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Trump news at a glance: president takes aim at Harvard, threatening tax-exempt status
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 April 2025, 00:06
The Trump administration has taken aim at Harvard, with President Trump calling for the university’s tax-exempt status to be revoked, despite the likely illegality of that threat.The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reportedly planning to enact the president’s demand, a move that would cost Harvard millions of dollars each year.The move is part on an ongoing battle, and a significant escalation on Trump’s attack on Harvard and his aggressive, multi-pronged assault on higher education institutions. The White has urged Harvard to change its hiring, teaching and admissions practices to help fight antisemitism on campus.Harvard has said that it has taken steps to address the issue, and has received support from institutions such as Stanford University, and other schools united in support of academic freedom.Here are the key stories at a glance:IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status – reportsThe IRS is reportedly planning to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status in what would be a probably illegal move amid Donald Trump’s concerted attack on the independence of US institutions of higher education.Read the full storyÁbrego García’s wife rejects Trump officials’ ‘violent’ depictionsThe wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, has strongly criticized the Trump administration’s attempt to smear his character, saying a temporary restraining order against him was “out of caution” and that “he is a loving partner and father” who is being denied justice.Read the full storyLuigi Mangione indicted on federal murder charge over healthcare CEO killingLuigi Mangione was indicted on Thursday on a federal murder charge in the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel last year, a necessary step for prosecutors to seek the death penalty.The indictment returned by a grand jury in Manhattan federal court also charges Mangione with two counts of stalking and a firearms count.Read the full storyTrump condemns Fed chair over interest ratesDonald Trump early on Thursday condemned the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering US interest rates, and expressed a wish for him to be gone from his role. The US president lambasted Powell as “always too late and wrong” in a post on his Truth Social platform.Read the full storySpaceX is frontrunner to build Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters.Read the full storyBooker to visit El Salvador in effort to return wrongly deported manCory Booker plans to travel to El Salvador, a source familiar with the New Jersey senator’s itinerary said, as Democrats seek to pressure the Trump administration to return a wrongly deported Maryland resident.Read the full storyMeloni says Trump to visit Rome after Washington talksGiorgia Meloni said Donald Trump had accepted her invitation for an official trip to Rome, as the pair met in Washington in an attempt by the Italian prime minister to bridge the gap between the EU and US amid trade tariff tensions.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
A Turkish PhD student detained after co-authoring an op-ed about Gaza has been denied bond by an immigration judge in Massachusetts.
Trump’s fledgling media firm urged market regulators to investigate “suspicious activity” after a London-based hedge fund disclosed a vast bet against its stock.
Two people were killed in a mass shooting at the Florida State University (FSU) campus in Tallahassee on Thursday, and six others were injured, police said. “It’s horrible that things like this take place,” the US president said.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 17 April 2025. More
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Giorgia Meloni whispers soothing words to Trump on ‘western nationalism’
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 April 2025, 21:51
She had been welcomed to the White House with open arms as few other foreign visitors had been since Donald Trump’s return, and Giorgia Meloni wanted to assure her host that – at least when it came to their political worldview – they spoke a common language.Italy’s prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party has roots in neo-fascism, was keen to stress that she shared many things with the man who had just hailed her as a “friend” who “everybody loves … and respects”.Tariffs were a bit of problem. But between friends? Hey, we can work it out.Even if Italy boasted one of Europe’s biggest trade surpluses with the US, such disagreements could be bridged with recourse to the previously uncoined creed of “western nationalism”, argued Meloni, speaking in confident, lightly accented English, although she admitted she did not know if it was “the right word”.“I know that when I speak about west mainly, I don’t speak about geographical space. I speak about the civilization, and I want to make that civilization stronger,” she said, in terms that the president and his attendant cabinet members-cum-courtiers surely lapped up.“So I think even if we have some problems between the two shores of the Atlantic, it is the time that we try to sit down and find solutions.”After all, Meloni pointed out, they were on the same side when it came to one existential struggle, “the fight against the woke and ADI [sic] ideology that would like to erase our history.”The acronym was a bit confusing. Did she mean DEI? But no matter, her audience got the general gist.Meloni, 48, has been labelled “Europe’s Trump whisperer” – deemed capable of awakening the concealed angels of his nature that other Euro-leaders cannot reach. She has spent time at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, and was the only European leader invited to his inauguration in January.Here, in the Oval Office, the whispering was having a soothing effect. The president smiled indulgently, before going off on several “weaves” during which he attacked Joe Biden, the federal reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not cutting interest rates, Biden again, “activist judges” who were blocking his deportation agenda, then Powell once again.But it was standard Trump. The man who had publicly browbeaten Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, and barely tolerated Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer on their White House visits was the very picture of a gracious host.Even JD Vance – whose boorish interventions blew up the Zelenskyy visit and nearly did the same to Starmer’s – kept his trap shut, proof indeed that all was going swimmingly.Then disaster threatened.An Italian journalist insisted on asking the prime minister a question in her native Italian. Mama mia!Meloni looked disgusted. Weren’t they all supposed to be western nationalists here, defenders of the same civilization. Why emphasize differences?She played along reluctantly, her features relaxing slightly as she embarked on an extended discourse, but her body language betraying her as she lifted both feet off the ground, one crossed leg folding behind the other. Trump watched her intently all the while.When she finished, an American journalist tried to ask another question but Trump interjected: “No, wait, I want to hear what you said.”It was over to Meloni’s female interpreter, sitting nearby, who revealed: “Prime Minister Meloni was asked … what she thinks about the fact that President Trump holds Zelenskyy responsible for the war in Ukraine.”It was a discordant, yet key, moment – and the prime minister knew it. As the interpreter tried to continue, Meloni – perhaps sensing this was unsafe territory, not least because she has, for the most part, stuck with the western support for Ukraine that Trump is on the brink of abandoning – took over interpreting her own answer.She limited her explanation to vowing to raise Italy’s contributions to Nato, currently at below 1.5% – well below the 2% minimum agreed, and far short of the 5% Trump has lately demanded.Then it was the president’s turn. “I don’t hold Zelenskyy responsible,” he said, a retreat from his previous false accusations that Ukraine started the war. “But I’m not exactly thrilled with the fact that that war started. I’m not happy with anybody involved.”If anybody was to blame, he went on, it was Biden – the default scapegoat for every wrong – because, after all, everyone knew the war would never have started if Trump had still been president.No blame was attached to “President Putin”, the man who actually was responsible for starting the war. “Now I’m trying to get him to stop,” said Trump.For the unfortunate Zelenskyy, widely praised across the west for standing steadfast in defense of his country when it was under attack, there was little charity.“I’m not blaming him. But what I’m saying is that I don’t think he’s done the greatest job, OK? I’m not a big fan, I’m really not.”It was a telling moment of just how far the west’s center of gravity had shifted in the few short weeks since Trump’s return to power. And an uncomfortable one, even for Meloni.Then the conversation moved on to to the common ground of combatting migration – and it was back to the whispering again. More
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Trump administration moves to narrow protections for endangered species
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 April 2025, 20:56
The Trump administration is planning to narrow protections for endangered species, in a move that environmentalists say would accelerate extinction by opening up critical habitats for development, logging, mining and other uses.The proposal is the latest deregulatory effort by Donald Trump, who has made it a priority to dismantle endangered species protections as part of a broader quest to boost energy extraction and industrial access, even in the US’s most sensitive and vulnerable natural areas.The new proposal from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service offers a new interpretation of the of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which would strike habitat destruction from regulations.At issue is a long-standing definition of two terms in the Endangered Species Act: “harm” and “take”. “Harm” has meant altering or destroying the places those species live. “Take”, meanwhile, is a term used in regulations to denote any actions that include hunting, capturing, wounding or killing a protected species, which has included altering or destroying the places those species live.The US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service said in a proposed rule, issued on Wednesday, that habitat modification and destruction should not be considered “harm” because it is not the same as intentionally targeting a species, which is defined as “take”.“The existing regulatory definition of ‘harm,’ which includes habitat modification, runs contrary to the best meaning of the statutory term ‘take,’” the proposal says.Challenges to the legalese could enable a much more limited application of the regulations, which would free industry to continue or begin activities that would impact habitat.But habitat loss is considered the strongest driver of species loss. Striking the word or changing these definitions could cause catastrophic damage to species already close to the brink.“If [you] say harm doesn’t mean significant habitat degradation or modification, then it really leaves endangered species out in the cold,” Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity said, adding that the proposal “cuts the heart out of the Endangered Species Act”.Environmentalists argue that the definition of “take” has always included actions that harm species, and the definition of “harm” has been upheld by the US supreme court.Spotted owls and Florida panthers both are protected because the current rule forbids habitat destruction, Greenwald said. The legislation has helped safeguard more than 1,700 species and their habitats, preventing 99% of those listed from going extinct, most famously the bald eagle.But if the new rule is adopted, someone who logs in a forest or builds a development would be unimpeded as long as they could say they didn’t intend to harm an endangered species.The proposed rule was expected to be published in the Federal Register on Thursday, kicking off a 30-day public comment period. Environmental groups are already planning to challenge the rule in court if it’s adopted. Questions remain about whether the Trump administration is legally able to repeal a rule already upheld by the supreme court.The proposal “threatens a half-century of progress in protecting and restoring endangered species”, said Drew Caputo, an attorney at Earthjustice. He added that the law currently “recognizes the common-sense concept that destroying a forest, beach, river, or wetland that a species relies on for survival constitutes harm to that species”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s not the first attempt by the administration to undermine protections. One of Trump’s first executive orders after returning to the White House in January, declared a national energy emergency even amid a record glut of oil and gas drilling, and calls for the endangered species committee, a group nicknamed the “God squad”, to meet at least quarterly.This committee, which would be led by US interior secretary Doug Burgum, five other senior officials from different government agencies and a representative from an affected state, has rarely been used but has the power to override the Endangered Species Act even if it results in the extinction of a species, hence its existential nickname.Changing the rule could prove an easier strategy to override protections. It could also threaten conservation areas kept safe because of the species that call them home.The issue is of particular concern in Hawaii. The islands have more endangered species than any other state – 40% of the nation’s federally listed threatened and endangered species – even though Hawaii has less than 1% of the land area of the US, according to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.Maxx Philips, Hawaii and Pacific Islands director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said removing these safeguards will accelerate Hawaii’s extinction crisis and erode the biological and cultural heritage of the islands.She pointed to the example of tiny native bees that forage on and pollinate coastal dune plants. Very little oceanfront property remains undeveloped and what is left tends to be fragmented pockets. Other listed species living on the shoreline – like green sea turtles – could also lose their homes if protections are removed.“Habitat is life, right?” she said. “And without it, there is no recovery and without recovery, there is only extinction.”Oliver Milman and the Associated Press contributed reporting More
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What is a ‘criminal’ immigrant? The word is an American rhetorical trap | Jonathan Ben-Menachem
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 April 2025, 18:37
Last month, the Trump administration flew 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Federal officials alleged that the detainees were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, calling them “heinous monsters” ,“criminal aliens”, “the worst of the worst”. The federal government has also revoked visas for a thousand international students over their alleged participation in protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Some were abducted, like Mahmoud Khalil, who has spent more than a month incarcerated in one of the worst jails in the US. Officials alleged that Mahmoud “sided with terrorists … who have killed innocent men, women, and children”.Media reports quickly revealed that the Trump administration is lying about “innocent” people to justify abducting them. But this raises a more important question: if Trump’s victims weren’t “innocent”, does that make them disposable? I worry that emphasizing the innocence of victims creates a rhetorical trap. It’s like carefully digging a pit that the fascists can shove us into.Instead, we should interrogate the fact that the Trump administration chose to target “gang members” and “terrorist supporters” in the first step of its ethnic cleansing project. Criminals and terrorists are the bogeymen animating bipartisan racism against Black, Latino and Arab people, and Trump is weaponizing these myths because many liberals have already written them off as less than human. The political context that enabled US residents to be shipped to El Salvador’s Cecot facility is a bipartisan project more than 50 years in the making, largely unquestioned by people who are rightfully horrified by recent escalations.Allegations of criminality have long been an effective pretext for anti-Black violence in the US – this is the “war on crime”. So long as there are “criminals” to fight, vicious police brutality becomes politically palatable. This is true in blue and red states alike. The gang member is the latest symbol used to dehumanize Black and Latino people, replacing the “superpredator”. In practice, police and prosecutors invoke the specter of monstrous gangs to continue targeting entire neighborhoods while evading allegations of explicit discrimination.You can be added to a gang database because of your tattoos, the color of the clothing you wear or even for using certain emojis on social media. These lists are riddled with errors, sometimes naming toddlers and elders. More commonly, gang databases index the thousands of people – often children – swept up by police because of where they live or whom they socialize with. The consequences of gang policing are devastating: it can lead to federal prosecution or potential deportation, not to mention a lifetime of state harassment.Gang membership isn’t the only tool the Trump administration can use to portray its victims as guilty. When the “war on crime” morphed into the “war on terror”, Arab and Muslim residents suffered from discriminatory surveillance and repression – the “terrorist” category matches the “gang member” category in that it justifies racist dragnet policing practices. The “counter-terrorism” net has already widened, targeting Stop Cop City activists in Atlanta. This problem is not limited to Republicans – liberal politicians and university stakeholders laid the groundwork for Trump’s deportation efforts. Last year, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, called student Palestine activists proxies for Iran, and New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, smeared us as terrorist supporters to justify an incredibly violent police raid.The widening net of who is considered a criminal not only chills dissent among immigrants and activists. It further dehumanizes and renders disposable people who have genuinely committed harm.We must defend the rights of people who do have criminal records. No one deserves to be whisked away to a brutal prison that deprives them of basic human rights – no matter if it’s in El Salvador, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania or New York. Criminal records and bona fide gang membership don’t turn human beings into monsters. If Trump goes through with his plan of sending citizens to El Salvador, he could initially target people convicted of heinous crimes. This would allow federal officials to ask: “Why do liberals care about pedophiles and murderers?”We should be prepared to defend the basic rights of all of Trump’s targets with our full strength. If a single person becomes disposable, anyone could become the next target. Last week, Trump said he “loved” the idea of sending American “criminals” to El Salvador, and law professors are sounding the alarm about citizen student activists being subjected to terrorism prosecutions. First it will be the “migrant gang member” or “terrorist on a student visa” sent to Cecot. Next it will be the domestic gang member and the terrorist-supporting citizen. Eventually, perhaps any political opponent could be construed as a criminal-terrorist.Trump may not even need to rely on the justice department to criminalize his enemies – dozens of local cops joined the 6 January 2021 putsch at the US Capitol, and local prosecutors have eagerly charged student activists with felonies. This is another reason to avoid the innocence trap: many police love Trump, and law enforcement can very easily make their adversaries seem like criminals.The innocence trap is dangerous because allegations of criminality have always been deployed to justify state violence. If we only defend the “innocent”, the fascists will argue that their victim “was no angel”. An anti-fascist rhetoric that carves out exceptions for imperfect victims is a gift to our opponents.
Jonathan Ben-Menachem is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia University, where he researches the politics of criminalization More
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Musk’s SpaceX is frontrunner to build Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ missile shield
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 April 2025, 16:33
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, six people familiar with the matter said.Musk’s rocket and satellite company is partnering with the software maker Palantir and the drone builder Anduril on a bid to build key parts of Golden Dome, the sources said, which has drawn significant interest from the technology sector’s burgeoning base of defense startups.In his 27 January executive order, Trump cited a missile attack as “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States”.All three companies were founded by entrepreneurs who have been major political supporters of Trump. Musk has donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump, and now serves as a special adviser to the president working to cut government spending through his so-called “department of government efficiency”.Despite the Pentagon’s positive signals to the SpaceX group, some sources stressed the decision process for Trump’s Golden Dome was in its early stages. Its ultimate structure and who is selected to work on it could change dramatically in the coming months.The three companies met with top officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon in recent weeks to pitch their plan, which would build and launch 400 to more than 1,000 satellites circling the globe to sense missiles and track their movement, sources said.A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers would then bring enemy missiles down, three of the sources said. The SpaceX group is not expected to be involved in the weaponization of satellites, these sources said.One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as “a departure from the usual acquisition process. There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.”SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.
The Pentagon did not respond to detailed questions from Reuters, only saying it will deliver “options to the president for his decision in line with the executive order and in alignment with White House guidance and timelines”.The White House, SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril also did not respond to questions.In an unusual twist, SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a “subscription service” in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.The subscription model, which has not been previously reported, could skirt some Pentagon procurement protocols allowing the system to be rolled out faster, the two sources said. While the approach would not violate any rules, the government may then be locked into a subscription and lose control over its ongoing development and pricing, they added.Some Pentagon officials have expressed concerns internally about relying on the subscription-based model for any part of the Golden Dome, two sources told Reuters. Such an arrangement would be unusual for such a large and critical defense program.The US space force general Michael Guetlein has been in talks on whether SpaceX should be the owner and operator of its part of the system, the two sources said. Other options include having the US own and operate the system, or having the US own it while contractors handle operations. Guetlein did not respond to a request for comment.The retired air force general Terrence O’Shaughnessy, a top SpaceX adviser to Musk, has been involved in the company’s recent discussions with senior defense and intelligence leaders, the two sources said. O’Shaughnessy did not respond to requests for comment.Should the group led by SpaceX win a Golden Dome contract, it would be the biggest win for Silicon Valley in the lucrative defense contracting industry and a blow to the traditional contractors.However, those long-standing contractors, such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing and RTX are expected to be big players in the process as well, people familiar with the companies said. Lockheed Martin put up a webpage as a part of its marketing efforts.SpaceX is pitching for the part of the Golden Dome initiative called the “custody layer”, a constellation of satellites that would detect missiles, track their trajectory, and determine if they are heading toward the US, according to two sources familiar with SpaceX’s goals.SpaceX has estimated the preliminary engineering and design work for the custody layer of satellites would cost between $6bn and $10bn, two of the sources said. In the last five years, SpaceX has launched hundreds of operational spy satellites and more recently several prototypes, which could be retrofitted to be used for the project, the sources said.Reuters reviewed an internal Pentagon memo from the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, issued shortly before a 28 February deadline to senior Pentagon leadership asking them for initial Golden Dome proposals and calling for the “acceleration of the deployment” of constellations of satellites.The time frame could give SpaceX an advantage because of its fleet of rockets, including the Falcon 9, and existing satellites that could be repurposed for the missile defense shield, the people familiar with the plan said. More
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Cory Booker to visit El Salvador in effort to return wrongly deported man to US
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 April 2025, 15:29
Cory Booker plans to travel to El Salvador, a source familiar with the New Jersey senator’s itinerary said, as Democrats seek to pressure the Trump administration to return a wrongly deported Maryland resident.Booker’s trip to the Central American country would come after the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen traveled there this week to meet with his constituent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian national deported last month in what the Trump administration acknowledged was an “administrative error”. Despite a supreme court ruling saying his administration must “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return, Trump has refused to take steps to do so, and El Salvador’s government on Wednesday denied Van Hollen a meeting with the deportee.Ábrego García’s case has become a rallying cry for Democrats, who argue it is a sign of Donald Trump’s reckless approach to immigration enforcement and willingness to defy court orders. An immigration judge in 2019 had given Ábrego García protection from deportation, finding that he may face retaliation if he returns to El Salvador.Booker wrote on X earlier this week: “The Supreme Court was clear: the Trump administration must act to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García to the United States. There is no room for debate – yet Trump is refusing, in defiance of a lawful court order.“Every member of Congress should be standing up for the Constitution and demanding that the administration act to return Mr. Ábrego García to the U.S. and to his family.”Trump administration officials have countered by accusing Democrats of caring more about undocumented immigrants than US citizens. On Monday, the Republican congressman Riley Moore toured El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), where US authorities say Ábrego García is being held, and gave a thumbs up in front of a cell packed with inmates.Several other Democratic lawmakers have signaled they would like to visit El Salvador and Cecot, including Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic caucus, and Robert Garcia, Yassamin Ansari and Maxwell Alejandro Frost, all members of the investigative House oversight committee. Delia Ramirez of the House homeland security committee has also asked for a visit to Cecot.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBooker, who ran for president in 2020 and is viewed as a potential candidate again three years from now, has been particularly outspoken against Trump. Earlier this month, he delivered a speech from the Senate floor warning of the “grave and urgent” danger presented by his presidency that ran for 25 hours and five minutes – the longest such speech ever. More
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‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 April 2025, 14:00
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View image in fullscreenOne afternoon in February, hoping to survive the apocalypse or at least avoid finding myself among its earliest victims, I logged on to an online course entitled Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisis called climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.Our two-hour live video session was taught by Alex Steffen, a 56-year-old author, speaker, podcaster and “foresight consultant”, who was addressing us from his home in the Bay Area.For many years, Steffen worked as an environmental reporter. He wrote several acclaimed books that explored technological solutions to the climate crisis, served as “futurist in residence” at the design firm IDEO, and taped a couple Ted Talks, gradually gaining a reputation as one of the foremost thinkers on the sustainability circuit. Meanwhile, he watched in horror as the window for action narrowed and governments and institutions dithered. “I still find it staggering and heart-rending that we blew this so badly,” he said in an interview.Having eventually concluded that the worst consequences of a heating climate had become inevitable, Steffen made a pivot. He now advises individuals, as well as businesses and localities, on how to gird themselves for impact. Interest in his classes and one-on-one consultations had roughly doubled every year since 2021, he said, and he expected 2,000 participants this year.Steffen bucks the image of the prototypical end times prepper, most of whom are creatures of the right. Emerging in the 1950s, preppers were animated by a variety of often overlapping fears: some were troubled by the increasingly networked, and therefore fragile, nature of contemporary life. Others perceived a divine warning in biblical references to the Tribulation, the ultimate scriptural nightmare fuel. Still others, alarmed by the superpower brinkmanship of the cold war, sought a refuge from nuclear annihilation. Finally, there was the widespread conviction that the turbulence of the 1960s presaged a full-blown civil war. Kurt Saxon, the author often credited with inventing the term “survivalist” in the mid-1970s, had been a member of the American Nazi party and the John Birch Society, and the need to guard against a vaguely racialized horde animates some of his writings.Originally known as “retreaters” (a term Saxon rejected due to its association with weakness), early adopters of what we now think of as the prepper philosophy went off-grid; hoarded provisions, firearms and ammunition, and sometimes constructed hidden bunkers. They championed individual fortitude over collective welfare. Wary of being vilified as violent crackpots (not to mention one day finding a throng of desperate neighbors banging on their steel-reinforced concrete door), many kept their hobby secret. As a result, researchers have long struggled to quantify the movement’s reach.Prepperism took a reputational hit in the 1990s, when it was linked with the militia movement, along with incidents such as the deadly standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing. But it re-emerged with renewed force after 9/11, the first assault by a foreign adversary on the US homeland in decades. Among the many casualties of the World Trade Center attack was Americans’ long-unquestioned sense of safety. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, George W Bush’s assertion that his Fema director was “doing a heck of a job” – even as thousands of storm refugees huddled in the Superdome without food or water – seemed to validate a central pillar of the prepper ethos: relying on government was the height of folly.View image in fullscreenIn the ensuing years, the philosophy went mainstream, fueling radio shows and YouTube channels as well as an ecosystem of regional conventions and wilderness survival trainings. Meanwhile, Americans began devouring survival-oriented programming, from Lost and The Walking Dead to Doomsday Preppers and Naked and Afraid, which played to our darkest eschatological nightmares. Though accurate demographic figures on preppers remain elusive, surveys taken after the worst of the Covid pandemic suggest that more than 20 million Americans are now taking steps to prepare for cataclysm – assembling go-bags and stocking up on food, water and first aid supplies – more than double the estimated number in 2017.Not all of them are conservatives. Liberals make up about 15% of the prepping scene, according to one estimate, and their numbers appear to be growing.One private Facebook group dedicated to preparedness for liberals has more than tripled in size since the election. Here, one finds no tradwife panegyrics, gun porn or “TEOTWAWKI” (the End of the World as We Know It) merch. Instead, participants offer advice on maintaining one’s online anonymity under a potential fascist regime, advocate the stockpiling of anxiety meds and reading material (ahead of expected bans), and debate the moral dilemma of buying a first aid kit from a company that caters to law enforcement. Liberal preparedness podcasters and newsletter writers I spoke to also reported a notable uptick in subscribers since Trump’s election.Liberal preppers differ from their rightwing counterparts because the calamities they anticipate have different characteristics. Rightwing bugbears like civil unrest and globalist tyranny lead to a focus on the stockpiling of weapons to defend one’s property and family from hostile adversaries. But concerns about global heating point to different notions of readiness. Climate breakdown – the destabilization of the entire ecological system on which our lives depend – is not a fleeting crisis one can ride out with a well-stocked arsenal and a few pallets from Costco. As Margaret Killjoy, who launched the prominent anarchist-prepper podcast Live Like the World Is Dying at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, put it: “There’s not much preparedness you can do for the end of the world.”While Steffen, who considers himself “moderately progressive”, believes it’s only prudent to have a reserve of basic items – water, food, medical supplies and the like – on hand in case of emergencies, his approach to preparedness differs markedly from the version promoted on the right. “I would put to you that if you find yourself in a situation where you’re having to let off some rounds to protect your canned goods, you’ve already failed,” he told our class. “You have not understood the assignment.”Eric Shonkwiler, author of the When/If newsletter, which focuses on prepperism with a leftist spin, agreed. “The first time this guy in his Maga hat falls down the stairs and breaks his leg and it gets gangrenous and neither him nor anyone in his family are doctors, he’s done,” Shonkwiler predicted. “And that’s a month into the apocalypse, and all of his guns did nothing for him.”For Steffen and other preppers on the left, threat analysis begins with an understanding of network effects: how various social and economic systems work together to support our ongoing survival, or undermine it. Bald and bespectacled, with headphone wires dangling from his ears, he explained that the effects of climate collapse will be experienced as a series of localized disasters – flooding here, wildfire there – each requiring planning and forethought.“Every piece of infrastructure, every home, every community, every business, every industry, was built to work in a world that no longer exists,” he told us, adding that this ever-widening gap will be “ripping through every single person’s life”.Steffen’s prescription was “ruggedization”, a term borrowed from the military. Ruggedization, he explained, was “the design of a system such that it can take unexpected punishment and retain its core functions”. Its opposite he termed brittleness – “the condition of a thing being subject to sudden failure”. Our primary goal ahead of climate chaos was to recognize brittleness in the systems around us – from failing infrastructure to political ineptitude – and either remedy it or avoid it altogether.Steffen shared a map on the screen of the US Climate Vulnerability Index, which is operated by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University, and noted that some places would be harder hit than others. “If I lived there,” he told the class, referring to the Gulf and the south-eastern coast, exceptionally high-risk areas, “I would already be thinking about how to get out.” Extreme heat will make much of the Sun belt inhospitable as well, and if the Atlantic meridional ocean current, or Amoc, collapses, as some models predict, New England could soon look more like Siberia.As the reality of climate collapse hits home, those with the means to do so will beeline for safer locales, Steffen predicted. (Though is anywhere really safe? Sleepy Duluth, Minnesota, for example, had been identified as an especially attractive destination before a “generational storm” associated with warmer temperatures destroyed 100,000 acres of forest around the city and knocked out power for tens of thousands of residents in the area.) “Some very smart people believe it is going to be the largest human migration in history,” he said. While his $149 introductory course is short on specifics, he also offers a more detailed 12-hour Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization, as well as individual consultations.For some on the left, steeped in the mutual aid framework of the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin, Steffen’s vision of migratory musical chairs smacks of the all-against-all gospel of the right. “Not everybody can do that,” Shonkwiler said of relocating, calling it “a ridiculous solution”.View image in fullscreenSteffen is all too aware uprooting is far from ideal even for those who can afford it. For one thing, it will tend to weaken the family and community ties that help keep us safe. Moreover, he noted that the exodus of people with money, resources and skills from endangered areas would tend to amplify the crisis for those left behind.Then again, nobody said the apocalypse would be pretty.Killjoy, who lives in rural West Virginia, thinks her identity as a trans woman may have contributed to her interest in preparedness. “Queer people have always had to look out for each other,” she said. Which highlights another important way in which liberal prepperism differs from the rightwing version: a rejection of individualism and an emphasis on community building and mutual aid. When Hurricane Helene hit, Killjoy, who had previously lived in western North Carolina, loaded her stash of dry goods, water jugs and solar generators into a van and drove to the hard-hit area to help out her former neighbors.The typical survivalist fantasy of isolating oneself in an off-grid cabin deep in the woods is unlikely to offer much protection, Steffen said. “Most people who try to use distance as their means of providing safety don’t succeed,” he said. “We still have this idea that we can just move out into the middle of rural Kentucky, put up some solar panels, drill a well, and we’re good, but it’s really not that easy. You can learn those skills, but you’re still going to have to work really hard on physical tasks compared to people who have common infrastructure that they’re sharing.”Elizabeth Doerr, co-host of the Cramming for the Apocalypse podcast, agreed: “Researchers talk a lot about how your ability to survive a disaster or thrive post-disaster is contingent on really knowing your neighbors – because when they don’t see you, they’re gonna come check on you.”The vast majority, Steffen believes, would be safer in urban settings – especially cities that are taking the threats seriously and developing resilience plans. “You are better off choosing to move towards systems that are used by a lot of people,” he told us. He admitted the idea may sound counterintuitive; a steady diet of zombie movies have taught many of us to associate proximity to other people with increased peril. “But the more people who are using the same set of infrastructure, the more money you have to keep those things well repaired and the more easily you can devote resources to it.”Another distinctive characteristic of liberal prepperism is an increasing focus on the emotional and even spiritual aspect of facing catastrophe. Given the damage we’ve already done to the atmosphere and the alarming lack of collective will to address the issue, those seeking to prepare have begun talking about what acceptance looks like.For them, the question is less whether we survive than how we maintain our humanity in the face of calamity, how we cope with loss, and how we use the time we have.David Baum spent years volunteering for the Community Emergency Response Team in Seattle. But when he learned how much of the preparedness budget had been earmarked for police equipment – “you know, armored trucks and weapons and handcuffs and sound cannons” – he began to question an approach to crisis response more suited to violent repression than communal wellbeing. He changed course after encountering the influential academic paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy by Jem Bendell, a professor of sustainability leadership and one-time darling of Davos, who has come to believe that our addiction to fossil fuels will soon bring about the destruction of civilization.After participating in online forums devoted to Bendell’s thinking, Baum started his own group. Three times a week, he and several colleagues host free online meetups where participants from around the world assemble to talk through their emotional responses to the prospect of human extinction. They call it Collapse Club.I participated in one session, and came away persuaded that genuine prepping requires not only “outer resilience”, as Baum puts it, but an inner kind as well.“Survival is not the goal,” he told me afterward. “It is impossible, given what’s happening. The relationship and the wisdom and the love that one discovers by approaching nature with respect – that’s the goal.”Despite his dismal prognosis, Baum is no doomer. “Even though it’s a global collapse we’re talking about, it really is possible in the company of others to metabolize these feelings and find stability in your life,” he promised. “You can imagine new ways to live, and you can find a purpose to go on.”Or as Bendell put it in his 2023 book Breaking Together: “Humanity is really screwed, so let’s slow down, help each other, be nicer to animals and nature, defend freedom, grow food, play more, be open-minded about what might help, and forgive ourselves.”For the last few years, Bendell told me in an email, he has done exactly that. He quit his full professorship, moved to Indonesia, and launched a school to teach sustainable agricultural practices to local farmers.He is under no illusion that the small, volunteer effort will have any real impact on a global crisis. And by no means would he refer to it as prepping. Rather than an effort to defend himself and his adopted community against a nightmare future, it’s a part of a commitment to living meaningfully in the present. “I know we could get washed away next week,” he wrote in a blogpost not long ago. “Or we could run out of money next year. Or we could get shut down due to a bureaucratic hitch. But it would still have been great for a time.” More
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Who are the death row executioners? Disgraced doctors, suspended nurses and drunk drivers
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 April 2025, 11:00
Being an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don’t dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don’t go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it?This was the question I couldn’t help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I’m a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions.Seven years later – and with the Trump administration promising more executions to come – I have an answer, sort of.We do not, and for the most part cannot, know precisely who is under the executioner’s hood. State secrecy statutes put the equivalent of a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility over these state-sanctioned killers. But litigation files and investigative journalism have revealed a number of executioners’ identities, allowing us to peek behind the veil of secrecy for a glimpse of who these people are.Consider Missouri’s chief executioner from 1995-2006, Dr Alan Doerhoff, who was responsible for 54 of Missouri’s 65 executions between 1976 and 2006. He didn’t push the syringes – shockingly, non-medical prison guards did that – but he did most everything else. “Nobody will ever do as many [executions] as I have,” he would later boast.Doerhoff’s identity was revealed when a lawyer for a condemned prisoner checked the prison’s chemical dispensary logs and discovered that 2.5 grams of sodium thiopental (the drug used to anesthetize the prisoner) had been used in previous executions. The state’s protocol called for 5 grams, double that amount. The prisoner sued.State officials first told the court that the chemical dispensary logs were wrong. But the next day, they wrote again to “apologize to the court and the parties for providing incorrect information”. The logs were correct. The amount of sodium thiopental being injected was wrong.Troubled by the finding, the court allowed the prisoner’s lawyers to conduct a limited deposition of the state’s chief executioner. The executioner stated under oath that he had problems mixing the drugs, “so right now we’re still improvising”. He also said that he “sometimes transpose[d] numbers”.View image in fullscreen“I am dyslexic,” he explained. “So, it’s not unusual for me to make mistakes.” (Doerhoff later stated that he was not dyslexic, he just sometimes mixed up numbers.)Missouri doubled down on its executioner, telling the court that it was confident in his competence and planned to continue to use him in future executions. But the court rejected the state’s assurances, writing that it was “gravely concerned that a physician who is solely responsible for correctly mixing the drugs which will be responsible for humanely ending the life of condemned inmates has a condition which causes him confusion with regard to numbers”.The state appealed, but soon thereafter, investigative journalism discovered Doerhoff’s identity. Jeremy Kohler with the St Louis Post-Dispatch broke the story in January 2008, and with it came another shocking revelation: Doerhoff had been sued for medical malpractice more than 20 times, and his hospital privileges had been revoked at two hospitals. Doerhoff had also been publicly reprimanded by the state medical board for hiding his malpractice suits from the hospitals where he practiced.All of this was known to the Missouri attorney general’s office when it assured the court of Doerhoff’s professional competence. After oral arguments, the state dropped its appeal of the ruling.The following year, Missouri’s legislature passed a law stating: “A person may not knowingly disclose the identity of a current or former member of an execution team,” authorizing punitive damages for violations.“Their answer to the public finding out they had an incompetent doctor was making it impossible to find out who the doctor is,” an ACLU spokesperson stated.No longer able to serve as Missouri’s executioner, Doerhoff joined the staff of a local hair-removal business and served as an executioner for the federal government and at least one other state – Arizona.Arizona knew about the trial court’s ruling in Missouri, and the facts behind it. But it hired Doerhoff anyway, and he conducted an execution for the state in 2007, just months after being barred from conducting executions in Missouri.When attorneys found out about Doerhoff’s involvement, the prisoners next in line for execution in Arizona sued.Arizona settled that suit in 2009, agreeing to a number of changes in its lethal injection protocol, including formal background and license checks of its executioners. But during the litigation, attorneys for the prisoners discovered that Doerhoff wasn’t the only executioner who had no business conducting executions.One of Arizona’s three IV team executioners was medical team member #3, who was once a nurse but had his nursing license suspended. At the time of the litigation, his occupation was running an appliance business in another state. The identity of medical team member #3 is unknown, but the court noted that he had been arrested multiple times, “including three times in 10 days in Arizona for a DUI in 2007”.Arizona pledged that with its new screening system in place, the court could be confident that the state would use only licensed medical personnel going forward.But in 2011, Arizona was hauled back into federal court because it had not made good on its promise. The prison director admitted to conducting five executions with full knowledge that medical team member #4 did not hold a medical license of any kind. Nor did officials conduct the required criminal history check on him. If they had, they would have learned that medical team member #4 had been charged with DUI in 2008, public intoxication in 2000, and writing a bad check before that.Medical team member #4 was a prison guard who had previously served as a medical corpsman in the military. He later stated that his only screening was a phone call from the warden “asking whether he knew how to start an IV and whether he would have a problem doing it for an execution”. He was not asked any other questions, and at the time, he had not placed an IV for 15 years. On paper, Arizona was dutifully screening its execution team members. But in reality, the state was doing nothing of the sort.View image in fullscreenMissouri and Arizona are not the only states where discoveries about executioners have raised serious questions about the care and competence with which executioners are chosen. In 2006, a federal court struck down California’s lethal injection protocol based in part on the “inconsistent and unreliable screening of execution team members”.The execution team member responsible for the custody of lethal injection drugs had been disciplined for smuggling drugs into San Quentin before joining the execution team; two team members had been arrested for drunk driving; one suffered from depression and PTSD; and one had been out on a two-month medical leave from getting into a fight with a prisoner.The court in California also noted the “extremely troubling” disappearance of sodium thiopental that was ostensibly taken from the prison pharmacy for training purposes but never used and never returned. “These circumstances may warrant investigation by an appropriate law-enforcement agency,” the court wrote. In California, the state’s executioners were also the chief suspects in a potential criminal investigation.The federal government has proven no better than states on this score. Not only did the federal government hire Doerhoff after he was banned from serving as Missouri’s executioner, but it also hired a nurse for the Timothy McVeigh execution who had been charged with felony aggravated stalking and first-degree tampering with property, ultimately pleading no contest to the misdemeanor version of both charges. The nurse had allegedly smashed the windshield and headlights of a man who was seeing his estranged wife, ran over his mailbox, smashed windows of his home, and left voice messages threatening to burn his house down and blow his “[expletive] head off”!Federal officials knew of the convictions when it hired him – the nurse was on active probation and had to get permission from his probation officer to leave the state.“It seems bizarre to me that we would knowingly allow an offender, on active supervision, to participate in the execution process at any level,” a probation supervisor had written while the department was considering the request. But the permission was granted.In an internal memo, the administrator who confirmed the request for travel wrote: “It would be extremely problematic for [the nurse] and this department if the media got wind of this.”And how did this nurse-executioner get on the federal government’s radar? He was recommended by the Missouri department of corrections. A nurse with his own serious criminal convictions was secretly conducting executions on behalf of the show-me state.Lethal injection litigation has likewise revealed patently unfit executioners in other states as well. In Maryland, litigation revealed that one member of the state’s execution team had been fired by a local police department and charged with poisoning several neighborhood dogs, while another execution team member had been suspended for spitting in prisoners’ food.In Tennessee, litigation revealed that a member of the execution team had pleaded guilty, twice, to possession of a controlled substance, and missed an execution because he was at an in-patient treatment program. That was in 2007. In 2021, Tennessee’s physician-executioner stated that he surrendered his surgery accreditation because of “too many malpractice suits” – at least 10 by his estimation.These are just the executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know. As the former head of Oklahoma’s corrections department told a legislative committee in 2023, the prison staff charged with carrying out executions are “some of the lowest-paid state employees in government”.In executions, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for. Even when a doctor is nominally involved in the execution process, the people injecting the drugs are typically low-level prison employees.Most executioners say they just fell into the job. The opportunity came to them, and they had their reasons for saying yes. For prison guards, it may be a necessary step to moving up the prison ranks. Doctors likewise tend to say they simply slipped into the role. They had agreed to be an observer, but then the medical team needed help. Who were they to watch executioners prick a prisoner a dozen times in a desperate attempt to pierce the vein when they could do it more quickly?One reason doctors aren’t giving, but merits mention anyway, is money. A doctor willing to participate in an execution is a precious commodity, and states will pay dearly for it – up to $20,000 in cash per execution in some places. No doctor yet has said they’re participating in executions for the money. But the fact that they can make a killing from state killing has to be worth something.
Corinna Lain is the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, out on 22 April More

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