We’re less than a week away from the first match of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, with tensions mounting over the United States’ role as one of the host countries, and it remains to be seen just how the Department of Homeland Security will respond to what it deems threats—or how active ICE will be at the tournament.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that “every single” agency would be on site. “We’re going to have facial recognition, right. If we have people coming in that’s on the terrorist watchlist, we’re going to collapse on them. That’s not going to [just] be ICE, that could be state police that collapse on them. We’re all working together.”

ICE’s facial recognition systems can misidentify people and generate false matches—and the agency reportedly places smartphone-based facial recognition matches ahead of physical evidence including birth certificates.

Perhaps to counter potential criticisms, Mullin stated that ICE will be there “not for immigration, but for terrorist threats” and that “for years, ICE has been around and no one knew who they were.”

Several cities hosting World Cup matches have announced that they would not cooperate with ICE enforcement, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Seattle. On Monday, LA County Sheriff Robert Luna claimed that Mullin personally told him that federal agents would not conduct civil immigration enforcement “at any of the games.” But the federal government has increasingly deployed the criminal legal system against people they allege to have violated immigration law, with little regard for their alleged offenses and despite the fact that unauthorized presence in the US is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

Even giving Mullin the benefit of the doubt—which may not be the best move—his statement leaves ample room for loopholes: will it apply between games? To areas outside the stadiums? That uncertainty impacts fans, visitors, families of players, journalists—all of whom face a heightened risk of human rights violations, according to a joint travel advisory issued by more than 120 civil society groups in April. Among the risks listed in their press release:

• Arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation
• Expanded restrictions and limitation on travel and entry to the U.S.
• Invasive social media screening and searches of electronic devices
• Violent and unconstitutional immigration enforcement, including racial profiling
• Suppression of speech and protest and increased surveillance
• Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment – and even death – while in ICE detention or custody

Given that ominous warning—and the Trump administration’s tendency to label political opponents and immigrants of all stripes as “criminal aliens,” “domestic terrorists,” or otherwise dangerous—a secondhand verbal promise that there will be no civil immigration enforcement is not reassuring.

While watching Madonna’s recent Times Square takeover—sponsored by the gay “dating” app Grindr—it struck me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Something about Madonna’s performance made me immediately think of Nancy Pelosi. (Do with that what you will.) Both women are legendary trailblazers in their own right, foundational to their respective worlds, and yet always in a complicated negotiation with the legacy they’re leaving behind.

From the very start, both women were dismissed by the world around them, eventually defying expectations and a male-driven culture that wished to deem them unworthy. They both found longevity in their worlds due to reinvention, navigating the changing winds of pop culture or political landscapes by having to shape shift in ways their male counterparts never had to.

It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly sparked the comparison—maybe initially, it was the superficial fact of both being women who take up powerful spaces and refuse to let the world tell them they can’t do powerful things. Maybe it’s also that when these women dare to exist in public, we write about it, talk about it, send clips to our group chats about it.

But there was something else too. As Madonna precariously dangled her leg over the edge of a Times Square banister while she promotes Confessions II, the long-awaited follow-up to her 2005 chart-topping Confessions on a Dance Floor, I was hit with a type of exhaustion. It was a feeling I felt when Pelosi was exiting Congress. Madonna and Pelosi, in all their power, once created the winds of culture and politics. Now, it seems, they chase them.

But maybe that’s real legacy. It’s not about newness or the albums or gavels, but the audacity to still be here, unbothered and reveling in knowing you already did it. In a culture terrified of irrelevance, there’s something loudly radical about two women who’ve already proved everything—and know it.

Far-right podcaster Candace Owens made a surprise trip to Russia this week, where she spoke on a panel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), a Davos-style event meant to build relationships between Russia and other world powers. Owens, who initially claimed that she was only taking a family vacation, used her trip to tweet at length about the country’s beauty, safety, and friendliness to Christians. “The Christian expression and heritage here is unmatched,” she tweeted, alongside photos of Russian Orthodox churches. “Unsurprisingly, they are lying to us about Russia.” 

“I’m starting to understand why the talking heads panic and shout and lie about ‘Russian collusion’ when they learn an American with a platform is traveling here,” Owens added in another tweet. “It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave. It is genuinely shocking how clean, beautiful and ordered this city is. It is so far removed from media depictions.” 

The baldly propagandistic nature of Owens’ trip generated condemnation from an unusual quarter: other MAGA figures, who suddenly found themselves unusually concerned about Kremlin-backed disinformation. 

Glenn Beck, for instance, tweeted that Owens’ trip is “proof that Russia and Alexander Dugin’s massive propaganda operation is working.” (Dugin is a political philosopher and ultra-nationalist figure who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” due to his reported influence on the president.) A MAGA podcaster named Matt Tardio responded in agreement: “I’ve respected Glenn Beck for years on his honest reporting. Finally, people are waking up. Russian disinformation has been fooling influential people in the west with one goal, to destroy us from within.” 

“Candace continues lying openly to her audience and they still clap like brainless seals,” declared Jessica Reed Kraus, the MAGA gossip blogger who writes the House Inhabit substack. “Russia is cool guys!” she added, mocking Owens’ fans.

In truth, most of the MAGA media world had very little to say about Owens’ trip. The few people on the right who condemned it notably have longstanding feuds with her, part of a massive, omnidirectional set of beefs and internecine fights that have been dividing the movement for most of Trump’s second presidency. Beck, for instance, has defended Erika Kirk, the widow of slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, against attacks from Owens. Other critics of Owens’ travel included her ex-boss Ben Shapiro, who referred to her trip as a “magical propaganda tour.” The two have been enemies for years after Shapiro fired Owens from the Daily Wire in 2024 for her rabidly antisemitic statements.

Laura Loomer, who’s been bitterly feuding with Owens for months, went further. 

“I don’t think conservatives realize how much Russian propaganda we have been fed over the last few years as ‘independent journalism,’” she tweeted during Owens’ visit. “It’s starting to become very clear to me how many people who claimed to be defenders of the West were just saying that to suck in a pro-West audience so they could slowly brainwash them with foreign propaganda until they could convince their viewers to work against the West. Those ‘interviews’ we all defended were not actually interviews. They were psychological operations meant to weaponize political factions in America for the purpose of pushing foreign interests.”

The left, Loomer added in another tweet, “wasn’t entirely wrong when they called some people Russian puppets. Just like the right isn’t wrong when they call some people agents of the Chinese communists and Islamists. Now I’m just wondering how long some of these people I’ve known for years have been activated as foreign agents and who their handlers are.” 

The MAGA movement as a whole has a mixed record on recognizing that disinformation or propaganda exist. Loomer, for instance, often dismissed reports that the Russian government attempted to interfere in U.S. elections as a “hoax.” And Beck had very little to say publicly about the Tenet Media scandal, in which numerous prominent right-wing influencers took money from a company that was secretly receiving financial backing from two people with ties to Russian state media. Lauren Chen, Tenet’s co-founder, had been a freelance contributor to Beck’s BlazeTV, although her contract was terminated after the indictment was released. 

Russia uses the SPIEF as a display of economic might and soft power, mixing speeches from Vladimir Putin with ballet performances. Owens’ participation was first reported on X by national security analyst Ryan Mauro. Amid Russia’s continued attack on Ukraine, Western countries largely shun the event, but the Taliban did make an appearance this year. In a break with recent tradition, a U.S. official also attended: Rodney Mims Cook Jr, the Chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts, who’s overseeing the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom. Cook presented images of the ballroom during the panel, where he spoke alongside actor Steven Seagal, a Putin ally.

Owens, a dedicated rage-baiter, clearly understood her visit would generate controversy. “This has been the most triggering trip for the mainstream media,” she declared in an RT interview. “And it has been laughable to see the headlines they are coming up with.”  

“Great news!” she tweeted on Friday morning, celebrating that she’s be attending a second day of the conference. “Thanks to the wall-to-wall western media meltdown about my trip to Russia, their entire nation became aware of my presence here. I have now been cordially invited to hear President Putin speak today at SPIEF. This is why we say there is no such thing as bad press.” 

Owens also sought to leverage the presence of a U.S. official at SPIEF to defend herself from her erstwhile allies’ attacks: “Isn’t it kind of weird how Trump sent an entire delegation, (including the architect building his ‘ballroom’) and yet Zionists never accused any of them of being Russian spies? It’s almost as if the people who refuse to peddle their talking points, get smeared.” 

(Owens often blames Jews or “Zionists” for unconnected world events—for instance blaming the Orthodox Jewish Chabad Lubavitch movement for U.S. involvement in Iran.)

Mitchell Jackson, a publicist for Owens and a slate of other controversial figures, told me that “Candace is not being paid to attend” SPIEF, adding, “Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley having previously hosted panels at this event, and everyone from Rex Tillerson to Jon Huntsman has spoken at this event.” 

In 2018, Huntsman actually chose to cancel his address, and Tillerson’s appearance was before the United States enforced major economic sanctions against Russia. Today, the State Department advises Americans not to go to the country for any reason.

OpenAI and its chatbot ChatGPT’s “success has not been earned; the rise of OpenAI is attributable to a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI’s market value at unacceptable costs.”

Earlier this week, Florida, a state led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ right-wing, pro-business administration, sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging they promoted their products while knowing it could hurt users.

On its surface, this lawsuit may seem odd: It was filed by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, the 2024 presidential campaign manager and former chief of staff to Gov. DeSantis, who has repeatedly struck down government regulation and championed businesses—often at the expense of everyday people. 

And the Trump administration appears to be committed to expanding artificial intelligence, stating in a January 2025 executive order that the US had to be dominant in the field “to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security. The Defense Department even made a deal with OpenAI to use the company’s AI technology for classified security networks. 

But the first page of Florida’s complaint features a screenshot of OpenAI’s explanation of its parental controls for ChatGPT, in part reading: “We work with experts, test safeguards, and update our systems regularly to reduce risks. ChatGPT is trained to avoid showing harmful material and to respond in a respectful way for all users.”

Florida’s response: “Not so.”

The lawsuit claims that “mass shooters have been aided and abetted in deadly rampages”—including one where an accused gunman had extended conversations with ChatGPT before a mass shooting at Florida State University last year—and has pushed vulnerable people to take their own lives, among other allegations.

As my colleague Mark Follman reported last month, within a roughly 20-minute conversation with ChatGPT, the chatbot had given him advice on weapons and tactics while he simulated planning a mass shooting: 

ChatGPT delivered these responses with lots of encouragement—and it kept going even after I talked of emulating the Uvalde mass shooter’s choice of weapon, asked about livestreaming with a body camera and using hollow-point bullets, and focused on defending against return gunfire from police.

Mark’s investigation is cited in the Florida lawsuit.

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

These are legitimate concerns and DeSantis’ administration is correct to pursue accountability against OpenAI and Altman. DeSantis also has a record—although largely only starting toward the end of 2025—of protecting Floridians from AI companies, including allowing local governments to reject data center development projects. Some of the governor’s efforts have even failed, with other Florida Republicans citing Trump’s messaging that states shouldn’t oppose AI development.

So are we looking at the “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” meme?

Perhaps, but the large range of public statements on AI regulation among prominent figures in the GOP demonstrate that officials may see different upsides and downsides to following the Trump administration on this one issue.

For DeSantis, Floridians across the state, many of whom are part of—or could be—his voting base, are organizing against data centers. “No political party has a monopoly on the anger locals feel,” the Tampa Bay Times noted on Thursday. “It’s common at anti-data center events for the speakers to not even mention political parties.” And as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote last month, most Americans say they would be against living near a data center. It’s popular to at least visibly consider regulating AI. 

And this pressure may be seeping into the White House. President Trump flip-flopped on calling for federal vetting of some advanced AI systems for national security risks before their release to the public (although participation from AI companies is voluntary), eventually signing the executive order on Tuesday. It is still unclear to what extent the executive order changed after Trump had initially voiced objections last month, but AI regulation is now an issue that may be worth alienating others on the right over.

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

There has justifiably been much attention paid to Donald Trump’s personal corruption: cutting sleazy crypto deals, trading stocks in companies affected by his administration’s decisions, doling out pardons to fraudsters who make hefty donations to his political organizations, and so much more. But what’s even more significant is how Trump is perverting the federal government to allow wealthy individuals and corporations engaged in crooked conduct to escape scrutiny, prosecution, and punishment. Corporate scumbags and felonious plutocrats have never had it so good.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, enforcement actions have fallen precipitously, and the commission ended several high-profile cryptocurrency inquires that involved Binance, Coinbase, and other firms. The workforce for the SEC’s enforcement division was cut by a fifth last year, with many experienced attorneys and accountants given the boot. The IRS, too, has been hammered by layoffs, and the number of audits of people with $10 million or more in income dropped by two-thirds from 6,786 in 2025 to 2,264 in 2026. With new priorities established at the Justice Department—such as essentially shutting down the pursuit of cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—the number of white-collar prosecutions has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, according to the Financial Times.

But beyond this, the Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues. Who says so? The US Government Accountability Office. It recently released a report assessing Trump’s decision to loosen reporting requirements for shell companies. These are corporations that can have legitimate uses but are also set up so people or entitites can evade taxes, launder money, hide assets, and obscure the true beneficiaries of financial transactions. For instance, a sanctioned Russian oligarch might be able to use a shell company—or a string of them—to buy real estate in the United States and keep secret his ownership of the property.

The Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2021, required most US firms to disclose to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) their “beneficial owners”—that is, the real people who control or own them. (In many instances, shell companies do not have to reveal their true owners and are registered in the name of others.) The aim of the legislation was to create a registry of owners and impede illegal financial activities, such as money laundering. An estimated 32 million businesses would have to register and note their real owners. (Several categories of business were exempted because disclosure requirements already applied to them—such as banks, credit unions, and securities dealers.)

But one month into Trump’s second term, his administration essentially eviscerated this reporting requirement, when FinCEN issued rules exempting domestic companies and Americans from this disclosure. As the GAO put it, this new exemption applied “to over 99 percent of entities that were previously targeted.”

The GAO report—in exceedingly dry language—notes this exemption is a boon for assorted malfeasants:

U.S.-based shell companies, often structured as LLCs or corporations, can pose significant risks of illicit finance activity. Treasury’s 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment identified several cases in which shell companies were used to facilitate financial crimes, including laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, cybercrime, and fraud, among others, indicating the continued risk posed by shell companies. The 2025 domestic reporting company exemption may perpetuate these risks.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, quickly jumped on the GAO report and cited it as evidence Trump is on the side of the bad guys:

The Trump Administration continues to put cartels and criminals ahead of law enforcement, opening the door for them to move millions of dollars through our financial system. Today’s GAO report confirms that Treasury gutted a bipartisan law designed to crack down on the abuse of shell companies, exempted 99 percent of the entities previously required to report, and has failed to address the “significant risks” this rollback created. Law enforcement groups have warned that it will be harder to go after drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and major criminal enterprises.

Warren noted that one of the main forces behind passage of the Corporate Transparency Act was a former senator named Marco Rubio. In 2020, he tweeted, “My ‘Corporate Transparency Act’ [is] the most significant anti-corruption and money-laundering legislation in decades [and] forces anonymous shell companies to disclose their true owners.”

Republican and Democratic senators have opposed the Trump administration’s wipeout of the Corporate Transparency Act, as have law enforcement organizations, business groups, and national security–minded think tanks of the right and left. The hawkish and neocon-ish Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a statement last year that said, “Anonymous U.S. shell companies are not a theoretical vulnerability—they are a proven vehicle for illicit finance, sanctions evasion, corruption, terrorism, and transnational crime…FinCEN’s decision to exempt domestic entities would allow these practices to continue unchecked.”

Last year, Warren, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and other Democratic senators wrote the Treasury to complain about the weakening of this requirement, noting, “There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”

The Trump administration claims this disclosure obligation was too onerous for businesses, but it entailed minimal effort for the corporations compelled to register. So why kill this requirement? Warren and other legislators suspect Elon Musk had something to do with this. In a separate letter sent to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in April 2025, she and 18 other congressional Democrats asserted the Trump administration’s decision to neuter the Corporate Transparency Act was “seemingly triggered by a single Elon Musk social media comment.”

They pointed out that Musk, who at that time was a key adviser to Trump and engaged in a reckless dismantling of various government agencies, might have been “benefiting from foreign investments made through legal entities designed to hide the identities of the foreign investors.” They cited the Financial Times: “Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funneling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk” through “opaque structures” and “an arrangement that shields their identities from public view.”

Responding to the recent GAO report, Warren asserted that this disclosure requirement would be beneficial for efforts to combat transnational crime, drug trafficking (including fentanyl smuggling), sex trafficking, the evasion of sanctions imposed on Iran, the theft of US technology by China and others, and fraud that targets US government programs. (The criminals that stole federal funds in Minnesota relied on shell companies.)

This may well be a personal issue for Trump. His Trump Organization is a collection of hundreds of shell companies. (Such entities are commonly used for real estate transactions.) And during the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”

Corporate reporting rules may seem like a wonkish topic. It certainly is not as visceral as Trump selling pardons or pocketing billions in crypto grift. But it may be more important, for Trump’s decision to protect the secrecy of shell companies—perhaps at the urging of Musk—has more far-ranging consequences than his own sticky-fingers corruption. It’s another way Trump is making America great for plutocrats, oligarchs, fraudsters, and scoundrels.

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

Is Frito-Lay categorically refusing to buy potatoes grown on farmland that has hosted solar installations? No, the company says. 

That hasn’t stopped lawmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania from spreading the false claim about one of the biggest purchasers of potatoes in the country.

In January, Michigan Republican state Rep. Cam Cavitt posted a 51-second clip to Facebook labeled ​“Solar Farm SECRET.” In the segment, he claimed that farmers in his district couldn’t grow potatoes on land where solar developments were sited.

“Frito [Frito-Lay] did the same with the potato growers up by us,” fellow Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Prestin told Cavitt in the clip. ​“Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due to the leaching.”

More than 1 million people viewed that video. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Cris Dush shared it and said he wanted ​“cash bond guaranteeing restoration” of the soil after a solar development was removed. ​“When Frito Lay refuses to accept potatoes from farms that had solar arrays we should all sit up and take notice!” he wrote.

PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, told Canary Media that the company ​“has not issued blanket guidance to growers that fields with solar installations will not be accepted.”

Nor is there any published evidence that solar farms have a negative impact on potato farming, according to experts consulted for this story. On the contrary, there is agrivoltaics research showing that potatoes—and many other crops—can benefit from growing alongside shade-making solar panels.

Nevertheless, this false claim about solar is gaining some traction. Like other forms of misinformation about renewables, it helps fuel local pushback to proposed energy installations.

The claim comes amid a broader wave of opposition to building solar arrays on farmland.

As energy developers look to build more solar installations to meet climate goals and fast-rising electricity demand in the U.S., more and more projects are being proposed on flat and sunny land that could otherwise grow crops. The impact these projects may have on the land is often exaggerated by opponents—including Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers—who claim solar will destroy prime farmland.

American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving agricultural land, found that by 2040, 7 million acres of agricultural land could be used for solar installations. That’s less than 1 percent of the farmland across the Lower 48 states.

Such misinformation could threaten not only solar developments but also farmers’ livelihoods. Farmers can earn tens of thousands of dollars by leasing land to solar developers, providing a financial lifeline in a precarious agricultural market. Potato farmers in particular could have a hard time leasing under ​“this sort of speculated risk,” according to Scott Laeser, senior working lands adviser for the Rural Climate Partnership, a nonprofit connecting rural and renewable development.

“Raising these claims about solar could prevent farmers from diversifying their income stream and adding a really stable source of income to their operation, which I suspect most farmers would be pretty happy to add in the volatile moment that we’re in,” he said.

The speculation about solar’s impact on potatoes began a year ago with a statement from the agricultural trade group Potato Growers of Michigan. While the organization recognized the role of renewable energy in Michigan’s future, it didn’t want solar on farmland and cited concerns about food safety.

“When solar panels and systems are eventually removed, small fragments of plastic and metal may remain in the soil,” the statement read. ​“For crops like potatoes, which grow underground, this poses a unique and serious risk. Tuber vegetables can readily engulf foreign objects, creating contamination hazards that impact not just growers, but also processors and consumers.”

But there’s no evidence to suggest that this actually happens, experts say.

Steven Loheide, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is located in one of the three biggest potato-growing states and researches the interaction of solar projects and farmland. Loheide had not heard of the concern from Michigan potato growers.

Nor had Alan Knapp, a plant ecologist at Colorado State University, who added that he did not know of any scientific study finding that solar panels installed aboveground could impact potato crops grown belowground. Knapp noted that there’s a list of worries about what happens underneath solar panels—like toxins leaching into the soil or metal and silica shards impacting crops—and most are unfounded.

“I’ve never heard of any sort of toxicity issues or any concerns about the quality of the crop being consumed by humans being impacted by the installation of solar panels above,” Knapp said.

Rumors have spread anyway.

In August 2025, a public comment from a farmer opposing a project in Kentucky called Wood Duck Solar quoted the Potato Growers of Michigan statement. Potential contamination from the 100-megawatt solar field threatened food safety, the farmer wrote. That project was ultimately approved.

In March 2026, Dennis Iott, the chair of the Potato Growers of Michigan, along with Kelly Turner, executive director of the Michigan Potato Growers Commission, another trade group, repeated the claims at a Michigan House Agriculture Committee hearing.

Solar threatens potato growers because the vegetables require a lot of land that farmers often lease in rotational years, but solar groups are buying up that land, Turner said.

“You cannot blame them for signing the solar contracts,” Turner said of the farmers. ​“The problem is, though, that it takes that land out of production, and now it starts to hurt economies of scale because there’s no more land near the grower to be able to create enough land to have those rotations.”

Potatoes are also ground crops, and could form around foreign objects in the ground, Turner purported, including whatever might be left behind after a solar system is dismantled.

But Iott, speaking after Turner at the hearing, admitted, ​“The food safety issue hasn’t been seen yet, because we haven’t taken those solar fields out. But it will be a problem for anything that grows in the soil.”

Iott and Turner did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

At some point, the general speculation raised by industry lobbyists morphed into specific falsehoods about Frito-Lay, and caught the ear of the lawmakers from Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Neither Cavitt nor Prestin responded to multiple requests for comment.

Lynsey Mukomel, communications director for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said she and her colleagues were not aware of any statements made by Frito-Lay or any other company asking Michigan farmers not to grow potatoes on land with solar installations.

And, of course, PepsiCo itself said it had issued no such directives.

The furthest PepsiCo says it has gone is to provide growers with its carefully worded perspective on endorsing solar outside of ​“prime agricultural lands,” but only when growers have asked them directly, a company spokesperson said.

While the firm says it values solar energy as part of its corporate decarbonization goals, it endorses solar and other renewable installations outside of prime agricultural lands ​“in order to avoid potential impacts to crop yields, quality and the creation of other unintended consequences,” a spokesperson for PepsiCo said in an email.

Although there is no evidence that solar panels damage potato farmland, there is mounting proof that siting solar and crops on the same land can be beneficial.

A four-year study in Italy published earlier this year showed that agrivoltaic systems, which combine farming with photovoltaic electricity generation, could potentially support potato crops.

Solar panels can help retain groundwater as rain runs off the sloped panels which then provide shade that blocks the sunlight and helps retain moisture, Loheide said. He has also studied solar’s impact on native pollinator habitats.

“There’s a huge opportunity to get both agricultural benefits and energy production off a single plot of land,” said Loheide, who was not part of the Italian study.

Despite the evidence, speculation that strikes a nerve has a way of circulating anyway. After all, concerns that offshore wind hurts whales, a claim that lacks any evidence, have turned out to be one of the biggest vectors of attack on the beleaguered energy source.

Speculation about potatoes and solar may never rise to quite that level. But it doesn’t seem likely to fade away, either. Late last month, a post on X from a prominent anti-solar account repeated the falsehood that customers won’t buy potatoes grown on land that once hosted solar. It racked up nearly 10,000 shares and 20,000 likes.

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

Last December, the Department of Justice opened a new office in its Civil Rights Division called the Second Amendment Section. The goal of the office, as previously reported by Mother Jones and The Trace, is to identify firearm restrictions enacted by cities and states that the administration believes to be unconstitutional—and sue to overturn them.

And sue they have.

In the section’s first six months of operation, the Justice Department has brought cases against police departments in Los Angeles County and the Virgin Islands, the city of Denver, the state of Colorado, and the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Virginia may be next: Minutes after Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed an assault weapon ban last month, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, “See you in court!”

The Civil Rights Division typically fights for the disempowered by enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes. It was created in 1957 to ensure Black voting rights and school desegregation. Gun rights “have never been a focus,” said Megan Marks, a former attorney in the division who is now deputy director and managing editor of Red Line for Civil Rights, a nonprofit initiative that tracks the politicization of civil rights enforcement under President Donald Trump.

Not surprisingly, pro-gun organizations are thrilled with the Civil Rights Division’s new direction. “It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us,” said Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, which has more than 50 active lawsuits seeking to void gun laws across the country. “Because courts, like it or not, do take the DOJ more seriously. And frankly it’s nice to have the DOJ at least seeing the Second Amendment as equal to all the other rights.”

The DOJ’s suits come at a time when the Trump administration has departed from more traditional civil rights issues—discrimination against marginalized groups based on race, sex, disability, and religion—by pursuing conservative policies, reshaping DEI initiatives, investigating “reverse discrimination,” and suing universities over affirmative action practices.

“Under the leadership of President Trump, this is the most pro-Second Amendment Department of Justice in history,” a Justice Department spokesperson told me. “We are committed to maximizing law-abiding citizens’ ability to fully exercise their right to bear arms and evenhandedly enforcing federal laws that do not infringe on Second Amendment rights.”

The flurry of litigation began last September, when the Civil Rights Division filed suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over “unreasonable delays” in issuing concealed carry permits that allegedly stretched “as far as two years.” Six weeks later the division sued the police department in the Virgin Islands, a US territory, over “unreasonable delays” in its gun permitting process and requirements like bolted-in gun safes. Shortly after, the territory’s governor proposed laws establishing a 90-day deadline for approving or denying permits. The division then began targeting bans on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, first in Washington, DC, in December, then in Colorado in May.

Some experts and veteran civil rights attorneys said they are troubled by the Justice Department’s new direction. “The history of racial discrimination in the US is this deep scar, while gun rights were never really under assault in a country that has more guns than people,” said John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University. He said the Second Amendment Section is unnecessary because an army of well-funded pro-gun groups “are constantly bringing litigation.” He also pointed to the financial burden for states and municipalities that will have to spend money defending their laws in court. 

For decades, the National Rifle Association and allied groups have successfully waged legislative and legal campaigns to loosen firearm regulations across the country. They argue gun ownership is an innate human right—one that’s constantly under attack. These days most states allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit, and many even prevent municipalities from restricting the practice.

Marks, who spent nine years probing police misconduct in the Civil Rights Division before leaving in 2025, is concerned that the division is abdicating its responsibility to investigate serious law enforcement abuses in favor of instead “making AR-15s more accessible.” One of the key federal statutes that Marks and her colleagues enforced was passed after Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991. It authorized investigations to determine whether law enforcement agencies have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations, including excessive force or racial profiling.

The DOJ’s new Second Amendment Section is now utilizing that same language from the statute, but repurposing its meaning to “investigate law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern or practice of infringing on law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.” That trade-off, experts said, comes with a cost.

“What we’ve seen play out is the department walking away from a number of completed investigations where they found systemic misconduct,” said Marks, referring to the traditional cases the Civil Rights Division has more typically pursued in the past. By focusing on gun rights, she said, “the department is walking away from its responsibilities to marginalized communities.”

Moros, of the Second Amendment Foundation, disagrees, pointing to a historical analogue for the Trump DOJ’s view that gun rights are a key component of civil rights. After the Civil War, he notes, the War Department established The Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary division created essentially to stabilize the South and to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people. Among other things, the bureau helped formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient—and argued for their right to own guns. “I do think it’s a very clear precedent, because they stood up for people who the state and local governments were trying to disarm,” Moros said. “This is definitely something the federal government has taken an interest in in the past.”

Donohue, the law professor, rejects that argument, adding that the gun rights movement has a long history of co-opting the language of civil rights. The NRA, for example, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization” without a hint of irony. 

Former employees of the Civil Rights Division told Mother Jones and The Trace last fall that the revered unit had been co-opted by the Trump administration “to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.” In December, more than 100 former DOJ civil rights attorneys and staff published a letter warning of the destruction of the division, citing the retirement or removal of 5,000 career attorneys from the department overall. The new focus on guns is just another example of how the division has been repurposed to fulfill the administration’s ideological objectives, said Marks.

Marks said she hopes that if the next administration disbands the Second Amendment Section, the Civil Rights Division can return to its original focus of fighting for the disempowered. But she said it will take time. “I think it’s a question of, can they rebuild the resources? Can they ensure and reestablish norms like independent enforcement by career experts? So many of those guardrails are gone now. I don’t know that it can happen overnight.”

It has now been almost two weeks since the laborers keeping ICE’s Delaney Hall mega-jail open went on strike—demanding a chance to speak with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, reviews of their cases, and ultimately, their freedom. Those workers are the detainees themselves, who serve as custodians, line cooks, hairdressers, laundry workers, and janitors at the Newark prison-turned-detention center where a thousand people are trapped in DHS custody, working for wages as low as a dollar per day.

What began as a simultaneous hunger and labor strike has become largely a labor struggle, organizers with the immigrant rights group Cosecha New Jersey told me. That strike, according to a letter signed by 46 detained people and published June 3, is near-unanimous and ongoing: “people detained have all voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” they wrote in a May 31 letter titled “We Demand Freedom.” 

The for-profit firm GEO Group, ICE’s largest private contractor and Delaney Hall’s operator, runs what it calls a “voluntary work program” that in effect keeps the center operating, described in a recent GEO Group detainee handbook reviewed by Mother Jones. 

“Any resident assigned to work in the kitchen will be paid $4.00 per day,” the handbook says. That’s the highest wage anyone gets: “Laundry Work Details and Barbershop Workers will be paid $3.00 per day. Special Work Details are paid $2.00 per day. All other job assignments are $1.00 per day. Ordinarily you will not be permitted to work more than eight hours per day or 40 hours per week.” 

The document also lists the cost of a pair of shoes at GEO Group’s commissary: $24.28, equivalent to several weeks’ wages. A blanket costs eight dollars. ID cards, which detained people must pay to replace if damaged, cost $5 each, or a full week’s pay. 

While the work program is labeled as voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is listed in the detainee handbook as a “high offense,” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or initiating criminal proceedings. 

“Engaging in, or inciting a group demonstration” is also a “high offense” and “prohibited act.” And, the detained strikers wrote in their June 3 letter, they have been “subjected to reprisals, discrimination, mockery, mistreatment, and threats” since their strike began. 

“They are trying to force us to work in all areas of the facility (cleaning, kitchen, maintenance, laundry, floor polishing)” they wrote, adding that GEO Group staffers threaten “to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another” if they refuse to work. “They tell us we have no rights here.” 

“They don’t have cleaning staff, they don’t have kitchen staff,” said Cat Adorno, an organizer with Cosecha. “Those jobs, the detainees are the ones that do that.” 

“We’re hearing that the place is becoming really dirty, that it started to smell like feces, that the guards have become incredibly aggressive, threatening them that if they don’t resume their work, they’re going to get transferred or get additional charges,” Adorno added. 

The profit margins of facilities like Delaney Hall depend on coercing people into working for otherwise illegal rates, Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and journalist who researches conditions in ICE detention, said. “The way you keep the place clean is you use the people who are inside to clean it.” 

Those dollar-a-day rates have held since 1950, when they were established by Congress. It was keyed to the “international standard for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which was three Swiss francs.”  Since then, several courts have ruled that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not apply to people detained by ICE. But the legal battle isn’t over: there are now more than a dozen lawsuits making their way through the courts regarding involuntary work for unjust pay in ICE detention.

GEO Group staffers did not answer questions about the strike, or about whether Delaney Hall cleaning and kitchen staff can sustain the facility without the labor of detained people. 

“In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel…to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement. 

For more than a year, a group of union activists calling itself “Labor Eyes On ICE” has held monthly vigils at Delaney Hall—and on Sunday, members of at least 12 unions, including the Teamsters and the American Federation of Teachers, picketed on a dusty road just under half a mile from the building, prevented from getting within detainees’ earshot by barricades and lines of police. 

Teachers and librarians showed up to chant and picket, as did Amazon warehouse workers and university clerical staff. In a nearby tent, masked medics wearing red-tape crosses on their arms handed out goggles to protect people from tear gas—and told me quietly that in their day-to-day lives, many of them are unionized medical professionals. 

Mitch Israel, an organizer with the Teamsters at Amazon, had the ties between that company and ICE on his mind outside Delaney Hall this week: “Amazon actually loses money on its package delivering business most years,” he said, “and it funds that by using its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, to get huge contracts with ICE, with Palantir, and other groups that allow it to fund its abuse of workers. There is a direct connection between these things.”

“This fight actually goes beyond Delaney Hall and back to our employers and our workplaces,” said Isaac Jimenez, a member of the administrative workers’ union at Rutgers University. At his employer, students, staff and faculty “have been calling for a sanctuary campus for over a year.” 

“We’re supporting and uplifting the demands of the striking detainees and calling for this place to be shut down, calling on our governor, Mikie Sherrill, to meet with the strikers, and to help shut this place down as well,” Jimenez added. “I know it’s only really gotten to a head in the past 10 days, but this movement’s been growing for over a year, since Delaney Hall’s been reopened.” On Thursday, 13 days into the strike, Sherrill announced a $12 million increase in funding for legal services—enough to fund legal aid for “all low-income detainees in Delaney Hall.”

By withholding their labor, Free said, detained people “are in a real way hitting GEO where it hurts.” They are undermining the company’s revenue, “which is why the repression is so harsh.” 

But it’s generally cheaper to let people go than to transfer strikers to different facilities, Free said. So when some detained people are released—like an 18-year-old who was freed from Delaney Hall earlier this week after missing her high school prom—“that is just as much a predictable consequence of these hunger and labor strikes as the repression and retaliation.”

On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its interim final rule on Medicaid work requirements, mandating that everyone who seeks Medicaid support has to prove they are unable to work to a greater extent, even if they have already been diagnosed with a debilitating condition like sickle cell disease—and even if they are already on Medicaid.

Federal Medicaid work requirements are being implemented as part of President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, a budget and spending bill which is also cutting nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid’s budget over the next decade.

In states with Medicaid expansion, an Affordable Care Act provision that allows more low-income people to access Medicaid, the legislation mandated that work requirements be implemented, but didn’t resolve certain details of how and who would be targeted—questions the Department of Health and Human Services has now answered in the most restrictive possible way. The Urban Institute estimates that between 4.9 and 10.1 million fewer people could be enrolled in Medicaid by 2028 as a result of work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. The interim final rule is likely to yield a figure at the high end of that estimate. Medicaid work requirements have to be implemented in all states with Medicaid expansion by January 1, 2027, though some Republican-led states have opted to do so ahead of schedule.

“Congress compelled states to impose Medicaid work requirements on the expansion population,” said University of Pittsburgh health policy and management professor Miranda Yaver, “but it wasn’t entirely clear from the legislation to what extent states’ hands were going to be tied…there were a lot of open questions about how much discretion there would have.”

Under the interim final rule, people with certain conditions who are already on Medicaid will no longer be automatically considered “medically frail,” a classification that exempts them from work requirements; they must provide further proof, beyond their diagnosis, that they are “greatly impaired” from working. The new federal rule is notably stricter than what was implemented in Nebraska, a GOP-dominated state that voluntarily enacted work requirements eight months before the deadline—but which at least retained a list of conditions considered automatically exempt from work requirements for those on Medicaid.

State officials were blindsided by this medical frailty definition outlined in the new federal rule, which was never brought up in discussions between states and the federal government, Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, told me.

“We have heard that this was driven more by the White House,” Wagner said. “I don’t think it was CMS intentionally misleading states.”

While the federal interim rule is harsh, it is not final: there is a 60-day public comment period, after which states have until the end of the calendar year to implement (or, in Nebraska’s case, modify) their Medicaid work requirements.

“It’s going to be very costly in terms of time as well as money,” Wagner said, “and, realistically, states are not going to be able to do this accurately by January 1.”

There is no way to implement Medicaid work requirements without disabled and chronically ill people losing their access to the program, despite the claims of Republican politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.).

“There are going to be so many disabled people and chronically ill people who lose access to their health care and other kinds of supports that Medicaid provides,” said Maria Town, the President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities.

Town is also extremely concerned that Medicaid-supported employment for disabled people is not considered to be meaningful “community engagement,” another stipulation for Medicaid coverage under the new rule. “It’s just a way of saying that disabled people’s labor shouldn’t be compensated,” Town told me.

The new administrative burdens will push people off of Medicaid, as when Medicaid work requirements were implemented in Arkansas during the first Trump administration, leading to 18,000 people losing Medicaid coverage in the state.

“People who had lost Medicaid benefits were worse off—they were more likely to have medical debt and have delayed important healthcare due to concerns about cost,” University of Colorado, Boulder economics professor Chloe East said in an interview.

Yaver, of the University of Pittsburgh, is also concerned that places that serve more Medicaid patients, like federally qualified health centers, will not be able to keep up with paperwork requirements to prove medical frailty.

“Writing attestations of medical frailty would almost assuredly fall under the umbrella of non-billable hours,” Yaver told me, “and this is going to be a large share of their patient population.”

Not only do Medicaid work requirements not increase employment, according to multiple studies, but a majority of adults on Medicaid already work.

“It’s hard not to think that the cruelty of the policy is the point,” East said. “Adding work requirements to Medicaid is part of a massive shift in our safety net in this country under this administration to make it as small and hard to access as possible.”

Maybe I’m leaning too much into The Discourse, but here’s this mind-boggling thing happening on the internet with the internet’s latest supervillian. Mackenzie Shirilla is the—star? protagonist?—of a new documentary on Netflix about a deadly 2022 car wreck that claimed the lives of her boyfriend Dominic Russo and his friend Davion Flanagan. Shirilla, the driver, was eventually sentenced to two consecutive life terms in an Ohio women’s prison after a judge ruled that she deliberately drove her 2018 Toyota Camry directly into a brick wall at more than 90 miles per hour.

While the case had previously been covered on HBO’s Mean Girl Murders and and Hulu’s Killer Cases, its May 15 Netflix release catapulted it to stratospheric new levels of public awareness. It’s not hard to see why. The whole thing is true crime catnip: Shirilla comes off as an entitled wanna-be influencer with a massive internet footprint, overly permissive parents, and a contentious romantic relationship history with Russo, 20, who showers her with designer gifts paid for, apparently in cash, with money from “crypto investments.” The entire friend group is portrayed as Sam Levinson’s Euphoria come to life, where everybody involved is privileged, addicted to weed or mushrooms, and bored.

In one clip that’s since gone viral, Shirilla’s mother, Natalie, addresses the court at her daughter’s sentencing and all but shrugs away Davion Flanagan’s death by saying, “he was a new friend.”

YouTube and TikTok Nation are activated. Countless prison phone calls between Mackenzie and her mother have been released online, each signaling some new element of the case: her prison romances, her lack of remorse, her glee at the film’s popularity, her hope that Kim Kardashian takes on her case. She’s alleged to have sugar daddies putting money on her books, prison godmothers watching out for her on the yard, a lucrative but undisclosed prison business, a waist trainer. Sleuths have tracked down her high school disciplinary records. Her father, Steve Shirilla, was suspended from his job as a digital media teacher at a local Catholic high school over his comments in the film about being happy his daughter smoked weed “instead of shooting up.” It’s been reported that he won’t return.

The only redeeming person in the whole thing seems to be Davion’s adopted father, Steve Flanagan, who is portrayed as the film’s moral center. But even he seems, perhaps understandably, lost in bloodthirsty vengeance. Eventually he reflects on people’s capacity to change, and his hope that Mackenzie’s parents learn to hold her accountable. As for an appropriate punishment? He wants his son’s life to have concrete value, he says about the prospect of the judge issuing a sentence of either of at least 15 years to life.

“If that were 30, I’d be happier with that,” he says.

As a culture, we’ve been to this place before. It was called the 1990s and it was not particularly fun for whole swaths of people who were young, poor, or of color. Prison populations soared, communities were wrecked, and most of the damage was underwritten by salacious coverage of crimes perpetrated by young people whom judges and the media wrote off as irredeemable.

For a small pocket of time, just before and during the pandemic, we seemed ready to reckon with damage wrought by those punitive impulses. The Supreme Court even ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of parole constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Shirilla, at least, will be eligible for parole—in 2037. But at sentencing, in August of 2023, Judge Nancy Russo (no relation to Dominic) didn’t seem optimistic. “I understand that the pain in this room wants me to impose the harshest sentence,” Russo said. “But I don’t believe that would be the appropriate sentence because I do believe that Mackenzie will not be out in 15 years.”

So, in other words, it’s not worth sentencing Shirilla to the maximum because she’s…probably going to wind up serving most of it anyway?

Likability is not a pre-requisite for freedom. The frenzy over this film shows that we have learned nothing from the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed by an overzealous punishment system egged on by pop culture. We’re now hurtling dangerously toward a new nadir, one where the tough-on-crime tactics of the ’90s gets recast, its razor-sharp edges sanded down with the help of a new filter.