Mother Jones

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.”

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. 

On July 4, 2020, Guo Wengui stood next to Steve Bannon on a bobbing boat in New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, to announce the launch of the “New Federal State of China.”

Guo—a supposed billionaire Chinese dissident who claimed to know secrets of corruption among China’s leaders—had amassed a large, ardent following among that country’s diaspora.

 “This case destroyed everything I had—my family’s savings, our ability to support each other, and even our emotional connection.”

The new organization was wildly ambitious. Guo and Bannon called it a “government-in-waiting,” prepared to step in and run China following what they claimed was the imminent collapse of ruling Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. At the same time, Guo was also seeking investments in GTV, an online streaming site he claimed would compete with companies like Amazon and TikTok, make investors rich, and air reporting that would fulfill his oft-stated goal: “Take down CCP.”

On the boat, Guo joined Bannon in reading a declaration of principles, told the former Donald Trump aide he loved him, and kissed him. Then Guo bit his own index finger and signed the declaration with his blood.

That was, in retrospect, one of many signs of how weird 2020 got. But it was also a high point for the “whistleblower movement” Guo and Bannon touted. Nearly six years later, federal prosecutors are asking Judge Analisa Torres, at a hearing Monday, to sentence Guo to more than 30 years in prison for overseeing one of “this nation’s worst and most rampant frauds.”

In 2024, a jury convicted Guo of stealing hundreds of millions from his followers. The New Federal State of China, the harbor ceremony, the nonprofits, and the media companies were all part of an elaborate con Guo used to “lock in” those supporters before hitting them up for investments, prosecutors said a sentencing memo last week.

Guo, who has been jailed as a perceived flight risk since his March 2023 arrest, continues to deny guilt. His lawyers argue, in their own sentencing memo, that his conviction was the result of the Chinese government’s “relentless and overwhelmingly powerful targeting of him.” The memo also suggests, without evidence, that Guo’s support for Trump, in particular his role in the publication of explicit pictures of Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election, contributed to his prosecution.

“My family and I were defrauded of around $500,000.”

Guo has created a fashion line, secretly funded a pro-Trump social media company, starred in his own music videos, and once bought a $67 million apartment with a reference from Tony Blair. Last year, he publicly vouched for his former cell-block mate, Sean “Diddy” Combs, as “a very kind, sensitive, genius person.” He bankrolled bogus claims that covid is a Chinese bioweapon and clandestinely wired money to Trump backers trying to overturn the 2020 election results. While promoting himself as the world’s leading anti-China dissident, Guo has faced allegations, which he denies, that he has actually worked as a Chinese spy. In 2019, he faced an FBI counterintelligence probe. (In a ruling in a lawsuit two years later, a judge wrote: “The evidence at trial does not permit the Court to decide whether Guo is, in fact, a dissident or a double agent.”)

But behind the flamboyance and international intrigue was a straightforward scam. In China, Guo became rich through real estate development. He fled the country in late 2014 to avoid arrest there in a corruption scandal, and Chinese authorities ultimately seized most of his assets. Prosecutors argue that when he began launching anti-CCP organizations from the United States in 2018, his intention was to rebuild his wealth by fleecing his fans.

In the government’s telling, Guo, with Bannon’s help, launched a nonprofit, the Rule of Law Foundation, shortly after that seizure to cultivate donors in the Chinese diaspora community. Guo claimed he was putting $100 million of his own funds into the group, but never did. He instead relied on money from his followers, who prosecutors said ultimately put up $36 million.

Those funds were raised in part through an international network of clubs, which Guo followers called “farms.” These well-organized groups also worked to amplify claims Guo made in lengthy daily video broadcasts, with followers translating his remarks into various languages. At times the farms also carried out his directives to attack Guo critics or other Chinese dissidents he quarreled with, somtimes via aggressive in-person protests at their homes.

In 2020, as I have reported, Guo took new steps to monetize his network of political supporters. GTV was the first in a series of “investment opportunities” that Guo offered his backers. After a Securities and Exchange Commission probe curtailed his sale of GTV stock, Guo launched a scheme in which his fans “loaned” money to organizations tied to him in exchange for the chance to buy more stock. He followed that with a “club” in which fans paid tens of thousands of dollars for the chance, again, to invest in Guo companies at a discount, and then with cryptocurrency offerings and other financial vehicles.

Guo promoted these schemes in videos in he which told supporters their funds would help defeat the CCP and guaranteed that investors would not lose money.

“My entire moral compass, built around truth, compassion, and community, was manipulated and shattered.”

In fact, prosecutors say, “thousands” of investors, nearly all of them ethic Chinese fans of Guo’s anti-CCP politics, lost their shirts. The companies that Guo touted barely existed. And Guo moved money put up by his fans into bank accounts her controlled, then used the funds on luxury homes, an $832,000 Lamborghini, a $3.5 million Ferrari, a $4.4 million Bugatti, a $2 million yacht, and upkeep on a separate $30 million yacht—the same one Bannon was living on when federal agents arrested him in 2020 for an unrelated fraud scheme. (Trump pardoned Bannon before he faced trial.)

Guo’s schemes appeared to have benefited from his claims to have close ties to Trump advisers. His organizations paid or employed various MAGA figures, including Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, and current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Peter Navarro, between stints as a trade adviser to Trump, served as the New Federal’s State’s “Ambassador-at-Large.”

Bannon, who court records indicate was paid millions of dollars by Guo for consulting services, regularly promoted Guo’s companies in broadcasts watched by Guo fans, and privately advised Guo on how to pitch investors on the ventures that prosecutors later said were scams. In a court filing prior to Guo’s trial, prosecutors called Bannon a co-conspirator in Guo’s fraud scheme. But Bannon has not been charged with a crime in connection with Guo’s ventures. And while the gist of what Guo was up to was hard to miss by 2021, prosecutors have not presented evidence that Bannon knew the details of Guo’s fraud.

Bannon has had relatively little to say about Guo over the last few years, but has at times defended his former patron, arguing prosecutors targeted Guo due to his anti-CCP statements.

Some of Guo’s victims, too, continue to support him, taking up his argument that the government, by freezing his assets, caused their losses.

But according to prosecutors, 225 victims have provided impact statements to the government. Prosecutors quote extensively from those statements in their sentencing memo, though the filiings are sealed and the victims unnamed. Several victims also testified during Guo’s 2024 trial.

“[M]y family and I were defrauded of around $500,000, most of which came from selling our home,” one victim wrote. “Now, this entire amount has been lost. This has pushed us from a stable middle-class life to living on borrowed money.”

 “This case destroyed everything I had—my family’s savings, our ability to support each other, and even our emotional connection,” another victim said. “I involved my mother and brother, thinking I was helping them, only to see all of us dragged into financial ruin.”

“When the truth became undeniable, I was overwhelmed with shame, guilt, and despair.”

Another person wrote that the fraud “stripped away” much of the savings their mother had worked to pass on to her family and “exacerbated her health conditions, robbing her of peace in her final years.”

Many of the victims reported experiencing anxiety and depression as a result of the fraud. A half-dozen of the victims quoted by prosecutors said they thought about suicide.

“My entire moral compass, built around truth, compassion, and community, was manipulated and shattered,” one victim wrote. “I had trusted blindly. When the truth became undeniable, I was overwhelmed with shame, guilt, and despair. I struggled with recurring suicidal thoughts. I lost my will to live, to hope, to believe in anything again.”

These victims are Chinese immigrants, in the US and around the world, who Guo claimed to champion. They are people who Bannon likes to call the “laobaixing,” a Chinese term for “ordinary folks.”

Prosecutors call what Guo did “affinity fraud,” a scheme where a con artist uses apparent membership in a particular community to win trust and supposed investments, often to finance a Ponzi or pyramid scheme.

Federal prosecutors and some of Guo’s victims argued that this particular scam, by targeting Chinese immigrants who wanted to believe Guo’s claims that their savings would help “take down CCP,” hurt not only their finances but their political movement.

“While loudly proclaiming his goal to defeat the CCP, he actually served their interests by discrediting the very cause he claimed to support,” one victim wrote. “By betraying us—the true believers in ending the CCP’s tyranny—he has tarnished the fight against the CCP itself.”

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

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

Republican lawmakers are attempting to shield big oil from having to pay for its contributions to the climate crisis, alarming environmental advocates.

New House and Senate bills led by Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) would give oil and gas companies broad legal immunity from policies and lawsuits aimed at holding the industry accountable for damages caused by its emissions.

Dubbed the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, the proposal would protect the sector from liability. It is similar to a 2005 law that has largely blocked lawsuits against the firearms industry over gun violence.

“To try to legislate that science away is something that’s really alarming.”

The Republicans’ proposal is designed to stop a surge of climate accountability measures launched by states and municipalities—which Hageman’s office called “leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity,” in a statement. In recent years, more than 70 state and local governments have sued oil companies for allegedly deceiving the public about the dangers of their products. Meanwhile, New York and Vermont have also passed climate “superfund” laws requiring major polluters to pay for damages from past emissions, with other states considering similar policies.

If passed, the new federal legislation would dismiss pending climate accountability lawsuits, void all climate superfund laws and block similar future efforts. The proposals attempt to undermine the very foundations of climate accountability measures, said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the science hub for climate litigation at the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists.

Hageman, for instance, in a statement said her bill would “affirm” that the federal government had exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the regulation of greenhouse gases, but legal experts dispute that, Merner noted. The language attempts “to take away the ability for local harms to be decided at the local and state level,” Merner said.

Cruz’s bill, meanwhile, attempts to discredit climate attribution studies—scientific analyses quantifying how much the climate crisis altered the likelihood or intensity of specific extreme weather events—on which some climate legal claims are based. “To try to legislate that science away is something that’s really alarming,” said Merner.

This year, the top US oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (API), said blocking “abusive” climate lawsuits was a top priority. Months earlier, 16 Republican state attorneys general asked the justice department for a “liability shield” for oil companies. And last year, both the API and energy giant ConocoPhillips also pressed Congress on draft legislation to limit climate liability.

“The industry knows it’s vulnerable. They are not totally confident they can win cases on their merits.”

“Immunity is clearly something the industry has been after,” said Cassidy DiPaola of the pro-climate superfund group Make Polluters Pay. “We’re in a period where there’s a Republican trifecta that will basically bow down to the industry, and I think they view this moment as one of their biggest opportunities to get it.”

Industry groups have praised the federal proposal. In a joint statement, Mike Sommers, the API CEO, and Chet Thompson, the CEO of the influential fuel lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, thanked Hageman and Cruz for the legislation, saying: “Congress should act decisively to reaffirm federal authority over national energy policy and end this activist-driven state overreach.”

Asked about advocates’ concerns about the new policy proposal, API referred the Guardian to its previous statement.

The bills’ introduction came as red states are also proposing to block climate lawsuits and superfund acts. Last week, Tennessee passed a measure blocking big oil accountability efforts, and Utah greenlit a similar law earlier this month. Other states are considering similar policies, but none of them are as straightforward about their goals as the federal proposals, said DiPaola.

“It’s honestly shocking how direct the federal lawmakers are being with with their wording,” she said. “We kind of anticipated it being a little bit more discreet, but they’re not hiding the ball whatsoever. They’re saying it out front: ‘You can’t hold us accountable.’”

The industry and its allies have made a variety of other attempts to thwart climate accountability efforts, including challenging superfund laws in court and attempting to have litigation thrown out. “In some ways, this federal bill feels like a capstone [of the] multi-layered strategy that we’ve been watching unfold, where the fossil fuel industry is attacking climate accountability on several fronts at once,” said Merner.

The industry has seen mixed results. Some climate litigation, for instance, has been thrown out. But last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump administration that aimed to pre-emptively block Hawaii from suing big oil. “The industry knows it’s vulnerable,” said Merner. “They are not totally confident they can win cases on their merits.”

Jay Inslee, a former Washington governor, has recently been raising concerns about the fossil fuel industry’s desire for a liability waiver, particularly since Hageman indicated in February that a federal proposal was in the works. “Every elected official who cares about the interests of their constituents more than those of corporate polluters should oppose this disgraceful proposal,” Inslee said in a statement.

It’s not clear whether Republicans could muster the votes to pass the legislation as it is written. But the bills could help lay the groundwork for a similar measure to be slipped into a larger piece of must-pass legislation, or via the reconciliation process when measures can pass with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote filibuster threshold. “We don’t think that the strategy is to pass this bill as a freestanding bill,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which backs the litigation against the oil industry. “But bad things can happen at any minute, and we’ve got to be ready for it.”

The introduction of the federal legislation, Wiles said, “demystifies” oil industry allies’ objectives.

“If there was any doubt that they would try to do something this outrageous and this damaging to the justice system and to people’s rights to go to court to seek redress for harms, there’s no doubt any more,” he said.

While testifying in support of the Department of Health and Human Services’ budget before Congress this week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attacked home-and community-based services, a Medicaid-backed program that provides over seven million disabled people the support they need to remain out of institutions.

Specifically, Kennedy singled out the fact that some states allow some family caregivers to receive payment through Medicaid, a system Kennedy alleged is “rife with fraud.” Kennedy indicated that he’d like to dismantle those programs in favor of unpaid work, implicitly by women, in the home—already the predominant model for many households, and a far from sustainable one.

I spoke with Calli Ross, a parent and advocate who fought for paid caregiving for minor disabled children in her home state of Oregon, about what RFK Jr. doesn’t understand—or want to know—about these programs.

Most states allow parents of adult children with disabilities, family members of children with disabilities, and family members of the elderly to be paid for providing attendant care.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now saying all of this should be considered “natural supports” and unpaid labor. And the underlying rhetoric is that this labor should be provided by women.

Tensy is my 11-year-old little boy who was born with a genetic condition that makes him more susceptible to illness. At age one, he developed chronic lung disease. At four, he had his first cardiac arrest, going 33 minutes without oxygen to his brain. He recovered fairly well but with limited mobility. He requires 24/7 ventilator support for his lungs, uses a feeding tube, and is a wheelchair user.

In 2024, he had a second cardiac arrest caused by a seizure. This led to the loss of his smile, facial movement, and any purposeful physical movement. He is still able to communicate using an eye gaze device and experiences a full life because he is supported in his home and community.

Calli Ross with her son, Tensy.Courtesy of Calli Ross

In Oregon, like other states, a state assessment determined that to live safely at home, Tensy requires 744 hours of nursing and attendant care each month. These supports go far beyond typical parenting. They include tracheostomy care, manually resuscitating him during seizures, and full support for all activities of daily living.

Because Oregon passed the Children’s Extraordinary Needs waiver in 2023, parents of the highest-needs children are allowed to work up to 20 hours per week providing these supports, care that is clearly above and beyond typical parenting. Similar policies exist for adults with disabilities and the elderly, run by states but supplemented by federal matches. The few states that allow parents of minors to be paid are funded under the same principle.

Our program is incredibly small. Only 155 children can participate [at a time], and the waitlist is thousands long. That bill is named for my son: Tensy’s Law.

These are hours someone else could be paid to work—if the workforce existed. And by someone else, I mean anyone off the street who is 18 or older without a felony. But even that low-qualification workforce doesn’t exist. There is a well-documented national caregiver crisis. Many families are being forced to leave the workforce, rely on state aid, or institutionalize their loved ones at a much higher cost to state and federal systems.

As the baby boomer generation ages, the number of family caregivers is rapidly increasing. Without the infrastructure to support this care economy, the system as a whole will fail. We cannot expect women to leave the workforce en masse and provide the care needed for our aging and ill family members. We cannot expect families with children with disabilities to survive on GoFundMe and prayers.

Tensy is one of the 155 in children in Oregon, with a waitlist in the thousands, allowed to choose his dad as his paid caregiver for 20 hours a week. That is the cap, currently, in our state. (Even then, due to administrative delays, my son wasn’t able to benefit from having his dad as his paid caregiver until January.)

It isn’t much, but because of this help, we are able to afford a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. My husband is able to take more time from his job to provide Tensy the care he needs to thrive. As his parents, we are the most knowledgeable and most able to care for our son. But without support, we cannot keep him home. And that’s the reality everywhere.

The US Army announced this week that it has successfully 3D-printed a drone-based warhead prototype, and successfully used that weapon to make something explode.

In a press release, the military called the weapon “a lightweight, powerful, and lethal warhead that could be deployed from a small, agile drone.” In a video posted April 21 and captioned only “Multi-Purpose,” a drone blows up a makeshift bunker on a military testing site. 

3D-printed drones and drone-based weapons are fairly new, and they’re having a bit of a moment in the American military limelight. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who President Donald Trump calls “the drone guy,” told lawmakers last week he has learned a great deal from Ukraine’s use of cheap and easily replicable drones, and is eager to apply those lessons to the United States’ wars. (Per reporting from The Economist in 2023, Ukraine has also used ChatGPT to build bombs.)

The Ukrainian military has “fundamentally changed the approach to warfare,” Driscoll said during a congressional hearing Thursday. Iran, too, has reportedly used cheap Shahed drones—$20,000 each—to take out million-dollar American and Israeli missiles. Now, the US may adopt similar technology. “The United States Army is a beacon of transformation,” Driscoll said. “Imagine what we could do if we weren’t bound by the red tape!” 

This latest 3D-printed warhead, called the BRAKER, is part of a larger push towards high-tech, cheap munitions. At SpaceX’s Stargate campus in mid-January, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth urged the military and weapons-tech contractors to “accelerate like hell.” And as the Pentagon budget is slated to crest $1 trillion for the first time ever this year, the military is pushing to triple drone-related spending to $74 billion. 

As the United States continues to bombard Iran—killing thousands of people, and spending, at last count, nearly $60 billion doing so—the military is looking for cheaper ways to mass-produce war from a distance. That might be why US News and World Report thinks drone stocks are worth buying. 

Paolo Zampolli epitomizes why so many people hate the Trump administration.

Zampolli serves as Donald Trump’s US special envoy for “Global Partnership” and is mired in controversies over this year’s World Cup, Jeffrey Epstein, and, according to the New York Times, ICE.

He’s a shining example of people alleged to be scammer and abusers have weaseled their way into using Trump’s global platform for their own nefarious purposes. Let’s take a look.

The World Cup

On Wednesday, Zampolli told the Financial Times he made a suggestion to Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino that Iran be replaced by Italy at this summer’s World Cup. The soccer tournament will be played in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and both the US and Iran have expressed concerns that it would not be possible for Iran, which is currently at war with Israel and the United States.

“I’m an Italian native and it would be a dream to see the Azzurri at a US-hosted tournament. With four titles, they have the pedigree to justify inclusion,” Zampolli said to the Financial Times (“Azzuri” is a nickname for the Italian national sports team, which has won the competition four times, but has failed to qualify for three successive tournaments). Zampolli is an Italian-American but has no apparent association with Italian soccer or the World Cup.

The Financial Times suggested that Zampolli’s idea was designed to improve US and Italy relations after Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned Trump’s bizarre remarks about Pope Leo XIV over the war in Iran.

You may be wondering: Why is an American envoy attempting to lobby on behalf of Italy instead of the US?

Zampolli reposted the Financial Times‘ Tuesday story on X and, late Wednesday night, posted two screenshots of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reporting his World Cup proposal. 

“Firstly, it is not possible, secondly it is not appropriate,” Italy’s sports minister, Andrea Abodi, told LaPresse. “You qualify on the pitch.”

“The attempt to exclude Iran from the World Cup only reveals the moral bankruptcy of the United States, which is afraid even of the presence of eleven young Iranians on the field of play,” the Iranian embassy said. A spokesperson for Iran’s government said Wednesday that Iran is prepared to play at the World Cup, according to the Associated Press. 

According to the BBC, FIFA is not planning to replace Iran with Italy. 

In other words, everyone hates the Trump administration. 

Jeffrey Epstein

Zampolli, a former head of a modeling agency in the ’90s, claims that he introduced Donald and Melania Trump and helped the first lady obtain a work visa in the mid-’90s. He even told the Daily Mail he was prepared to testify before Congress following Melania’s public denial earlier this month of close connections to Jeffrey Epstein, including that it was the convicted sex offender introduced her to Donald Trump. Melania Trump called for a congressional hearing to allow survivors of Epstein’s abuse to testify. 

Zampolli has his own ties to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. He and Epstein discussed and later failed in their bid to purchase the agency Elite Model Management in 2004, and according to the Daily Beast, became a partner of Maxwell’s environmental charity and nonprofit organization, the TerraMar Project, that described itself as focused on protecting oceans. Maxwell launched the project in 2012 but the organization was dissolved in December 2019, following Epstein’s arrest in July of that same year.

ICE

Last month, the New York Times reported that Zampolli sent a request to David Venturella, an ICE official, to put his ex-girlfriend Amanda Ungaro, who is Brazilian and was arrested on charges of workplace fraud, in ICE detention. Zampolli had been in a custody battle with Ungaro over their son.

The Times obtained communication records demonstrating that Venturella contacted ICE’s Miami office to make sure agents would take Ungaro from a Miami jail where she was being held, an order that Venturella said was important to an individual closely connected to the White House. Ungaro was placed in ICE custody and deported, but, according to the Times, it remains unclear whether Zampolli’s request led to Ungaro’s deportation.

Mr. Zampolli denied asking ICE to detain Ungaro, saying he only asked Venturella about the status of her case.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to the Times that Ungaro was detained and deported due to an expired visa and her fraud charges. “Any suggestion that she was arrested and removed for political reasons or favors is FALSE.”

Neither the US State Department nor the Kennedy Center immediately responded to a request from Mother Jones for Zampolli’s comment on the Financial Times and New York Times stories. (The Office for Global Partnerships is an office within the US State Department and Zampolli is on the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, as appointed by President Trump.

Sensing a pattern? If Zampolli does get a role in organizing the World Cup, fans, players, journalists, and other travelers may be subjected to the Trump administration’s brutal immigration policies. 

Laura Spivak, an organizer with Washington County Indivisible, has spent the past few months trying everything to stop the construction of an ICE detention warehouse only five miles from her home. 

“We’ve protested, we’ve written and called, we’ve fought legal battles,” she said at a press conference Thursday in support of the Ban Warehouse Detention Act, a bill Rep.Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)  is introducing to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using taxpayer funds to purchase, convert, or operate commercial warehouses as immigration detention centers. Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) introduced a similar bill in the Senate two weeks ago. 

Spivak has found some success fighting the warehouse detention center in her backyard. Last week, a judge agreed to temporarily block the construction of a Williamsport, Maryland facility, where ICE planned to jail up to 1,500 people. But without more help, Spivak fears that this will only be a temporary victory. 

The Ban Warehouse Detention Act, Spivak said, “prevents local politicians from colluding with DHS to convert warehouses into detention camps, and prevents them from shutting out the voices of residents like us.” 

As of February, the Department of Homeland Security planned to spend over $38 billion dollars purchasing 24 warehouses across the country, in order to detain up to 92,000 people. So far, they have purchased eleven.

Spivak thinks that money could be better-spent doing pretty much anything else. Williamsport’s local library needs renovation, its school buildings need modernization, and investing in tourism could bring prosperity to the town’s historic district. “A prison camp will not help Williamsport develop economically,” she said. “It will drive down property values and bring shame to a town that deserves a helping hand, not a federal slap in the face.” 

In early April, the Department of Homeland Security said they would pause the purchase of any new warehouses while conducting an internal review of facilities purchased under recently-fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. But a pause, Tlaib said Thursday, is not enough. 

“We need to save lives right now,” Tlaib said. She has been in contact with immigrants held in warehouse detention in Michigan, she said: some of them have been held for months after signing letters stating their willingness to leave the country; others are becoming sick due to the conditions in the facilities. 

“A young lady that was in the facility for over a year at 33 years old, and never had a seizure before, had a seizure because of malnutrition and sleep deprivation,” Tlaib said. “I mean, this is a form of torture.” Immigrants at one GEO-group-owned facility in North Lake, Michigan, have launched a hunger strike demanding access to adequate food, medical care, and legal representation. 

The local-level pushback against ICE, meanwhile, continues: there are rapid-response networks in every major city, where residents alert each other to the presence of ICE officers and gather resources for immigrants in their communities. Online maps show current and future detention warehouse purchases planned in communities across the country. And wherever ICE plans to build a facility, protests tend to follow.

Under Tlaib’s draft bill, no agency may “Establish, operate, expand, convert, or renovate any warehouse, industrial facility, tent, soft-sided structure, modular unit, or similar building or structure for the purposes of housing, processing, or detaining individuals under civil immigration authority.”

“Human beings do not belong in warehouses,” said Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Il.). “From Arizona to New Hampshire, even Republican local elected officials oppose these warehouses. Not one penny of our tax dollars should be going towards these massive detention centers.”

The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial is being sued by one of its billionaire investors, who claims the company froze his token holdings.

In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Justin Sun accused World Liberty Financial of “engaging in an illegal scheme to seize property.”

“They wrongfully froze all of my tokens, stripped me of my right to vote on governance proposals, and have threatened to permanently destroy my tokens,” Sun wrote in a statement on X on Tuesday night. While he said he remains an “ardent supporter” of Trump and his administration’s efforts to make crypto-friendly policies, Sun wrote that “certain individuals” associated with World Liberty were operating the venture “in a manner that goes against President Trump’s values.”

Sun backed the Trump family when they launched World Liberty Financial in 2024, investing $30 million. He spent another $45 million on 3 billion tokens just a few months later. According to Reuters, Sun owns about 4 billion tokens worth approximately $320 million. 

World Liberty Financial’s co-founder, Zach Witkoff, wrote in a Wednesday post on X that Sun’s legal complaint “is a desperate attempt to deflect attention from Sun’s own misconduct.” Witkoff did not offer more details on what Sun did but said the investor’s actions required the company to “take action to protect itself and its users.” 

As my colleagues Russ Choma, Dan Friedman, and Tim Murphy wrote in 2025:

Shortly after Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission—which had accused Sun of fraud in a federal complaint—agreed to pause its lawsuit while the parties pursued a “potential resolution.” That was one of more than a dozen lawsuits and investigations targeting crypto firms that the SEC reportedly backed off from after Trump took office.

Sun eventually resolved the case with the SEC in a $10 million settlement last month. 

The Trump family receives 75 percent of net proceeds from token sales. According to the Wall Street Journal, since the launch, they have received about $1 billion in proceeds as of December 2025.

The infamous Florida immigrant detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” can remain open, an appeals court ruled Tuesday, overturning a lower judge’s decision to close the facility because it violated federal environmental laws.

The ruling is the latest development in the months-long legal battle against the center, which was constructed in the Everglades last summer by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration when the Department of Homeland Security needed more detention space to house immigrants pending their deportations.

The center has come under fire for both its living conditions and its impact on the surrounding area. As I reported in March, thousands of people have been detained there despite ongoing reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, lackluster food, and limited water access. Last month, two US senators said they launched an investigation into reported abuses, including the use of “the box,” in which detainees were allegedly shackled and held in small cages in direct sunlight for hours at a time. (A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, told me recently that the allegations were “false.”) In recent weeks, the center landed in the spotlight once again after attorneys representing immigrants held there told a judge that guards had assaulted and pepper-sprayed detainees who protested after the phones were shut off, less than a week after a federal judge ordered legal access should be expanded at the facility.

Environmentalists have spent almost a year trying to shutter Alligator Alcatraz in an effort to protect the Everglades. The center was built on a little-used airfield next to the environmentally protected wetlands of Big Cypress National Preserve. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier quipped in a video posted on social media late last June. 

As I reported that month, environmental groups sued federal and state officials to halt the project. They argued that the construction had proceeded without an environmental review or opportunity for public comment, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They filed declarations in the case documenting how the camp could potentially affect the neighboring ecosystems and wildlife. Traffic to and from the detention site increases the likelihood of panthers being struck by vehicles, according to court filings, and light pollution could destroy the nighttime foraging abilities of bats in the area.

“Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades.”

Florida and Trump officials argued that NEPA only applies to federal agencies, and that the facility was operated and funded by the state, which has spent at least $390 million to run it. But in August, a federal judge in Miami concluded that Alligator Alcatraz “exists for the sole purpose of detaining and deporting those subject to federal immigration enforcement” and ordered it to wind down operations within 60 days. The state of Florida appealed and the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit blocked the judge’s decision, allowing Alligator Alcatraz to continue to operate.

Alligator Alcatraz has disrupted the vulnerable ecosystems that surround it, Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the plaintiffs in the environmental lawsuit, told me last month. The high-intensity lighting, for example, has affected about 2,000 acres of habitat for the Florida panther, an endangered species with a population of about 200. “The evidence of that harm is clear,” she said in a phone interview. 

The three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the case on April 7 and released a 38-page ruling late Tuesday afternoon. In the 2–1 decision, judges concluded that the environmentalists failed to prove Alligator Alcatraz was under federal control. Florida also hasn’t received any federal funding (though it is in the process of requesting reimbursement). “Federal authority is, at most, indirect: it is involved in the construction only insofar as it sets the terms for which the facility may be used for detention of aliens, but Florida officials dedicated its land to that use,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, in the majority opinion. 

Judge Nancy Abudu, a Biden appointee, wrote in her dissent that immigration is ultimately a federal obligation and the majority’s ruling is “just plain wrong.” “So long as Florida remains a willing participant in the federal government’s immigration detention scheme, it subjects itself to the federal government’s substantial control over the parties’ joint efforts,” she wrote. 

The case was sent back to the district court. “This fight is far from over,” Samples, the Friends of the Everglades director, said in a statement Tuesday night. “Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades, and we look forward to returning to the District Court to advance our case to shut it down.” 

Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.

Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.

The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.

Even as the company struggled, Nunes prospered. In 2024 alone, his pay outstripped any revenue the company has made over its lifetime—he drew a salary of $1 million, a bonus of $600,000 and was awarded stock worth another $46 million.

To be fair to Nunes, he was asked to oversee a company that despite having one of thet world’s most recognizable faces as its power user, had a remarkably scattershot approach to everything.

When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.

Of those grand dreams, under Nunes, Trump Media managed to launch Truth Social and a tepid streaming service, that runs for free and mostly provides content that is also free on YouTube. Truth Social may have as few as several hundred thousand daily active users, while Elon Musk’s X is estimated to have around 224 million. Those kind of numbers place it firmly in 24th place among social media companies, a few spots behind YouTube Kids.

That’s not how things were supposed to go. At its launch, a slide presentation distributed to investors and filed with the SEC suggested that by 2026, the company expected to have about $3.3 billion in revenue, 40 million users on Truth Social and another 81 million spread across the company’s other services.

Under Nunes, the company has, instead, struck out in seemingly random directions. It has, among other things, launched:

• “Personal freedom” oriented ETFs.
• A crypto “token”—a non-tradeable blockchain-based digital asset which, despite having no value, is slated to be given to shareholders and would grant them discounts on the company’s products.
• A Bitcoin treasury: following in the footsteps of controversial Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, Trump Media announced in 2025 that it would begin accumulating as many Bitcoins as possible, based on the theory that Bitcoin’s precipitous increase in value would also make the company more valuable.

The last initiative, which was announced in May of 2025, a few months before a massive decline in Bitcoin prices kicked in, is responsible for most of the $712 million in losses. The company had purchased roughly $2.5 billion in bitcoin, and the latest data suggests that after declines in the price of Bitcoin and sale of some of the company’s Bitcoins, the treasury is now worth just $753 million.

Trump Media’s boldest move under Nunes might have been the idea to pivot to nuclear power—specifically the largely experimental method of nuclear fusion. In nuclear fission, which is the method used for decades, atoms are split, but in fusion, pushing atoms together generates even greater energy—but the process has never been made commercially viable. In late 2025, Trump Media announced it would be merging with TAE Technologies, a longstanding player in the fusion field, which despite having previously secured funding, was still struggling to build an actual power plant.

The merger, which is supposed to be completed in June, would have made Nunes co-CEO of the social media, streaming, web-hosting, financial products, Bitcoin treasury and nuclear fusion company.

All that is a lot of responsibility for Nunes who began his career working on the family dairy farm in southern California in the early 1990s (he has a degree in agriculture). First elected to Congress in 2003 and served for 19 years, including several as the chairman of the House Intelligence committee, where he and one of his staffers—Kash Patel—became two of Trump’s loudest backers in accusing a “deep state” in the intelligence community of having targeted Trump.

Nunes had no specific experience running a technology company before taking over as CEO of Trump Media, but in 2019 he sued political strategist Liz Mair and two anonymous parody Twitter accounts, including @DevinCow, which purported to be one of the cows on his dairy farm, for defamation. Nunes asked for $250 million in damages, but the case was dismissed.

Nunes confirmed his departure from Trump Media but did not say what he would be doing next. He remains chairman of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

On Saturday, Donald Trump convened a meeting on the Iran war in the White House situation room. At the table, according to news reports, were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, envoy Steve Witkoff, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Missing from this list: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. This was another opportunity for administration officials to snicker that DNI stands for Do Not Invite.

You might wonder what’s the point of having a director of national intelligence who’s routinely not included in major deliberations about national security. Gabbard’s value for Trump is not in her oversight of the 18 agencies in the intelligence community, which is ostensibly her job. Nor in her intelligence experience, which is slight. It is in her willingness to serve Trump’s lust for vengeance against those he deems his political enemies. That includes her enthusiasm for politicizing and weaponizing intelligence to an extent never seen in US history.

Last summer, she did this by releasing highly classified intelligence documents that she claimed proved that President Barack Obama, his CIA chief John Brennan, and other Deep Staters had committed “treason”—a crime punishable by death. She accused them of falsifying intelligence to show that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had covertly intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Trump. The memos clearly did not show that. (Investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee have confirmed Putin attacked that election to boost Trump.)

Here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.

Gabbard’s stunt was a despicable act of immense gaslighting. And she and Trump each called for Obama, Brennan, and others to be prosecuted. Trump went so far as to post an AI-generated video of FBI agents violently handcuffing and arresting Obama and tossing him into a prison cell. In the video, Obama is on his knees before Trump. Never has intelligence been so abused by an administration for purely political purposes. Gabbard’s move led the Justice Department to mount a criminal investigation of Brennan and others that is ongoing.

At the time, Gabbard also declassified and made public a secret report that cited Russian intelligence material from 2016 that claimed Hillary Clinton suffered from “intensified psycho-emotional problems,” was on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers,” and had schemed to set up the Trump-Russia scandal to distract from her email controversy. But US intelligence analysts and FBI agents had previously judged this Russian material to be unreliable and possibly disinformation. So here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials who worried its disclosure could compromise sources and methods—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.

Trump loved it. Gabbard had been on the outs with the White House prior to this for several reasons, including her release of a video that implied she opposed military action against Iran. Now Trump proclaimed her a “star.”

Recently, Gabbard was again in the hot seat. In March, the day after her ally Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the Iran war, Gabbard testified before Congress on threats posed to the United States. Trump, according to Axios, was displeased that Gabbard at this hearing did not wholeheartedly endorse his war in Iran and personally scolded her. He was also apparently mad that she had protected Kent, who had publicly undercut his rationale for the war. (In his resignation letter, Kent said Iran posed no “imminent threat” to the United States.) Trump began asking his top advisers if he should give Gabbard the boot.

Gabbard showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe.

MAGA activist Laura Loomer tweeted that “Tulsi was done” and that the White House was about to show her the door. But this didn’t happen. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser who was found guilty of lying to Congress during the Trump-Russia scandal (and subsequently pardoned by Trump), took credit for interceding with Trump and rescuing Gabbard. Axios quoted “a source familiar with Trump’s thinking” saying, “Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi.”

Whether Stone’s influence mattered or not, Gabbard last week showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe and to reveal yet another purported Deep State conspiracy against the president.

This time, the target was the whistleblower who in 2019 filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, about the infamous phone call during which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch investigations to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, who was then running for president, and to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election. The whistleblower maintained that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.

When the acting DNI, John Maguire, declined to share this classified complaint with Congress, Atkinson informed Congress of its existence, triggering a brouhaha that soon led to Trump’s first impeachment. 

Trump was not convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate, but he has always been steamed by the impeachment. Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.

Last week, she released a handful of documents that she asserted exposed “a coordinated effort by elements within the Intelligence Community (IC), including a former Inspector General (IG), to manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump in 2019.” She insisted these records show that Atkinson “did not follow standard IG procedures and relied upon politicized, manufactured narratives” and that he took “actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction.”

Once more, she insisted that Trump was the victim of a nefarious cabal: “Deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States.”  

Yet again, Gabbard is pulling a big con. The materials she released do not back up the charge that Atkinson mishandled this case, and they certainly don’t prove a narrative was manufactured. In fact, the whistleblower’s complaint was largely confirmed when the Trump White House, under pressure, released a summary of his call with Zelenskyy. And that summary played a more critical role in the impeachment proceedings than the whistleblower’s complaint. During the Trump-Ukraine controversy, Maguire testified that the whistleblower “did the right thing.” Maguire also testified that Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint was done “by the book” and consistent with the law. 

Gabbard went further then pumping out more disinformation. She sent the Justice Department criminal referrals for Atkinson, who Trump fired in April 2020, and the whistleblower, who has never been officially identified. (Conservative media, Donald Trump Jr., and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul revealed his name during the impeachment.)

A pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position.

This is another dangerous action from Gabbard, who once again is abusing intelligence to gin up a criminal case to feed Trump’s revenge fantasy. There is no case here. There was no Deep State plot. This is all about payback—and Gabbard keeping her job.

A few days ago, a pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position. This MAGA influencer called this conduct reprehensible, noting that if Gabbard has evidence of Deep State conspiracies, she ought to put it all out.

But none of the material Gabbard has released so far proves the conspiracy theories she’s peddling. As an apparatchik for Dear Leader, she’s misrepresenting once-classified material to set up show trials and demonstrating she will lie and cheat for Trump—and to stay employed. Such a disingenuous DNI is a threat to national security. Nothing she says—in private to the president or in public—can be trusted.

Gabbard’s most recent efforts to deceive the public have not received the media attention they deserve. They ought to be front-page news, for Gabbard also is leading the administration’s effort to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Remember when she was photographed at the Atlanta site when FBI agents seized voting records and machines?

If Gabbard will manufacture false narratives and bogus evidence to support baseless criminal prosecutions of supposed Deep State conspirators and Trump critics, what might she do to cook up proof of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 elections or to concoct phony evidence of fraud in the coming midterm elections?

Gabbard is a careerist chameleon. In 2018, as I revealed last year, she spoke at the Bernie Sanders Institute and slammed Trump as a supporter of “genocidal war.” In 2019, when she was running for president as a progressive Democrat, she blasted Trump for being “on the brink of launching us into a very stupid and costly war with Iran.” Now she’s a Trump loyalist. She clearly will flip positions and jettison supposed principles to attain power. And she has demonstrated she’s willing to go far beyond that.

Gabbard may not be in the room when the big decisions about war are being made. But she’s prosecuting her own war on the truth to score retaliation for Trump. To date, her war has targeted a handful of people whom Trump craves to see crushed. But with her focus also on elections, it’s a war that could affect the future of American democracy.