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      Gerry Connolly to step down as top Democrat on House oversight panel

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      Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ key oversight committee, has announced he will not run for re-election and resign his committee post, citing a return of the cancer for which he previously been successfully treated.The Virginia Democrat was elected as the party’s ranking member on the high-profile committee last December, after its former chair, the Maryland representative Jaime Raskin, moved on to the judiciary committee.He beat off a challenge from the progressive New York member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for a position that would be in the vanguard of scrutinizing the incoming Trump administration, aided by Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, who was understood to have lobbied members to vote for Connolly, who at 75, was more senior.On Monday, Connolly – who had been undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer – announced that the condition had returned after going into remission.“When I announced my candidacy six months ago, I promised transparency,” he wrote in an open letter to his northern Virginia constituents that was posted on social media. “After grueling treatments, we’ve learned that the cancer, which was initially beaten back, has now returned.“The sun is setting on my time in public service and this will be my last term in Congress. I will be stepping back as the ranking member of the oversight committee soon.”Some Democrats were critical of Connolly’s election as the party’s leading figure on the committee, which came at a time when other senior committee members were effectively pressured to step aside in favor of younger representatives amid calls for a generational shift.It was unclear whether Ocasio-Cortez, who is no longer a member of the oversight committee after having joined the energy and commerce committee, had plans to mount another bid to become its ranking member. Politico speculated that two other younger Democrats, Ro Khanna of California and Jasmine Crockett of Texas, might throw their hats in the ring.Mark Warner, a Democrat senator for Virginia, paid tribute to Connolly.“Throughout his career, Gerry Connolly has exemplified the very best of public service – fiercely intelligent, deeply principled, and relentlessly committed to the people of Northern Virginia and our nation,” he said. “Whether it’s standing up for federal workers, advocating for good governance, or now confronting cancer with the same resilience and grit that have defined his life of public service, Gerry is one of the toughest fighters I know. I have no doubt that Gerry will continue to fight – for his health, for his community, and for the causes he believes in.” More

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      Trump administration’s budget cuts endanger Meals on Wheels: ‘Life and death implications’

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      The Trump administration’s slashes to the Department of Health and Human Services is threatening Meals on Wheels, the popular program dedicated to combatting senior hunger and isolation. Despite decades of bipartisan support, Meals on Wheels now faces attacks from Republicans whose budget blueprint paves the way for deep cuts to nutrition and other social safety-net programs as a way to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.It’s a move anti-hunger advocates and policy experts warn could have disastrous ramifications for the millions of older Americans who rely on the program to eat each day.“It’s not hyperbolic to say that we’re going to be leaving people hungry and that this literally has life and death implications,” said Nicole Jorwic, the chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations, a non-profit that advocates for ageing Americans, disabled people and their caregivers. “This is not just about a nice-to-have program. These programs are necessities in the lives of seniors all over this country.”While it is still unknown exactly what will be slashed, the blueprint sets the stage for the potential elimination of the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), a key source of funding for local Meals on Wheels programs in 37 states, and serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) and Medicaid, which would increase food insecurity and hardship and steeply increase demand for Meals on Wheels services. The entire staff who oversaw SSBG have already been fired, according to reports.If Congress takes away SSBG funding and weakens other programs, seniors who rely on in-home deliveries or meals in community and senior centers to survive would receive less help as Meals on Wheels community providers would be forced to reduce services, add people to waitlists or turn seniors facing hunger away altogether. Some program operators who are already making tough choices about who to serve due to strained budgets and rising need have said it feels as though they are “playing God”.“We’re talking about lives here so it’s worrisome to me,” said Ellie Hollander, the president and CEO of Meals on Wheels America. “Some of our programs are already operating on razor-thin budgets and are pulling from their reserves. [If funding goes away], it could result in some programs having to close their doors.”In the US one in four Americans is over the age of 60 and nearly 13 million seniors are threatened by or experience hunger. Meals on Wheels America, a network of 5,000 community-based programs that feeds more than 2 million older Americans each year, has been a successful public-private partnership for more than 50 years. The Urban Institute estimates that the number of seniors in the US will more than double over the next 40 years.The Older Americans Act (OAA) nutrition program, which supports the health and wellbeing of seniors through nutrition services, is the network’s primary source of federal funding, covering 37% of what it takes to serve more than 250m meals each year. The exact mix of local, state, federal and private funding of Meals on Wheels’ thousands of on-the-ground community programs varies from provider to provider.Under the orders of the Elon Musk-led unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 20,000 people at HHS have lost their jobs in recent weeks, including at least 40% of the staff at the Administration for Community Living, which coordinates federal policy on ageing and disability. Since many of those staffers helped fulfill critical functions to serving older Americans through the OAA, some Meals on Wheels programs are worried about funding disbursements, reporting data and the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise.HHS has said it will reorganize the ACL into other HHS agencies, although how that would happen is unclear. The co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, composed of 62 member organizations that focus in part on ageing and disability, said in a recent statement: “This disruptive change threatens to increase rates of institutionalization, homelessness and long-lasting economic hardships.”Since experiencing multiple strokes that left her cognitively impaired and at risk for falls, Dierdre Mayes has relied on Meals on Wheels Yolo County to deliver meals that are the 64-year-old’s primary source of nutrition. “I’m really thriving off of the meals I get,” said Mayes, a Woodland, California, resident who also receives $20 a month in food stamps, which she uses to purchase cases of water. “The best part about it is I don’t have to go anywhere to get them.” For Mayes and other homebound older Americans, the program is a lifeline.The uncertainty around Meals on Wheels’ future is causing stress for seniors who are worried about how federal cuts, layoffs and tariffs will impact their daily deliveries. The non-profit FeedMore WNY, which serves homebound older adults in New York’s Erie and Niagara counties, said they’ve been hearing from fearful older clients as word of other recent cuts circulated in the news.Catherine Shick, the public relations manager for FeedMore WNY, said they served 4,775 unique Meals on Wheels clients last year and that demand for their feeding programs increased by 16% from 2023 to 2024, a trend they expect to continue. “Any cut to any funding has a direct impact on the individuals who rely on us for food assistance and any cuts are coming at a time when we know that food insecurity is on the rise,” she said. “We need the continued support of all levels of government, as well as the community, to be able to fulfill our mission.”In addition to delivering healthy, nutritious food, Meals on Wheels drivers, who are primarily volunteers, provide a host of other valuable services: they can look for signs of cognitive or other health changes. They can also address safety hazards in the home or provide pet support services, as well as offer crucial social connections since drivers are often the only person a senior may see in a given day or week.Deliveries have been shown to help keep seniors healthy and in their own homes and communities and out of costly institutional settings. Republicans in the House and Senate have said their goal is to reduce federal spending, but experts say cutting programs that help fund organizations such as Meals on Wheels would instead increase federal spending for healthcare and long-term care expenses for older Americans.“If people can’t stay in their own homes, they’re going to be ‘high flyers’ in hospitals and admitted prematurely into nursing homes,” said Hollander, “all of which cost taxpayers billions of dollars annually versus providing Meals on Wheels for one year to a senior for the same cost of being in the hospital for one day or 10 days in a nursing home.”Experts agree that even before the cuts, Meals on Wheels has been underfunded. Advocates and researchers say OAA hasn’t kept up with the rapid growth of the senior population, rising food costs or inflation. One in three local programs already have waiting lists with many programs already feeling stretched to their limits. For more than 60% of Meals on Wheels providers across the country, federal funding represents half or more of their total revenue, underscoring the serious damage that could be done if cuts or policy changes are made in any capacity.“It feels like a continuous slew of attacks on the programs that seniors rely on to be safe, independent and healthy in their own homes,” said Jorwic of Caring Across Generations. “Everything from cuts to Meals on Wheels to cuts to Medicaid, all these things that are being proposed and actively worked on being implemented, are a real threat to the security of aging Americans.” More

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      Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future | Quinn Slobodian

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      One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ. Being a “low-IQ individual” is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being “high-IQ” is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right. Yet in the drive for US supremacy in artificial intelligence – signalled by the $500bn (£375bn) Stargate project announcement in the White House and an executive order to integrate AI into public education, beginning in kindergarten – there is a hidden irony. If their vision for our economic future is realised, IQ in the sense that they value will lose its meaning.IQ testing arose at a time when the US and other industrialised nations were worried about the health of their populations. Recruitment campaigns for the Boer war in the UK, and then the first world war elsewhere, showed male populations that were unhealthier than their fathers’ generation. Industrial work seemed to be triggering what looked like a process of degeneration, with a fearful endpoint in the subterranean Morlocks of HG Wells’s classic novella, The Time Machine. Intelligence tests were a way to salvage the diamonds from the rough and find a new officer class – and later a new elite – to guide mass society from the slough of despond into a braver future.When manufacturing still ruled in the US, IQ was valued as a way of measuring educational outcomes, but arguably it was not until the breakthrough of the information economy in the 1980s and 90s that knowledge workers became indisputably the vanguard of future prosperity. It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright.One such person was Curtis Yarvin, the middle-aged software engineer and amateur political theorist who has drawn attention for his techno-monarchist philosophy and whose work has been positively cited by the US vice-president, JD Vance. As a youngster, Yarvin was part of Julian Stanley’s Center for Talented Youth. From the early 2000s to the present, he has been a consistent advocate for the importance of IQ as a measure of human worth. In the late 2000s, as an exponent of what came to be called the Dark Enlightenment, or “neo-reaction”, he suggested IQ tests could be used to disqualify voters in post-apartheid South Africa.Yarvin’s IQ fetishism was an organic outgrowth of the intellectual subculture of Silicon Valley. People who manipulated symbols and wrote code all day not surprisingly put special stock into the “general intelligence” measured by IQ, which gauged the proximity of minds to computers defined by logic, memory and processing speed.IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor (the building block of computer chips), who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves. In 2014, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel said the problem with the Republican party was that too many of its leaders were “lower IQ” compared with those in the Democratic party. IQ was also a common focus of discussion on the popular blog Slate Star Codex and elsewhere in the so-called “rationalist” community.All of this would have remained a quirky symptom of San Francisco Bay Area chatboards were it not for the recent alliance between the world of the tech right and the governing party in Washington DC. The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes – that IQ is meaningful and real – brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called “living with inequality”.The US Department of Education was set up in 1980 on a premise opposite to that of The Bell Curve. It worked on the belief that early interventions are crucial for brain development and that measuring outcomes was necessary to fine-tune interventions so that educational testing could produce more even results across the US. This department is in the process of being dismantled by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”, with the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive Linda McMahon promising to complete the task. Musk, like Trump, frequently refers to IQ as if it is a meaningful and important number. If you believe it is hardwired, then you too would want to destroy the Department of Education and stop trying to create standardised outcomes.People have cast around for ways to characterise the ideology that links the west coast of tech entrepreneurs and founders to the north-east and midwest of tycoons and conservatives around the Maga coalition. One way to see it is as a return to nature, a flight to a belief in implacable truths around intelligence, gender and race in the face of a changing world.Yet here’s the rub. That same coalition has bet the future of the US economy on breakthrough developments in artificial intelligence. To date, generative AI is primarily a means of automating away many of the very white-collar jobs that had previously been the heart of the knowledge economy. ChatGPT, its cheerleaders claim, can code better than a Stanford computer science graduate. It can make slides, take minutes and draft talking points quicker than any product of an elite liberal arts college. It can discover protein structures faster than any top hire from MIT. The argument in favour of paying attention to IQ was that, unfair or not, it was a ticket on to the escalator of upward mobility and meritocracy associated with jobs in finance, tech, advertising and even public service or higher education. If those jobs are whittled down to a nub, then on its own terms, the point of caring about IQ vanishes as well.As Musk has said himself, “we are all extremely dumb” compared with the “digital super intelligence” that he is helping to build through initiatives such as his model at xAI, which recently bought the social media platform X. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote once that software was eating the world. If their predictions are true, it will eat the right’s precious IQ too.

      Quinn Slobodian’s latest book is Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      ‘Maga Catholics’ are gaining ground in the US. Now their sight is set on the Vatican

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      Once the papal conclave starts, the cardinals choosing Pope Francis’s successor will be strictly shut off from the world until a new pope is named. But the coming days before the conclave begins on 7 May will see competing factions of Catholics, including many laypeople, campaigning in the Vatican and the US to influence the church’s future – none with more urgency than those discontented with Francis’s liberal reign.American Catholics will fight to play a central role. Soon after the news of Francis’s death reached faithful the world over, the American counter-revolution mobilized, Vatican watchers say. Red-eyes to Rome were booked. Long-distance phone calls were made. Various cardinals likely received sudden dinner invitations.No one involved calls it “lobbying” – that would be untoward, and it’s “subtler than what you see in DC”, Philip Lawler, a conservative Catholic writer and the author of a book critical of Francis, said. “But representatives of all points of view, from across the spectrum, will be doing their best to ensure that the cardinals understand their concerns.”“I’m going to Rome on Saturday, and I’m late to the game,” Francis X Maier, a Catholic writer and the former adviser to Archbishop Charles Chaput, said last week. “There are all sorts of people already meeting with bishops and cardinals and trying to create the environment that they want.”For conservative, traditionalist or self-described “orthodox” Catholics, fresh from 12 uneasy years under Francis, this interregnum will be the last chance in a long time to try to reset a church that they believe has drifted too far left. To some, that means pushing for a church that clearly affirms polarizing but longtime Catholic teachings on sexuality, marriage and abortion. Others, many of them associated with the priorities of Donald Trump and his supporters, would go further, and press for a church that is explicitly, politically rightwing – or at least less hostile to the Maga movement’s stances on immigration, social welfare and the environment.Steve Bannon, perhaps the most public and inflammatory voice of rightwing Catholic discontent, has said he intends to organize a “show of force of traditionalists” with confrontational “wall-to-wall” media coverage. Most politicking, however, will take the form of quieter wheeling and dealing.Conservative Catholics have their papal draft picks – Raymond Burke, Gerhard Müller, Péter Erdő and Robert Sarah are often mentioned – though observers are skeptical that the next pope will break Francis’s mold, in part because he appointed most of the cardinals who will choose his successor. Yet conservative Catholic Americans are unusually influential and wealthy, and the Vatican needs “American money and American influence”, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of religious studies at Villanova University.And while the conservative faction is a minority, it “shouldn’t be dismissed. For them, this conclave is just one battle in a war that lasts decades.”“Do I have time to talk to the Guardian about the fake pope?” Steve Bannon asked when I reached out for an interview. “Of course I do. Always.”For years, Bannon – Trump’s former adviser and a self-described traditionalist Catholic, though he has been divorced three times – has used his massively popular political podcast, War Room, to wage blistering attacks on the Francis pontificate. He has charged the pope with being a Marxist subversive, a globalist anti-American, even illegitimate.View image in fullscreenMuch of conservatives’ anger centers on Francis’s record of pronouncements that seemed to relax or render ambiguous Catholic social doctrines. In 2013, when a reporter asked Francis if there were gay men in the Vatican, he famously remarked: “Who am I to judge?”“‘Who am I to judge?’” Bannon repeated, incredulous. “Yo, dude, you’re the pope. That’s kind of the gig. You’re supposed to be judgmental. This ‘empathy’ is all phony. He brought the therapeutic 20th century into the church. The church is not supposed to be therapeutic.”Devout Catholics have historically been difficult to place in the American political binary. They were often anti-abortion but in favor of immigration and a social safety net. “I believe all the church teaches,” Leah Libresco Sargeant, the author of two books on her Catholic faith, told me. “I try to live up to it. And obviously that makes me a poor fit for either political party.”Still, working-class Catholics were a traditional base of 20th-century Democratic party support, and activist Catholic clergy marched in protests for Black civil rights and against the Vietnam war. Yet the legalization of abortion drove some prominent Catholics who had previously supported leftwing causes to the conservative movement.While the stereotypical Christian conservative of popular imagination may be a Bible-thumping southern Protestant, Catholics have for years dominated the intellectual leadership of the American right. Five of the US supreme court’s six right-leaning justices are Catholic, despite the fact that Catholics account for only about a fifth of the US population. JD Vance – the vice-president who earlier this year sparked a feud of sorts with the Vatican about immigration and compassion and also met briefly with Francis shortly before his death – converted to Catholicism in 2019.Although borderline sacrilege by normal Catholic standards, Bannon’s fulminations against Francis have found a ready audience among a demographic that the New York Post has coined “Maga Catholics”: Catholic Americans who are militantly conservative, both theologically and politically, and see no tension.Francis did a favor to a resurgent Catholic right, Bannon argues: “His reign of terror has been nothing short of disastrous. And that’s why you’re having a massive reaction, particularly in North America, where he rejuvenated the traditional church here.”View image in fullscreenGregory A Smith, who studies religious demography at Pew Research Center, noted that polling shows that most American Catholics – including most Catholic Republicans – viewed Pope Francis favorably throughout his pontificate. Yet starting around 2018, an ideological gap began to open, with Catholic Republicans reporting less favorable views of Francis than Catholic Democrats.Pointedly referring to Francis mostly by his secular, pre-papal surname, Bergoglio, Bannon outlined numerous grievances.Among his arguments: that the pope was hostile to the old-fashioned Latin mass liturgy beloved by some American Catholics, did not hold alleged abusers in the clergy fully accountable, muddled longstanding doctrines about sexuality and marriage, undermined US sovereignty by celebrating mass immigration, and betrayed persecuted Christians abroad by allowing the Chinese communist government control over the church there.“He’ll burn in hell just for that,” Bannon said of the agreement with China. He admitted that his stance was probably not representative of the average person in the pew.Yet many of these complaints, in more respectful form, are common to the orthodox Catholics who are the church’s most engaged, influential and financially generous constituency.While disagreeing with some of the conservative characterizations of the state of the church, Faggioli said that American detractors of Pope Francis have momentum, to some extent, on their side. American priests starting their vocations today are on average more conservative, not less, than their older peers, he noted.Latin masses are popular where they are offered. And the past couple years have seen a surprise influx of young adults converting or reverting to Catholicism, many of whom seem to want “smells and bells” and moral certitude, rather than the casual Catholicism they associate with their parents’ generation, or the rainbow flag-adorned progressivism of many mainline Protestant churches.“The living and vibrant parts of the US church are not those who were most enthusiastic about the Francis pontificate, but those who have embraced the ‘all-in’ Catholicism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI,” George Weigel, a neoconservative Catholic writer, told me by email as he traveled to Rome. “In the main,” he argued, “Francis’s most vocal supporters were the ageing and shrinking parts of the American church.”He contrasted the Anglican church. “[A] lot of the most engaged Catholics in the United States don’t think of the Church of England as a very impressive model of Christian vitality, and they rightly attribute its decline to its embracing a lot of contemporary culture, rather than working to convert that culture.”His views echo outside the US, as well. Recent data suggests that Catholics may soon outnumber Anglicans in Britain for the first time since the 16th-century Reformation, with the change driven in large part by gen-Z churchgoers, even as British society as a whole continues to become more secular.View image in fullscreenNot all conservative or orthodox Catholics were unhappy with Francis.In the magazine First Things, the conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari, who converted to Catholicism in 2016, argued recently that the substance of Francis’s preaching was often “far more ‘trad’ than critics appreciated”. Yet he was dogged by “the emergence of a veritable anti-Francis cottage industry” that worked to “prime a subset of Catholics against the pope”.In an email, he told me: “I personally loved the late Holy Father, and generally tried to relate to the Vatican as a medieval peasant might: pay, pray and obey.”Catholics For Catholics is one of the political faces of a newly militant Catholic right. In March, the organization hosted a prayer event at Mar-a-Lago for the second year in a row. The organization also worked to mobilize Catholic swing-state voters for the Republican party last fall, with a particular focus on millions of “low-propensity” Catholics who don’t regularly vote.John Yep co-founded Catholics For Catholics two and a half years ago, he told me, to “advocate for Catholics in the public square, and to just reaffirm our beliefs and present them to our politicians so that they are aware of them and respect who we stand for and what we believe”.The organization is well to the right of the average Catholic, by most metrics, and perhaps even to the right of the average conservative Catholic: it published a book by Bishop Joseph Strickland, a Texas clergyman who was removed from office in 2023 after becoming one of Francis’s fiercest critics.Faggioli, the Villanova professor, believes that traditionalists overreacted to Francis. “Conservative Catholics got used to a certain kind of papacy and a sympathy for their causes during the 35 years of John Paul II and Pope Benedict, and some of them thought that history was over,” he said.But Yep’s political instincts about Catholics as a voting bloc may be apt. According to an AP analysis, Trump won 54% of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, a four-point improvement on 2020, when he and Biden received roughly equal shares of the Catholic vote. And although white Catholics support Trump at higher rates than Latino Catholics, Trump also benefited from a swing in the Latino Catholic vote.Bannon believes that a rupture between traditionalist North American Catholics and the larger church is coming – and even welcomes it. Observers are skeptical of that idea, in part because most Catholics, regardless of their ideological stripe, would find the prospect of a 21st-century schism with the mother church in Rome unthinkable. But either way there seems to be a growing gap between a Catholic community in the US that is becoming more conservative and a church leadership in Rome that is open to new ideas.Faggioli believes that “in some sense, this church is already in a situation of soft schism”. But he doesn’t think a full-blown schism is in the cards.“The real goal of [most] neo-traditionalist voices is not to break away and make their own small church,” he said. “Their project is to win back the entire Catholic church, in the long term, to what they think is real Catholicism.” More

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      ‘Standing up for Christian values’: US evangelicals keep the faith with Trump

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      When asked about Donald Trump’s Easter morning post wishing a happy holiday to “the Radical Left Lunatics … fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners” to the United States, Jackson Lahmeyer, an Oklahoma evangelical Christian pastor, said: “Isn’t it terrible that they are wanting to do that?”Lahmeyer, the founder of the Pastors for Trump organization, was not bothered by Trump’s extreme and divisive message on the Christian religious holiday, because, he said: “You cannot unify with evil.”Lahmeyer’s attitude appears typical of many white evangelical leaders who still strongly support Trump despite what – for many – is violent, extremist-laden language that many would see as unsuitable for any religious occasion, let alone one intimately connected to rebirth, forgiveness and peace.But those leaders in the US say Trump – unlike some past Republican presidents – has followed through on campaign promises concerning core issues such as abortion, immigration, the location of the US embassy in Israel and, more generally, his pledge to “bring back Christianity”.More good things could be in store for that demographic because in a second Easter post on his platform Truth Social, Trump said he would make America “more religious, than it has ever been before!!!”“He has moved the needle for the Christian agenda unlike anyone else, especially in modern times,” said Lahmeyer, who attended an Easter dinner at the White House. “As a pastor, obviously, that is music to my ears.”White evangelical voters also turned out in large numbers for George W Bush when he ran for president in 2000 and 2004, but they were disappointed because they felt he did not do enough to oppose same-sex marriage or to ban abortion. Bush also, when compared to Trump, had a more liberal immigration policy, including supporting providing undocumented immigrants the chance to become citizens, according to John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and the author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.“Bush wasn’t willing to give them everything that they wanted to be elected,” Fea said. “Trump will do what evangelicals tell him to do for the most part, in order to maintain power.”In addition to appointing supreme court justices who ruled that there is no constitutional right to abortion, Trump also moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which previous presidents had said they supported but did not implement.“They all said it to get votes. They never did it. The president did it,” said Lahmeyer, who ran for Senate and lost in 2022.During this term, Trump has signed executive orders to establish a faith office and a taskforce to address “anti-Christian bias” in the federal government.To evangelical leaders, that emphasis on Christian values stands in contrast to how they perceive the Biden administration’s actions, including in 2024 declaring 31 March Transgender Day of Visibility, the date when it had been celebrated since its creation in 2009, but last year fell – entirely coincidentally – on Easter Sunday.But in a world where conspiracy theories and misinformation is rife, that sparked anger among rightwing Christians.“Easter was barely mentioned,” said Brad Sherman, an Iowa pastor and Republican now running for governor. “In fact, I think it was more about some kind of LGBTQ awareness day or something, if I remember correctly, so I just feel like President Trump is standing up for Christian values.”In actual fact, Biden continued the tradition of the annual White House Easter egg roll and in a statement said: “As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’s sacrifice … with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people.”This year, Trump held an Easter prayer service and dinner with Lahmeyer; prominent pastors such as Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress; and his personal pastor, Paula White-Cain, who now leads the White House faith office, among others.“[Trump] preached the gospel to us pastors, and I thought that was amazing,” Lahmeyer said.While most white evangelicals support Trump, there are Christian leaders, including evangelicals, who have criticized some of the president’s policy decisions, especially to eliminate 83% of US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs. Among the initiatives affected was the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), which has saved millions of lives from HIV/Aids and was popular with evangelicals.“We see it as really overarchingly a pro-life program in that it promotes the life-saving need for HIV treatment,” Emily Chambers Sharpe, the health director at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, told the Guardian.But the person behind many of the federal government cuts, Elon Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, called USAID a “criminal organization” and said that it was “time for it to die”.Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners, a Christian social justice group, said such remarks remind him of “the prophet Isaiah, who forewarned us that woe to you that call evil, good, and good, evil”.The administration is “making these allegations that aren’t backed up by evidence or proof. And they disparage this whole body of work that has created such goodwill around the world and is so aligned with our Christian values,” Russell Taylor said.But many American evangelicals continue to support Trump despite such cuts, because concern for the poor “always takes a back seat in evangelical politics to abortion [and] control of the supreme court, which will allow them to have the religious freedom that they want”, said Fea, the history professor.Tony Suárez, the founder of Revivalmakers Ministries, an evangelical group, said he supports Trump because he is trying to strengthen border security and is restoring “respect for conservative, Judeo-Christian values”.Once the country secures the border and removes “the criminal element”, Suárez, who is also executive vice-president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said he would like to see a pathway to at least legal permanent residency for undocumented immigrants. He thinks that based on some of his comments during his first term, Trump would support that too.But Trump also wants to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign residents, a guarantee under the 14th amendment.Asked for his position on this, Suárez said that is “a little bit above me to understand what it is specifically that they are arguing”.And on cuts to foreign aid programs, Suárez said he views them “as difficult decisions that any organization, denomination, reformation, might have to take, and they will never be popular”.Suárez joked that the only thing he disagrees with Trump on is him saying that “you may even get tired of winning”.“I’m not tired,” Suárez said. “I’m looking for the next win.” More

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      How Trump’s war on DEI is roiling US police: ‘it doesn’t mean work will stop’

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      After the murder of George Floyd, protests pushed some police agencies to bring in a new class of professionals like Colleen Jackson to help make departments more representative of and responsive to the communities they serve.Hired as the first chief diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officer in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 2021, Jackson has assisted in a hiring process that swore in a class of women, Black and Asian American recruits and has surveyed residents on their experiences with the police. She is now organizing an event to bring together young residents and Black officers that she hopes will lead to safer interactions on the street.“I hope what I do touches people’s hearts and that changes their behavior,” she said.Yet, the threat of the Cleveland suburb losing a federal grant because of her work only becomes more palpable as her friends and colleagues in the field of DEI lose their jobs – and the work they’ve dedicated their lives to hemorrhages esteem. “I’m just not the person who’s gonna operate in fear,” she said. “But I am a person who operates in reality.”View image in fullscreenThere is a growing realization among DEI professionals such as Jackson and police officers across the country that a backlash is gaining momentum. Donald Trump, who has called DEI “illegal”, has halted federal programs and encouraged executive branch agencies to investigate and withhold funds from institutions that engage in DEI practices.The new administration has threatened to pull federal funding to compel policy changes in other areas of American life, such as universities, but policing experts are skeptical that a similar tactic would work on the nation’s roughly 17,000 local and state law enforcement agencies, particularly because they draw most of their funds from local taxes.Still, Trump’s actions are already having an impact, contributing negatively to the culture in police departments by “encouraging tension within the ranks”, said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy project director of policing. Opposition to diverse perspectives, she said, can breed an insular culture prone to abuse of underrepresented groups.“This is not merely about the threat to diversity in policing,” Borchetta said. “That threat can spill out into the street.”Increasing diversity among the ranks isn’t a panacea for police abuse – think of the case of Tyre Nichols, a Black man in Memphis, Tennessee, who died after being beaten by several Black officers. Still, policing experts say, hiring a more diverse force combined with efforts to change the culture within departments can help.Trump’s anti-DEI push is not the first time efforts to diversify policing have faced a backlash. Black officers hired in the south during Reconstruction lost their jobs in the late 1800s when the federal government relinquished its control over former Confederate states. Later in the 1970s, after the civil rights movement era, federal efforts to force several big-city police departments to diversify faced opposition from white-dominated police unions. By the 1990s, most of these federal efforts were terminated.According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the rise of DEI in policing, the number of Black officers hit its high-water mark in 2022, constituting 17% of the nation’s rank-and-file cops before falling to 14% last year, which is about the number of Black Americans in the country. In 2024, white people made up more than 79% of police officers and women made up more than 14%.Although law enforcement diversity and inclusion experts such as Nicola Smith-Kea maintain that DEI is about more than race – it’s about including people with different abilities, genders, faiths and ages – Smith-Kea thinks Trump has transformed the acronym into a “code word” for Black, creating a framing that DEI is discriminatory against white officers.Smith-Kea said a backlash could mean “removing programs” that serve “the broader population, not just any one race”, such as accessibility ramps for disabled people or equal pay programs for women.In February, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, dismissed Biden-era lawsuits that accused police departments of hiring discrimination. Bondi dropped a case against the Maryland state police (MSP) before an agreement could be signed that would have required MSP to revise a test that Biden’s justice department found disproportionately disqualified Black and female applicants.In her dismissal, Bondi said police officers would now be “chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety – not to meet DEI quotas”.Phillip Atiba Solomon, the chief executive of the Center for Policing Equity, an organization that collects and analyzes public safety data to improve policing outcomes, said he wondered whether the Trump administration might try to use the Department of Justice to investigate police departments with DEI programs for “reverse racism”. Although Trump might have the power to quickly transform the executive branch, lawyer James Fett believes that it will take more time for the federal courts to turn against DEI. Fett, who frequently represents white officers who say they have faced employment discrimination, is eagerly awaiting the disposition of a case now with the US supreme court filed by a woman who claims she was denied a promotion with the Ohio department of youth services because she is not gay.If the conservative court rules in her favor, experts believe it could lower the standard that straight, white people will have to meet to prove they have faced employment discrimination. “It’s going to be much easier when people want to attack promotions or hiring or even terminations based on a DEI policy,” Fett said.Charles Billups of the Grand Council of Guardians, the umbrella organization for New York state’s African American policing organizations, said he and many of his members fear that Trump’s anti-DEI orders could roll back the progress they’ve seen in hiring and promotions. “A lot of us are preparing for the fair competition fostered by DEI to be eliminated,” he said.Even before Trump, some DEI professionals said they were facing pushback.Delaware county, Pennsylvania, hired Lauren Footman as its first DEI director in spring 2022. Included in her purview were the park police and law enforcement officials within the local prosecutor’s office. She said she felt tokenized right away in a department that was not interested in cultural change and only supportive of hosting parties for identity celebrations such as Black History Month.“Someone in HR actually thought that I was an event coordinator,” she said. During her time, she never worked with the park police or criminal investigation division because she says that Delaware county did not compel them to participate.Footman was fired in the spring of 2024. She says the termination was retaliation for her attempts to address the county’s culture of discrimination and she is currently pursuing legal action. When asked about Footman’s claims, Delaware county said that after her termination, the county worked with a consultant to evaluate its programs and make recommendations. However, county officials vigorously denied her accusations.Even in departments where DEI appears to have support, it can fall short. Veteran Sgt Charlotte Djossou believes that is the case in the DC Metropolitan police department (MPD).View image in fullscreenDjossou is a whistleblower who has been speaking out since the 2010s against the racial targeting in the MPD’s jump-out tactics, which involve plain clothes units accosting and searching people on the street. The courts have repeatedly found jump-outs to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. When Djossou first talked about them in the news media, she attributed their pervasiveness to the lack of Black officers in positions of power.But while she has seen more Black people hired and promoted due to DEI, she doesn’t believe it has altered the way the Black community is policed. “It’s not a Black or white thing. It’s a blue thing. And no matter what your race is, in policing, you have to conform in order to move up,” Djossou said.Djossou has filed a lawsuit against the MPD claiming it retaliated against her for whistleblowing by denying her promotions during a time when the department has been engaged in a high-profile DEI campaign to recruit and hire women. That DEI effort was shepherded by Chief Pamela A Smith, who initially joined the MPD in 2022 as its chief equity officer in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder.“I’m Black. I’m a woman. And all they’ve done is hold my career back,” Djossou said. The MPD did not respond to a request for comment.Smith-Kea understands the frustration some reform-oriented officers might have had with DEI. “Change doesn’t happen overnight,” she said, but there are advances, pointing to the widely used toolkit she helped develop for the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which instructs departments on how to implement interventions for dealing with people in a mental health crisis.Tragic killings like that of Daniel Prude have revealed the interplay between race and mental health in fatal police interactions. Prude was apprehended by Rochester, New York, police in the midst of a mental health crisis in 2020 and died of asphyxia after police put a mesh hood over his face and pinned him on the ground. Smith-Kea believes DEI-rooted solutions can prevent deaths like Prude’s. As an example, she points to the BJA toolkit’s potential to make all people, not just Black people, safer.Despite all the worries about DEI’s fate in policing, the ACLU’s Borchetta said departments have incentives to keep DEI because many learned in the 2020s that to solve crimes they “need to gain the trust of the people and that trust is more easily eroded when police departments don’t reflect the people they’re policing”.Borchetta noted that police departments also learned to use diversity to avoid accountability. She was the lead attorney in the case that brought an end to the New York police department’s unconstitutional practice of stop and frisk in 2013. While working on that case, she said, one of the NYPD’s key defenses was simply: “See how diverse our department is.”However, she also credited that diversity with helping to win the case, including the contribution of Latino and Black officers who raised alarms about stop-and-frisk. “That’s a reminder that diversity is important because it brings in perspectives of people who might be affected by your program in different ways,” she said.In Shaker Heights, where the mayor has vowed to continue its DEI initiatives, Jackson was optimistic about the future of DEI in policing. She believed that her work had touched people, and that kind of personal impact couldn’t just be erased with an executive order. She said she was certain she and other DEI professionals would continue the work, regardless of Trump’s efforts.“I recognize these executive orders could bring the end of this particular name for the work – DEI – but it doesn’t mean the work will stop,” Jackson said. When asked how she could be so sure, she said: “The work of DEI has been going on for generations. It’s the only reason why I, as a Black woman, have a job in the public sector, you know what I mean?”This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. More

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      How a solar storm could lead to a US nuclear disaster worse than Chornobyl | Mark Leyse

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      On 14 May 1921, a powerful solar storm – called the New York Railroad storm – caused the northern lights to illuminate New York City’s night sky. On Broadway, crowds lingered, enjoying “flaring skies” that remained undimmed by city lights. The following morning, excess electric currents shut down the New York Central Railroad’s signal and switching system in Manhattan, stopping trains. A fire broke out in a railroad control tower that was located at Park Avenue and 57th Street. Smoke filled the air. Along a stretch of Park Avenue, residents “were coughing and choking from the suffocating vapors which spread for blocks”.When a solar storm’s electrically charged particles envelop Earth, they cause geomagnetic storms that generate electric fields in the ground, inducing electric currents in power grids. Solar storms as intense as the 1921 superstorm have the potential to cause a nightmare scenario in which modern power grids, communication systems, and other infrastructures collapse for months. Such a collapse of power grids would likely also lead to nuclear power plant accidents, whose radioactive emissions would aggravate the overall catastrophe.Scientists estimate that solar storms powerful enough to collapse portions of modern power grids for months may hit Earth more often than once in a century. In July 2012, a solar superstorm, estimated to have been more intense than the New York Railroad storm, crossed Earth’s orbit, missing the planet by one week’s time.The east coast states, upper midwest, and Pacific north-west have geological characteristics – not predominant in other regions of the United States – that increase the vulnerability of power-grid infrastructures to solar storms. Unfortunately, the majority of the commercial nuclear power plants in the United States are located in east coast states and the upper midwest, two of the US regions that are most vulnerable to solar storm-induced blackouts.In a months-long blackout, nuclear plants would lose their supply of offsite electricity, which is necessary for their safe operation. Emergency diesel generators, which provide backup electricity, are designed to power cooling pumps for a number of days – not months. No nuclear plant in the United States has ever lost offsite electricity for longer than a week. In 2012, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission stated that an extreme solar storm could collapse power grids and potentially lead to reactor core damage at multiple nuclear plants.Storage pools at nuclear plants that house spent fuel assemblies, encasing nuclear waste, are also vulnerable to accidents. Spent fuel assemblies can overheat and catch fire, dispersing radioactive material into the environment, if a storage pool’s coolant water is lost.Spent fuel assemblies are so thermally hot and radioactive that they must be submerged in circulating water and cooled in a storage pool for years. Storage pools at US nuclear plants typically contain about six reactor core loads of nuclear fuel and are almost as densely packed with fuel assemblies as operating reactors – hazards that vastly increase the odds of a major accident.A spent fuel fire in an exposed, densely packed storage pool could potentially release 10 times as much caesium-137 as the Chornobyl accident is estimated to have released. Such a disaster could contaminate thousands of square miles of land and expose millions of people to large doses of ionizing radiation, many of whom might die from early or latent cancer.By contrast, if a thinly packed storage pool were deprived of coolant water, its spent fuel would likely release about 1% of the radioactive material estimated to be released by a spent fuel fire at a densely packed pool.Sufficiently cooled spent fuel assemblies can be transferred from a storage pool to dry cask storage; that is, passively cooled, liquid-free containers of steel and concrete that shield people from ionizing radiation. The inevitability of a nationwide power grid collapse that would lead to multiple nuclear disasters and untold human suffering emphasizes the need to transfer spent fuel assemblies to dry cask storage as quickly as possible.Promptly transferring the nationwide inventories of spent fuel assemblies that have been cooled for at least five years from US storage pools to dry cask storage would be “relatively inexpensive” – less than a total of $5.5bn. The economic cost of losing vast tracts of urban and rural land for generations to come because of radioactive contamination would be far more expensive.Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced the Dry Cask Storage Act in 2014, calling to outlaw the practice of overloading spent fuel pools. The act, which Markey has reintroduced in subsequent congressional sessions, has not passed into law. The nuclear industry’s mismanagement of spent fuel must stop. Congress needs to pass legislation requiring the owners of nuclear plants to swiftly thin out spent fuel pools.

      Mark Leyse is a nuclear power safety advocate More

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      Trump’s second term will be the worst presidential term ever | Steven Greenhouse

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      In his first 100 days back in office, Donald Trump has made a strong case that his second term will be by far the worst presidential term in US history. So many of his flood-the-zone actions have been head-spinning and stomach-turning. His administration seems to be powered by ignorance and incoherence, spleen and sycophancy. Both he and his right-hand man, Elon Musk, with their resentment-fueled desire to disrupt everything, seem intent on pulverizing the foundations of our government, our democracy, our alliances as well as any notions of truth. Tragically, Trump’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.The worst and most dangerous part of Trump’s agenda is his war against our democracy and constitution – defying judges’ orders, deporting people without due process, suggesting he will run for a third term, calling to impeach judges who rule against him, pardoning hundreds of January 6 criminals, gutting federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees in flagrant violation of the law, and banning books from military libraries. (One wonders: will book burning be next?) Underlining just how dangerous and lawless Trump is, he is talking publicly about disappearing US citizens to foreign countries where they could be locked in prison forever. For those who care about democracy and basic freedoms, this is Defcon 1 stuff.From Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, every president since the second world war has worked hard to build alliances to promote peace and prosperity and deter aggression. But right out of the box, Trump 2.0 has rushed to blow up our alliances and cavalierly alienate our allies. Trump quickly rejected the US’s traditional foreign policy and ideals by warmly embracing Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator, and turning against Ukraine and its noble fight against Putin’s aggression. Trump sounded like a rapacious 19th-century imperialist when he threatened to take over the Panama canal and, ditto, when he talked of using force to seize control of Greenland, which belongs to our longtime Nato ally, Denmark. Then there’s Trump’s astoundingly idiotic talk – and taunt – that Canada should be our 51st state. What a way to anger and alienate a nation that has long been the US’s best friend.Then there is the disaster – or should we say clown show – of Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again, who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-tomorrow tariffs. His “liberation day” tariffs were put together by a clown-car crew, just three hours before he announced it, and Trump and company seemed to have zero idea that his hodgepodge of tariffs would send the world’s stock markets into a nervous breakdown. Trump’s team was stupid enough to think that China was too feeble to respond effectively to Trump’s trade war – treasury secretary Scott Bessent said China had “a losing hand” with just “a pair of twos”. Trump and his clown car failed to realize that China had the ability to retaliate in devastating ways – by clamping down on rare earth exports that American manufacturers and tech companies desperately need, and perhaps by selling off hundreds of billions of dollars in US bonds. Former treasury secretary Janet Yellen was appalled, saying: “This is the worst self-inflicted policy wound I’ve ever seen in my career inflicted on our economy.”Moving beyond his bombastic rhetoric, Mr Make America Great Again has been showing the world that the US is not so great. Because of Trump’s incoherent policies, bond investors are souring on the US and the dollar as never before as they question America’s reliability with such an unstable man at its helm. Investors are even questioning whether the US under Trump will make good on its debts – a fear that has caused interest rates to soar on treasury bonds. For the first time in modern history, they are questioning the dollar’s primacy and whether it should remain the world’s reserve currency. To the world’s investors, it’s clear that Trump is dragging America down, not lifting it up.Indeed, Trump’s economic stewardship has been so astonishingly inept that we went from economists saying early this year that there was no way the US would have a recession anytime soon to many economists predicting a recession this year.

      Steven Greenhouse is a labor reporter. More