Mojo/Mother Jones

===

TARGET POSO HEGSETH 12 25

wow not much here given key art'ls bush 43?

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/

see nar xian nat?

===

-=-=

RWW --> MOJO

ON n Monday, federal authorities announced the arrest in California of at least 11 people, and charges against 28, alleging they registered to vote as noncitizens. Months of fears around the presence of federal agents at the polls and the use of armed immigration enforcement to affect national elections appear to be coming to fruition, despite the Trump administration’s inability to field meaningful evidence for claims of voter fraud or substantial voting by noncitizens.

The initiative, dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote,” comes in the lead-up to the midterm elections, where the Trump administration is making good on threats to weaponize the Justice Department and other federal entities in its favor over claims of supposed voter fraud. On Tuesday, the federal government sent election officials in Los Angeles County an unverified list of 20,000 people it claims are “likely noncitizens” registered to vote in California. As the New York Post first reported Monday, federal agents used the list to make the more than two dozen targeted arrests on the basis of its voter fraud allegations.

The Justice Department said in its Monday press release that federal law enforcement arrested “11 foreign nationals” against whom it will level criminal charges, including that they “fraudulently registered to vote in U.S. elections, electoral contests in which most of them cast illegal and fraudulently obtained ballots.”

The 11 arrestees are among 28 people the department officially charged—and all are from its list of 20,000 targets in the election. The press release claims that every person targeted is a legal permanent resident of the US but not a citizen.

“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen,” said Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter. “California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”

According to Reuters, federal authorities gave election officials 48 hours to review the list and withhold ballots or face legal action. The officials rejected the demand, and the Justice Department sued for a court order to prevent California from counting ballots from the 20,000 people on its list. The Trump administration has since threatened local officials who process those ballots with criminal investigation and prosecution.

“Noncitizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime, and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally unlawful,” McCotter wrote in a letter to county officials and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that was obtained by the Associated Press. “If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

“Protecting American elections from criminal interference remains a top priority,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X, in reference to the New York Post report. “We will use every legal resource to hold those who violate our election laws accountable and defend every American citizen’s constitutional right to vote."

THE Trump administration’s operation in California, along with its long history of voter suppression—which my colleagues at Mother Jones have reported on at length—will not have an impact confined to California, or to the people on the Justice Department list. The voting public’s fear of subsequent actions, based on further unverified claims, cannot be separated from ICE’s track record of raiding first and asking questions later, a practice that has yielded the detention of hundreds of US citizens, repeatedly involving serious physical harm.

Even if the federal government sticks to its claim that it will not station federal agents at polling places, it is taking actions with indistinguishable, potentially further-reaching effects—in an election in which millions of ballots are already being cast.

-=-=

---

MOJO

Donald Trump’s network of family businesses—and network of US government deals with those businesses—is mind-bogglingly wide. A *New York Times*investigation reveals his sons’ latest venture: tungsten mining in Kazakhstan.

The US government recently cut a massive mining deal for the critical mineral with the government of Kazakhstan, whose leader recently said Donald Trump was “sent by Heaven.” Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr., and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, are all tied directly or indirectly to the American company, Kaz Resources, that plans to break ground on the tungsten mine. Kaz Resources is also slated to receive at least $1.6 billion in government funding.

Tungsten, a mineral widely used in missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips, has become increasingly difficult for the US to access since China put export restrictions on it in 2025. Since then, the Pentagon has selected contractors to build small tungsten refineries on US military bases, while also looking to expand overseas mining—because no onshore mines are currently operational, and likely won’t be for a long time. And those offshore mining deals may mean big money for Trump and Lutnick-affiliated companies: at least 14 different companies affiliated with one or both families are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals.

The Kazakh deal was signed on November 6th, without disclosing the Trump or Lutnick families’ involvement. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Brandon Lutnick and Kyle Lutnick were “doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history,” Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton of theTimes wrote.

“I can see how the optics might be disturbing to some people,” Pini Althaus, the CEO of Kaz Resources, said. “But that’s unfortunate because this company and this project goes way beyond any one president, let alone any family.”

---

[### I Asked the Pentagon About Pete Hegseth's Mentor. Then ...

Mother Jones

https://www.motherjones.com › politics › 2025/12 › eri...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/eric-geressy-goodreads-pentagon-dod-pete-hegseth-jack-posobiec-threat/)

4 days ago — Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.” That was one of several false and wildly ...See more

Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”

That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”

I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.

Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my inquiries…This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.

I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. [chinese national?]I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.

The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

Posobiec’s email claimed I have “a history of objectifying women,” and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.

Posobiec’s questions suggested one of his “two sources” may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago. Contrary to the email’s depiction, that relationship was perfectly amicable at the time. But it was part of some personal messiness, especially around the end of my first marriage, that is embarrassing.

My first instinct was to laugh this off. Who cares what the Pizzagate guy writes? But getting lied about by someone with 3 million X followers is not that funny. Comet Ping Pong never housed a Democratic pedophilia ring in its basement. But that didn’t make it less dangerous when the restaurant was targeted by QAnon crazies, including a guy who fired an AR-15 into a room that had just been full of kids.

I have done reporting that angered other well-known figures on the right—Roger Stone, Miles Guo, Steve Bannon—and that drew some doxxing and half-assed personal attacks from their allies. But I am not famous. Who cares about me?

The threatened audience for the smear, clearly, was my peers—and my wife. It seemed meant to scare me into spiking my own story. That is not journalism, but an attack on journalism.

This apparent threat became more explicit as the possible publication date we had given the Pentagon approached. In tweets, Posobiec asked his followers if he should publish a story about mistreatment of women by a “DC-area liberal reporter.” After our possible publication date passed, though, he went quiet.

That left my editors and me with a problem. Here was what we believed to be an attempt to strong-arm Mother Jones, and perhaps an expansion of the administration’s war on the press. This was news. But the development also complicated an already tricky story. And if we delayed publication, or decided the story was not important enough to run, we risked leaving the impression that we, and I, had been intimidated into silence.

We knew that we would not drop the article because of Posobiec’s ploy, nor rush into running it before we were ready. Instead, we did what reporters are supposed to do when confronted with a journalism dilemma: more journalism.

My emails to the Pentagon and Geressy were part of an effort to check the information we had gathered. We wanted their side of the story. My questions went largely unanswered, but I kept asking. I talked to more people. And I worked to verify the information we had.

We had linked the Goodreads account to Geressy based on various pieces of identifying information, including an email address he had used. The account was listed under the username Eric J—Geressy’s middle name is Joseph. At one point, the page noted that Eric J lived in a specific Florida town, which matched Geressy’s known residence. Also, some of the non-erotic books displayed on the account were seemingly of interest to him; they included books, like Hegseth’s The War on Warriors, that mention Geressy’s military service. These titles appeared on the page between 2021 and July of this year.

Screenshot of the Goodreads page linked to Geressy’s email address. The page was deleted after we asked him and the Pentagon about it.

The same email address was also linked to other apps, including Yelp and MyFitnessPal, that appeared to be Geressy’s, along with a MySpace page that includes what looks like a photograph of him.

Geressy declined to comment, and did not confirm he had a Goodreads account. In theory that made it possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have used his email account, obtained through a hack or other means, to set up the Goodreads account. So we tried to rule out that possibility.

I spoke to Nathaniel Fried, the CEO of OSINT Industries. That’s a British organization whose platform matches personal information such as emails and phone numbers to online accounts; we had relied on this platform to connect Geressy’s email address to the Goodreads account. Fried said that while OSINT can’t tell you for sure who signed up, “it’s 100 percent that that email has an account.” In other words, either Geressy or someone using his email and personal information created the account.

I also asked Amazon, which owns Goodreads, about the account. After much back and forth, the company said it did not currently have a record of an account linked to Geressy, or the email address he appears to have used. But they also said that they do not retain identifying information for deleted Goodreads accounts. Since the account linked to Geressy had been deleted weeks before, right after I reached out to the Pentagon and Geressy for comment, this statement gave us little new information. Overall, Amazon’s carefully parsed response did nothing to refute the connection.

“It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you. It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”

Still, none of that fully bore on the main consideration. That is, whether personal reading tastes, past relationships, or apparent dating habits are worth reporting on. After extensive discussion, we decided that in this case, they are.

For one thing, former national security officials told us that for Pentagon personnel in particular, relationships with foreign partners are a major concern.

Geressy lived in 2016 with a woman who evidence suggests may be a Chinese national. That woman started a limited liability company during that time with a name that references Chinese investment. It was registered at Geressy’s home address, then dissolved a few months later. (I am omitting some specifics to avoid including identifying information.) The Pentagon said that Geressy has never been deemed a security risk. But it did not provide verifiable answers to questions about whether that relationship and company were examined as part of Geressy’s security clearance review. Neither did Geressy.

Geressy has had what appears to be a stormy personal life that has included three marriages. In 1997, a jury acquitted him of a domestic violence charge after an accusation by his then-wife, according to court records.

Email addresses Geressy used, and other identifying information, including his first name and biographical information, also appeared in three data breaches, between 2011 and 2016, of adult websites geared toward finding sexual partners, according to databases that include the hacked data. Those sites are Fling, AdultFriendFinder, which then called itself “the World’s Largest Sex & Swinger Community,” and Ashley Madison, which billed itself as “the most famous name in infidelity.”

The presence of Geressy’s email and other information in these data breaches does not confirm he used these sites, according to cyber researchers.

But as John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, told Mother Jones, in normal circumstances, a government official who might be involved with such websites and who had romantic relationships with foreigners would draw scrutiny. “It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you,” Sipher said. “It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”

And there is a second point. Geressy is a top official in a Defense Department that has booted trans people from the military based on President Trump’s executive order that argues that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Geressy is not responsible for trans policy, but he is part of a Pentagon leadership that concerns itself with subordinates’ private lives.

Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger.

In The War on Warriors, one of the books on the Goodreads page linked to Geressy, Hegesth cited his mentor to support the position that women should not serve in combat roles. “From my perspective,” Hegseth quoted Geressy as saying, circa 2007, “overwhelmingly most females want nothing to do with combat arms.” According to Hegseth, Geressy had argued that the Army had unfairly awarded medals to some women who had served in combat. “If SGM Geressy was a transvestite—or gay, or black, or a woman,” Hegseth wrote, “he would have three Distinguished Service Crosses and be on the front of a Wheaties box.”

The Pentagon is already beset by scandals in which top officials, most notably Hegseth himself, have been accused of conduct that falls short of the standards it demands of other Defense Department officials and service members. Critics have argued that for lower-ranking personnel, actions like Hegseth sharing military plans outside of approved channels, or the adultery he during confirmation hearings, would result in firing. The racy selections on the Goodreads account linked to Geressy’s email may be comparatively minor. But that a public page listing such titles existed until we flagged it adds to the impression that the department’s leadership is not only hypocritical, but inept.

Hegseth has reacted furiously to reporting on some of his missteps. He has raged over coverage of his sharing of plans for bombing targets in Yemen with a Signal group that included the editor of the Atlantic. (The department’s inspector general reported that Hegseth’s actions could have put US troops at risk.) He fired aides accused of leaking news of a plan to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing on US war plans versus China. Posobiec’s email came as the Pentagon took an increasingly hostile stance toward the media.

Kingsley Wilson, a former conservative influencer who is the department’s press secretary, told me that she did not speak to Posobiec about my story and did not believe Parnell did either. Posobiec also denied coordinating with the Pentagon. Geressy did not respond to a question about it.

But it came amid broader pushback to our reporting. “This is a garbage story made up of false allegations, decades-old claims that proved untrue, and disgusting innuendo aimed at smearing a man who was awarded the Army’s second-highest military honor for extraordinary heroism in combat,” Parnell said.

That response is consistent with the combative press relations posture of the second Trump administration. Shortly before, when a reporter asked the White House press secretary to identify who had suggested Trump meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, she responded: “Your mom did.”

Similar truculence drives the Defense Department’s recent decision to force outlets that assign reporters to the Pentagon to agree to a policy that bars reporters from revealing news the department does not authorize. Most news organizations refused. (The New York Times recently sued the Pentagon, arguing that the policy violates the First Amendment.) Posobiec is among a group of pro-Trump influencers who accepted the restrictive terms. The result is that the new press corps the Pentagon grants access to is largely composed of far-right activists.

The Pentagon press shop maintains close ties to its newly constituted press corps. Wilson, the department’s press secretary, occasionally appears on a program Posobiec hosts. In an October episode, she thanked him for agreeing to the department’s restrictions. “Now we get to have incredible journalists like yourself who are going to be here in the Pentagon reporting on what the Department of War is doing every single day,” she said.

On Wednesday night, after weeks of silence, I heard from Posobiec again. He said he was “finalizing my story,” and wanted to know if me, my wife, “or your in-laws” wished to comment. His message arrived an hour and forty minutes after I wrote to Geressy, posing some last questions and telling him I was “finalizing this story.”

Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger. It threatens to make us bad at our jobs. It can be harder work to treat people whom we cover critically like complete human beings, people who deserve empathy and a real chance to explain themselves. If the department yanks credentials for tough reporting, if a press secretary just attacks a story without engaging with questions, and if inquiries draw personal attacks, why give spokespeople, or the officials they work for, any opportunity to respond at all?

The answer, I think, is that in journalism, like everywhere else, we should treat people the way we want to be treated. This story, with its weird personal twist, drove home that necessity. By proposing to smear me, Posobiec inadvertently provided a reminder of how responsible reporters ought to act.

I have worked to be fair—and honest. This attempt won’t appease the Pentagon or the people who threatened me. And the choice here, between appearing to be coerced into silence or maybe getting slandered, lacks an option that doesn’t feel shitty.

But what I can control are the standards I aim for. Those are ultimately up to me. But they reflect the values of Mother Jones, and the influence of other journalists, one of whom is my wife. She makes the judgment I’ll live with.

[### The Brand-New Pentagon Press Corps Is Gaga for Hegseth

The Intercept

https://theintercept.com › 2025/12/13 › hegseth-new-pe...](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/13/hegseth-new-pentagon-press-reporters/)

2 days ago — After nearly all legacy news organizations declined to sign on to Hegseth's rules, the new Pentagon press corps is all his cheerleaders.

[### Hegseth team invites far-right activist Jack Posobiec on ...

The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com › ... › Military](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/13/pete-hegseth-jack-posobiec/)

Feb 13, 2025 — Trump administration officials at the Pentagon invited a far-right activist, Jack Posobiec, to participate in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's first trip ...See more

---

an 11 25 tim snyder orig is not in const

IFrame Content

Mother Jones writers Pema Levy and Ari Berman say that President Donald Trump "owes his corrupt and abusive reign to one man" — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

"Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes," they write.

"His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law," they add.

But Roberts wasn't what he seemed, they say.

"The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions — to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census — in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy," they write.

Roberts, they say, is the sole reason for Trump's authoritarian streak.

"Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up," they write.

"The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way," they add.

Among the lawless actions Roberts has allowed: "firing independent agency commissioners, using racial profiling in immigration sweeps, disappearing immigrants to authoritarian and war-torn nations, and defying Congress’ power of the purse," they note.

But Roberts' "acquiescence to an anti-democratic America" isn't new, noting he "has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy."

Ryan Doerfler, a Harvard Law professor who studies the judiciary’s role in a democratic system, says that "You really can trace, in so many ways, the moment we’re in to critical decisions surrounding our law of democracy."

And much of that began with Roberts, who, "over the last five decades, has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would 'lead to a quota system in all areas,'" the Mother Jones writers explain.

"In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance — if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out — by writing in Rucho v. Common Causethat federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them 'political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,'" they explain.

The writers also note that "Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people — he handed it to billionaires."

His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC "lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not 'lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.' Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold," they note.

That decision is "a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return," they add.

In his nearly five decades in law, Roberts, they write, "didn’t wait till he was on the Supreme Court to empower Republican presidents — he auditioned for the job by showing his willingness to break the rules and come through for his team."

And under Trump, "we are now operating under a Robertsian reimagining of the separation of powers, in which laws passed by Congress are mere suggestions for a monarchical president," they explain.

"Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts," they add. "His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation."

The writers agree, saying, today's court under Roberts "will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only."

---

an 11 25

Seven states are one flood away from a toxic sludge site spilling into the community.

Mother Jones reported Friday, "Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for 80 percent" of the sites. "Most of this risk is already locked in."

More than 5,500 toxic sites across the U.S. could face coastal flooding by 2100, threatening to spill contaminants into surrounding neighborhoods within the lifetimes of Generations Alpha and Beta, new research warns.

Scientists at the University of California found that a wide range of hazardous facilities are vulnerable, including sites handling sewage, toxic waste, oil, gas and other pollutants that are not fully protected from sea level rise and severe flooding.

"After examining 23 coastal states and Puerto Rico, scientists found that flood risk is far from evenly distributed. Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for nearly 80 percent of the hazardous sites expected to be at risk by 2100," the report said.

The project examined 47,600 coastal facilities in the U.S., finding that about 5,500 are at risk of frequent flooding that could send toxic materials into nearby communities.

Current environmental safeguards do little more than delay the danger. Future generations will be forced either to build stronger containment systems that can withstand flooding or face the consequences.

“Restricting greenhouse gas emissions to the low emissions scenario makes little difference in terms of the number of projected sites at risk in the near term (2050) but would reduce the number of at-risk sites from 5,500 to 5,138 (a reduction of 362 or 7 percent of sites) in the long term," the scientists found.

Read the full study at Nature Communications.

---

===

said release, then 180 then shut down hse

an 7 25

During a press conference on Tuesday morning, July 22, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) announced that he was cutting the week's legislative activities short and sending lawmakers in order avoid a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. And he blamed Democrats, accusing them of "endless efforts to politicize the Epstein investigation" and adding, "We're not going to play political games with this."

Johnson's announcement drew plenty of criticism online, with many social media users accusing him of running interference for President Donald Trump.

Mother Jones' Kiera Butler, in a biting article, argues that far-right "Christian nationalism" is influencing that decision and others from the House speaker.

"On Tuesday," Butler explains, "House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a departure from his previous calls for transparency, announced that he would not ask for a vote on whether the files pertaining to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be released…. It's impossible to truly know what prompted Johnson's about-face, but it's worth noting that he has long been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation — a charismatic evangelical movement that teaches that Christians are called to take 'dominion' over all aspects of society, including the government. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that NAR has had a 'profound influence' on his life, according to a report issued by the Congressional Freethought Caucus last year."

IFrame Content

Butler adds, "It's also worth noting that arguably the most influential and visible NAR leader, a Texas business strategist named Lance Wallnau, has been outspoken in recent weeks in his defense of Trump on the Epstein issue. On July 14, Wallnau told his 100,000 YouTube followers that he believed that Trump was acting in the best interest of the country by not releasing the files."

The Mother Jones reporter notes, however, that Wallnau isn't the only far-right evangelical "Christian nationalist influencer" who is closely allied with MAGA Republicans.

"Another prominent Christian nationalist influencer, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, has also arrived at a belief in Trump's innocence —but from a different perspective," Butler observes. "Webbon isn’t connected with the NAR like Johnson and Wallnau — instead, he's a member of the TheoBros, a network of Christian nationalist Millennial influencers. Many of them believe that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, and that the Ten Commandments should replace the U.S. Constitution."

Butler continues, "Like NAR, the TheoBros are also well-connected to Republican politicians. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a TheoBros-aligned church, and (Vice President JD) Vance has socialized with members of the movement as well."

Webbon, according to Butler, isn't shy about expressing "antisemitic views."

In a November 2, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter, Webbon wrote, "I hate Judaism, but I love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity. If you really want to know my full thoughts on the modern nation/state of Israel, you can watch the new series I recently published with @BonifaceOption…. Christ Is King."

Webbon told Mother Jones he stands by "everything I've said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil."

*Kiera Butler's full article for Mother Jones is available at this link.

IFrame Content

---

an 12 24 mojo

I was a rotten high school student, a shirker and smart-ass of the first rank. I even found myself purged from a typing class for bad behavior—an event I regret to this precise moment, since touch-typing is obviously a convenient skill for someone in my profession. Afterward, I had to choose another "elective." Naturally, I seized upon home economics—in which, I hoped, I'd spend my time amusing girls with wisecracks and whipping up desserts from boxed mixes. If memory serves, that's exactly how it played out—especially the bit about the just-add-water confections. Mmmm, instant cake.

In other words, I retained just as much from my home ec class as I did from my failed stint as a student of the keyboard: which is to say, nothing. Yet Ruth Graham's recent Boston Globe essay "Bring back home ec! The case for a revival of the most retro class in school"strikes me as spot on. Graham isn't talking about the home ec of my misspent '80s youth, nor that of quaint stereotypes featuring "visions of future homemakers quietly whisking white sauce or stitching rickrack onto an apron."

She means a revitalized, contemporary home economics for all genders, one capable of at least exposing youth to basic skills that so many adults (i.e., their parents) lack: "to shop intelligently, cook healthily, [and] manage money." And I think such a reimagined home ec should move from the shadowy margins it now occupies—the field has been rebranded as "Family and Consumer Science," Graham reports—and become mandatory for all high school kids, and—why not?—even elementary school ones.

I have witnessed firsthand the vexed state of basic cooking skills among the young. When I helped run the kitchen at Maverick Farms for seven years, I noticed that most of our interns couldn't chop an onion or turn even just-picked produce into a reasonably good dish in a reasonable amount of time. And these were people motivated enough about food to intern at a small farm in rural North Carolina. If I had their cooking skills, I'd be tempted to resort to takeout often, just to save time.

It's true that in my home ec class nearly a quarter century ago, we weren't taught how to handle a knife or follow a simple recipe for a from-scratch dish. But home ec wasn't always so vapid. Graham points to New York Times reporter Michael Moss' great 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat, which contains a brief history of the home ec trade in US public schools.

The convenience food industry that's so powerful and entrenched today was just taking root in the 1950s. And as it began to aggressively market its products to a growing US middle class, it "faced one real obstacle," Moss writes: the "army of school teachers and federal outreach workers who insisted on promoting home-cooked meals, prepared the old fashioned way."

Home ec teachers explicitly battled against the industry's claims of convenience, Moss shows. In 1957, he writes, the American Home Economics Association conducted a demo pitting a commercial cake mix against a homemade batter, Moss reports. "As reported in the association's journal, the homemade cake not only cost less and tasted better, it took only five more minutes to prepare, cook, and serve." Plus the batter could be made in advance and stored, "for quick parceling out when a cake was needed." Home-ec teachers also schooled their charges in frugal shopping, teaching them to "avoid buying things they didn't need."

Graham drops a bit more history:

If any single person could be said to be the founder of home economics, it is the formidable Ellen Swallow Richards, a Bostonian who was the first woman admitted to MIT. She served as the first president of the American Home Economics Association and was instrumental in coming up with the term "home economics," officially adopted at a conference "for the betterment of the home" in 1899, just in time for the dawn of a scientifically minded century. Though it may now seem impossible, the discipline was originally rooted in progressive and even feminist thinking. The idea was to bring scientific rigor into the home, and to professionalize women’s domestic work, bringing dignity and efficiency to both.

To rebuff this cadre of holdouts within America's schools, the food industry mobilized in two ways, Moss reports. First up was rolling out a school marmish figure called "Betty Crocker"—invented by the marketing department of the company that would become General Mills to extol the wholesomeness and ease of processed crap. The other move was a kind of leveraged buyout of the home ec trade itself: first by pouring money into grants and fellowships for the American Home Economics Association—$288,250 in 1957 alone, Moss writes—and then by "sponsoring candidates for the organization's top leadership posts, candidates who would bring a decidedly pro-industrial view to home economics."

And that is how home ec became the piece-of-instant-cake elective that I so idly enjoyed in the '80s.

But imagine a home ec that taught basic skills like how to prepare a simple pureed vegetable soup, whip up a quick, easy, and much-cheaper-than-bottled salad dressing, or stock up a pantry with inexpensive bulk staples?

Food isn't the only sphere in which millions of American adults—and the kids they are raising—find themselves swimming in a sea of ignorance, at the mercy of an industry peddling dubious wares. Another one is personal finance, as Helene Olen shows in her indispensable 2013 book Pound Foolish. Over the past two decades, what Olen calls the "personal finance industrial complex" has fooled Americans into such follies as leveraging their futures with deceptively pricey credit cards, dumping hard-earned savings into that casino called the stock market, and buying houses they can't afford and too often can't hold on

In doing so, the industry has made personal finance into something that seems impossibly complex—what the hell is a variable annuity?—and then presented gurus who simplify it along lines convenient for itself. All of that is nonsense, Olen shows. After an interviewingher about what he sees as the "financial industry's most basic dilemma," that the "best advice fits on a 3×5 index card and is available for free at the library," University of Chicago social scientist Harold Pollack actually scribbled out that card. Check it out—it's mostly about saving as much as possible and avoiding the fees of Wall Street charlatans. If those simple principles could be drummed into the heads of high school students, imagine the misery that could be avoided. And what better forum for it than new-wave home ec? After all, the home ec curricula of yore included lessons on household finance.

A revived curriculum could be broader than just food and money, Graham notes. "Even sewing is gaining a certain relevance, as consumers grow increasingly wary of disposable garments made in unregulated factories overseas," she writes. "An ambitious class could also include things like basic household plumbing or car repair." I certainly could have used those skills (though auto mechanics have gotten so complex that I think "How to choose a reliable car you can afford—or get by without one altogether" might be a better theme.)

The main obstacle between where we are now and home ec nirvana is funding, as Graham notes. Public school systems are so strapped that they're already slashing equally worthy classes like art, music, and PE. But producing generation upon generation of people who don't know how to feed themselves healthily or manage their finances is generating massive, cascading societal costs—and the pennies we pinch by not revitalizing home ec seem like a classic false economy, much like those boxed cakes the food industry was already peddling by 1957

===

2015 cost 3m$ to defend

Today we are happy to announce a monumental legal victory for Mother Jones: A judge in Idaho has ruled in our favor on all claims in a defamation case filed by a major Republican donor, Frank VanderSloot, and his company, Melaleuca Inc. In a decision issued Tuesday, the court found that Mother Jones did not defame VanderSloot or Melaleuca because “all of the statements at issue are non-actionable truth or substantial truth.” The court also found that the statements were protected as fair comment under the First Amendment.

ref BBB

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/climate-koch-brothers-lobbying-biden-build-back-better-1234815/

no lnx many

The Koch Empire Goes All Out to Sink Joe Biden’s Agenda — and His Presidency, Too

The dark-money network is spending tens of millions to undermine Democrats’ effort to protect the climate and shore up the social safety net

By ANDY KROLL & GEOFF DEMBICKI

The Koch Empire Goes All-Out to Sink Joe Biden's Agenda — and His Presidency, TooThe Koch Empire Goes All-Out to Sink Joe Biden's Agenda — and His Presidency, Too

Charles Koch, chief executive officer of Koch Industries, at the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs, 2019. (AP Photo]

With the fate of President Biden’s domestic agenda in the balance, an armada of right-wing dark-money groups aligned with the Koch political network is mobilizing to sink Biden’s $3.5-trillion Build Back Better plan and deal a devastating blow to his presidency.

The Koch network is one of the most extensive and well-funded political and policy operations in the country, having pledged to spend more than a billion dollars in the past four election cycles. The web of nonprofit groups funded by or affiliated with the Koch network — dubbed the “Kochtopus” by critics — broadly promotes an anti-government, libertarian-style vision for American life. In most cases, the donors who bankroll the network’s groups remain anonymous, playing a central role in the spike in dark-money spending in American politics.

RELATED STORIES

Democrats Got Serious About Taxing The Rich. Then Manchin Got Ready To Spike It

Trump Is Now Asking Putin to Dig Up Dirt on the Biden Family]

Koch-backed groups fiercely opposed Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and his cap-and-trade climate bill, successfully weakening the former and helping to kill the latter. The network’s groups have different mandates and focuses, including foreign policy, health care, and energy. At times, their libertarian leanings have found them making common cause with progressive groups — including by pushing to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to criticize government-mandated bans on racial-justice curriculums. But with a Democrat back in the White House, the Koch network of late has largely unified behind a push to stop Biden‘s agenda.

Koch-aligned groups are together spending millions of dollars on advertising, targeting moderate Democratic lawmakers, and pushing their influence in the halls of Congress to whittle down or outright kill the sweeping policy package, which would represent the largest expansion of the social safety net in the past 50 years and the biggest step toward addressing climate change in U.S. history.

“Fighting the reconciliation bill is a top priority for Charles Koch’s surrogates,” says Connor Gibson, founder of the corporate watchdog organization Grassrootbeer Investigations, who has spent years tracking Koch influence in the United States. “This is a viable threat for his network, and we can see that all the tentacles of the Kochtopus are out in full force trying to stop it from passing.”

This lobbying blitz comes at a critical moment for Biden’s agenda. Democratic leaders in Congress have pushed for a two-track strategy to pass a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill paired with the much larger $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act, which contains many of the signature policies Biden campaigned on as a presidential candidate. Those policies include hundreds of billions of new spending on universal prekindergarten, major expansions to child-care and home health-care programs, free community college, and the biggest-ever investments in renewable energies, electric cars, and other climate-focused policies. But for the larger bill to pass, it’ll need to get through a closely divided House and get unanimous support from the 50 Senate Democrats, including centrists such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

While the Koch network refused to support Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the dozens of groups who receive funding or support from the network spent heavily to elect Republican governors, House members, and U.S. senators. AFP Action, the Super PAC affiliate of the Koch network’s flagship group Americans for Prosperity, spent $47 million last year, all of it to elect Republicans and defeat Democrats in high-profile races. The PAC tied to the Libre Initiative, a Koch affiliate focused on Hispanic Americans, spent $1.3 million in other key races across the country, often to great effect.

After the Democratic Party took control of the House and Senate, albeit by slim majorities, the Koch network set its sights on the pillars of Biden’s policy agenda. Just days after the two Georgia Senate runoff victories, Koch operatives held a private conference call to strategize about how to kill a top Democratic policy priority, theFor the People Act, the most ambitious election-reform bill since Watergate. As the New Yorker reported, an official with Stand Together,a Koch-backed nonprofit, conceded that the bill’s provision requiring greater transparency of dark money was so popular that the Koch network and its allies couldn’t mount a public-pressure campaign to stop — instead, they would have to play the inside game, mounting a lobbying blitz targeting members of Congress if they wanted to stop the bill. Now, the Koch network has an even more sweeping piece of legislation in its sights, the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic policy agenda, the Build Back Better Act.

The tip of the spear for the Koch network in this pressure campaign is Americans for Prosperity. Led by longtime Koch operative Tim Phillips, AFP is spending seven figures on TV and digital ads opposing not only Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act but also the bipartisan infrastructure deal awaiting a vote in the House of Representatives.

AFP has adopted another tactic aimed at making Biden’s domestic agenda unpopular — hitching Biden’s plans with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a progressive leader, while claiming that the Build Back Better package is the biggest spending bill in American history. One AFP ad says Biden’s policy package is “the last thing we need to recover from this pandemic,” adding, “Tell Congress to stop the Biden-Sanders spending spree.” The ads appear onFacebook, Google platforms (including YouTube), and on TV stations across the country.

The Koch-backed LIBRE Initiative is running ads against the reconciliation package in Texas, Florida, and Arizona “to inform Latinos about the negative effects of overspending and overtaxing.” The group’s president, Daniel Garza, explains in a release that he intends to “mobilize our grassroots army of volunteers and activists to hold our elected officials accountable.”

Yet another group with long-standing Koch network ties, the 60 Plus Association, has launched a multimillion-dollar ad blitz focused on the prescription-drug-reform policies in the Build Back Better Act. Founded in 1992, 60 Plus was originally conceived as the conservative movement’s answer to the AARP; over the years, it’s taken millions from Koch nonprofit groups and been used to attack Obamacare and Democratic candidates for office.Indeed, almost two decades ago, 60 Plus lobbied to eliminate Medicare’s ability to negotiate with drugmakers during a previous battle over drug prices.

In its new ad blitz, 60 Plus claims that the provisions included in Biden’s plan to allow for greater drug-price negotiation in Medicare would cause benefits for Medicare recipients to be slashed and make medication harder to obtain for doctors. Like AFP, 60 Plus describes the Biden plan as an “out-of-control spending spree.” However, PolitiFact slapped this claim by 60 Plus with a “False” rating, citing health care experts who said giving the government the ability to negotiate with drug companies shouldn’t lead to reduced access to key drugs for Medicare patients.

All told, these and more than 100 other similar groups, many of them linked to Koch, are mobilizing to fight the spending bill. “As your committee begins marking up the$3.5 trillion reckless tax-and-spend reconciliation proposal,” this large right-wing coalition said in a letter earlier this month to top congressional Democrats, “we write in opposition to any effort to raise taxes on American families and businesses.”

The threat comes not only in the form of corporate tax increases — although the financial impact could be substantial, given thatTrump-era tax cuts potentially saved the Koch brothers up to $1.4 billion, according to estimates from the group Americans for Tax Fairness; many of the Koch-backed groups fighting Biden’s spending package are also deeply concerned about the ambitious climate provisions the package contains.

Proposed policies include expanding tax credits for electric vehicles, as well as provisions pushing utilities to use clean energy instead of fossil fuels. Add up all the climate impacts, and this could reduce America’s carbon footprint by nearly 1 gigaton worth of greenhouse gas emissions, the research firm Rhodium Group estimates. This would represent some of the most significant action ever taken on climate change in the U.S.

But what’s good for the planet is potentially terrible for Koch’s bottom line. The Koch Industries subsidiary Flint Hills Resources, for instance, operates the largest oil refinery in Minnesota, capable of processing more than 300,000 barrels per day of crude oil, predominantly from the Canadian tar sands. The refinery is fed by a Koch-owned pipeline network spanning more than 500 miles.

“Charles Koch has so many different layers of interest in fossil fuel and petrochemical production that the Biden administration’s bill could cause the costs of his businesses to increase, and therefore his profits would drop,” Gibson explains.

Fighting climate action has for this reason long been a top policy priority for Koch’s network — and it’s animating dark-money opposition to the current $3.5 trillion spending package.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation calls the spending package’s climate provisions “incredibly expensive and harmful anti-energy policies that will cripple our economy, increase our dependence on foreign oil, and increase cost of living, especially for the poorest Americans.” The Austin-based think tank has received at least $3.6 million from foundations linked to Koch since 1998, the watchdog group Desmog calculates.

One of the signatories of the coalition letter opposing the plan isMyron Ebell, a Koch-linked energy punditand professional climate-change skeptic. As recently as 2016, Ebell said that while he now acknowledges climate change is real, he doesn’t think it’s a “rapid or a serious problem.”

The Koch crew is also stoking fears of inflation and skyrocketing prices for consumers if the bill passes. “Prices are rising everywhere, from the gas pump to the grocery store,” AFP recently tweeted.

Opponents of Biden’s Covid-19 relief measures and his domestic policy agenda have raised fears of inflation as a result of so much government spending. But earlier this month, a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists published an open letter that argued inflation wasn’t nearly as big of a concern. More important, they wrote, was “reversing years of disinvestment in public goods and addressing the country’s long-term needs — including building toward sustainable and inclusive growth and facilitating our clean energy transition.”

The dark-money groups mobilizing against the plan don’t seem to care. The country might have problems — including soaring inequality and a collapsing climate — but, for the Koch empire, that’s just the cost of doing business.

In This Article: Charles Koch, Climate Change, Joe Biden

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/latest-senate-hearing-social-media-bias-was-just-another-example-right-wingers-working

parker m

On Wednesday, the Senate commerce committee held a hearing about content moderation on social media platforms, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were called as witnesses. The hearing was ostensibly about possible reform to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, but the goal of the Republican senators who called it was clearly to influence how these platforms enforce their policies in the days leading up to and following next week’s elections.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went so far as to promote the hearing like some type of boxing match between himself (“the free speech champion”) and Dorsey (“the czar of censorship”), and he used his speaking time to berate the CEO for their content moderation policies.

The hearing served as a public forum for conservatives to work the refs, accusing these platforms of having anti-conservative bias in an effort to spur more favorable treatment. Of course, there isn’t actually anti-conservative bias on social media platforms -- quite the opposite, actually.

A new nine-month Media Matters study of Facebook pages posting political content found that right-leaning pages outperformed left-leaning and politically neutral pages in the number of average weekly interactions they accrued. Studies published in August 2019, April 2019, and July 2018 found similar disparities or equal performance. Past studies of Facebook have found that conservative pages dominate liberal and neutral pages on topics including abortion, immigration, and transgender issues, as well. While Zuckerberg may deny that Facebook is a “right-wing echo chamber,” his belief isn’t supported by the facts.

In fact, Zuckerberg has made repeated overtures to the right when conservatives claim to be the victims of bias on the platform. Zuckerberg hired lifelong Republican operatives to head global policy and election policy initiatives, and earlier this year he hired a former *Fox & Friends* senior producer to head video strategy for Facebook News. A February Washington Post report outlined some of the many ways Zuckerberg has tried to appease conservatives, which included the torpedoing of a plan to address fake news websites, the politically motivated inclusion of Breitbart in its news tab program, and meetings with the likes of Corey Lewandowski, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and a bevy of conservative commentators in 2016.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg talks regularly with White House senior advisor Jared Kushner and has built a relationship with Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, whose content happens to be some of the most shared on the entire platform. That same Wall Street Journal report showed that Facebook’s actions to help conservatives had the effect of reducing traffic to left-leaning outlets like Mother Jones.

Even with all of this evidence showing how Facebook supports them, conservatives still play the role of victims. It will never, ever be good enough for them.

“What we are watching -- the militarization of social media on behalf of Democrats, and the overt suppression of material damaging to Democrats to the cheering of the press -- is one of the single most dangerous political moments I have ever seen,” Shapiro wrote on Twitter, seemingly oblivious to the way social media companies promote his content at the expense of liberal articles.

Evidence of anti-conservative bias is always thin, based on faulty comparisons, or just outright false. During the hearing, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) brought up a recent Media Research Center report that claimed that Trump was “censored” 65 times on social media. This was a particularly weak and easily debunked point, and it goes to show just how much of a reach conservatives are making when they claim to be the victims of bias.

Conservatives have called tech CEOs in front of Congress over and over and over and over, usually under the guise of an anti-trust hearing or a chance to comment on reforming Section 230. But they’re clearly interested only in trying to coerce these companies into giving them an advantage.

sinclair national reporters have repeatedly pushed right-wing lies about supposed social media platform bias

10/27/20 4:47 PM EDT

A new study finds that Facebook is not censoring conservatives despite their repeated attacks

10/28/20 10:17 AM EDT

Some pro-gun Facebook pages are fearmongering about mass violence from the left after the election

10/26/20 11:44 AM EDT

===

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-lists/climate-enemies-ceos-oilmen-politicians-975667/robert-mercer-mercer-family-foundation-975703/

===

Rolling Stone

POLITICS LISTS

MARCH 31, 2020

Climate Enemies: The Men Who Sold the World

The CEOs, oilmen, financiers, politicians, and ideologues who are robbing us of a stable climate

By RYAN BORT

Climate change is going to dramatically alter life on the planet in the coming decades. Just how dramatically will depend on how aggressively governments and businesses move to correct the practices that over the past century have filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, some bad actors are not only failing to address the crisis, they’re actively exacerbating it. Here’s a list of America’s worst offenders, from fossil-fuel industry magnates, to investment gurus, to the president himself.

Donald J. Trump, President of the United States

Trump has been a godsend for the fossil-fuel industry, gutting the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior while stocking each agency with former fossil-fuel-industry executives and lobbyists. He has auctioned off millions of acres of public land to oil-and-gas drilling and rolled back close to 100 environmental regulations, paving the way for 200 million more tons of carbon to be pumped into the atmosphere per year. But Trump insists he’s one of the good guys. “I’m an environmentalist,” he said last fall after bailing on a climate-focused meeting of the G-7. “A lot of people don’t understand that. I think I know more about the environment than most people.”

Andrew Wheeler, Administrator of the EPA

Since taking the helm of the EPA in 2018, Wheeler has curtailed the agency’s ability to use scientific data when establishing regulations, rolled back clean-water protections that prevented polluters from dumping chemicals in streams and wetlands, and waged campaigns to strip numerous emissions regulations — from checks on methane to tailpipe-exhaust restrictions in California. He came to the EPA after spending years as a fossil-fuel-industry lobbyist. “Wheeler is the embodiment of the anti-regulatory ‘deep state’ in Washington,” Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, told us in 2018. “He’s playing the long game. And that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous.”

Rupert Murdoch, International Media Mogul

The billionaire executive chair of News Corp. and founder of Fox News, Murdoch started a network of media properties that has been instrumental in the propagation of climate-change skepticism, both in America and abroad. As climate-fueled wildfires decimated his home country of Australia, Murdoch’s outlets spread disinformation — The Australian dismissed the fires as “nothing new.” It’s even worse in the U.S., whereFox News has been a platform for climate deniers for years. In 2019 alone, its guests called climate science “fake,” argued the climate is bound to change “with the Earth rotating at 1,000 miles per hour,” and claimed that pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere couldn’t be bad because “we exhale carbon dioxide.”

Robert Mercer, The Mercer Family Foundation

Billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who directs the Mercer Family Foundation, have spread millions of dollars across America’s most influential climate-science-denying groups, including the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute. Tax filings made public in December showed they scaled back such donations in 2018, but they did send more than $8 million to Donors Trust, a Koch-funded dark-money group, and $300,000 to the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, whose founder Arthur Robinson, an “alt-science” pioneer, once said increasing CO2 levels would result in a “host of beneficial effects” for the environment.

Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

The “Oracle of Omaha” is a little shortsighted when it comes to the climate crisis. The billionaire financial guru has long been pumping money into the fossil-fuel industry, and it doesn’t look like he has plans to stop. In 2019, Buffett invested $10 billion in Occidental Petroleum’s interest in the Permian Basin, marveling to CNBC how “incredible” it is that the region is producing 4 million barrels of oil a day. He’s rationalized his climate-killing investments by arguing that his first priority is to enrich his shareholders, not save the environment. Nevertheless, Buffett has described the climate crisis as “an incredibly important subject.” Thanks for your concern, Warren.

Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries

Koch Industries pumped more than 25 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2017, according to a University of Massachusetts study, more than Chevron, BP, and a host of other fossil-fuel-industry powerhouses. Charles, 84, and his brother David (who died in 2019) began funding climate denial long before the crisis went mainstream. In 1991, Charles’ Cato Institute hosted a conference for skeptics titled “Global Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?”They continued to work to prevent congressional action on climate change for decades, founding and funding anti-science advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners. As Kochland author Christopher Leonard wrote for The New York Times in 2019, the Kochs’ “unrivaled” political influence machine “has been employed to great effect to ensure that no government action is taken to control greenhouse gas emissions.”

Myron Ebell, US President Trump's environment advisor, leaves number 10 Downing Street after meeting with government officials.Myron Ebell meeting at Downing Street, London, UK - 31 Jan 2017

Myron Ebell, Professional Climate-Change Skeptic

Ebell has made a career out of casting doubt on climate science (though he has no scientific training himself), most notably through his role at the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that has taken millions from the fossil-fuel industry. In 2016, he led Trump’s transition team at the EPA, helping to put in place a team to dismantle Obama’s policies, and he has continued to advocate for harmful rollbacks like replacing the landmark Clean Power Plan with weaker regulations.

Robert Murray Robert Murray, chief executive of Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp., speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Huntington, Utah. Murray Energy alleges in an Illinois lawsuit against rival Williamson Energy LLC that after it shared its confidential business plans with Williamson during a deal that later fizzled, Williamson used the proprietary details to buy up enough southern Illinois land to thwart the accuser's expansion plansCoal Mining Lawsuit, Huntington, USA

Robert Murray, Founder of Murray Energy

The founder and former CEO of Murray Energy saw his coal behemoth — which, as America’s largest privately owned coal company, produced 76 million tons of coal annually — go bankrupt in 2019, but Murray’s influence extends beyond his floundering dirty-energy company. For years, he pumped money into a diverse portfolio of conservative groups that continue to push disinformation about the climate crisis. Murray also had an oversize influence on Trump’s climate policy, donating $300,000 to his inaugural committee before handing the president a literal wish list of rollback requests, many of which were dutifully carried out by the administration.

Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, United States Senators from Florida

Florida is one of America’s most vulnerable states when it comes to climate change, but you wouldn’t know it from how its Republican senators have punted on the issue. When he was governor, Scott even had the words “climate change” and “global warming” removed from official reports. Though both men took a small step forward in 2019 by acknowledging climate change is real, they both bashed the Green New Deal and prescribed, as Rubio put it, “adaptive” solutions to a “manageable” problem. This is to say: solutions that don’t upset the fossil-fuel industry. Rubio and Scott both have a 100-percent approval rating from the Koch-backed climate-denial group Americans for Prosperity.

United States Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National HarborConservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),Oxon Hill, USA - 29 Feb 2020

David Bernhardt, United States Secretary of the Interior

Since joining Trump’s Department of the Interior, Bernhardt has shown complete deference to the wishes of the extractive industries that he long served as a fossil-fuel-industry lobbyist (clients included Halliburton and the U.S. Oil and Gas Association). In 2018, he led an effort to strip protections from 9 million acres of the imperiled sage-grouse habitat, opening up the land to oil drilling. More recently, his department has worked to lease portions of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for, you guessed it, more drilling — a decision so destructive that even a number of major banks have vowed not to fund oil-and-gas operations there. Executives with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, one of Bernhardt’s former clients, were recorded in 2017 bragging of their “direct access” to Bernhardt and of having “conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species.”

William HapperMeetings at Trump Tower, New York, USA - 13 Jan 2017Physicist William Happer arrives for a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York, New York, USA, 13 January 2017. US President Elect Donald Trump is still holding meetings upstairs at Trump Tower as he continues to fill in key positions in his new administration.

William Happer, Scientist and Climate Denier

An 80-year-old professor emeritus of physics at Princeton, Happer has deep ties to the Heartland Institute, one of the most influential pushers of climate denial in the U.S. In 2018, he joined Trump’s National Security Council, but his plans to discredit the government’s own climate reports were so extreme the White House rejected them for fear they might hurt Trump’s ability to get re-elected. Happer resigned from the administration in 2019, but the man who once compared the demonization of CO2 to the “demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler” hasn’t quit pushing climate denial. He appeared at a Heartland Institute forum to counter the U.N.’s climate conference last December, where he called the climate movement “a bizarre environmental cult.”

Jim Inhofe, United States Senator from Oklahoma

The longtime Republican senator literally wrote the book on climate denial (The Greatest Hoax) and is best known for presenting a snowball on the Senate floor as evidence that climate change isn’t real. The 2015 stunt is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. Inhofe, who has introduced bills to gut the EPA (which he once likened to the Gestapo and, in 2017, claimed was “brainwashing our kids”) and been a regular fixture at high-profile climate-denial conferences, now has a network of disciples carrying out his agenda.

EPA head Andrew Wheeler used to work in Inhofe’s office, as did the agency’s chief of staff, Mandy Gunasekara, who encouraged Trump to leave the Paris Agreement. “It gives me comfort,” Inhofe told The Washington Post of his former staffers who are now influencing Trump’s environmental policy. What’s fueling Inhofe’s climate denial? In 2012, he cited the Book of Genesis, arguing that humans aren’t “able to change what [God] is doing in the climate.” It could also be that he’s received more than $2 million in donations from fossil-fuel interests over the course of his congressional career, with his biggest donors being Koch Industries and Murray Energy.

Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners

Billionaire Texan and Republican mega-donor Kelcy Warren is the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline (which extends the DAPL into Texas), and several other terminals across North America. The DAPL and the ETCO have sprung several leaks — including a 4,998-gallon spill in Tennessee in 2017 — while another pipeline, Rover, spilled 2 million gallons of drilling fluid into Ohio wetlands, one of several of that pipeline’s environmental violations. Warren has pushed to expand despite the leaks — including a move to double the capacity of the Dakota Access — and quipped in 2018 that two activists who drilled holes in an empty pipeline should be “removed from the gene pool.”

Daniel Jorjani, Solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior

Jorjani first worked for the DOI during George W. Bush’s presidency, a tenure that included a stint counseling for Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett, who in 1997 compared environmentalism to Marxism in its restriction of individual rights. He later went to work for the Charles Koch Institute and served as a general counsel for the Koch-funded Freedom Partners, which doled out millions to conservative politicians and causes, including deregulating the fossil-fuel industry. Since joining Trump’s DOI as solicitor, Jorjani has issued several controversial legal opinions, including one allowing mining companies to set up shop near Minnesota’s Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness, which had been protected under the Obama administration, and another shielding energy companies whose operations killed protected birds. “The way Interior has acted under the Trump administration is the textbook definition of a political cartel, using state resources to help special interests,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said. “It sure looks to me like Mr. Jorjani has been a key member of the cartel.”

[Editor’s note: A quote attributed to Charles Koch that was in this original version of this post, stating that his donor network “made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous 50” was incorrectly stated to be about tamping down federal climate action. It was about the network’s general activities]

In This Article: Charles Koch, Climate Crisis, Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump, Rick Scott, Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett

mojo 619 grab

Remember the BP Oil Spill? These Cleanup Workers Are Still Suffering After 9 Years.

ROCKY KISTNER

How US Government Funds Meant to Stop Poaching May Have Ended up Funding Torture

CHRIS D’ANGELO

Microplastic Is Ruining the Beauty of Monterey Bay

MATT SIMON

Dream Big, Reach for the Stars, and Don’t You Dare Mention Climate Change

OLIVER MILMAN

Jay Inslee Says He May Defy the DNC on a Climate Change Debate

REBECCA LEBER

Donald Trump Said Really Stupid Things About Climate Today. Here Are 8 Facts He Ignored.

FIONA HARVEY

Elizabeth Warren Just Added a Green Marshall Plan to Her Long List of Proposals

ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN

Joe Biden Just Released His Green New Deal. He’s Targeting Net Zero Emissions by 2050.

ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN

===

We stood up to a billionaire political donor with a record of intimidating journalists and we won. On Tuesday, a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Frank VanderSloot against Mother Jones.

It’s a monumental victory, and a big blow to those who try to use their power to silence the media. But the two and a half year legal onslaught has also dealt a big blow to our budget. Fighting back—and winning—has cost us and our insurer at least $2.5 million and left us with $650,000 in out-of-pocket legal bills.

There’s a lot to bring you up to speed on, so please read this all the way to the bottom and make an emergency, tax-deductible donation to *Mother Jones*.

In February 2012, we published a story about how the Citizens United decision allowed wealthy contributors like VanderSloot—then a national finance co-chair for the Romney campaign—to drastically increase their political spending. Our story also covered the unusual lengths VanderSloot had gone to oppose LGBT rights in Idaho, and it touched on his company’s run-ins with regulators. Voters need to know who’s funding campaigns, and it’s our duty to report it.

VanderSloot’s lawyers sent us a letter complaining about the piece. In the past, big news organizations likeForbes have taken down stories in response to his complaints. But we wouldn’t—so nearly a year later, VanderSloot sued Mother Jones, as well as one of our reporters and me personally.

The lawsuit was filed one day before the statute of limitations expired, and it asked for $1 less than the amount that would have allowed the case to be moved out of VanderSloot’s local court in Idaho Falls.

People have asked us whether we think the lawsuit was connected to the story we broke about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” video, which many argue cost the GOP the 2012 election. The honest answer is: we have no idea. But we do know that the aggressive legal assault by VanderSloot consumed a good part of the last two and a half years, and it cost us and our insurer at least $2.5 million.