Did you know there is a second-term Republican congressman from North Carolina named Chuck Edwards who owns six McDonald’s franchises? I certainly did not. Neither, for that matter, did his constituent, Leslie Boyd—until she received a letter notifying her that she was now banned from all of them. The Assembly‘s Jessica Wakeman has the full story, featuring an interview with the offending constituent, Leslie Boyd. A Republican congressman banning his own constituent from McDonald’s for protesting his vote to cut SNAP benefits? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more House Republicans story than this.

It has always perplexed me that the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)—known colloquially as food stamps—doesn’t allow recipients to use the benefit to purchase hot food items at grocery stores.

Bread, steak, fish, potato chips, bananas and nearly every other food item lining the shelves? Sure. The ready-made rotisserie chickens, mac-and-cheese, or mashed potatoes on warming racks near the check-out? Nope.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, nearly 80 percent of SNAP households include a child, an elderly individual, or someone with a disability—families that would plausibly benefit from having affordable and efficient meals and side dishes as dinner options. Until now, it’s been a no-go.

However, there was a tender development in the US House of Representatives on Thursday, when the legislative chamber voted to include an amendment on their broader $390 billion Farm Bill package that redefines “food” from an earlier law to cover rotisserie chicken too. (The other hot-and-ready dishes weren’t lucky enough to be included.) Before being folded into the Farm Bill, the idea was most recently touted as a stand-alone bill, the aptly named “Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act” by a bipartisan group of Senators earlier this month.

While the legislation still needs to move through the Senate, the House passed the Farm Bill mostly along partisan lines, 224-220. Just 14 Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in supporting it.

You may be wondering what kind of monster would want to deprive SNAP households—75 percent of which live below the poverty line—of such a convenient delicacy. But to vote for the rotisserie chicken would have meant to vote for other components of the Farm Bill, too. Namely, $187 billion in cuts to the SNAP program.

That part wasn’t as appetizing to most House Democrats.

OpenAI admitted it had to develop a specific instruction in the code of its latest model of ChatGPT to stop it from repeatedly referencing “goblins, gremlins, and other creatures.”

In an explanation posted Wednesday, the company said the “strange habit” came from its chatbot personality feature—specifically for users who chose the “Nerdy” personality. According to OpenAI, this personality receives the following prompt from its system: 

You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. You are passionately enthusiastic about promoting truth, knowledge, philosophy, the scientific method, and critical thinking…You must undercut pretension through playful use of language. The world is complex and strange, and its strangeness must be acknowledged, analyzed, and enjoyed. Tackle weighty subjects without falling into the trap of self-seriousness.

OpenAI said it first noticed the trend last November and some users said they found increased “goblin” references over newer model releases, even beyond the “Nerdy” personality. 

Some exact quotes that users reported:

• “sensible little goblin”
• “because ovens are filthy little goblins.”
• “Brutal little goblin of a dynamic” 
• “Tragic little digital swamp creature”

Through “reinforcement learning,” where the chatbot accounts for whichspecific responses receive high rankings from human evaluators in terms of accuracy and quality, the “playful” responses performed better.

As Wired first reported Tuesday, the latest ChatGPT model, released last week, included the instructions: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” OpenAI did not immediately respond to Wired’s request for comment but the same day the report was published, Sam Altman posted a meme on X, making light of the situation by joking that the upcoming GPT-6 would have “extra goblins.”

pic.twitter.com/PR7C3NPxqk

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 28, 2026

After the company explained its troubleshooting process and how it implemented the override instruction to reduce goblin-related outputs the next day, it stated in its Wednesday post that “taking the time to understand why a model is behaving in a strange way, and building out ways to investigate those patterns quickly, is an important capability for our research team.”

The explanation may bring to mind how Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot repeatedly brought up “white genocide” in South Africa. Although xAI stated that Grok’s responses were due to an “unauthorized modification” from an employee, chatbot models should not be that easily manipulable if user safety was an actual concern. 

Despite all this, the company is pushing for less regulation of its products while simultaneously acknowledging that it is still learning how its chatbot models work. As I wrote on Monday, Sam Altman and OpenAI have publicly wiped their hands of the detrimental effects their products are costing people now and have demonstrated a blatant disregard for potential lasting impacts.

A true embrace of goblin mode.

For the first time since the US began bombing Iran two weeks ago, our military leadership testified before a congressional committee today. The main takeaway: there is no real plan for ending this war. But there is a plan for giving the Pentagon more money. 

At today’s House Armed Services Committee hearing, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, General Dan Caine, and Comptroller of the Army Jules Hurst each explained why they believe it is critical to American security to fund the Pentagon to the tune of 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027. The military’s budget surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2026—but, Hegseth said, building a “lethal arsenal of freedom” requires 500 billion more dollars per year. This, he said, would both allow military “domination” and fuel the “American economic engine.” 

Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, invoked the power of mathematics to justify the budget proposal. Another half-billion dollars in funding for the Pentagon—an agency which has never passed an audit—is necessary, he said, because “China announced a 7 percent increase in defense spending this year” and “as a result, they are spending more of their GDP on defense than we are.” As are “all of our adversaries,” Rogers said. 

Moreover, he added, American defense spending as a percentage of GDP has “been falling since World War II.” American defense spending as dollars, however, has consistently risen. Adjusted for inflation, current U.S. defense spending is more than $400 billion higher than in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, Rogers said, “we don’t have enough munitions, ships, aircraft, and autonomous systems” to get the country “where we need to be if we want to truly deter conflict.” 

The military wants more money: as Hegseth put it, that money will go to “where technology is evolving. And as I mentioned, the character of war fighting is changing pretty quickly, mass simultaneity autonomy undersea space, cyber information.” All these big words require “a higher end of capital investment. It’s an important down payment on the future.” 

As Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) pointed out, the Pentagon that’s asking for all that money has not yet provided Congress with an estimate of how much money they’re spending on war with Iran. Hurst, for the first time, answered on the record: about $25 billion in 60 days, or over $400 million dollars per day at war. Some independent researchers’ estimates, however, are nearly double that. And according to Iran’s ministry of health, well over 3,000 people have been killed since the US and Israel started bombing Iran in late February. When Hegseth was asked how much this war is costing American families in fuel and food costs, he said “that’s a gotcha question.” 

Pressed by several members of Congress, Hegseth—who spent yesterday on a helicopter joyride with Kid Rock—did not outline a plan for ending the war. 

“Their nuclear facilities have been obliterated. They’re buried underground,” he said. 

“So we had to start this war, you just said 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat, and now you’re saying that it was completely obliterated?” Smith asked. 

“Their facilities were bombed and obliterated, their ambitions were not,” Hegseth said. This—bombing on the basis of ‘ambitions’—is a “peace through strength” strategy. 

Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) said that from his perspective, Hegseth’s strategy has been one of “astounding incompetence.” 

“You have misled the public about why we are at war, you and the President have offered ever-changing reasons for this war,” he said. 

Hegseth, for his part, said that criticizing him is providing free propaganda for America’s enemies. “Shame on you,” he told Garamendi. “Calling this a quagmire, two months in? Handing propaganda to our enemies?”

“Don’t say you support our troops on the one hand, and then a two-month mission is a quagmire. That’s a false equivalation. It undermines the mission.” 

My first thought: Wow, the Brits are going to love this. Tabloid heaven.

The United Kingdom’s King Charles III and Queen Camilla are on a kind of diplomatic Cirque du Soleil mission to their former colony right now, trying to ease tensions between the two historic allies. Especially front-of-mind: Can the King smooth over Britain’s lack of support for Trump’s war on Iran—a stance for which Prime Minister Keir Starmer has received several bouts of Trumpian invective. The president loves the royals and all that pageantry, and there’s been no shortage of it since they touched down at Joint Base Andrews yesterday: hats, bees, bands—they’re getting the works.

Trump’s love of all this stuff is clear. So much so that he couldn’t resist musing on his family’s affection for the Royal Family during an event today on the South Lawn of the White House.

“Any time the Queen was involved at a ceremony or anything, my mother would be glued to the television,” he told his guests, referring to his mother, Mary Anne, who died in 2000. “I also remember her saying very clearly, ‘Charles, look, young Charles. He’s so cute.'”

He went on, to laughter: “My mother had a crush on Charles. Can you believe it? I wonder what she’s thinking right now.” The King gamely laughed and waved his hand in a performance of kingly modesty. The cringe, however, lingered—and the British press revved up, posting breathlessly within minutes. “King Charles smoothly plays off awkward moment with Trump during formal arrival ceremony at the White House,” read one headline in the Daily Mail.

Maybe not quite what Starmer had imagined. But perhaps just what he was looking for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is re-post of an internal post:

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

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

"• Consistent with applicable laws,…

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 3, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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.

A majority of American adults say that the US House should vote to impeach President Trump—including one-in-five people who voted for him in 2024.

A new poll by Strength in Numbers, a data-based news website, and the market research platform Verasight found that 55 percent of respondents said they support the US House voting for impeachment. Out of the 1,514 Americans surveyed between April 10 and April 14, 37 percent said they opposed and eight percent reported they were unsure.

While this is just one poll in a collection of many, it is clear that Trump’s approval ratings are sinking. The New York Times’ daily average of dozens of polls has the president at a 38 percent approval rating. On January 27, 2025, the first average calculated following Inauguration Day, the Times recorded Trump’s approval rating at 52 percent. 

The numbers are striking, but there are few avenues for popular sentiment to achieve tangible results in Washington. There have been numerous calls from lawmakers to impeach and convict Trump or invoke the 25th Amendment, especially following his threats of genocide against the people of Iran. But they appear unlikely to succeed given the Republican majorities in the US House and Senate, as well as large support from his cabinet.

However, as I wrote on Sunday about Trump’s approval rating falling to its lowest point of his second term, if Americans see the upcoming midterms as a referendum on the failures of the current administration, then it could swing elections across the country.

Voters are anxious about losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, and key players across the political spectrum have started to notice. 

Now, the Working Families Party has rolled out a slate of policy proposals for the midterms, backed by more than two dozen Democratic candidates and representatives, that aims to address that anxiety. Their plan to counter AI-related job losses? Not a direct cash dividend, but a program seeking to place Americans in union jobs. 

A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that over half of Americans believe AI does more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and 70 percent think that broad AI adoption will decrease the overall number of available jobs. 

With the midterms coming up, corporations and politicians are looking to address these fears. This month, OpenAI proposed creating a “public wealth fund” that would “provide every citizen with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” Yesterday, New York Assemblyman Alex Bores proposed a taxation framework designed to redistribute wealth from major AI corporations to people whose jobs might be displaced by their products, calling it an “AI dividend.” 

The Working Families Party, meanwhile, is proposing what looks like another Green New Deal-style jobs program to solve the same problem. 

Julie Gonzales, who is running for U.S. Senate in Colorado, said the WFP’s union jobs would be in green infrastructure and healthcare, though the platform itself doesn’t specify how this jobs program would work. “Corporations and the do-nothing Dems they support have shipped jobs overseas, cut wages, and busted unions to boost their own profits,” Gonzales said. 

A jobs guarantee hasn’t seen much success since the Works Progress Administration of the 1940s—despite broad popular support for such a policy. The new WFP platform, called the “Working Families Guarantee,” also includes guaranteed low-cost health and childcare. They plan to fund this program by (you guessed it) increasing taxes on the rich. “The working families guarantee is what working people deserve, and we are coming to collect,” said Maurice Mitchell, the group’s national political director. The politicians endorsing the Working Families Guarantee include Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-IL). Several prominent candidates—among them Brad Lander in New York, Charles Booker in Kentucky, and Graham Platner in Maine—have also signed on. 

The Working Families Guarantee platform is part of an ongoing struggle over the future of AI policy within the Democratic Party. The Searchlight Institute, a moderate think tank which pitches itself as the leader of a “realignment” within the party, has vocally opposed efforts to limit datacenter buildout. (Searchlight, however, is backed by Nvidia-linked donors.) Third Way, another centrist Democratic think tank, has taken similar positions. 

The WFP, a relatively small left-wing party with big influence, wants to push moderate candidates further to the left. They’ve found a foothold among younger voters, who increasingly distrust both major parties. Ravi Mangla, National Press Secretary for the Working Families Party, told Mother Jones “people want leaders with backbone, yet groups like Third Way and the Searchlight Institute are telling Democrats to avoid taking positions on things like guaranteed health care and AI regulations.”

“That,” Mangla said, “is a losing position.” 

Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve chair promised to bring a new inflation framework and regime change to the central bank on Tuesday morning—all while maintaining that the president’s economy was doing just great. 

One bizarre exchange between nominee Kevin Warsh and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) during the former’s confirmation hearing was telling:

“If Professor Warsh were to assign a letter grade to the American economy today for the average working family, what grade would you assign?” Warnock asked. 

“In modern academic institutions they give everyone A’s,” Warsh joked to a handful of laughs in the crowd. “If I give a student anything but an A, I would have been summoned to the dean’s office.” 

While Warnock’s question had a peculiar frame—Warsh became a lecturer at Stanford University after resigning from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2011 over disagreements on how to improve the US economy—the Fed chair nominee avoided a factual response, lest it displease the president. 

WARNOCK: What grade would you give the American economy?WARSH: Well, if i gave a student anything other than an A, the dean would summon me because I would've hurt his self-imageWARNOCK: Consumer confidence is at a record low. That's Americans' grade on the economy

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-21T15:46:53.513Z

Warsh made a similar move when Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) asked him about Trump’s remarks that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before” in his State of the Union address in February.  

“The broad contours of the economy are improving,” Warsh responded. “I think it can improve more, and in the years ahead, I think the economy’s potential is strengthening.”

Warsh’s comment comes amid a massive affordability crisis with prices skyrocketing even further during the US-Israeli ongoing war in Iran and Trump’s tariffs—even if Wall Street appears to be happy. 

It wasn’t just larger economic issues that Warsh avoided answering. Democratic senators, and even Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), questioned whether the nominee was as independent from political pressure as he asserts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized Warsh for flip-flopping on his position on interest rates, which notably aligned with Trump when he won the 2024 election. During the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh, who was a Federal Reserve board member at the time, argued against lowering interest rates to help American families and businesses borrow money. Instead, banks got bailouts during his term.

Warren said Trump passed on nominating Warsh for Fed chair over his stance on interest rates, “but as soon as Donald Trump became president a second time,” Warsh “began shouting from the rooftops about how the Fed should cut interest rates.” 

Just a few hours before the Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Trump appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box and said he would be disappointed if Warsh did not cut interest rates immediately upon getting confirmed. Last week, when asked on Fox Business whether interest rates would still drop this year, Trump answered, “When Kevin gets in, I do.” And last December, Trump said that “anybody that disagrees with me will never be the Fed chairman.”

Warsh’s confirmation hearing comes as Trump strains to restore the economy and the public’s confidence before the midterm elections this November. The nomination is one desperate move in a desperate campaign by a desperate party. 

Two lawmakers—Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—resigned from office last week amid unrelated House Ethics Committee investigations over alleged sexual misconduct. And yesterday, the Committee stated that since 2017, they have initiated no less than 20 misconduct investigations against members of Congress, most of whom have not ended up resigning. 

Sexual misconduct is pervasive in America’s statehouses, too, according to a new report by the National Women’s Defense League, a group focused on preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. The group started reporting on accusations against state lawmakers in 2023, tracking accusations going back to 2013. 

NWDL has found credible sexual harassment allegations against 162 sitting state officials, in 424 incidents between 2013 and 2026. Six of those lawmakers were accused in 2025 — Ryan Armagost (R-Colo.); Ron Weinberg (R-Colo.); Jeremy Dean (D-Mo.); Dan McKeon (R-Neb.); Jeremy Olson (R-N.D.); and Solicitor General Judd Stone (R-Texas). Of those 162 lawmakers, 17 are still in office. 

“The public record is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Sarah Higginbotham, NWDL co-director. Higginbotham noted that the report only includes public-facing accounts from people able to withstand the fear of retaliation from their bosses. “These numbers understate the harm.” 

The problem is bipartisan: at the statehouse level, accusations against Republicans and Democrats happen at near-equal rates. The vast majority of victims are women, and 93 percent of accused officials over the past decade are men. 

For Aftyn Behn (D-Tenn.), this isn’t surprising news. “Old-school sexism is absolutely back,” Behn said at a virtual press conference Tuesday morning, before offering a recent example. “Yesterday, a Republican female colleague of mine walked to the lectern on the Tennessee General Assembly House floor to present her bill. A member whistled at her. We all heard it, but nobody said a word, and we just moved on like nothing had happened.”

The problem may also be growing worse. In the years following the #MeToo movement, NWDL co-director Emma Davidson Tribbs said, the number of people reporting workplace sexual misconduct has decreased. “The recent dip in public reporting is a warning sign. It signals distrust in accountability systems,” she said. After Swalwell and Gonzales’ resignations, advocates hope they can push this issue back into the spotlight. 

“This moment can, hopefully, give us momentum,” Republican Pennsylvania state representative Abby Major said at Tuesday’s press conference. This past year, five states enacted laws addressing sexual harassment in state legislatures—but most states still have relatively few protections in place. In practice, those protections might look like a confidential sexual misconduct reporting system, transparency around misconduct investigations, and other reforms. “We have to ensure that no one has to choose between their safety and their livelihood,” Major said. 

Tucker Carlson would very much like you to forgive him for backing Donald Trump all these years.

“It’s not enough to say ‘I changed my mind’ or ‘this is bad, I’m out,'” Carlson said on his news podcast The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Carlson said he will “be tormented for a long time” for promoting Trump in his campaign for presidency. The podcast episode featured his brother Buckley, who, according to the show’s notes, wrote speeches for Trump in 2015 and “can fully understand how painful the current betrayal is.”

Carlson, it must be noted, claimed his support for Trump “was not intentional.”

Tucker Carlson: I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. We’re implicated in this. I misled people.

— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social) 2026-04-21T13:12:44.447Z

But it certainly looks intentional. Carlson consistently misled over 3.5 million viewers on his Fox News show. During the lead-up to the 2020 election, Carlson boasted a nightly audience of over 5 million.

Carlson repeatedly spread Trump’s propaganda, including unsubstantiated claims of “meaningful voter fraud” in Georgia following the 2020 election. He also made racist and anti-immigrant remarks, including voicing support for the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which promotes the fictional idea that nonwhite people are brought to the US to replace white voters and decimate the GOP fundraising base. 

Carlson’s breaking point came when Trump invaded Iran and went on a genocidal online crash out by posting a series of religious posts on religious Truth Social posts earlier this month.  Carlson said the whole ordeal made “a mockery of Christianity.”

Carlson has been sowing the seeds of redemption for weeks now. After Trump went on several verbal tirades against Pope Leo XIV, who himself criticized the US’ role in the Iran War, Carlson condemned Trump publicly saying on his April 15 show: “Could this be the antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion.”

So here is my conclusion: Carlson is one of many conservative commentators who now want you to believe they were sold a fake bill of goods. From Marjorie Taylor Greene to Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, right-wing commentators see Trump’s MAGA base defecting. Are these right-wing ideologues suddenly principled defenders of conservative values? Not a chance. They’re all just hucksters who sense a good business opportunity.

These fake outrage artists are even using Trump’s playbook to do it. Call it the latest iteration of the art of the deal.

The Trump administration has officially begun the process of repaying up to $175 billion in illegally collected tariffs, following a February Supreme Court ruling. It’s the biggest such repayment program in history, and over 330,000 businesses stand to benefit. But American consumers—that is, the people who ended up shouldering higher prices thanks to these fees—likely won’t see the cash anytime soon. 

Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, told Mother Jones the tariffs—a vast set of taxes Trump imposed on imports—“haven’t achieved what they were meant to achieve.”

“They were meant to onshore manufacturing—it’s continued to shrink. They were meant to lead to new factories being built—that hasn’t happened. They were meant to lead to an increase in government revenue—but the government’s about to write a whole bunch of checks. They were meant to lead to the US having leverage and signing new trade deals. We have effectively done none of that. So at a minimum, it achieved nothing positive.” 

The refunds, then, might seem like a step towards minimizing the economic damage of “Liberation Day.” But Wolfers said that’s not how he’d put it in his Economics 101 class. “Often in economics, what we’ll do is we’ll try to subsidize something that we want more of, or we’ll tax something that we want less of”—a basic incentive structure. These tariff refunds don’t incentivize much, because “they’re purely tied to what you did in the past, which means [companies] have no incentive to do anything.” 

“This is more like when your grandma sends money for your birthday,” he said. Smaller companies that folded entirely after the onset of Trump’s tariffs—think women selling handmade earrings on Etsy from their living rooms—won’t be refunded. Consumers, too, will likely miss out. 

In February, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at the Economic Club of Dallas, “I’ve got a feeling the American people won’t see” the money. “My sense is this could be dragged out for weeks, months, years, so … we’ll see what happens there,” Bessent added. 

“So, nothing here has helped American consumers,” Wolfers said. “If Costco raised the price of olive oil, I paid that higher price, and now I’m poorer. Costco, now, gets a refund. So what we did is, we took money out of the government coffers and gave it to Costco. Costco is not going to write me a check, it has no reason to. And now there’s less money in the government coffers, so eventually they’re going to tax me some more.” Theoretically, shoppers could benefit from lower prices after the tariffs—but the Budget Lab at Yale suggests that’s not the case, and that corporations haven’t stopped passing costs on to consumers.

One group of Costco-shoppers is attempting to sue the supermarket chain for collecting tariff prices from consumers, “while simultaneously seeking refunds of the same tariff payments from the federal government.” So, they’d be repaid by the government for costs that have already been passed on to shoppers.

“Costco stands to recover the same tariff payments twice” if the court doesn’t intervene, the customers wrote in their complaint. As of April 9th, over 56,000 importers had already completed the necessary steps to get an electronic refund—but they aren’t required to pass any of that money onto consumers.

On Sunday afternoon, Palantir, the defense-tech company that sells software to clients like ICE, the US military, and the Israeli military, decided to give us all a piece of their mind. The company’s official X account published a list of excerpts from co-founder Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic. 

The book frames Silicon Valley’s move into military technology as the righteous repayment of a “moral debt” owed to the country that built the tech billionaire class. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.” 

If you read past the post and dig into the book itself, you’ll find that this sentence continues: “the engineering elite must also, Karp said, participate in “the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.” 

That is to say: Men like Karp should decide what this country is. 

“If a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software,” Palantir’s Bill-Ackman-esque digression continued. It asserts that the future of American military dominance will not depend on nuclear deterrence, but on AI weaponry—possibly like the Palantir AI product that is reportedly used to help generate ‘kill lists’ for the Israeli military in Gaza. 

Then, after arguing for the primacy of its own products—called “spy tech” by Palantir’s critics—Karp suggests the remilitarization of the Axis Powers. “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” Karp’s company account asserted. “The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.” 

That would make those countries massive defense markets, which means more money for Palantir. Right now, about half of their earnings come from their contracts with various governments. A further militarized Japan and Germany could see that share expand further. 

The rest of the manifesto is also, essentially, a sales pitch for corporate capture: “hard power in this century will be built on software,” Palantir says, meaning that if America doesn’t buy that software, someone else will. The company has had a banner year profiting on Trump’s ICE crackdowns, and currently holds $970 million in US government contracts, but is eager for more. 

As Palantir pitches an increasingly militarized United States, ideologically determined by Silicon-valley tastes—at one point in the post, they suggest bringing back the draft—they’re suggesting a country in which they get all the power.