the talk show host made fun of Trump, his family, and his supporters in a parody version of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, during which it’s traditional to roast the politicians in attendance.

In the bit, Kimmel took aim at the president over his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump’s physical appearance and widely-panned documentary from this past January, and Stephen Miller’s white supremacism. 

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” the first lady posted on X in a rare public statement on Monday morning. “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand.” 

The president escalated his wife’s condemnation, posting on Truth Social three hours later, insinuating a connection between Kimmel’s remarks and the shooting at Saturday’s dinner and heaping pressure—for the second time since taking office—on ABC and Disney, who owns the network, to fire Kimmel. 

Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.

People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to…

— First Lady Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 27, 2026

“Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings, made a statement on his Show that is really shocking,” Donald Trump wrote. “A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

At Monday’s White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt similarly tied Kimmel’s jokes to the shooting: “We as Americans must recommit ourselves to resolving our differences peacefully.”

“The deranged lies and smears against the president have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” Leavitt continued. “It is not just the media, it is the entire Democratic Party.” 

Several far-right content creators also weighed in, including MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, who wrote on X that the host had wished “death on President Trump and his supporters time and time again.” (Johnson’s claim came without evidence or reference to specific remarks of Kimmel’s, and does not appear to be tethered in fact, however remotely.)

Last year, the right pressured ABC to drop Jimmy Kimmel after the host argued that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points from the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

But comedy is legal again, right? And free speech is good and shouldn’t be subject to federal censorship, and hate speech isn’t acceptable?

On Monday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments over Bayer AG’s efforts to shut down the thousands of lawsuits alleging its product Roundup, a weedkiller containing glyphosate, causes people to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

Bayer, a German company which bought the American agrochemical giant Monsanto, has spent the better part of a decade fighting more than 100,000 lawsuits from plaintiffs seeking “billions and billions” of dollars. Glyphosate has been linked to cancer in numerous studies, but the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that it is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” President Trump, meanwhile, has declared glyphosate “critical to national defense,” and signed an executive order to boost production of the weedkiller.

In court today, Bayer is seeking a ruling that would give it legal immunity from lawsuits by cancer patients and their families. Some of those same cancer patients showed up in front of the Supreme Court to protest today—as did an improbable cast of characters.

Make America Healthy Again influencers like “The Food Babe” and “The Glyphosate Girl” streamed from DC Monday—but more mainstream figures like Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) spoke at the rally outside the Supreme Court, too, as did environmental activists with groups like the Center for Biological Diversity.

On the legislative end of things, meanwhile, Representatives Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are teaming up against Bayer’s lobbyists, who are attempting to pass a provision in the 2026 Farm Bill that would permanently prevent state and local governments from issuing warnings about the risks of pesticides, giving Bayer even greater legal immunity.

“This is not to grant farmers immunity. This is to grant corporations immunity,” Massie said earlier this month. “If farmers contract cancer from this chemical, if this makes it into the Farm Bill you won’t be able to sue.”

As the Farm Bill moves through Congress and the Roundup case moves through the Supreme Court, government agencies are still using massive amounts of glyphosate, including, as a new investigation by my colleague Nate Halverson reveals, in America’s forests.

In March 2024, the Food and Drug Administration under President Joe Biden introduced a new rule that would have banned, after decades, the use of electric shocks on disabled children as a form of punishment. A ban on forcibly shocking kids—which the American Academy of Pediatrics says causes “long-lasting adverse physical and psychological impacts,” was set to come into force last year—but the Trump FDA kicked the can down the road, giving itself more time to decide whether its new leadership was on board.

Now, two years later, the FDA’s website claims that a decision will be made in the coming days on whether or not to follow through.

Massachusetts’ Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC), the focus of a 2007 Mother Jones investigation, remains the only known US institution to use electric shock devices to control—and punish—disabled youths in its care, many of whom are autistic or have mental illnesses, like schizophrenia.

The FDA’s new rule, if finalized by the Trump administration, doesn’t prohibit all types of shock therapy. Electrical stimulation may still be used voluntarily for things like smoking cessation, for example, and the rule won’t affect the electroconvulsive therapy devices used to treat conditions like major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. But the types of devices used by JRC will be banned from the market.

“We know from the testimony of survivors and experts that this torture inflicts injuries, trauma and lasting harm,” Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said.

“Autistic people…are getting [electrically shocked] for things like not taking off their coat.”

The FDA banned involuntary shock for self-injurious or aggressive behavior in 2020, but was overruled the following year by a federal appeals court panel that questioned the agency’s authority to institute such an order.

The House of Representatives then passed legislation in 2022 that would have banned using the supposed treatment to control the behavior of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but the bill never cleared the Senate. In September 2023, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled that JRC could continue shocking children in its care.

Proponents of shock therapy claim that it calms people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who are engaging in the behaviors at issue. But there is no evidence that supports this claim, according to the FDA, and shock therapy can have side effects. “These devices present a number of psychological risks including depression, anxiety, worsening of underlying symptoms, development of post-traumatic stress disorder, and physical risks such as pain, burns, and tissue damage,” Owen Faris, former acting director of the FDA’s Office of Product Evaluation and Quality, said in a statement in March 2024.

During the rulemaking process, nearly 800 people and groups submitted comments. Most favored reinstating the ban. “Autistic people need help, not punishment,” wrote River Bradley, an autistic person who submitted comment, “and they are getting punished for things like not taking off their coat and for screaming out in pain from being shocked.” One parent of an autistic person noted that the stimulation devices “used at the JRC are much more powerful than the taser I carried” as a police officer—and that the criteria for shocking kids in the institution’s care were much looser.

As Mother Jones previously reported, several “students” died while receiving shocks at JRC. Dr. Matthew Israel, the center’s founder, resigned in 2011 after being accused of interfering with an investigation. Authorities were looking into an incident in which a person called the center impersonating a supervisor and demanded that two students be shocked. Administrators gave one teen 29 electric shocks and the other 77.

JRC’s practices have garnered international attention. Back in 2012, a UN special rapporteur on torture called for an investigation of its practices, telling the Guardian, “The use of electricity on anyone’s body raises the question of whether this is therapeutic or whether it inflicts pain and suffering tantamount to torture in violation of international law.”

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are set to square off in court over OpenAI’s mission.

In his lawsuit, Musk accuses Altman of illegally transforming OpenAI from a nonprofit into a massive for-profit organization—one that is expected to go public as early as this summer at a valuation of nearly $1 trillion.

Here’s the messy backstory: The week after Musk sued OpenAI in 2024, the company claimed that its founders realized early in its development that it needed to raise money to obtain enough computing power and other resources to build its AI. To acquire investors, it first had to become a for-profit company. The nonprofit—now called the OpenAI Foundation—created the for-profit OpenAI as a subsidiary. OpenAI claimed in December 2024 that, back in 2017, Musk agreed that a for-profit move was necessary, but wanted “absolute control” as sole CEO—and a merger with Tesla. Following a reported power struggle with Altman to take control of OpenAI in 2018, Musk left the company’s board. OpenAI said that Musk left to avoid potential conflicts of interests as the CEO of Tesla. 

Musk is now demanding that the billions of dollars made by the for-profit be returned to the OpenAI Foundation. He also wants Altman to be kicked off the leadership team of both the for-profit and non-profit organizations.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Musk, Altman, and nine others. Musk and Altman were named co-chairs, and on the day of its launch, the nonprofit stated its goal to “advance digital intelligence” in a manner “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” In its 2018 charter, the company promised to halt focusing on its own models and help another group “if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI [or artificial general intelligence that outperforms the work of humans] before we do.” 

To put it lightly, this is a far cry from what the company looks like today. It’s got energy-guzzling data centers, a chatbot that’s been involved in multiple mass shootings, and, according to what tech journalist Karen Hao told us in 2025, poses “the greatest threat that we’ve seen to democracy to date.” Oh, and not to mention the deal with the Pentagon to provide its technology for military purposes. (Following backlash from users, Sam Altman posted on X last month that they would amend their agreement to “not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”)

Here is re-post of an internal post:

We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear.

1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else:

"• Consistent with applicable laws,…

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 3, 2026

OpenAI has gone from trying to benefit humanity to making humanity clean up its messes. As I wrote earlier this month, the company released 13 pages of “ambitious ideas” to add safety nets as AI advances to outperform human beings, even those who are assisted by AI.

Altman and OpenAI’s decisionmakers clearly don’t care about their lasting damage. They attribute the growing animosity toward AI to the struggle to, as OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman put it last week on the science and tech podcast Core Memory, “help people really understand what it is that this technology can do for them.” 

But there’s a difference between what AI can do and what it should do. While Musk and Altman fight over OpenAI’s structure, and Musks licks his wounds after potentially losing yet another power struggle, they don’t seem to be listening in any real way to the people this technology is meant to help.

(Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

At 11:00 PM Sunday night, Donald Trump endorsed a conservative influencer’s suggestion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be renamed National Immigration and Customs Enforcement (NICE), “so the media has to say NICE Agents all day everyday.”

“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT .” the President wrote. He has rarely been able to resist the magic of a good rebranding opportunity. Days after his inauguration, Trump announced that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the “Gulf of America,” though that name has not caught on in the year since.

A few months later, he renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

This, at least, was an honest move. The United States has been at peace for fewer than 20 years out of its 250-year history; calling our nation’s war-making machine the Department of Defense has always been a euphemistic choice.

Some of his renaming attempts have been more baldly self-centered: see the recently-re-dubbed Trump-Kennedy Center.

But none of these rebrands, no matter their motives, have reshaped the realities of the things they name: the gulf is still the gulf, whether of Mexico or of America. The Department of Defense or War is still vacuuming up over half the federal government’s discretionary budget in order to bomb at least seven different countries during Trump’s second term.

And whether National is tacked onto ICE or not, they’ll still be the same agency: bloated, overfunded, and killing roughly one person in their custody per week.

Getting banned from Elon Musk’s X for pointing out Palantir’s fascism has created more interest in my work.

Last week, I spoke with Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report about the Palantir manifesto and the company’s role in Trump’s fascist regime. You can watch the full interview below.

I also spoke with Cydney Hayes of the SF Gazetteer, one of the few journalists to write about my baseless suspension from X, for her piece on Palantir.

“Palantir is quickly becoming one of the most hated companies in the world, due to its open complicity with an authoritarian regime,” I told her. “They have a major public relations crisis.”

Here’s a gift link to read her story.

Reading Palantir: Why the defense tech giant’s manifesto may signal panic inside the companyThe war tech firm is suffering from a lethal combo of stock price superinflation and midterms anxietyGazetteer SFCydney Hayes

The word “fascism” gets tossed around a lot, often as a generic term for authoritarian or dictatorial. But it has a more specific meaning. I’m currently writing a piece that will explain why the Palantir manifesto is a clear expression of fascism. (Makena Kelly of Wired reports that “Palantir Employees Are Starting To Wonder If They’re The Bad Guys.” Spoiler Alert: Obviously.)

In the meantime, I explain some of my thinking in the Majority Report interview (transcript below).

Prefer audio?

• Listen to the Majority Report on Apple Podcasts
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Full transcript below

The Palantir Manifesto | The Majority Report with Sam Seder|Gil Duran Interviewed By Emma Vigeland

Transcripts may contain errors.

Emma Vigeland: We are back, and we are joined now by Gil Durán, publisher of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter about the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley. Gil, welcome back to the show.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

Emma Vigeland: Of course. So earlier this week, Palantir took out a full-page ad in the New York Times — or was it the Wall Street Journal? I forget which paper — about how they "stand with Israel." We knew that already. But they also published this so-called manifesto on social media, and I want to get to that in a second. Before we do, can you explain to people what Palantir is? It's talked about all the time — it's kind of this boogeyman — but its origin story, how it came to be, and really what role it's currently playing in American politics and in our economy.

Gil Durán: Sure. Palantir came into being after 9/11, when there was a lot of concern about national security, fears of terrorism, and the need for vastly increased surveillance of everything in the United States and internationally as well. It was funded partly with an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm, but most of the funding came from Peter Thiel and his venture capital funds. He's a co-founder along with several other people, like Joe Lonsdale and Alex Karp, who was Thiel's law school buddy and is now the CEO and has been a part of it a long time too.

What Palantir does — they keep the whole thing kind of opaque, so it's hard to explain — but they're a surveillance technology giant with software that helps governments sort through, collect, and organize large troves of information on whatever their chosen targets are. It's a program that sits on top of other systems and helps them have more of an all-seeing-eye effect. That's why they chose the name Palantir. The name comes from The Lord of the Rings, and it's that little orb the evil wizard uses to see what's going on with the hobbits as he tries to take over the world. So they literally named it after a technology wielded by an evil, corrupted wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Think of it that way: it's the little all-seeing orb. That's what they want you to think of.

Emma Vigeland: Yeah. And their insistence on portraying themselves in this braggadociously evil, mendacious manner is unique. It's manifest in this manifesto, if you will. Let's pull it up here. From what I understand, it's basically a summary of Alex Karp's book — Karp being the CEO of Palantir, who we've played on the show before, a very manic and bizarre individual. A lot of this is just summarized from what he's previously written. But this is what they say the new Palantir manifesto is — their role in the United States.

The first plank: Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible, and they have an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. Number two — rebelling against the iPhone apps — that seems a little less consequential. Number three: free email is not enough; the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. Whatever. But one and four seem to link together. Number four: the limits of soft power or soaring rhetoric alone have been exposed; the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal — it requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

We'll come back to this in a second, but those two seem to connect. And the fifth plank is about how AI needs to be used to develop weapons and military and national security technology. So this is them announcing publicly: one, we shouldn't be bound by morality, and yet Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to contribute to the national defense via surveillance; and also, we're going to use AI weapons. Are they going to do that for free, or are they going to take government contracts? I think we know the answer.

Gil Durán: Yeah. What's interesting about that first point is that the greatest threat to our nation right now is from the Trump regime, which is attempting to destroy the country from the inside — and Palantir is a major conspirator in that project. They are reaping billions in contracts, expanding their footprint like never before. To be clear, Palantir has thrived under Democratic and Republican administrations — something that really needs to change. But the country they're talking about defending is not the country we think of as the United States of America. It's this new authoritarian regime that's being brought into being by Trump, and which they plan to defend with their software violence.

The important thing to understand about this Palantir manifesto — which, as you said, comes from Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic — is that it rings all the bells of classic fascism. It is a call to arms for a group of chosen Silicon Valley elites to merge with the military-industrial complex, on a moral imperative to defend against an existential threat to Western civilization posed by inferior cultures that are invading us and weakening us, along with liberal elite decadence. This is fascism.

In addition, they call for Silicon Valley to get engaged with law and order and fighting violent crime to save lives — fascists always try to exacerbate fears around crime. And they call for a new respect for religion and the fusing of corporations with government. That's pretty much what Mussolini did when he created fascism: you fuse corporate, state, and religion. So without saying the f-word, they're winking and nodding and saying it other ways.

The thing is, this is what many of these venture-capital-funded tech companies are doing right now. Everyone's issuing some kind of manifesto about acceleration, about the need for more warfare and technology — and this is basically classic fascist rhetoric. They're all competing to be the new Mussolini, essentially. It should terrify Americans, and it should radicalize Americans, that these people are becoming so completely extreme while living off our taxpayer dollars.

Emma Vigeland: And it is notable that Palantir's technology has been integrated with ICE activities. You mentioned how Palantir started after 9/11, and that the CIA's venture arm invested in it. ICE is also an outgrowth of 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security is an outgrowth of 9/11. And viewing Palantir and its growth as an extension of the national security state that came out of 9/11 — many leftists, many people, warned that eventually these technologies and the rollback of our civil liberties would result in this being used on American citizens. It feels like Palantir is central in that project, as is its work with ICE specifically.

Gil Durán: Oh, definitely. It's part of the immigration machine. It's part of the war machine. It is completely bought in. Its entire fate depends on this increased surveillance model. They're also doing stuff in hospitals, like monitoring the work schedules of nurses. There's a large level of buy-in to this company right now.

One of the big problems is that the United States government is creating a company that now feels entitled to rival government power — to start issuing its own political manifestos. It's the hazards of privatization unfolding in real time. If the government needs some of these technologies, it should own those technologies. It should not have a company that now decides what the new political structure of the country is going to be.

Why aren't the CEOs of Lockheed or Raytheon issuing manifestos? I'm not saying those companies are good, but for the most part, in the past, you didn't have government contractors out there pushing radical political ideas of their own. Their job is to do what the president and Congress decide. They are contractors. So you have contractors acting like they're the CEOs of government, and this is very much the idea they have in mind: a privatization of government and a seizure of power through surveillance and military might. It's important to be aware of that. It has to become a political goal of all of us to destroy this company and disentangle it from our government.

Emma Vigeland: We had Rana Dasgupta on a few weeks ago to discuss his book After Nations, and he compared Silicon Valley and the growth of the tech industry to the East India Company historically — a private entity acting alongside and in conjunction with the imperial power of the time, but privatized, with its own incentives, and so powerful at this point that it can have more sway than even the most powerful nation states that supposedly have some sort of democratic input.

Gil Durán: And they talk about that very openly. Balaji Srinivasan uses the Dutch East India Company as a framework — returning to a world where these sort of corporate guilds have a tremendous amount of power. A big idea I've talked about on your show before is what they call the Network State: the creation of a new power source that is not national, that is not based on democracy or government power, that's based on pure corporate power. They explicitly talk about that, and everywhere we look we can see examples of them doing it.

I should say, too, that meanwhile, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has been traveling the globe talking about the Antichrist, saying the Antichrist will seek to establish a one-world rule through technology under the slogan of "peace and safety" — which sounds a lot like what Palantir is doing, as people have pointed out.

Emma Vigeland: Isn't he saying Greta Thunberg is the one ushering it in?

Gil Durán: He throws in a lot of words like that, but those are distractions. What he's really saying, if you read the whole speech, is that the United States is the cradle of the Antichrist, apparently because it's the cradle of what we call democracy — and that Silicon Valley should not help the United States spread democracy, but should find a way to decentralize this power. Basically what Karp is saying: make it privatized, and reverse what the country has traditionally stood for.

A lot of what these guys are afraid of is the fact that this is going to become a minority-majority country, and they fear what will happen to white supremacy when that happens. So that's the thread: these expressions of public political psychosis coming out of Silicon Valley. It's extremely concerning.

Emma Vigeland: Yeah. And as Matt just said off-mic — what a coincidence that these are all white South Africans who seem very obsessed with demographics. I just want to return quickly to what you said about crime — Silicon Valley coming out of San Francisco, where there has been this large-scale panic about homelessness and crime, and the insistence that crime was out of control when we saw a temporary spike during COVID and now have seen precipitous declines. The network state concept you've written about is about the privatization of government, as you say. They made those efforts within different cities — they funded an effort to recall Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. But it feels like their ambitions for the privatized surveillance state to combat crime aren't just limited to the cities where they were making billions. It's now about expanding that to the entire United States.

Gil Durán: Crime is a tried-and-true way to create anxiety about poor people, about poverty, to create racial anxiety. This goes back many decades. They're not creating anything new there. They're just saying they've got to supercharge it. That's what we saw in San Francisco at a time when crime was declining and crime rates were generally at historic lows across California, including in San Francisco, which is a very safe city. They created a moral panic around crime and were able to achieve their political aims by doing so.

I definitely think they want to deploy that strategy at a larger scale. Again, everywhere you look, this is the extreme right-wing fascist playbook being played out: creation of fear of the other, a need to centralize elites and wealthy people around a goal of purging the enemy. They speak about inferior cultures that don't contribute to the country. It's all very transparent, but they put it in this pseudo-intellectual format that makes it seem like they have some kind of high-minded philosophy, when it's really some of the ugliest stuff in our politics.

Emma Vigeland: My last question: how seriously should we take it? How much is this Alex Karp branding himself? How much is a way to attract investors by overstating their power? How concerned should we be about a manifesto like this? Is it PR? Is it bluster? Is it a mix of all of the scary things?

Gil Durán: I think it's a mix of all of them. And I would say, too, I think Palantir is starting to panic a little bit, because they're becoming one of the most hated companies in the world. People are now associating them with some of the worst abuses of the genocide in Gaza. So they have a massive public relations problem, and I think they thought this would somehow assuage that, but it seems to have only made it worse.

What we have to do is take it very seriously. These people mean what they say. They do mean to destroy our country and our democracy, and we have to organize against them in order to purge Palantir from our government, and from the planet, really.

Emma Vigeland: I really appreciate your time today, Gil Durán. You can read The Nerd Reich newsletter about the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley — it's essential reading these days. Thanks so much.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

Data reporting by Melissa Lewis

In remote Northeast California, about 10 miles outside the lumber mill town of Chester and a half-hour’s drive from the old hunting cabin I bought and fixed up about a decade ago, I steer my old Toyota Tacoma down a bumpy dirt road to where the Lassen National Forest gives way to private timberland. Lilly rides shotgun.

We’d come to this exact spot seven years ago. Lilly, my sharp-eyed border collie, had jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit through a meadow of knee-high grass, returning covered in mud and burrs. The landscape was straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog: a flower-dotted meadow buzzing with life. Douglas firs, incense cedars, and some of the tallest sugar pines on the planet sheltered protected species ranging from gray wolves to Pacific fishers and northern goshawks. The Sierra Nevada red fox, one of California’s rarest mammals, was known to live nearby, amid the vast patchwork of private and public lands. The Lassen area is where I come to reset, forage for wild mushrooms, and let stress evaporate.

But today, I’m looking out over a barren, sun-bleached expanse that stretches across the former meadow and up the sides of denuded mountains as far as the eye can see. No birds. No animals. No insects. No big trees. Just some waist-high piles of volcanic rock, a nod to the still-active Lassen Peak nearby. It is eerily quiet—desolate. The Dixie Fire roared through here in July 2021, burning nearly 1 million acres. The Park Fire three years later took out another 430,000 acres nearby. But the fires aren’t directly responsible for what I’m seeing today. People did this.

Just a few minutes down the road, nature has crept back to life. There, I saw vibrant green mountain whitethorn bushes, rabbitbrush, and purple-tinged bull thistles, with energetic bees bopping from flower to flower. The towering trees were gone, but new saplings abounded—cedars, pines, firs, and more—scattered randomly amid the greenery, already a foot or two high. No such verdant revival is visible on the private timberland before me. No bees, no flowers—it’s a virtual dead zone where the only life consists of row upon row of manually planted, tightly packed conifer saplings, all less than a foot tall.

This is because, unbeknownst to most people, logging companies and the US Forest Service have been spraying massive amounts of herbicide in clear-cut and fire-ravaged forests of California—and throughout the nation. And not just any herbicide, but glyphosate, a potent and problematic weed killer best known by the brand name Roundup.

This once-idyllic landscape, spanning tens of thousands of acres, is among California’s most heavily sprayed forest areas. The Pacific Crest Trail—a hiking route immortalized in the Hollywood movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon—runs straight through it. Yet thanks to all the chemicals, it remains a moonscape even now, nearly five years after the Dixie Fire.

I keep Lilly in the truck.

Burn zones treated with glyphosate lack signs of life even years after the fires. The Pacific Crest Trail passes through this area—California’s most heavily sprayed forestland in 2023.Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson examines land sprayed with glyphosate in the wake of the 2021 Dixie Fire.Scott Anger

My first hint of all this was a single word in a letter the Forest Service sent to me and my neighbors about a year and a half ago. Lassen, it said, was to be part of an ambitious new wildfire recovery project. This was welcome, as the fires had burned perilously close to our properties. Workers would remove selected trees, cull undergrowth, and set prescribed fires, as Native Americans have done for millennia to keep forests healthy and reduce the risk of megafires. The agency also would plant new trees where few had survived.

Then I came to the word “herbicides.” The Forest Service would, starting in spring 2026, spray glyphosate on some 10,000 acres of public land in Lassen to wipe out leafy plants and shrubs that might compete with replanted conifers, whose needles allow them to tolerate the chemical.

Introduced in 1974 by agri-giant Monsanto, glyphosate is among the world’s most controversial herbicides, one the World Health Organization’s cancer agency calls a probable carcinogen. In the late 1990s, widespread spraying on US crops genetically engineered to withstand it helped propel the organics movement and led scientists and activists to decry the chemical’s potential to wreak environmental havoc, from decimating monarch butterfly populations to killing wild frogs.

Bayer, the multinational conglomerate that acquired Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer or other ailments. (Bayer says its herbicide is safe when used as directed.) But the company, which has hired lobbyists with deep ties to the Trump administration, may have notched a win in February, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order deeming glyphosate critical to national security. He even invoked the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic production of the herb­icide and extend some immunity from lawsuits to its manufacturers.

The Forest Service and private loggers say they use glyphosate because it helps commercially attractive conifers like pine and Douglas fir rebound faster after fires and timber harvests. It does so by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. In short, a key rationale for spraying a disputed chemical in natural settings boils down to executives and regulators treating forests, including our national forests, as tree farms.

To learn more about how widely glyphosate was being used and the risks of using it in places where people camp, forage, hike, hunt, and swim, I began by requesting all California spraying reports going back to 1990. My colleague Melissa Lewis and I analyzed more than 5 million records, and what we found was eye opening: Forest spraying, which practically nobody knows about, is happening at record levels. The amount applied annually in state forests—266,000 pounds of pure glyphosate in 2023, the latest year for which data was available—is nearly five times what it was two decades ago. And though far more glyphosate is sprayed on state croplands overall, forest uses have become the herbicide’s fastest-growing market in California.

My Lassen neighbors had a mixture of reactions to the Forest Service letter. Some of them are reflexively averse to environmental concerns. They remember back before the timber wars of the 1990s, when logging boomed and so did good jobs. Classrooms were packed. Families fished, hunted, and called these forests home. Their prosperity was upended by a “tree-hugger” movement to save what remained of California’s old-growth forests. Logging communities were hit hard, and locals paid an economic and emotional price they haven’t forgotten.

Others, upset about the proposed spraying, wrote to the agency to register their opposition. They knew of the health concerns—studies suggesting glyphosate might contribute to ailments ranging from non-Hodgkin lymphoma to brain inflammation and metabolic and liver problems in children. There’s a growing body of evidence, too, suggesting it disrupts the gut microbiome, with implications for chronic disease. (Bayer disputes these findings and says glyphosate safety is “supported by one of the most extensive bodies of research.”)

How, I wondered, given the myriad health and environmental concerns, had regulators come to approve so much forest use of glyphosate—especially at a time when bad press around the chemical had left many a farmer and landscaper searching for alternatives? At least part of the answer lies within the thousands of pages of additional public records, court filings, and internal Monsanto emails I obtained.

The collected documents detail a secret campaign the company hatched in the late 1990s—not unlike the ones used by Big Tobacco decades earlier—to counter public health concerns and convince government agencies to keep approving its multibillion-­dollar product. They show how Monsanto orchestrated, financed, and even ghostwrote studies that were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals under the names of supposedly independent researchers—papers that state and federal agencies have relied upon to justify copious spraying of Roundup.

As my reporting proceeded, the questions kept piling up: Is glyphosate as safe for humans as Bayer insists? Does it really help forests bounce back after fires or, conversely, might it leave them more susceptible? And finally, what would come of the Trump administration setting two key parts of its coalition—Big Agriculture, which embraces glyphosate, and the Make America Healthy Again crowd, which loathes it—on a collision course?

This hillside, burned in the 2024 Park Fire, has not yet been treated with glyphosate. Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson stands in the scar of the 2024 Park Fire, where baby trees and other plants are reemerging from the ashes, and where the Forest Service plans to spray glyphosate this spring. Scott Anger

Back in the burn zone, a sudden movement catches my eye; not a rabbit this time but a dust devil forming. It swirls and dances over the sunbaked terrain, taking on the color of the rust-colored dirt. The vortex grows ever larger, now towering hundreds of feet in the air, where an overhead wind, like an unseen paintbrush, streaks the ­reddish dirt off into the distance, a miles-long trail of impressionistic art.

This can’t be good. That topsoil was drenched with chemicals not so long ago. Now it’s airborne and presumably traveling well beyond the intended spraying boundaries. Joe Van Meter, owner of the Mill Creek Resort about 15 miles away, mentions the dust devils when I visit him. He’s seen them, too, on his drive to Chester.

Van Meter is a charming and earthy forty­something who in 2017 bought the nearly century-old, 12-acre resort with his wife, Jillian. They are raising their three young daughters here, having revitalized the old cabins, RV sites, and campground, adding retro trailers and glamping tents to attract the hip Bay Area crowd. “As you see, we’ve got a little slice of heaven,” he tells me.

The resort, as its name suggests, sits alongside Mill Creek, which originates in nearby Lassen Volcanic National Park and meanders through the area. The fast-­flowing mountain creek has long been hallowed ground for Native Americans and anglers because it remains undammed and is a spawning ground for some of the state’s last remaining spring-run Chinook salmon. Recent studies have found that glyphosate-based herbicides caused “deleterious effects” on fish development and reproduction, which is one reason Van Meter has helped lead local pushback to the Forest Service’s plan. Having perused the science—and lawsuits—he also fears that spraying Roundup on local hillsides, whose feeder streams empty into the creek, could taint his community’s primary water source.

 
“It seems like it’s poison that they’re putting into the woods,” Van Meter says.
“This is our backyard. This is where my children play.”
 

Scott Anger

He gets the need for fire mitigation. The 2024 Park Fire burned right up to the edge of his property and sent him fleeing for his life on highways lapped by flames. “We came to a couple points where we had to stop because of how intense it was ahead of us,” he recalls. But the family got out and the resort was spared. The ­earlier Dixie Fire had also come close, forcing him and Jillian to shut down at the peak of the busy summer season. As such, he’s on board with the thinning and replanting and supports logging in the area, but Van Meter and others oppose the use of Roundup and related herbicides. “We need work to be done, and so I want to see that work done,” he says. “But I want it done without the use of toxic chemicals.”

Roundup has been on the market for half a century, but sales exploded in the late 1990s after Monsanto introduced “Roundup-­ready” GMO soybeans and corn, crops genetically modified to withstand a direct hit with glyphosate. This allowed farmers to kill everything else in their fields, increasing crop yields and giving struggling growers hope that they might eke out more money. Monsanto cashed in doubly by selling them both Roundup and the seeds that could survive it.

But after a series of studies in the late 1990s indicated glyphosate might be harmful to people, Monsanto executives and scientists concocted a plan to convince regulators otherwise. Internal emails obtained through discovery in various lawsuits against the company show how Monsanto personnel sought out researchers who would “get up and shout Glyphosate is non-toxic,” as William Heydens, one of the company’s scientists, told colleagues in a May 1999 email. Their testimonials, he wrote, could “be referenced and used to counter-balance the negative stuff.”

In the emails, Heydens, who helped spearhead the strategy, and whom we tried to contact without success, emphasized that his team would work with “outside scientific experts who are influential at driving science, regulators, public opinion, etc.” They turned first to a British scientist, James Parry, a globally recognized expert on genetic mutations. But Parry’s internal report to Monsanto concluded that glyphosate potentially caused clastogenicity—chromosome damage—which can lead to cancer. He recommended more tests.

Monsanto executives were not thrilled. Heydens informed his crew that the company had no intention of doing “the studies Parry suggests”—the goal, rather, was to identify scientists willing to declare Roundup safe. “Let’s step back and look at what we are really trying to achieve here. We want to find/develop someone who is comfortable with the genetox profile”­—an assessment of cancer risk—“of glyphosate/Roundup and who can be influential with regulators,” he wrote. “My read is that Parry is not currently such a person.”

The border between unsprayed parcels and those where glyphosate has been applied is hard to miss.Scott Anger Reporter Nate Halverson visits a site burned by the 2024 Park Fire where dead trees are being cleared and harvested for sale.Scott Anger

The team turned instead to Dr. Gary Williams, a physician who taught at the New York Medical College. Williams and two co-authors then published an April 2000 review article in the peer-reviewed journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. Unlike the Parry report, which included independent research in its ­analysis, the Williams paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal lab tests to evaluate whether glyphosate causes cancer. Its conclusions were unequivocal: “There is no potential for Roundup herbicide to pose a health risk to humans.” (Williams could not be reached for comment.)

In another email, this one from a trove of trial records dubbed the Monsanto Papers, Heydens reminded his team they’d ghostwritten the Williams paper, a claim he would later deny under oath. “Apparently I didn’t have good recollection, because that’s not what happened,” he said in a 2017 deposition. But the emails make clear that ghostwriting was widely discussed at Monsanto. Michael Koch, an executive who oversaw teams responsible for Roundup and glyphosate’s safety and regulatory approval, emailed subordinates at one point to ask them to orchestrate a study with a “manuscript to be initiated by MON ghostwriters” and published by one of their go-to scientists—Williams and four others were listed as options. Heydens, one of the recipients, noted in a separate message that “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and [the outside scientists] would just edit and sign their names, so to speak.” Their imprimatur would make the articles more credible to regulators and the public, he added.

Monsanto would orchestrate several influential studies over the years. In 2016, Williams was the lead author on another paper secretly overseen by the company and published at a crucial moment. WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had made headlines the year before by concluding that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Monsanto responded with a PR onslaught that included a ghostwritten Forbes op-ed under the byline of former FDA official Henry Miller, a Stanford Hoover Institution fellow and regular contributor to the magazine. “The reality is that glyphosate is not a human health risk,” it concluded. (When Forbes editors learned Monsanto had ghostwritten the piece, they cut ties with Miller, who did not respond to requests for comment.)

Heydens and other insiders, meanwhile, were busy preparing a series of five new papers involving Williams and 15 named co-authors. The package ran in the September 2016 issue of Critical Reviews in Toxicology, with a title suggesting it was written by “four independent expert panels.” Critical Reviews, like most academic journals, requires authors to disclose any ethical conflicts in a declaration of interest section, in which Williams et al. wrote: “Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.”

That was a lie.

The declaration also said the authors “were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company,” which wasn’t true, either. Monsanto employees had exchanged emails with at least some of them, provided comments and edits on drafts, and in some cases agreed to pay authors tens of thousands of dollars. Heydens himself contributed to the 2016 package: “Here is my 1st shot at starting the Manuscript for the Panel report,” he wrote in an email to colleagues more than a year before it was published. Entire paragraphs from his draft ran verbatim, or nearly so, in the published version, such as: “A molecule with these characteristics would be expected to exhibit, if any, only a low order of toxicity. The results from toxicity studies and regulatory risk assessments have been consistent with that expectation.” Emails and court records show that at least some of the authors were aware of Monsanto’s involvement in editing the package, which, like Williams’ earlier article, was cited in the glyphosate safety assessments of regulators worldwide. “Plaintiff lawyers have cherry-picked isolated emails out of millions of pages of documents,” Bayer said in a statement, and Monsanto’s involvement “did not rise to the level of authorship.”

“We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous. We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”

The Forest Service’s 2011 risk assessment, which broadly depicts glyphosate as posing no significant threat to people and the environment, references Williams’ 2000 article 27 times—more than any other peer-reviewed paper, often to refute studies that raised health concerns. In fact, five of the seven most-cited journal articles in the report were either directly orchestrated by Monsanto or written by authors with financial ties to the company.

The only potential human risk acknow­ledged in the Forest Service’s assessment has to do with people unknowingly ingesting glyphosate after foraging for mushrooms and plants in recently sprayed areas. That’s a problem not just for foragers like me, but for anyone who has ever eaten a chanterelle, morel, or porcini mushroom, none of which can be farmed. Stores and restaurants purchase them from permitted commercial foragers who collect them in wild places, including the Lassen National Forest.

One warm day last August, I drive out to Chester to meet biologist Russell Nickerson, the district ranger in charge of the Lassen spraying. Bespectacled, mustachioed, and clad in the light tan uniform of the Forest Service, he ambles into the district office’s visitor center to greet me. We’re surrounded by taxidermied forest critters, including falcons and owls, a river otter, and a mountain lion set to pounce. Nickerson helped create the October 2024 fire recovery plan, and so, after shaking hands, we head to a little outbuilding to discuss it. The Forest Service has a complex portfolio. On one hand, it manages recreation and conservation in the nation’s woodlands. But as a division of the Department of Agriculture, it also oversees timber production on public land. In the wake of a March 2025 Trump executive order calling for more logging, the agency is more focused than ever on the commercial side of its mission.

That includes reviving areas recently logged or damaged in wildfires so as to regrow the trees as profitably as possible. In Lassen, the agency will deploy workers with portable backpack sprayers to hike through the massive burn zone and apply up to 8 pounds of glyphosate per acre—enough to kill every leafy plant. A first round of spraying is tentatively planned for spring or early summer 2026, followed by another round in the fall. Once new baby conifers are planted, workers will reapply glyphosate one or more times to terminate anything growing too close to them.

Above and below: Timber harvesting operations in the scar of the 2024 Park Fire.Scott Anger Scott Anger

Nickerson concedes that the Forest Service still relies on its 15-year-old risk assessment—the one that cites Williams 27 times. When I ask him point-blank whether Roundup is safe, he fidgets in his chair and laughs uncomfortably. “It’s probably our Washington office that you would talk to on that,” he says. The chemical is approved, so he uses it.

I show him what I’ve learned about Monsanto’s efforts to sway agencies like his. He shrugs. “Something you’d have to talk about with our national office.”

I then show him a 2020 EPA report that concluded glyphosate harms 93 percent of endangered species and 96 percent of the critical habitat they rely on—creatures including the Sierra Nevada red fox, gray wolf, and spotted owl, all protected in Lassen. Nickerson says he’s never seen the report. Fair enough, but do its findings make him think twice about using Roundup? “Still gotta talk to our national office on that one, sorry,” he says.

As I’m getting ready to leave, he makes a casual comment that sticks with me: It’s his understanding that the agency’s risk assessment says glyphosate is so safe “you could bathe in it.” I looked, and it doesn’t say that exactly. It does say that if you were fully immersed in undiluted glyphosate, there would be no cancer risk. One of the sources it cites for skin contact being safe? Williams et al., 2000. Nickerson later disputes using that language. His point, he says, was that given the quantities of glyphosate used by the Forest Service, it “did not rise to a level of concern.”

In December, four months after we spoke in person, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology announced it was retracting the 2000 Williams article. The journal had “lost confidence in the results and conclusions,” Co-Editor-in-Chief Martin van den Berg wrote, after learning that the paper’s named authors, Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian Munro, “were not solely responsible for writing its content” and had relied entirely on Monsanto data, disregarding other evidence.

The retraction was prompted by a critical analysis shared with the editors by scientists Naomi Oreskes and Alexander Kaurov. Oreskes is co-author of Merchants of Doubt, a 2010 book showing how corporations deliberately distort science to influence policy. “We’re not claiming that this paper being retracted proves that glyphosate is scary dangerous,” Oreskes tells me. “We’re saying it proves that Monsanto poisoned the well of public understanding of science.”

It also nullifies the Forest Service’s most-cited journal article in support of glyphosate safety. The agency, which had previously declined me an interview with its chief, Tom Schultz, provided a statement noting that the USDA supports the EPA’s “use of gold-standard science to assess pesticide safety.”

Oreskes doesn’t fault the regulators. They “are making a good-faith assumption that because this paper was published in a respectable, peer-reviewed journal that it was a legitimate paper and that its findings were valid,” she says. But “what we’ve shown is that it was not a legitimate paper.” Rather, it was a ploy by Monsanto “to manipulate the scientific conversation and thereby the regulatory conversation, and to persuade people of the safety of a product [when], in fact, there is significant scientific evidence to raise concern.”

“As a person who studies scientific integrity, that profoundly offends me,” Oreskes says. “But also, it’s crucial because it means we can’t trust what they say.”

A 2020 EPA report determined that glyphosate harms a wide range of wild animals and their habitats. This artistic rendition shows a gray fox photographed in California’s Bodie Mountains.Billie Carter-Rankin; Ken Hickman/Forest Service Research Data Archive

The Forest Service intends to keep using Roundup, and far more heavily than in years past, per our analysis of California pesticide reports, which include herbicides. It approved a plan that could spray more glyphosate on those 10,000 Lassen acres than it sprayed in an average year two decades ago across its entire portfolio of 193 million acres. It also plans to spray up to 75,000 acres affected by the 2021 Caldor Fire, including spots near Lake Tahoe’s famed ski resorts—such as the base and parking lot at Sierra-at-Tahoe and in forests close to Kirkwood and Heavenly. The plan includes spraying in campgrounds, around trailheads, and close to homes in Meyers. These applications alone will amount to more spraying in California’s woodlands than happened in all of 2023.

It is difficult to say whether the Golden State is an outlier, because most states, unlike California, don’t have a mandatory and comprehensive reporting system for commercial pesticide and herbicide users. But a 2020 EPA study largely based on private industry data suggests that glyphosate use may be even more prevalent elsewhere: Sixteen Southern states accounted for about 90 percent of the nation’s overall forest spraying in 2016, the authors estimated.

The Forest Service acknowledges it can get similar timber yields by reforesting without chemicals, using workers and machines, but at triple the cost—expense is a “major factor” in the decision to spray, according to a 2024 agency report. The same report cites a 40-year-old study that claims injuries are more likely when vegetation is culled by hand, but it doesn’t address potential health risks for crews hired to spray the chemical.

Oversight of spraying is lax, even here in California. When I asked state regulators for records of all site inspections for forest spraying from 2020 through 2022, they returned only 11 reports, despite more than 8,000 reported sprayings covering a quarter-­million acres during those three years. In one report, from El Dorado County, an inspector witnessed contract workers handling Roundup with their gloves off. They’d been hired to spray on Forest Service land but had neither the protective equipment nor the safety training mandated by the state. The inspector snapped a photo in which one of the workers’ hands is bright purple—covered in Roundup.

Skin exposure was central to the first-ever glyphosate cancer lawsuit against Monsanto. In 2018, a jury awarded $289 million to Bay Area groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, concluding that occupational exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The 1st District Court of Appeal reduced the award to $20.5 million but ruled that the jurors were entitled to declare Roundup dangerous based on WHO’s review, expert witnesses, and evidence that Monsanto had behaved unethically to sway regulators and research findings. “Even if the evidence did not require an inference that Monsanto was more concerned about defending and promoting its product than public health, it supported such an inference,” the presiding judge wrote.

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Craig Thomas, a fire reduction expert who in 2021 served on a congressional wildfire recovery commission with then–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, raised similar concerns with the Forest Service, he says, and was told the agency wasn’t aware of anyone harmed by spraying Roundup on the job. “And I’m like, ‘No, they die of non-Hodgkin lymphoma 15 years later,’” Thomas tells me when we meet up not far from my cabin to survey land where the agency plans to spray.

I show him some of what I’ve found. “Oh god, that’s totally corrupt,” he says. “Do we care about human beings or our natural landscapes? Doesn’t sound like it.”

Forest Service mascot Smokey Bear, he declares, has become a glyphosate junkie. “It’s a chemical addiction that’s been fostered inside the agency with the help of Bayer and Monsanto,” he says. “The system operated for thousands of years without it.”

 
You don’t need herb­icides for fire recovery, Thomas says. That’s about cost cutting.
The forests, he says, can be adequately managed using just machines, laborers, and tools such as prescribed burns.
 

Consider that Quebec, the largest timber-producing region in North America, has eliminated glyphosate and other herbicides in 90 percent of its forests. Back in 1994, the province put in place a “forest protection strategy” designed to balance jobs and profits with healthy forests. Glyphosate, once widely used, was banned in 2001, and logging companies switched to manual and mechanical methods to stifle plant competition with minimal effects on yields, according to a 2010 government study. Now, instead of enriching a German chemical company, the money goes to pay local workers.

Quebec’s experience has gone unheeded by California officials, who aim to expand glyphosate spraying in state-run forests as part of their own fire prevention strategy. Gov. Gavin Newsom even signed an emergency executive order last year allowing the state ­Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) and other agencies to bypass normal safety procedures when spraying the herbicide.

The state’s plans rely on Cal Fire’s 2015 glyphosate safety report, which also leaned on Monsanto’s ghostwritten studies. The report’s author, contractor Bill Williams, who is unrelated to the physician Monsanto recruited as the lead author for its papers, has a long history working for the chemical industry. He once, for instance, argued that dioxin, a highly toxic chemical known to cause cancer and other health problems, doesn’t hurt bald eagles. (It does.) At a 2003 chemical industry event, he gave a presentation titled “A Little Pesticide Is Good For You,” arguing that the EPA should loosen regulations around pesticide exposure. (Williams did not respond to my outreach attempts.)

While working on the Cal Fire report, according to his own résumé, Williams was also working for a consulting company, Cardno, that helps firms like Monsanto recruit scientists to conduct and write studies for them. That same year, court records show, a Cardno scientist pitched Monsanto executives, offering to help manage Roundup’s PR problem in the wake of WHO’s carcinogenicity declaration.

California already sprays glyphosate in state parks, such as Jackson Demonstration State Forest, where it issues permits for people to forage for mushrooms and where the Mycological Society of San Francisco hosts an annual gathering. Last year’s attendees were unaware of the spraying, several members told me. And that’s problematic, because many foragers and chefs recommend not rinsing wild mushrooms in order to maintain their flavor. But eating unwashed food recently sprayed with glyphosate is a problem—even the Forest Service’s outdated risk assessment says so.

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High on the list of California’s biggest overall glyphosate users is the state Department of Transportation, which sprays along roads and highways to keep flammable grasses and brush in check. Caltrans also sprays in counties, including Los Angeles, that won’t let their own workers use the herbicide. The spraying isn’t just in rural areas. Records show Caltrans has been applying herbicides in downtown Hollywood, right along Santa Monica Boulevard.

The state’s No. 1 forest sprayer in 2023, records show, was Sierra Pacific Industries, a timber company owned by billionaire Trump supporter Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson. Sierra Pacific is the largest landowner in the state and the second-largest in the country, controlling more acreage than Ted Turner and Bill Gates put together. It was responsible for 70 percent of reported glyphosate spraying in California’s wooded areas that year, including the lands near my cabin. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment—ditto the timber company Collins, another major user.

The irony of firms and government agencies spraying replanted burn zones is that they may be setting us up for more trouble down the road. Deciduous hardwoods such as oak, aspen, and birch can slow a fire’s progression, studies show, whereas resin-filled conifers are more flammable than other trees. A densely packed commercial conifer forest like the one I saw taking shape near Chester is, according to a growing scientific consensus, a megafire waiting to happen.

An artistic rendition. The US Forest Service is now gearing up for more woodland spraying in California—including in campgrounds, around trailheads, and near ski resorts—than ever before recorded.Billie Carter-Rankin; Randy Pench/Sacramento Bee/Getty

Given everything we’ve learned, it’s worth asking: Just how bad is glyphosate for human health?

The science on cancer is mixed. Even successful lawsuits like Johnson’s found it to be only a weak or modest carcinogen. But that’s not the only worry. Brenda ­Eskenazi, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied glyphosate for decades. For a 2023 article, she followed 480 mothers and their children in California’s Salinas Valley for more than 18 years, testing their urine periodically. She found statistically significant increases in the prevalence of liver inflammation (14 percent) and metabolic syndrome (55 percent)—which can result in liver cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease later in life—among young adults exposed to glyphosate in the womb or during early childhood. “Everyone was focused on cancer, and they weren’t looking elsewhere,” Eskenazi tells me. “There are other health effects that have long-term impacts.”

Given the heated rhetoric around glyphosate, Eskenazi speaks with restraint. “We need more research,” she says. Yet much of her funding has been in limbo since the Trump administration hit the brakes on grants from the National Institutes of Health. Without those funds, her lab may have to shut down and destroy some 400,000 biological samples. But she is unwilling as yet to pass final judgment on the safety of the world’s most widely used herbicide. “There are a lot of little pieces that make us concerned,” she says, but “I’m not one of these people who say we shouldn’t use pesticides at all. I think we should use it discretionarily and carefully. That means when nothing else works.”

Bayer asserts in its statement that “regulators, including the EPA, EU, and others around the world, have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate-based products—which are the most widely used and extensively studied products of their kind—can be used safely according to the product label directions.” The EPA’s glyphosate assessment relied heavily on a 2018 analysis based on the Agricultural Health Study. The researchers asked 57,310 people who had applied for pesticide licenses in North Carolina or Iowa whether they used glyphosate and then followed up with a series of health-related questions. The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found no statistically significant correlation between glyphosate exposure and cancers such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But the paper had its critics. Lianne Sheppard, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington who served on the EPA’s scientific advisory panel on glyphosate, published a critique in the same journal arguing that the authors’ approach was likely to underestimate cancer risk. The authors responded, explaining why they believed their results were valid.

And so it goes. “I have friends who are good scientists and think it causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” David Eastmond, a professor of toxicology at UC Riverside, tells me. “And I have others who think it doesn’t.”

Eastmond is in the latter camp. About 10 years ago, a joint task force assembled by WHO and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization asked him and other scientists to conduct a new review of glyphosate studies in light of the 2015 probable-­carcinogen determination. Whereas that determination had relied exclusively on published research, Eastmond and his colleagues were given full access to Monsanto’s internal glyphosate data as well. “This industry dataset was almost entirely negative for cancer and genotoxicity,” he recalls. With this data in the mix, he and his colleagues concluded glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer. But his work preceded revelations that Monsanto was tampering with the scientific process—the lies and the ghostwriting. “Yeah, that’s totally dishonest,” Eastmond says. “A lot of this is very sleazy.”

Can Monsanto’s data still be trusted? “I think it’s fair to be skeptical,” he says. “When someone is putting pressure to manipulate things, then I become more skeptical, too.”

While the jury may still be out on the extent of Roundup’s harms, we know for certain that it’s in our bodies and environment. A 2020 study by the US Geological Survey found glyphosate in 74 percent of American streams tested. A study published two years later by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found glyphosate residues in more than 80 percent of the 2,000-plus urine samples it collected from US adults and children.

Such findings concern Ramon Velazquez, a researcher at Arizona State University whose team’s glyphosate study appeared in the Journal of Neuroinflammation in 2024. They fed glyphosate to mice at levels comparable to what the EPA considers safe in human food. The mice developed brain inflammation that persisted for months after the chemical was removed from their diets. The exposure, the authors wrote, also resulted in premature death of the rodents and Alzheimer’s-like damage to their brains. “I am very cautious about how I eat now,” Velazquez tells me. “I eat an organic diet.”

In 2020, after more than a decade of planning and review, the EPA released an updated glyphosate assessment. It said the herbicide is safe to use and does not cause cancer. Oreskes and Kaurov’s ­analysis points out that, whereas WHO’s cancer agency looked mainly at peer-reviewed studies, 70 percent of which indicated genotoxic effects, the EPA relied largely on industry-funded studies, 99 percent of which found no cancer links.

The EPA’s approval process was not without scandal. In 2013, Marion Copley, a veterinarian recently retired from the agency, wrote to her former colleague Jess Rowland, who was leading the EPA’s glyphosate cancer assessment. In her letter, now part of the Monsanto Papers, Copley, then dying of breast cancer, implored Rowland to follow the science on glyphosate, which she “strongly believed” triggered tumors.

“For once in your life, listen to me and don’t play your political conniving games with the science to favor the registrants. For once do the right thing,” she wrote. “I have cancer and I don’t want these serious issues in [the Health Effects Division] to go unaddressed before I go to my grave.” (She died nine months later.)

Above and below: Post-fire growth emerges in as-yet-untreated areas near Mt. Lassen in the scar of the 2021 Dixie Fire. Scott Anger Scott Anger

Rowland later came under scrutiny for his cozy relationship with Monsanto. While conducting the assessment, he’d spoken regularly with its employees, assuring them he could help, internal emails show. When insiders worried that CDC toxicologists might conduct an independent analysis and conclude that glyphosate was harmful, Rowland said he would try to intervene. One employee quoted him as saying, “If I can kill this I should get a medal.”

Rowland, who could not be reached for comment, left the EPA soon after someone leaked an unauthorized draft of the agency’s preliminary conclusion that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, according to court records. Monsanto immediately filed the document in court as evidence to refute claims that Roundup caused cancer.

The EPA inspector general’s office concluded in 2019 that Rowland had done nothing wrong and that there was no evidence the process lacked “scientific rigor.” But the EPA’s official assessment in favor of glyphosate was promptly challenged in court by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network North America, which accused the agency of ignoring its own cancer guidelines and glyphosate’s impacts on endangered species. In 2022, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. It overturned the assessment, noting that the “EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act.” The ruling pointed to serious “errors in assessing human-­health risk” and noted that most of the studies the EPA examined had “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”

A fresh EPA determination is expected this year. During Trump’s first term, according to one internal email, Monsanto executives were assured they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration.” Last June, Bayer’s CEO met personally with EPA Adm­inistrator Lee Zeldin to discuss glyphosate’s “legal/judicial issues,” per an agency memo obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. Six months later, Trump’s solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to take a case that would help shield Bayer from further Roundup lawsuits. The court agreed, and oral arguments were set for April 27. (Bayer shares soared 14 percent on the news.) North Dakota and Georgia have passed laws that would give Bayer legal immunity, and more such bills are expected at the state and federal level.

Then came Trump’s executive order saying America must ensure, even boost, production of glyphosate and white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon also manufactured by Bayer. “Lack of access to glyphosate-based herb­icides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system,” it read.

The MAHA contingent saw the order and went ballistic. “There is a level of anger and frustration like I’ve never witnessed before,” a conservative wellness influencer with millions of Instagram followers told the New York Times. “Where is RFK JR?” asked a commenter. MAHA wants crop chemicals reduced, if not banned entirely, but that could prove a tough sell. Mexico’s leaders ran into heavy resistance in 2024 when they tried to ban glyphosate in their agriculture sector. Farmers were hooked on it and the government ultimately concluded that cutting them off might prove as dangerous to a farm operation as quitting heroin or alcohol cold turkey might to an addict. The ban was rescinded. “It is known to be harmful to health,” then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador explained, “but there is no substitute.”

And now, as the global food industry grapples with glyphosate addiction, America’s forestry sector is headed down the same path—though, in a small concession to my neighbors, the Forest Service has agreed not to apply glyphosate so close to people’s homes or near certain waterways in the Lassen area, a roughly 2 percent reduction in spraying.

To sum up, the US government botched its safety review of glyphosate, thanks in part to Monsanto’s gaming of the system. Concerned researchers say we need additional data to fully understand the chemical’s harms. But the Trump administration has slashed research funding, and politicians are waiving safety reviews and working to ensure that people who say glyphosate made them sick cannot sue its manufacturer. The Forest Service, meanwhile, plans to spray even more of the herb­icide, despite knowing that it hurts nearly all endangered species, that nonchemical options are available, and that its own assessment of human safety hinges on an industry-driven review paper, since retracted.

If all of these revelations are spiking your anxiety levels, you also should probably know that that’s one of the symptoms those Arizona State researchers observed in the mice they’d injected with supposedly safe levels of glyphosate.

On Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he would confirm Donald Trump’s nominee for the new Federal Reserve chair after the Department of Justice made “assurances” to him that it would drop its investigation into the current chair, Jerome Powell.

“The U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal investigation into Chair Powell was a serious threat to the Fed’s independence,” Tillis wrote in a Sunday morning statement on X. “I take the Department of Justice at its word: the investigation is closed.”

The dispute started when the Justice Department opened a criminal probe into Chair Jerome Powell over costs in funding renovations to the Federal Reserve’s Washington headquarters. But on Friday, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, posted on X that her office would close its investigation while the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve looks into central bank’s project costs.

“Note well, however, that I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so,” Pirro wrote at the end of her Friday statement. 

While Tillis may take Pirro’s announcement as a win, when has fully trusting the Department of Justice been a good idea?

“It’s not dropped. They’re looking into the whole thing,” President Trump suggested on Saturday regarding Pirro’s statement. “How can a building that I could have done for $25 million cost $4 billion?”

Q: "Do you agree with the decision by Jeanine Pirro to drop the investigation into Jerome Powell?"Trump: "It's not dropped. They're looking into the whole thing."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-04-25T19:25:24.171Z

Pressure has ramped up on Trump to boost the economy and relieve the affordability crisis. He has repeatedly called for dropping interest rates—and his new nominee Kevin Warsh is falling in line. But Powell, who was nominated to become Fed chair in 2017 by Trump, has held interest rates steady and reiterated the central bank’s independence from the president. 

As I wrote when news broke of the Justice Department’s investigation this past January, many lawmakers said that the move was part of the president’s public efforts to coerce lower interest rates.

The Trump administration was “actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve,” Tillis said. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” he continued, as he vowed to oppose the confirmation of any new Fed chair nominee until the matter was “fully resolved.”

During Kevin Warsh’s confirmation hearing last week, Tillis backed up his January statement, saying that while Warsh had “extraordinary credentials,” he would not support a confirmation unless the Justice Department dropped its investigation.

So much for that now.

President Donald Trump and many of his supporters are using the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night to promote construction plans for the new White House ballroom. 

“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning. 

“This is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House,” Trump said at his Saturday night press conference following the incident. “It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got—it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”

And his supporters have chimed in shortly after news of the shooting broke: 

“Unfortunately, the First Lady and I had to be evacuated from the White House correspondents’ dinner alongside the President and the entire cabinet,” Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry posted on X Saturday night, referring to his wife, Sharon Landry. “This event is yet another reason that President @realDonaldTrump’s ballroom should be built!”

“We’d better never again hear a peep from anyone complaining about a White House ballroom,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) wrote on X.  

There were similar messages in right-wing media:

“I don’t want to hear one more fucking criticism of Trump’s new ballroom at the White House,” wrote Meghan McCain, a conservative television personality who has criticized the president in the past for disparaging her father, former Senator John McCain, but has since seemed to have offered “the olive branch.”

“THIS IS WHY WE NEED TRUMP’S BALLROOM,” Chaya Raichik, who runs the anti-LGBTQ+ and far-right social media account Libs of TikTok posted on X. 

MAGA accounts tweet in unison about the need for a White House ballroom following WHCD incident pic.twitter.com/3acgko7qv3

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 26, 2026

The president’s ballroom has been stalled in legal disputes for months, with a federal ruling asserting last month that Trump doesn’t have the authority to continue his $400 million passion project without congressional approval. But earlier this month, a federal appeals court stayed the March ruling until this coming June, permitting construction to continue until then. 

While Trump has repeatedly insisted that his new ballroom will not cost taxpayers any money, his administration reportedly may have revised tariffs to help out a foreign private firm who provided steel for the White House renovation and, according to a Saturday report from the New York Times, the company building the ballroom was secretly handed a no-bid contract for another Washington project at an inflated cost.

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

Quiet fell over the room, which was neither full nor very loud to begin with, and the 2026 Florida Citrus Show began.

“It should be a great day,” began the event’s first speaker. “Rain should hold off today, even though we definitely need more rain.” No one laughed.

There was no need to say that things were bad. Everyone knew it. The mood wasn’t sour—citrus farmers could handle sour. It was something else. Postapocalyptic. Florida is in the midst of its worst drought in 25 years, but the dry spell actually ranked far down on the list of challenges these bedraggled growers were facing.

You are today more likely to see the oranges printed on Florida’s 18 million license plates than a box of actual fruit.

In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.

And everyone knew, more or less, that even that figure was not happening. “Twelve million? I would doubt it,” Matt Joyner, CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest trade group, told me. There was chatter that even 11 million might be out of reach. Could the total end up being less than that, just seven figures? In Florida, the citrus capital of the world, you are today more likely to see the oranges printed on the state’s 18 million license plates than a box of actual fruit.

Rick Dantzler, chief operating officer of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, took the podium. He was blunt. “It’s been a dumpster fire of a year,” he said.

On the list of immediate problems: the implementation of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, then the government shutdown, then a stunning, historic freeze, days long, at the end of January and early February, that besieged the fragile orange trees.

And yet those, too, were just footnotes to the even larger problem. Already, Florida had lost about three-quarters of its citrus growers. The last of them, these spent survivors, these hangers-on, had trudged to the Citrus Show to talk about the real problem, which was the disease.

In 2005, Florida first got signs of a new affliction in its groves called citrus greening disease. It also has a Chinese name, Huanglongbing, or HLB, because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place.

Already, Florida had lost about three-quarters of its citrus growers.

Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection that is delivered by the gnawing of the Asian citrus psyllid. (It’s now believed the psyllid first turned up near the Port of Miami in 1998.) The flea-sized psyllid bites the leaves and transmits the disease, which slowly chokes out the tree’s vascular system from the inside, taking years to finally show itself. By the time a tree is displaying symptoms—three to five years, in most cases—it’s too late.

Floridian farmers are no strangers to disease. When HLB first began to spread, there was no indication it would be any worse than any other bug that had appeared over the years. The farmers did what they always did: They sprayed and sprayed, chemicals and pesticides, stuff so powerful that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration freaked out about potential risks to human health.

But greening spread anyway. Industry groups and the state poured money, millions, into finding a cure, and every time they thought they’d figured it out, it didn’t work, and the greening accelerated. Hurricanes turned out to be a vector for spreading the little winged bug. The wind carried the psyllid all over the state, dropping it off in hundreds of thousands of acres of groves.

Soon enough, trees everywhere were showing blotchy, mottled, yellowed leaves and suffering from twig dieback and sparse foliage. Under duress, the trees would drop all their fruit on the ground prematurely. What rare fruit survived to maturity on these little, addled trees was misshapen, acrid, and stubbornly green on one end; in short, it tasted terrible. Even after being squeezed and processed and pasteurized, the juice was gross.

Now, according to the University of Florida website, the disease is “incurable.” It warns: “There is currently no treatment for citrus greening. Once a tree is infected, it will eventually become unproductive and may even die.”

I asked numerous people—farmers and industry leaders and researchers—to estimate how many trees in Florida now have greening. The answer was resounding: 100 percent. Every single tree.

The Citrus Show was meant to rally those weary troops, to assure them that help was on the way, that this was the bottom. That there was reason to hold on.

And there was: There had been some progress, with oxytetracycline, OTC for short, a powerful antibiotic that is used to treat chlamydia and sometimes syphilis in humans. It wasn’t a cure, exactly, but ceaselessly applied, it was keeping the effects of greening at bay for a few months at a time. Growers were boring holes in the bases of their infected trees and injecting it. It was expensive, and it had only been in use for two or three years, and it would only be a temporary fix at best. But it seemed to be working. There were greener leaves, and oranger fruit, and a palatable juice product.

Young orange trees are draped with translucent bags to fend off bugs like the Asian citrus psyllid and other wildlife in a grove near Arcadia, Florida. March 8, 2026.Scott McIntyre for Slate

They had been wrong before, yes—who could forget the tree-steaming solution, which once looked so promising, tenting each tree with a makeshift steam room cranked to 130 degrees, but which ended up failing when it became clear the bacteria were in the roots. But this one seemed, the researchers tried to assure their charges, for real.

A panel of multigeneration growers took the stage to weigh in on their experiences with OTC. It wasn’t altogether triumphant. “Injection just crushes the older trees,” said Tommy Thayer, a fourth-generation grower.

“Most groves are not producing as well post-Ian as pre-Ian,” said Daniel Hunt, of the legendary Hunt Bros. citrus family, referring to the 2022 hurricane. But he had done double injections on some trees, and had seen successes. “Our Valencias were beautiful,” he said. “They had color.”

“Unfortunately, they’re all on the ground right now,” said Thayer, because of the freeze.

Their panel closed with a request that everyone say something positive about their experience in the citrus industry. “The long history,” offered Hunt. “Good for character-building.”

Scientists took the stage, one after another, supplying encouragement. The OTC trials were positive; they were fast at work on a genetically modified tree. “The tree of the future,” they said, again and again. And it was in the lab, and it was on the way. The OTC might tide them over until that GMO creation was ready for widespread planting.

But the timeline, they conceded, was difficult. “We don’t have time because of how the industry is,” said Manjul Dutt, a researcher with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The realistic run from discovery to commercial production of the GMO tree? “Typically, it’s five years before a tree produces flowers and fruit,” so…“10 to 14 years.” A second researcher presented a slightly different timeline: 12 to 18 years.

“Hopefully you can stay in business,” commented a third.

“Someday, there’s gonna be a talk where ‘HLB’ and ‘solved’ are in the title,” said Randy Niedz of the USDA. “This is not that talk.”

The afternoon wore on. At lunch, I spoke to Jillian Rooney of the Crop Disaster Recovery group, which had a tent set up in the parking lot. I told her I was writing about the state of the citrus industry in Florida. “Oh. Sad,” she said.

A sign at another booth seemingly encouraged the growers to try growing anything else. “Why grow passion fruit?” read one, with a list of its potential upsides. “Sugar apple,” suggested another.

After lunch, the bad news kept coming. It wasn’t just greening that had to be worried about. There were root nematodes, launching a subterranean attack. There was citrus canker, a viral infection that had plagued citrus for years prior to the arrival of greening. (It, too, came from China.) Then came a seminar on citrus black spot, another recent arrival.

“It is not known how it arrived,” said Clive Bock of the USDA. “But it could spread to the whole Gulf Coast.”

Things had deteriorated quickly. “Three, four years ago, the juice was 80 percent from Florida,” said Weston Johnson, of the Coca-Cola Company, which owns Minute Maid. “Now we’re 20 percent Florida.” A quintessential crop and national icon of the 20th century in America was dying before our eyes, and outside this room, most of the country—even Florida itself—had barely noticed.

Juice shots were being given out, in tiny 1.5-ounce bottles. “Made with orange-like hybrids with tolerance to HLB. This juice is an innovation that represents the future of citrus,” a sign next to the cooler said. “100 percent American juice,” boasted the label.

I drank it. It didn’t taste very good.

The Tropicana Motel in Wauchula, Florida.Scott McIntyre for Slate

The custom of drinking orange juice with breakfast is not very widespread, taking the world as a whole, and it is thought by many peoples to be a distinctly American habit,” begins writer John McPhee in a famous two-part 1966 essay in the New Yorker that ran to 40,000 words, an indulgence that met the grandeur of the industry.

Maybe attention spans were too long back then. Here’s the condensed version: The Spanish conquistadors rocked up to northern Florida in the 1500s, amid all that marauding, and planted the orange tree, taken from (yes!) China. It was small-time stuff until after the Civil War, when the railroads reached south and the fruit sold north. Historic freezes in 1894 and 1895 nearly eradicated the industry, its first and last real brush with old-world calamity. Instead, it drove things south. Planters started anew in central Florida, in Polk County and its surroundings, what’s known as the Ridge, the highest part of Florida, and the only part that was never below sea level, historically.

The frost problem having been dealt with, the arrow was pointing straight up. Then came the technology that changed it all. It was World War II, and the American military wanted vitamin C to keep its front-line boys in fighting trim. It paid for the research for what would become frozen juice concentrate. As with cigarettes, those boys came home hooked. By 1950, the state was doing more than 100 million boxes a year. The orange blossom had already become the state flower in 1909, and, by 1967, a year after McPhee’s opus, the orange was the state fruit.

Florida sold some whole fruit, but the biggest money was in “crushing fruit”: making and selling juice. The citrus families became royal in the Sunshine State. Incredible intergenerational empires were amassed, with land holdings the size of small states. The Jack Berrys, the Bob Pauls, the Hunt brothers, the Lykes brothers, all of them with juniors or thirds or fourths. And the biggest, by far, was Ben Hill Griffin Jr. Even Peter Pulitzer, grandson of publishing tycoon Joseph Pulitzer, amassed a citrus empire.

The orange barons lost breakfast, and lost Florida, too.

Behind them came the corporate class: Tropicana, which ended up with PepsiCo, and Minute Maid, which went to Coca-Cola.

The citrus barons’ names went up on everything in Florida. Street signs and golf courses and the university. The ranks of the Bull Gators—that’s the list of top boosters of the University of Florida’s athletic programs—were overrun with citrus families.

The citrus world got whole stadiums. Ben Hill Griffin still has his name on the University of Florida’s 90,000-person football palace, better known now as the Swamp. Tropicana got the MLB stadium in St. Petersburg, where the Tampa Bay Rays played until Hurricane Milton blew the roof off in 2024.

Griffin even made for himself an industry town called Frostproof—a canny, if defiant, advertising play, named years prior, after the town had survived the mythic 1895 freeze without much issue. Frostproof became a cipher for just how untouchable the industry had become. Citrus baron Latt Maxcy incorporated there, too.

McPhee marveled: “The industry is self-regulating and pays its own way.”

Then came the 1970s, and a new technology arrived: the herbicide glyphosate, created by Monsanto. The citrus industry adopted it early and zealously, taking to it like water, spraying it all over the ground until not one sign of non-citrus life remained. When new complications came, they sprayed more. Acreage grew to 832,000, with record yields, and Florida was king, producing 78 percent of all United States citrus.

Up and up it went, and why not? The process got more mechanized through the back half of the American Century—out with the cover cropping, in with the monocrop, packed tight as can be. One innovation followed the next. Frozen concentrate fell behind the novel idea of “not from concentrate”—no longer did they squeeze it and freeze it. And they were unaware, or unconcerned, that that chemical was wreaking havoc on the soil, weakening the trees’ defenses, leaving them extremely vulnerable to disease.

Why would they be? Times were good. In 2000, the agricultural trade agreement with China opened the Chinese market to fresh Florida citrus. Commissioner Bob Crawford hand-delivered a 10-carton shipment to commemorate the event. They were loving China then.

And then it all came down so fast. There were the fad diets of the 2000s: no sugar, low-carb. The American Academy of Pediatrics began crusading against juice for kids. Orange-industry groups hired medical professionals as spokespeople in public relations, and kicked off an emergency ad campaign addressing what they branded “juice confusion.” That didn’t work. The citrus estates began to get carved up in tawdry divorce settlements, battles of wills that captivated the tabloids. Invasive species came in all guises: foreign pestilence, foreign capital, and the developers. It was the perfect storm. And then, of course, there were the actual perfect storms, the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge: Irma, Ian, Milton, massive cells, all direct hits on the groves.

The orange barons lost breakfast, and lost Florida, too. Who killed the Florida orange? Were outside invaders to blame? Or was the culprit right at home?

Oranges, Florida citrus candies, and other gifts for sale at Davidson of Dundee, a shop along US 27 near Dundee. It has been open since the late 1960s.Scott McIntyre for Slate

As with his beloved Florida citrus, Rick Dantzler’s on the way out—age 70, retiring from the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, which, after losing its state funding, was getting absorbed by another group anyway. He met me in Lake Alfred, at the site of its University of Florida satellite campus. I asked him to drive me through the best groves in the heart of citrus country. “It’s gonna be a lot of houses,” he warned me. “It breaks my heart.”

Dantzler is a Florida man through and through. He is third-generation in Winter Haven, in Polk County, and has the locution to prove it. When talkin’ oranges, he pronounces Valencia “Vuh-LEN-chuh.” His wife is fourth-generation. His father at one point had 160 acres of citrus. Now the family has none.

The collapse of Florida’s citrus industry, he told me, took everyone by surprise. “It happened so fast,” he said. “What’s remarkable is how many people here in Florida are not aware of it.”

The first stop on our tour was a brand-new grocery store with a sprawling parking lot out front. “That was a fantastic grove. It’s now turning into a Publix,” he said matter-of-factly. Opposite that was a giant dirt lot, graded flat. “These were fantastic groves on both sides of the road. I remember one time as a kid I saw a great big corn snake crossing the road—when there was not much of a road—and the corn snake climbed up into an orange tree. I acted like I couldn’t quite get to it, I was actually scared—” He cut himself off. “These were just fantastic groves. Not anything left.”

The next stop on our tour was a gas station. “This used to be a really great grove right here where this Circle K is going in,” said Dantzler, on cue.

“You’d drive down here in the spring and it’d smell so good you’d think you were in a perfume shop,” said Dantzler, as we passed through Polk County. It was March, and if you rolled down the window, the only scent was exhaust.

Dantzler knew citrus greening as well as anyone. He’d lived with it every day for years. He was sanguine about the effects of OTC, even though it was temporary, and expensive, and even though the treated trees got reinfected every four months. He was sure there were better days in oranges to come—oranges were growing well beneath pricey protective screens, for instance—so long as there was anyone left to plant them.

We crossed into Dundee. “Now, this was citrus country; this was the heart of the industry. The best groves in Florida were right here. All the varieties in Florida were located right there. It was almost like a seed bank, so if catastrophe happened, the industry could always replant,” said Dantzler.

“Catastrophe’s kinda happened,” he added—but the seed bank grove was no longer there.

The Dundee Citrus Growers Association, a citrus and fruit wholesaler that has been in operation since 1924 and has adapted to growing its trees with the CUPS (Citrus Under Protective Screen) initiative to protect them against the Asian citrus psyllid.Scott McIntyre for Slate

He also knew hurricanes. The storms were also part of old Florida culture. But rarely did they make landfall near the oranges. Many of the groves had gone decades without any real hurricane exposure. Then the climate got warmer, and along came Hurricane Irma in 2017, which hammered the Ridge. Its winds, which reached 142 mph, shook the trees violently on their shallow roots. It was the first of many. The trees made it through that year, without evincing the scale of the damage. The next year, or the year after, or three past, when the fruit wasn’t coming, it became clear that the stress of the high winds on already weakened root systems had traumatized the trees, often permanently.

After that, Hurricanes Ian, Idalia, Helene, and Milton all made landfall on the peninsula. “In 2021, we fell off a cliff,” he said. Five major storms went right over grove land.

We drove past more empty lots, more abandoned groves, desiccated trees, signs announcing public hearings for land-use changes. We passed mountains of trunks and branches, piled high. In the local parlance, they’d been “pushed”; soon, they would be burned. We passed a road sign for Tucker Paving as another plot was getting razed. “Mr. Tucker’s father and my father were best friends,” Dantzler said. “I know all these guys, they’re my friends. But look at what’s happening.”

Dantzler told me that he didn’t see 2005, when greening symptoms first became clear, or 2017, even with Irma, as the turning point. He pegged it to 2007, when another invasive species took off, the one that now dominated the landscape on our drive: suburban sprawl.

The stress placed on the groves by wind and water turned out to be little compared to the stress put on them by development. There were the solar farms, which targeted large tracts of land for panels, and those tended to be former groves. There were the data centers, too. In nearby St. Lucie County, a $13.5 billion hyperscale data center was proposed, one of the largest in the world, to be built atop 1,400 acres of old groves. That was on the corner of Orange Avenue and Minute Maid Road.

But the sprawl was really the crux of it.

It was not inevitable. In the mid-1970s, Florida began a period of environmental enlightenment. In the course of three decades, the state passed all sorts of legislation, from wetlands protection to local government growth-management initiatives. The state government established what was called a “concurrency doctrine,” instituting strict requirements for infrastructure development—water, sewer, schooling—that had to be established before construction permits were granted.

Then came the heady days of 2007, when, as you might remember, Florida’s housing developers overbuilt so dramatically, and financed so dubiously, that they helped bring the whole global economy down with them: the Great Recession. The state government, desperate to stimulate the economy and its moribund real-estate sector, began eroding the growth-management plan that had restrained development. The Department of Community Affairs, the state agency that oversaw all the local government growth planning and limited development, was just abolished outright.

From then on, it became a political story. Soon, the developers had bounced back, deep-pocketed and powerful in Tallahassee, and they weren’t done yet. They bet big on the ascendant Florida Republican Party, backing Rick Scott all the way to the governor’s mansion. In 2011, Scott gutted concurrency, a critical regulatory standard that kept developers in check. Then the developers went all in for a Yale man named Ron DeSantis. The citrus industry still had political power, too. But the deregulation they won did little to stanch the bleeding. Reeling from a depressed economy, then an explosive greening problem, then hurricanes, they were soon going to the statehouse, desperate for bailout money. “I think the development community saw an opportunity to get rid of most of those regulations. And they’ve gotten rid of most of it,” Dantzler said.

A property for sale in Eloise, Florida, in April. Orange and citrus related imagery can be seen throughout the region.Scott McIntyre for Slate

By certain estimates, Polk County, where we were driving, has been the fastest-growing area in America, and the developers have been cashing in. A citrus grove must be planted in sand, which occurs naturally, by some geological miracle, in central Florida. (The miracle, specifically, was the Appalachian Mountains, which eroded and deposited sand there over millions of years.) The trees won’t take in wetlands, in mucky soils. But that sand itself is also in high demand for cement, for construction, for building shoulders for highways, for filling in wetlands for development. Up here, Dantzler pointed, was a sand mine, which had torn out groves and gotten to mining beneath them. “There’s a crazy market for sand,” he said.

Sandy land itself is the easiest property to develop. Wetlands are still often protected from a development standpoint, and so, in addition to infill, require pricey, lengthy permitting. Sandy uplands, hiding beneath every citrus tree, are low-regulation and ready to build on.

So, while the growers were losing money hand over fist, housing developers were coming through with godfather offers to buy them out, convert them to row housing, and sell, sell, sell. Flags of every homebuilding giant flew on vanquished ground: DR Horton, Lennar. At nearly every intersection there were signs for cheap housing—no money down, homes in the low $200,000s, yes, for real, in 2026. Bunting and grand openings and exclusive offers abounded.

We drove past another former grove, which Dantzler again called “phenomenal,” which was now selling 10-acre lots. “This is all post-’07 stuff,” he sighed.

And so real estate was on the march, and even the citrus industry legends had become deserters. After the Gulf Citrus Growers Association shut down in 2024, its president, Wayne Simmons, a fifth-generation citrus grower, became a realtor. He wasn’t the only one.

We drove down new roads graded for housing, named after the citrus families who had once planted there, not a tree in sight. “Cable and Internet Included,” offered one sign.

“My gosh, we’re getting into the Ben Hill Griffin stuff. It’s just phenomenal,” said Dantzler. But there were no trees there anymore. There was just compact sand, a model home, and a barely-there development project. “We offer zero down payment!” the developer pledged. “Enjoy limited-time incentives like paid closing costs and exceptional financing options!”

The sign out front was complete, bearing the development’s name: Citrus Place.

“Citrus Place?!” Dantzler asked, incredulous. “That offends me.”

We drove on, and Dantzler told stories of dove hunts in the grove, of outsize characters of the old citrus elite. He insisted that in the midst of all of this housing, the citrus of the future remained. He put the car into low gear, and we drove into a test grove he had just recently been involved in planting. The trees were shorter than they used to be, with less canopy, packed tighter than ever, but they were showing promise. “In the pre-greening days, you could spot a grove car by all the scratches on both sides,” he told me.

Orange trees used to live 50 to 100 years; these little upstarts might make it 12 to 15. And so we set off down the aisle, and the branches hit the side mirrors and, on occasion, scratched the door.

And there, in the adjacent grove, had sprung up a house. “Now, that house is new,” said Dantzler. “What in the world’s that all about?”

Fallen oranges in a grove near Frostproof, Florida.Scott McIntyre for Slate

The famed Frostproof, Florida, was once the seat of the Ben Hill Griffin empire. It wouldn’t be fair to call it a ghost town now, exactly. According to census data, 3,000 people call it home. There is a stoplight. But the name does loom over it, haunting what remains.

There are three parts to a citrus operation: groves, packinghouses, and processing facilities, where the juice is made. Griffin—Frostproof—once had it all. The firm operated a major packinghouse in Frostproof, where fresh fruit was boxed for sale for roughly 70 years. It closed for good in April 2017.

The Ben Hill Griffin packinghouse wasn’t the only one. According to Peter Chaires, executive vice president of Florida Citrus Packers, in less than 40 years Florida had gone from 88 packinghouses to, now, just eight. Even one closure could be devastating to a community. Chaires told me that in Haines City, they lost a packinghouse that had been the primary employer since 1909.

Chaires was even more alarmed by the collapse of the processing facilities, which make juice. Florida was a juice state, after all. Building a new packinghouse was light work compared to building new juicing facilities. “It’s extraordinarily important that we try to hold on to our processing capacity that we have now,” he said.

In fact, in 1977, Florida boasted 53 different processing plants for crushing fruit, pasteurizing, or making fresh juice or frozen concentrate. Now, said Robin Bryant, executive director of the Florida Citrus Processors, there are just four: Cutrale (a Brazilian firm supplying Minute Maid), Peace River Citrus, Florida’s Natural, and Paracone, a boutique operation.

At their peak, those processing facilities would run three shifts, billowing steam morning, noon, and night. Now they’d cut back to one shift. Even still, Bryant told me, “all but one of those plants could process everything we produce in Florida on their own.” This year, Tropicana announced that for the first time it would not be processing fruit in Florida at all. Minute Maid killed frozen juice concentrate.

“The orange is gone. It’s dead,” he told me. “All the spots that they’re building houses, they’re the orange groves.”

Griffin once had a processing plant in Frostproof, too. And that, too, was gone.

But it wasn’t greening that had caused this collapse. The decline had taken off in the 1990s, when the industry opened itself up to Wall Street and to foreign capital. According to the Florida Department of Citrus, in 1996, foreign buyers bought two plants in Auburndale, which kicked off a trend: From then on, the “majority of plant acquisitions that followed would have owners headquartered outside of the United States.” In 1998, privately owned Seagram’s sold Tropicana to publicly traded Wall Street darling PepsiCo, and things quickly began to change.

Griffin, meanwhile, had sold off its Frostproof processing facility to Procter & Gamble, which in turn had sold it to Cargill, based in Minnesota. But Google Maps, itself seemingly haunted, insisted that the boxy plant off Highway 17 was Griffin’s. When I drove up, the gate was open, though there were no other cars; from its dull roar, I could tell the plant was not totally idle.

Out came Mike, one of two employees I saw on-site. Mike had grown up in the area, he told me; worked there for years.

“The orange is gone. It’s dead,” he told me. “All the spots that they’re building houses, they’re the orange groves.”

The plant where he worked, he said, was now owned by Peace River. But they weren’t processing anymore. They were simply cold storage. Now orange juice came from Costa Rica, Argentina, and, mostly, Brazil. Grapefruit juice sometimes came from Hungary. It was shipped in tankers to the nearby Port of Manatee and then trucked to facilities like the one behind him, for safekeeping.

“Today, it’s a lost empire,” said Mike; the plant where he worked best described as “a mausoleum.”

In fact, Florida, everywhere, has become a storage locker for juice from Brazil, where the land is cheaper, the regulations are laxer, and the chemicals are cheaper, too. “The labor is pretty much slave labor, I guess,” shrugged one local farmer I spoke with.

At the Citrosuco plant in Polk County—which flew the Brazilian flag alongside the red, white, and blue—and at the Cutrale sites and even at Florida-based Peace River, it was basically Florida in name only. “Seventy-five percent of juice packaged in Florida comes from Mexico or Brazil,” Bryant said. One had to be honest: Florida juice was “just not at the quality it used to be.”

But not all is well in the citrus kingdom of Brazil, either. The greening is “beginning to catch up to them,” Bryant said. In 2025, greening affected a record 47.63 percent of orange trees in the Brazilian Citrus Belt, according to Fundecitrus; 100 million trees, of 209 million, are now infected. Brazil followed Florida’s lead in what researchers now call “excessive glyphosate usage,” and has been, suddenly, reaping similar outcomes. (Citrus greening has been around for 120 years, and exists worldwide, and has, so far, caused an extinction-level event only in Florida.)

Behind the Peace River plant, sprawled out across a massive lawn, and behind a chain-link fence, were the ruins of a processing infrastructure. Giant, stainless-steel mixing tanks and vats, on their sides, tanning in the Florida sun.

And then, finally, came another modern pestilence. In 2021, after years of losing money on Tropicana, PepsiCo decided to get the company off the books. They put their majority share up for auction. In January 2022, they announced the buyer: a French private-equity fund called PAI Partners. (PepsiCo maintains a minority position.)

“European,” noted Tim Hynes, global head of credit research at Debtwire, a leveraged finance consultancy. “It was actually somewhat surprising to me that they had won this asset.”

PAI had a food and consumer portfolio: They owned European Pizza Group, a leader in the frozen-pizza business in Europe. They owned Alphia, a pet-food co-manufacturer in North America.

Maybe they thought that what ailed the Florida citrus could be cured with a little private-equity magic. The firm renamed it Tropicana Brands Group, balling up other beleaguered beverage properties too, and packed it full of debt. And then they raised prices and shrank the packaging. “Everyone does that,” Bryant said. But the move was calamitous. In 2024, Tropicana became the face of the shrinkflation epidemic. People raged online, in Reddit forums, on Facebook.

“That just didn’t go as planned,” Hynes told me. “They have a bunch of debt. They were going to run out of money.” By 2025, PAI was talking about bankruptcy for Tropicana, though a $30 million emergency loan had steadied things for a time. PAI is “not confident any value remains from their initial investment,” Hynes told CNN.

I drove all around Frostproof, at Mike’s encouragement, looking for oranges, which I hadn’t seen many of. “Valencia Acres,” read one housing development. “Price cuts!”

What I saw, primarily, were mobile-home parks, next to Ben Hill Griffin Elementary.

Decommissioned orange processing equipment at a facility near Frostproof.Scott McIntyre for Slate

Alico’s Joshua Grove was the largest citrus grove in Florida, likely the largest contiguous grove in the country. Except that in January 2025, Alico—the largest citrus grower in Florida, the largest citrus producer in America—announced in a release that it was done. Their orange era was over. So the Joshua Grove is now actually Florida’s largest citrus graveyard.

In all, Alico began gutting 53,000 citrus acres at the end of the 2025 harvest: 35 percent of Florida’s citrus production, condemned in one press release. Which meant that every tree under Alico management in the Joshua Grove was dead, dying, or already gone.

“For over a century, Alico has been proud to be one of Florida’s leading citrus producers,” Alico’s president and CEO John Kiernan said in the statement. “But we must now reluctantly adapt to changing environmental and economic realities.”

Because of outstanding leases, third-party caretakers were getting one final season to manage 3,500-odd acres, “through 2026,” added Kiernan, in the announcement. The harvest ends in early April now—it used to stretch into June—so the oranges here now would be the very last to ever come off the property.

Mitch Hutchcraft, Alico’s executive vice president of real estate, agreed to give me a personal tour of this citrus necropolis. The grove was more remote than anything I’d seen: south of the Ridge, in DeSoto County, without a house in sight. It was also enormous: seven miles on one side, nearly seven miles on the other, all planted in tight rows, stretching beyond the horizon, which, in flat Florida, is really saying something. A gate guard lifted the arm, and we drove in.

To the right, he pointed, was an old grass runway where pesticide planes once landed and took off.

We began to roll past dead and dying trees in various stages of decay. Some were blackened, shriveled, barren of leaves. Others had fruit sitting on the ground beneath, most of it not quite orange, rotting. “They go pretty quickly,” Hutchcraft said.

Alico, as part of its plan to “become a diversified land company,” was turning 25 percent of its land into—what else—commercial and residential development. Already, it was underway with the construction of two “villages.” A year prior, the company unveiled Corkscrew Grove East Village, and Corkscrew Grove West Village, a 9,000-home development. They had similar plans for Bonnet Lake in Highlands County, Saddlebag Grove in Polk County, and Plant World in Hendry County.

The remaining 75 percent, like the Joshua Grove, which remained too remote for housing development, would be put to other agricultural uses. That meant row crops; that meant cattle grazing. The company would also be pursuing mineral extraction and oil. Already, it had tens of thousands of acres of oil production.

Everyone had their theories about what happened to the Florida orange, their longing for citrus nirvana, and their anger at the loss.

Alico had done everything it could, Hutchcraft told me, right up until the end. It had replanted, and injected trees with OTC, and everything else. But it was still losing money, and lots of money, fast.

Soon enough, they would begin to turn this land over. A front-end loader would roll down the seemingly endless aisles and pop the trees out one by one. With their shallow root systems, addled by disease, the trees wouldn’t put up much resistance. Then, they’d push the carcasses into piles and burn them. There weren’t any loaders working yet, though, and the weather wasn’t cooperating for a burn. “You do it when you’re getting rain—April, May. You don’t want it to be really dry, that can get out of control,” he said. “We’ve had cold spells, and it’s windy.” Plus the drought.

We pulled up to a harvest wagon, a large flatbed. It was empty. Picture, said Hutchcraft, laborers going up and down the rows with bags on their shoulders, picking orange fruit and filling them, and then lugging the bags to tubs at the ends of rows. There, they’d empty the bags into the tubs. Then trucks would go up and down the rows picking up the tubs. Finally, the trucks would disgorge their citrus into a harvest wagon, the giant flatbed, which would be driven by semitruck to the processing center. Historically, these groves would throw off 500 boxes per acre. At the end, the company was lucky to get 90. “There would have been harvest crews all up and down. You’d have seen trailers parked, filled with fruit,” he said.

Now the harvest wagon was empty, and there were no trucks, and no tubs, and no shoulder bags, and no guys.

“SLOW—CONGESTED AREA” warned various road signs stationed throughout the rows. But we didn’t see a single other person.

Up until the moment Alico announced it would be producing zero oranges, it had been the single largest provider of oranges for Tropicana. When they informed Tropicana of their decision, Hutchcraft told me, the company didn’t push back.

Down the rows we went. “Hamlin,” read a sign, and for miles in both directions were furrows and beds with only dirt or scrub brush or dead trees. “Valencia,” read another, and the same.

It was hard not to be nostalgic.

But time had run out, and times had changed. Citrus was “the profession that drove the state, was the iconic state industry,” Hutchcraft said. No longer. Now Florida Southern College, the fabled Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus that citrus money made, didn’t even offer a citrus management program. Orange juice had even lost the battle for shelf space to seltzers and energy drinks and kombucha and more.

“Florida’s always been a boom-and-bust state,” said Hutchcraft. In the distance, a plume of smoke rose, likely dead trees burning, though it was hard to see from so far. We shook hands and parted ways, the tour complete.

I returned to the guard booth, which housed the only other person I’d seen at Joshua Grove. The guard, Jack Gunther, cracked the door. He had false teeth and an American flag baseball cap. The smell of cigarettes billowed from the booth; the walls were stained with nicotine.

Thirteen years was how long Gunther had worked directing traffic at this grove, he told me. He’d lived in the county all his life. Here he was, the last orange man left.

What did he think of all this, I asked him. What happened to the Florida orange?

“I think they killed it themselves, with chemicals. That’s a fact,” Gunther said. In my time in Florida, I’d found a more complicated story, but down here, everyone had their theories, their longing for citrus nirvana, and their anger at the loss.

“They sprayed so much chemicals, the damn grass don’t even grow here anymore—you can quote me,” Gunther said. “I knew it back in 1990. I said, ‘They’re sprayin’ so much chemicals it’s gonna be the end.’ And it’s the end.”

And then he asked: “You wanna come in and watch TV?”

President Donald Trump and the first lady were rushed from the stage after gunfire erupted at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night—unleashing a chaotic scene at the annual gathering of journalists at the Washington Hilton in DC.

Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchor, was outside the main ballroom when he said he heard powerful gunfire ring out, coming from a gunman just a few feet away. “The next thing I knew, was a police officer jumped on me and threw me on the ground and laid on top of me,” he said. “It was a very frightening moment.” Video from inside the event showed armed Secret Service agents racing to the stage to quickly escort the president away as stunned guests ducked under tables.

Loud Bangs and President Trump Evacuated

"Stay down!"

Loud bangs are heard and President Trump and others are evacuated from White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

Watch LIVE –> https://t.co/OQnyC97cOI#WHCD #WHCA #NerdProm pic.twitter.com/b36LtCEhnx

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 26, 2026

In the aftermath of the shooting, President Trump posted on Truth Social that “the shooter has been apprehended,” and encouraged the event to “go on.” The New York Times reported that the gunman had been stopped near a security perimeter, though it remained unclear whether the shooter fired the shots within or outside that perimeter.

We will provide updates as they become available and confirm information. Our teams are on the ground assessing the situation and investigating. All of our protectees are safe. pic.twitter.com/BYl6sR5WVU

— Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) April 26, 2026

In a short speech, Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, confirmed the president and top officials were all safe, and that law enforcement had asked to clear the event.

The ballroom was filled with journalists and top Trump administration officials, including the vice president and Cabinet members, for the event that is sometimes dubbed “nerd prom.” The dinner typically celebrates the role of the independent press and gently roasts the president.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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

Some Texas oil wells gush hundreds of barrels of oil a day. But many are like the wells on Jackie Chesnutt’s ranch in West Texas that only trickle out a couple barrels a month.

Chesnutt, a retired engineer, claims the five wells operating on her ranch are out of compliance with state rules and should be shut down. The company, CORE Petro, says that it’s struggling to break even, let alone pay to plug the wells. But it says that all its wells are in compliance. 

There are thousands of oil and gas wells around Texas like these: low-producing wells leased by companies operating on a shoestring. About two-thirds of the active oil wells in Texas, or 99,000 wells, produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day, according to the state regulator. To remain active, oil wells in Texas must produce at least five barrels for three consecutive months or at least one barrel for 12 consecutive months.

Companies will often maintain a minimal amount of oil production instead of plugging a well, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Landowners like Chesnutt argue that this pattern can lead to pollution and burdensome equipment on their land. 

Chestnutt poses for a portrait on her property in Knickerbocker, Texas.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

Oil industry analysts and environmental advocates say they have heard claims that companies report the bare minimum of oil production to avoid plugging wells. “The wells on the lease are all producing,” said Railroad Commission spokesperson Bryce Dubee.

Advocates of reforming the oil and gas industry say that stricter rules are needed to ensure companies plug wells in a timely manner and assume the costs so that it does not fall to the state.

In a 2022 report on Texas’ orphan well problem, the nonprofit organization Commission Shift wrote companies should not be able to “indefinitely ‘produce’ a teaspoon of crude or a cubic foot of gas simply to avoid paying for decommissioning.”

Texas has more than 159,000 inactive wells. If the operator of an inactive well goes out of business, the unplugged well eventually becomes an orphan. Texas is facing a record-high backlog of more than 11,000 orphan wells. 

“We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business.”

Chesnutt is the rare landowner who is fighting back against this broken system. The 69-year-old and her now-deceased husband bought the 375-acre property outside San Angelo in 1998. After retiring from a career working at a pharmaceutical company in San Angelo, she now tends goats and sheep on the ranch.

Her complaints to the Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas, have gone nowhere, she said. She has resorted to shutting off power to CORE Petro’s wells because she says they are out of compliance with state production rules. CORE Petro responds that it’s Chesnutt who is breaking the law by shutting off power and, without electricity, they have no way to produce oil at the wells. 

Chestnutt feels underneath a tank that is rusted out on its base. It’s one of several on her property owned by CORE Petro.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

“We’re between a rock and hard place,” said Cassie Ohlhausen, who runs CORE Petro with her husband, Kent. “We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business. We’re in this business to produce oil wells.”

Chesnutt’s growing frustration has spilled over into confrontations with CORE Petro and commission staff. The Railroad Commission alleges that Chesnutt physically assaulted staff members and endangered them with aggressive driving. The agency has instructed her to put all communications in writing to avoid future incidents. The owners of CORE Petro say she has threatened them with a gun. Chesnutt disputes these claims.

The Railroad Commission declined to answer numerous questions about the oil lease on Chesnutt’s ranch. Instead, commission staff provided a letter sent to Chesnutt that described altercations with staff members. The Railroad Commission has not issued any fines to CORE Petro.

Chesnutt’s ranch is one small window into the vast problem of Texas’ aging oil assets. Existing financial mechanisms are not enough to retire the thousands of low-producing oil wells littered across the Texas countryside. The problem eventually falls to the state or becomes a thorn in the side of landowners like Chesnutt. 

Persimmon Creek Ranch lays where the desert scrubland of the Trans Pecos region meets the rocky woodlands of the Texas Hill Country. The ranch, about 200 miles northwest of Austin, gets its name from the native persimmons she collects to make preserves.

“One of the biggest things we have focused on out here since we’ve bought the place is water, water, water,” she said. Chesnutt, now widowed, relies on a windmill-operated well to provide water for her residence and animals.

Chesnutt’s home office displays professional mementos, including her diploma from the University of Texas, Austin, where she was an early female graduate of the engineering program. She now applies an engineer’s attention to detail to investigating the drilling operations on her property.

Chesnutt holds 50 percent of the mineral rights on the property, meaning she receives a share of profits from the wells. This has amounted to only a few hundred dollars in royalties every couple months in recent years. This money is hardly worth the trouble the wells have caused, she said. She riffled through documents on a sunny fall afternoon, her dog Einstein asleep at her side.

Chestnutt looks through documents pertaining to oil wells located on her property.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News Relics from Chestnutt’s career as an engineer.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News Chestnutt’s dog, Einstein, rests on a sofa.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

While the lease was operated by a previous company, Amor Petroleum, Well #10 had been shut down for lack of production. That left only four producing wells.

Then CORE Petro took over the lease in 2021. Chesnutt says that is when the problems started. 

Once a well is inactive, the operator has 12 months to plug it or obtain an extension. The clock started ticking for CORE Petrol to get Well #10 producing again. CORE Petro reported a small amount of production at the well to bring it back to active status. 

Chesnutt said that the company caused numerous spills in their attempts to get oil flowing.

“They made a big mess of it,” she said, showing photos of spills of oil and produced water, a hazardous byproduct of drilling. Chesnutt fears the spills could contaminate her groundwater and has paid to get her water tested multiple times.

“We have worked our asses off to make this place wonderful and beautiful,” she said. “I refuse to accept that the next person is going to have this happen to them.”

The Railroad Commission issued CORE Petro multiple violations for unpermitted disposal of oil and gas waste, or spills, at the lease. But each time, the violation was later resolved without the company paying fines.

“RRC records indicate four pollution violations for this lease,” Railroad Commission spokesperson Dubee said. “In each instance the operator was notified and upon reinspection all violations have been fixed on the lease indicating compliance.”

CORE’s Ohlhausen said that some amount of spillage is to be expected and that the company always cleaned up the spills.

But Chesnutt’s frustrations only grew. 

A water reservoir on Chestnutt’s property .Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

“What has really blown my mind about this is that we have to follow one set of rules in industry,” Chesnutt told Inside Climate News. ”But the oil companies, they allow them to just come out here and do whatever the hell they want.”

By her account, only one of the wells on her property has produced oil in years. But CORE Petro reports ongoing production at all the active wells. The Railroad Commission requires well testing to prove wells are producing oil. CORE Petro’s most recent well testing, in 2025, shows each well producing less than one barrel a day.

Chesnutt claimed the company is falsifying production numbers to keep the wells operating. The company denies this claim. “The operators can fill in any information they want and nobody checks them,” she said. “It’s unacceptable. I’m really sad that the Permian Basin and all these areas are like this.”

Operators submit monthly reports to the Railroad Commission of how much oil is produced and how much is stored at each lease. While the state rules require every well to be actively producing oil, production reports are only required for the entire lease, not individual wells. Inside Climate News found inconsistencies between public records of oil production and inspections at the lease. 

On July 2, 2025, a truck picked up oil from the ranch and recorded the level of oil in the tank afterward, according to a commission inspection report. A Railroad Commission inspector visited the site on Sept. 16. He noted that the amount of oil in the tank hadn’t changed since July 2.

Chestnutt points to a leaky oil pipe next to a tank battery owned by Core Petro.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News One of the leaky oil pipes running along the ground.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

But in the intervening months, CORE reported producing 10 barrels in July and another 15 barrels in August. The company was reporting production on paper but the volume of the tank did not rise, according to the RRC inspection. 

The Railroad Commission declined to answer questions about this and it does not appear the agency has investigated the discrepancy. Cassie Ohlhausen said that the company uses an auxiliary tank to collect the oil. Once it is full, the oil is transported to the tank battery, a large metal tank that stores oil. She said this could explain why the tank battery did not rise even though oil was being produced.

“The reporting of production is accurate and is done by a third party who tracks our oil sales and inputs those numbers into the RRC system,” Ohlhausen said.

Inside Climate News observed an auxiliary tank at only one well. Any oil produced at the other wells would have to flow directly into the tank battery.

Commission documents reveal other inconsistencies. On February 7, 2025, the Railroad Commission issued a violation to CORE Petro that said Well #9 was an “inactive unplugged well.” However, the next time the inspector visited the site, the well was determined to be compliant. The Railroad Commission declined to respond to questions about this.

Property owners have little recourse other than reporting the problems to the Railroad Commission. Chesnutt feels the Railroad Commission is ignoring her complaints about CORE Petro.

“Not one single acknowledgement that [the wells] should be plugged,” she said of her interactions with the state agency. “I’ve had resistance on even cleaning up the spills.”

The three Railroad Commission members, from left: Wayne Christian, Jim Wright, and Christi Craddick.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

Meanwhile, Chesnutt’s behavior has alarmed Railroad Commission staff. An attorney for the agency sent a letter to Chesnutt on Oct. 31, 2024. The letter states that she “verbally threatened and physically assaulted Commission staff” and “engaged in reckless and aggressive driving,” threatening the safety of commission staff. The letter also says that she told commission staff of her “intent to commit several violent crimes” against CORE Petro’s employees.

Chesnutt disputes the commission’s characterizations. “I don’t know, because I’ve never assaulted anyone,” she said.

The Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office has responded to calls from Chesnutt, Kent Ohlhausen and the Railroad Commission about incidents at the ranch, according to call sheets. The Railroad Commission requested the sheriff’s office be on “standby” when visiting Chesnutt’s property. 

Commission inspectors have also noted in inspection reports that Chesnutt is turning off power to wells on her property. Chesnutt maintains that the wells pose a fire hazard and she is within her rights to turn them off. State rules require electricity be disconnected at inactive wells. Electrical lines for oil wells were blamed for starting devastating wildfires in the Texas Panhandle in 2024.

In response to the regulator’s claims of her “reckless driving,” Chesnutt said that last October she saw a Railroad Commission truck on the road leading to her ranch. She was driving in the opposite direction, so she did a U-turn and flashed her headlights to get the driver’s attention. She asked him to pull over and asked if he was headed to her property, because she was waiting for an inspector. 

CORE’s Ohlhausen said that Chesnutt has threatened their staff multiple times.

Chestnutt points to an oil well owned by Core Petro LLC which is in disrepair and leaking.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News Chestnutt photographs a leaking oil well.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News A piece of soil hardened from the produced water of an oil well.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

“All the wells produce at some point or another until she goes and turns them off,” she said.

“We can’t afford a lawsuit, but we have every right to call the sheriff and the justice of the peace and have her stand down on turning our oil wells off,” she said.

CORE Petro specializes in operating aging, low-producing wells, Ohlhauser explains, noting that her husband Kent is called “the Oil Well Undertaker” because he works with “end of life wells.” 

“We’re the ones that end up with what they call the stripper wells that have already been stripped of all their oil,” she said. “They’re just producing a bit of oil every day to keep somebody alive.”

Kent Ohlhausen owns several other oil companies. Many of the leases he operates meet the bare minimum requirement of one barrel of oil production a month for 12 consecutive months. For example, the Olhausen Oil Company’s Ohlhausen, West Texas lease reported one barrel of oil production for each month from April 2023 to April 2024. The same company’s Barker C.P. lease reported one barrel of oil production every month December 2023 to January 2025.

The US Department of Justice announced Friday that it plans to revive the firing squad as a method of killing in federal capital cases. In a 52-page memo, the department expanded the ways it can apply the death penalty to include using a group of executioners to simultaneously shoot at a condemned person. Taking action to strengthen the federal death penalty, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote, “is our highest duty as public servants.” 

Only five states currently allow executions by firing squad. The execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year was only the fifth such killing since 1976; his lawyers later said the bullets mostly missed Mahdi’s heart, leaving him to die in a manner that violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. 

Jim Craig, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center, has represented men and women on death row in the Deep South since 1986. I spoke with Craig about the dangers of executions carried out with guns, the 40 years he’s spent witnessing how governments condemn people to die, and what people should know about his clients.

What’s your reaction to the news that Trump is bringing back the federal firing squad? 

This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism. 

The Department of Justice report suggests that the firing squad “does not offend the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.” Is that true? 

The pitch that is made by proponents of the firing squad is that it destroys the consciousness of the condemned person within 10 to 15 seconds. This is not the case. In the execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year…the three shooters were positioned 15 feet away from Mr. Mahdi. There was a target pinned on him. The folks that were witnessing his execution noticed that he cried out as the bullets hit him, that he groaned two times about 45 seconds after that, and that he continued to breathe for another 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final gasp. 

There were two wounds—not three—even though there were three shooters. The entry point for the bullets was downward through the liver, the pancreas, and the left lower lung lobe, before crashing into his spine and ribs.

“The men and women who are on death row in the US are basically the losers in a lottery.”

He did bleed, he did die, but an expert pathologist who studied the state’s autopsy report said that Mr. Mahdi’s ventricles were not disrupted. He was conscious for a lot longer than the state had suggested. You’re causing multiple multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum, and obviously also piercing flesh and internal organs. And that is extraordinarily painful. If it doesn’t cause an immediate lack of consciousness, which it clearly did not in Mr. Mahdi’s case, then it is torture. Mr. Mahdi was sentenced to death. He was not sentenced to be tortured. 

[The firing squad] relies on human actors to perform the execution in a way that, according to them, would cause a loss of consciousness in 15 seconds, to shoot to kill in the most accurate way, so as to essentially vaporize the heart. They clearly did not vaporize Mr. Mahdi’s heart. 

It comes back to my point about brutality. It’s just one of many, many provisions of the Constitution that they choose to ignore to focus on on their brutality trip.

You’ve spent decades representing people on death row. Who are those people? 

The men and women who are on death row in the United States are basically the losers in a lottery. They have not committed the most cruel crimes in the United States compared to other incarcerated people, or to people who are not incarcerated, but maybe should be. 

If you broaden the focus, the people who are responsible for 500,000 deaths of children because they cut funding to USAID are much more mass murderers than anybody who is on death row in the United States. But even if we’re just restricting ourselves to this 19th-century concept of “you do a bad thing on the street and we’re going to punish you,” I think it’s also true. 

The death penalty is fraught with all kinds of discretionary choices by prosecutors, judges, and juries on the basis of skewed evidence, usually litigating at the trial level with attorneys who are poorly-resourced, sometimes poorly-qualified, and in many cases giving horrifically poor performances. 

The clients that I’ve had over the years in Mississippi and Louisiana are there because the prosecutor in their jurisdiction decided to seek the death penalty, and the defense lawyer in their jurisdiction wasn’t able to match what the prosecution was able to put up, and because all the courts afterwards decided it was good enough. They don’t want to be called soft on crime. 

The overwhelming majority of the people I’ve represented who are on death row are in the far-lower percentiles of income in the United States, overwhelmingly Black or Brown, disproportionately suffering from intellectual disabilities or mental illness. A disproportionate number are combat veterans. 

These are not monsters. These are not people possessed by evil. These are people who were living under extremely precarious circumstances, some of whom committed acts of violence that caused the death of other people. And most of those folks accept that they have responsibility for that—and that the death penalty has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than vengeance and brutal retribution to make people feel better. And that’s not a good enough reason to torture people. 

Until yesterday, it looked like Maine would enshrine the country’s first state-level hyperscale data center moratorium into law. But late on Friday, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills announced she would veto the bill. Though a statement she issued claimed that she agreed a “moratorium is appropriate” in theory, Mills wrote that she would not sign the one passed by legislators in order to avoid jeopardizing a single data center being built in the town of Jay, which she said would bring 800 temporary and 100 permanent jobs to the area. 

The data center industry’s lobby welcomed the move. “Enacting a statewide moratorium on data centers would have discouraged investment and sent a signal that Maine is closed for business—both for data centers and economic development projects involving other industries,” said Dan Diorio, a spokesperson for the Data Center Coalition. “Critically, it would have denied local communities the opportunity to compete for investment and jobs involving data center projects they found suitable.” 

Instead, Mills ordered a study on “the potential impacts of large-scale data centers in Maine.”

Environmental advocates were less thrilled. “With this veto, Governor Mills has demonstrated a shocking disconnect with the people of Maine, their elected legislators, and a large and growing national movement against the reckless explosion of this highly problematic industry,” said Mitch Jones of Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit focused on climate and corporate accountability. “Mainers and people across the country are becoming increasingly fed up with the skyrocketing electricity rates, false jobs promises, and harmful industrialization of small-town communities that hyperscale data centers bring wherever they land.” 

Rather than pause their construction altogether, Mills’ statement said she will issue an executive order to establish a council studying “the potential impacts of large-scale data centers in Maine.”

But as I reported last week, data center moratoriums are gaining public support in Maine and beyond. With Mills set to compete in a hotly-contested June Senate primary against Graham Platner, who supported the moratorium, her veto decision could become a political liability. Platner currently leads Mills in the polls by double digits. 

Beyond Maine, twelve states are considering legislative moratoriums on data center construction, and dozens of municipalities have already passed such laws. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a proposal for a nationwide moratorium in March. “A year ago, nobody was entertaining a moratorium,” says Greg LeRoy of the watchdog group Good Jobs First. “Now a fourth of the states are.”

Last year, tech fascist guru Curtis Yarvin warned that Trump’s Silicon Valley supporters should prepare to flee the United States in case Democrats retake power. Now, one of Yarvin’s key followers—Palantir co-founder and Antichrist enthusiast Peter Thiel—appears to be heeding his advice.

Thiel has purchased a new mansion in an affluent section of Buenos Aires, according to the New York Post. The billionaire plans an extended stay in Argentina, according to the Buenos Aires Herald, and he met with Argentine President Javier Milei this week.

“Thiel, the 58-year-old founder of online payments processor PayPal and AI company Palantir, is reportedly planning to stay in the country for two months,” reported the Herald on April 23. “He is mostly in a US$12 million house he bought in Barrio Parque, an affluent suburb in Buenos Aires City, local media reported. Thiel and his husband, Matt Danzeisen, saw Milei in Casa Rosada at 2 p.m., together with the country’s Foreign Minister, Pablo Quirno.”

The Herald notes the German-born billionaire’s extremist politics: “The ideology he champions is called the ‘Dark Enlightenment’—a proposed alliance between autocrats and AI accelerationists to manage societies as if they were corporations.”

American tech fascists have rallied in support of Milei, a chainsaw-waving anarcho-capitalist zealot who is known for claiming to communicate with the ghost of a dead dog, as well as for imposing disastrous policies on the country’s economy. Milei claims credit for reducing inflation, but his popularity has dropped to 36% as people struggle to survive.

“[T]he drop in inflation is certainly not a victory for Argentine productivity,” writes political economist Can Cinar. “It’s a byproduct of a deliberate and engineered collapse in people’s wages. Milei hasn't fixed the engine of Argentina's economy, he has simply turned it off.”

Things are going so badly under the libertarian economist’s leadership that, late last year, the Trump administration authorized a $20 billion lifeline for Milei’s flailing administration. There was a catch, however: Trump’s offer required Argentina’s voters to support Milei’s party in the country's midterm elections (they did).

Thiel’s decision to establish a beachhead in Buenos Aires comes as Trump sinks to record-low popularity and the Republican Party heads toward a likely defeat in U.S. midterm elections. It’s the latest move for Silicon Valley's most prominent apocalypse enthusiast, who seems to be wandering the earth anxiously in search of refuge. Over the past few years, he has drifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Miami. His plans to create some kind of doomsday estate in New Zealand appear to have fizzled.

(Argentina has a peculiar history as a refuge for rootless fascists. After World War II, it became a primary destination for Nazi war criminals fleeing prosecution via the so-called “ratlines.”)

Thiel believes that the United States—and most nation-states—will experience a dramatic collapse in the 21st century as technological advances create widespread economic and political chaos. His beliefs were largely inspired by The Sovereign Individual: How To Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, a 1997 book which predicted that crypto and AI would collapse the existing world order. It advised savvy investors—a new class of so-called “cognitive elites”—to prepare for this reality by acquiring extra passports and exiting the USA for remote parts of the world.

“Thinly populated regions with temperate climates, and a large endowment of arable land per head, like New Zealand and Argentina, will also enjoy a comparative advantage because they enjoy high standards of public health and are low-cost producers of foods and renewable products,” wrote James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in The Sovereign Individual.

“A good marker for the viability of cities is whether those living at the core of the city are richer than those on its periphery,” they wrote. “Buenos Aires, London, and Paris will remain inviting places to live and do business long after the last good restaurant closes in South Bend, Louisville, and Philadelphia.”

Davidson and Rees-Mogg made many failed doomsday predictions. But this did not harm their standing with Thiel. When The Sovereign Individual was republished in 2020, he wrote the foreword. He appears to still be following the book’s advice.

“Buenos Aires is only the latest square on what amounts to a meticulously constructed global hedge,” reported the New York Post. “Thiel has spent years assembling a portfolio of residences, passports, and legal presences across multiple continents. In New Zealand, he secured citizenship—a process that drew considerable scrutiny given how rapidly it was granted—and with it, residency access across the Pacific corridor including Australia.” 

In addition: “Thiel subsequently acquired a Maltese passport, granting him full freedom of movement across the European Union.”

News of Thiel’s latest home comes as Palantir faces massive public blowback for publishing a 22-point fascist manifesto. In addition, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—a Thiel protégé who keeps promising that AI will destroy most jobs—recently had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his mansion in San Francisco.

The Sovereign Individual predicted a violent backlash against socially destructive technologies, which may explain why Thiel and his friends are so obsessed with doomsday preparations. In 2016, Altman told the New Yorker he was stockpiling guns, gold and gas masks in Big Sur, and also had plans to flee with Thiel to New Zealand.

If history is any indicator, Thiel will not find happiness in Argentina and will continue touring the globe to preach his own personal brand of apocalypse. But his decision to publicly decamp to Latin America at the height of his power suggests that he, like Yarvin, lacks confidence in the Trump regime.

The Nerd Reich Is Coming!

This is only a taste of what you’ll learn in my forthcoming book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy. It details how a cult of venture capitalists—led by Thiel—are pushing a self-fulfilling prophecy of societal collapse. If you can, please pre-order it today!

Click this link to support independent bookstores and this newsletter.

Here’s what some amazing writers are saying about The Nerd Reich:

“A clear and compelling account of the threats posed by technofascism to democracies everywhere.” —Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Reader take note: Gil Durán is a deep, thoughtful, and expansive observer of events that shape the current and future of our American democracy.” —George Lakoff, author of The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

“Gil Durán is an essential voice on this technofascist moment—where it comes from and where we are going.” —Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist, The Nerve

“The Nerd Reich is a clarion warning about the rise of techno-fascist sociopaths who seek to profit off of our collective misery. In clear, compelling and meticulously-researched detail, Gil Durán sounds the alarm about this incestuous cabal of broligarchs. He brings the receipts and the righteous rage.” —Wajahat Ali, The Left Hook

The forest floor was nothing but patches of brown. No ferns, no brush, no flowers, and definitely no wildlife. Everything was dead except for rows of hand-planted baby trees.

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This is what reporter Nate Halverson found while mushroom foraging in the California wilderness near Lassen Peak. He would learn the area had been sprayed with the controversial weed killer glyphosate, more commonly known by its brand name, Roundup.

This week on Reveal, Halverson’s yearlong investigation reveals that the US Forest Service and timber companies are spraying glyphosate in record amounts in California’s forests in an effort to regrow timberland that’s been decimated by years of megafires.

“The wedding of the chemical industry and the Forest Service has got to be seriously and deeply looked at,” Craig Thomas, a fire restoration expert, says about the spraying. The Forest Service is “addicted to herbicide use and glyphosate, and we need to get them into rehab.”

The Justice Department this week announced criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging that the longtime civil rights watchdog had defrauded its own donors by secretly paying large sums of money to informants within various hate groups. “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” asserted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement. “The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

A number of commentators—including vocal SPLC critics from across the political spectrum—have expressed skepticism about the DOJ’s case.  But for President Donald Trump and his supporters, the indictment appears to be just the beginning. At 1:13 am Friday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD. This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others. If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.

It’s not clear on what legal basis the SPLC prosecution could justify overturning the election of a president who left office 15 months ago. Even so, the current president’s allies seem increasingly eager to find other disfavored organizations to target. 

By Thursday afternoon, Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen was asking Grok—the AI chatbot available on Elon Musk’s X—to speculate about which “other activist pressure groups” might be involved in similar activities. He then announced to readers that “Grok has thoughts on who to look at next.”

Grok is a large language model and does not, in fact, have thoughts. But Grok did have plenty of suggestions. Among them: the Anti-Defamation League, Media Matters for America, GLAAD, and the Human Rights Campaign. Grok was careful to note that for these groups, there was “no proven SPLC-style fraud yet.” (Of course, none has been proven for SPLC itself, either.)

Groups like the ADL (which tracks "hate" and pushes deplatforming while accused of overreach on critics), Media Matters (drives ad boycotts against conservative speech), and CCDH (reports targeting platforms for censorship) operate on similar models: identifying enemies to fuel…

— Grok (@grok) April 23, 2026

“Interesting thread,” Musk commented, as he promoted Andreessen’s research to his 239 million followers.

These are all large nonprofits, generally center-to-center-left in political leaning, and not particularly radical. In a separate X post Thursday evening, Andreessen elaborated on his grievances against a constellation of activist groups he didn’t identify by name. 

“I sat in so many meetings for a DECADE where these groups determined who got cancelled/debanked/censored,” he said. “Wholly un-American. People need to go to jail.”

When Nazir Khan picked up the phone on Wednesday, he was a bit delirious. Hours earlier, he’d had his first bites of food after a twelve-day hunger strike.

Alongside two other Minneapolis community organizers, Khan refused food for nearly two weeks in order to draw attention to a persistent, overlooked problem: a trash incinerator that just won’t die. 

Located in a predominantly-Black neighborhood, the Hennepin County Energy Recovery (HERC) incinerator is one of only about 73 municipal trash incinerators left in the United States, down from a peak of nearly 200 in the 1990s. Hennepin County officials have said they plan to close the HERC incinerator between 2028 and 2040—but advocates want a clearer timeline and a more concrete plan. 

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, living near a trash incinerator comes with a bevy of health consequences: increased risk of cancer, birth defects, and lung disease among them. People from the area surrounding HERC have higher rates of asthma-related emergency room visits than people elsewhere in the state, and in 2022, Sierra Club researchers estimated that particulate-matter emissions from HERC are responsible for 1-2 early deaths per year. 

The HERC is still operational, and no firm closure date has been set. But, Khan said, people are paying more attention to the incinerator than ever before. 

Mother Jones spoke with Khan about his hunger strike, the connection between the HERC fight and the broader Minneapolis activist landscape, and the long road to communities people can breathe in. 

How did you end up trying to take down a trash incinerator?

I came to Minneapolis 11 years ago as a labor organizer. Then, I got sucked into the environmental justice movement with Standing Rock, and got more involved with the fight around the Enbridge pipeline in Minnesota, Line Three. 

People had been trying to organize around the HERC for decades. In the early 2010s they were trying to increase the amount of trash that was burned there to its full capacity, which would have been 1200-something tons. At the time, it was burning a thousand tons per day. They succeeded in blocking that. 

There are very few new incinerators in the United States, but across the Global South, they’re spreading. My father is from India — one of the places that’s very important to us is near a giant incinerator in Delhi, India. 

At the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table, we were trying to bring a sort of labor mentality to the environmental justice movement, which can often be focused on emergency-response- type fights. We wanted to be more strategic and forward-thinking. And then a whistleblower got in touch with us, six years ago. He had a lot of really concerning information about the state of the facility. He showed us pictures of ash violations, of worker injuries, really severe worker injuries. 

Coming from a labor background, I can see how that would get your attention. 

We’ve tried reaching out to the workers there. We’ve made many overtures, but to no avail so far. But to be concise about it, the HERC is blocking the way to zero waste. Detroit shut its incinerator down in 2019–since then, the recycling rates have doubled. 

It seems like the assumption is that trash generation is just going to continue to exponentially increase, and the only solution is to use incinerators to deal with that. But that doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, which is, no, trash generation should not be exponentially increasing.

So how does the HERC influence the community around it? 

On the one side of the facility in North Minneapolis, there’s one of the most economically marginalized, majority Black and Brown zip codes in the state, and it has the highest asthma rate in the state. And then on the other side is this quickly-gentrifying, Williamsburg Brooklyn type community. 

Before the gentrification started, like 10 years ago, the HERC didn’t have odor control technology. It would stink, and people who lived in North Minneapolis would talk about the smell. Even with the odor control tech, there are hundreds of garbage trucks going through there every day. The garbage trucks don’t seem to go through the nice part of town. 

How long did the hunger strike last? How did you protect your health? 

We did it for twelve days. We had a medical team looking after us, doing checks in the morning and evening. We’d have people sleeping over at the house just to make sure we’re okay. We got wheeled around in wheelchairs to conserve energy. We all live pretty close to [HERC], but one of us…lives within sight of it. 

We were really in some pretty intense discussion the last few days about extending it. It felt like we were making a lot of progress on the one hand, but on the other hand, the commissioners who represent Minneapolis…it’s like they were giving us the silent treatment. 

Finally, yesterday morning, we heard from a state legislator and got the promise of a meeting. 

So, what did you gain from the hunger strike? 

The demands were really two things: one, we want a date for them to shut down the facility. Two, we want a just transition process, in which the community is at the table for what comes next. And so this hunger strike, I think, has been very effective in terms of clarifying to the public that it’s not closing without an actual additional vote. People are paying attention. The overall political apparatus – they are now at the table with us in a different way. 

Part of the reason we stopped is, we’re at the point when negotiations are about to begin. It’s hard to negotiate if you don’t have any food in you. 

Lately, of course, Minneapolis has been in the news for ICE violence, and also for the city’s ability to come together and push back against ICE. From an organizing perspective, are these things connected? 

Our response to ICE was this moral kind of line-setting – we put our foot down and put a line in the road and said, you’re not passing this. This is Minneapolis saying to the world that there are some things that are not going to be acceptable. You’re not going to assassinate someone in the street for protecting somebody else. We’re not going to let that happen.

And to tie it into the HERC, you’re not going to poison a majority-Black community and get away with it anymore. We’re done. We’re putting a line in the road. We’re not going to allow anyone else to be sacrificed and murdered by this facility. And the commissioners and everyone need to understand that our resolve is set, that we’re not going anywhere.