On New Year’s Eve, fireworks bloomed behind the Washington Monument. Along the side of the 550-foot structure, a birthday candle was projected, flickering as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. This spectacle kicked off Freedom 250’s countdown to the semiquincentennial and was followed by animated neoclassic-style graphics overlaid with audio narrating the nation’s “discovery, expansion, independence, and future.” As the narrative unraveled and onlookers watched Christopher Columbus sail across the sea and settlers in wagons push westward, there was no mention of women or people of color.

This display, along with the announcement of a UFC fight on the White House lawn, an IndyCar grand prix near the National Mall, and the Great American State Fair, made it clear that this year’s semiquincentennial is more about creating spectacle in service of President Donald Trump’s idea of America than it is about honoring American history. With each event, the complexities that have brought America to where it is today are erased or sidelined in favor of blind patriotism—a celebration of an uncritical American story centering predominantly white men. 

But state commissions are also celebrating the anniversary. And some of them are doing a far better job honoring the country’s complexity. These groups, formed by state governor appointments, legislation, and executive orders, are also political and flawed. But they are focusing on their communities, choosing to use the semiquincentennial as a moment to embrace diversity and make history more accessible. This anniversary is more than a celebration; it’s a chance to reexamine America’s story and take stock of those the federal government would rather censor from the larger narrative. 

As these separate state commissions facilitated conversations with local communities, they found that more than any spectacle, people wanted to see themselves and their ancestors in the celebrations of 250 years of the United States. 

In Rhode Island, one of the original 13 colonies, locals know their history and take pride in it. Lauren Fogarty, the commission’s program coordinator, said there’s been an opportunity to hear from more families about their personal connections to the Revolution, including from descendants of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, the first Black battalion in US military history. Although the history of the regiment has often been overshadowed, the anniversary and one of the commission’s grant recipients, the Rhode Island Historical Society, provided an opportunity for author John Rees to discuss the experiences of those soldiers during and after the war at an April event at the John Brown House Museum.

North Carolina’s commission has drawn attention to the Edenton Tea Party, where a group of 51 women gathered to pledge that they wouldn’t buy British goods, one of the earliest instances of women’s political activism. This history is presented in one of the children’s books the commission created in celebration of the semiquincentennial. The commission has sold roughly 3,700 of the three children’s books. It recently secured funding for another children’s book, this one focused on Martin Black, one of the 14 Harlowe Patriots, a group of free Black men who fought in the Revolution.

In Illinois, the state commission created a free passport, similar to the National Parks Passport, that includes nearly 60 sites across the state, illuminating how “people in Illinois have made good on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence,” said Gabrielle Lyon, the Illinois commission chair. “The idea is to connect things that have happened locally here to the formation of our national story.” They’ve distributed 100,000 of them as of June. The passport includes the Elijah P. Lovejoy memorial for the journalist and abolitionist, who was killed by a mob for wanting a free press. It also includes Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, the remnants of the largest pre-Columbian Native American civilization north of Mexico. 

State commissions have also bolstered the work of the expert agencies and organizations that already had programming planned around the semiquincentennial. “No one really needed a commission to say, ‘Hey, here’s what you do and how you do it,’” said Cameron Bean, Georgia’s commission chair. He said people, organizations, and nonprofits needed to “have a commission that said, ‘Hey, how can we serve you?’”

So rather than investing a large portion of its funds into hiring staff or a planning committee, Bean said the Georgia commission decided to focus on giving out grants, helping raise sponsorship money, and promoting events like the African Film Festival Atlanta, the African American Heritage Symposium, and a musical about pioneer women that uses traditional quilt patterns as a storytelling tool. Jason Mancini, vice chair of the Connecticut commission, said over the last three years, his commission has been able to award over $800,000 to over 80 organizations in the state.  

Locals have responded positively to this grassroots approach. It doesn’t pull people out of their counties or municipalities to celebrate somewhere else; it allows them to celebrate where they are. As Ansley Herring Wegner, director of North Carolina’s state commission, put it, locals might “see the Washington Monument lit up like a birthday candle on their TV, but we’re going to be at their events. We’re at their parades. We’re at their soccer tournaments.” These grants can also help revitalize third spaces, bring new audiences to organizations that have been working in the state for years, and reinforce the idea that every place has played a part in this country’s history.

Lyon, the Illinois chair, remarked that this year’s celebration has taken a more inclusive approach, setting it apart from previous milestone anniversaries. She said that in 1776 and 1976, festivities left out many Americans, but in 2026, Illinois was committed to inviting as many voices as possible into the commemoration. 

In Rhode Island, Fogarty said she spoke to all 39 municipalities to tell them about the semiquincentennial. The Utah state commission held monthly meetings at which community members could share national and local updates, giving them a chance to amplify each other’s work, draw inspiration from one another, and collaborate with groups they hadn’t worked with before. 

These conversations resulted in events and programming across the states that spoke directly to local history and culture. In Connecticut, an exhibit of different artists’ depictions of the American flag opened at the Fairfield University Art Museum. Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution loaned the Continental Army’s North Carolina brigade sketch to the state. In Boulder, Utah, a local artist spent 250 hours carving handprints into a boulder to commemorate a yearlong commitment to volunteering.

Bean, of Georgia, noted that this variety in programming is a good way to meet people where they are. The hope is that there is something in which everyone can find value and enjoyment.

Some programming also resulted from more complex conversations with communities about reckoning with American history. Mancini has had a long history of working with tribal communities and communities of color, both in Connecticut and outside the state. So when it came time to plan as a commission, he said the group had some hard conversations with Black and Native community members who expressed that they didn’t feel they had been seen as a part of America’s story thus far. 

He recalled one commissioner who represented a Black community organization that had been vocal about the hundreds of Black men who served in the Colonial militia but hadn’t been recognized. “We want to tell those stories,” Mancini said. “We didn’t want to make this about drums and guns. This has to be something more, so that people see themselves today and they can see themselves tomorrow, and they can see their children and grandchildren as part of this story.” 

Cyndi Tolosa, the Connecticut commission’s project manager, listed other initiatives members had hoped to do to make things more inclusive, such as translating more materials into Spanish and doing more outreach in Spanish-speaking communities. She also noted organizations like Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, which was working to create dialogue about immigrants’ and refugees’ contributions to Connecticut and the US.

Although there have been positive responses to this approach, some, like tribal communities in Connecticut, still express apprehension. The founding documents the semiquincentennial celebrates refer to “merciless Indian savages,” and the political and legal framings for much of America’s history have leaned on erasure and extermination. Mancini noted that while some tribes wanted to be vocal, others wanted to keep the commission at arm’s length, a sentiment he understood. Lyon dealt with similar conversations in Illinois with many marginalized communities.

“I think complexity is where we need to be and get comfortable,” Lyon said. “And that’s what’s most interesting and important about this moment. So some people want to be involved, some people choose not to. The commission’s approach has tried to be inclusive and specific and historically accurate to the best of our ability, but also to connect what’s happening now.” 

A year ago, after participating in a panel about Indigenous perspectives on the 250th for a Virginia state commission event, Kitcki Carroll, executive director of United South and Eastern Tribes, met Virginia’s honorary chair, Carly Fiorina. As the event wrapped up, the two continued a conversation about Indigenous perspectives and the anniversary that would later evolve into an event in April that will be released as a documentary this week.

It included a panel surrounding tribal nations’ inherent sovereignty and the United States’ treaty obligations to them, a conversation about creating greater visibility for Native Americans, and a fireside chat with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Carroll noted that the day was meant to be an opportunity to pause and understand the costs associated with the establishment of this nation.

Having more discussions about the ugly side of America’s history serves to “make sure that for the next 250 years that we are not dealing with the same shortcomings and failures that we dealt with during the first 250 years,” Carroll said.

Despite all the work state commissions are doing, it hasn’t been a seamless process. Some commissions have had to navigate funding shortfalls. DOGE cut the funding of the humanities organization unofficially coordinating the celebration in Illinois. Since North Carolina hadn’t passed a budget since 2023, when it ran out after two years, its state commission had a “base budget” of $0. Both commissions have been fundraising and using their own funds and networks of resources to move forward with events.

“From my view, the opportunity is not just about celebrating the 250; to me, the drive, what keeps me going, what I’m inspired by is the idea that the legacy of this moment is the strengthened cultural infrastructure that is at the heart of the American experiment,” Illinois’ Lyon said.   

Many of the state commissions see this commemoration as a moment to honor the value of community. It’s a reminder of all this country has been through, a time to celebrate our differences, and an opportunity to rely on one another. North Carolina’s Wegner said that as a public historian, the semiquincentennial is about giving history to the public in ways they can understand. This happens through the networks they’ve created, the evergreen educational resources that people can reference, and the highlighting of libraries, museums, and nonprofits whose work doesn’t stop after the semiquincentennial. 

As the Fourth of July fast approaches, the state commissions’ efforts to give texture and complexity to American history are a reminder that America’s story belongs to all of us and doesn’t start or end with the founding—or a fireworks show. While thinking about our history, we can consider what, and maybe who, we hope will be displayed on the Washington Monument in the next 250 years. 

On a glorious morning walk about a week before America’s 250th birthday, I was listening to Jon Stewart’s podcast on that theme. I recommend it. One of the things he discusses with his historian guests, Yale’s David Blight and Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed, is the Declaration of Independence, which both historians called a “dangerous document” in terms of its focus on the right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler.

Indeed, as my colleagues David Corn and Tim Murphy pointed out exactly one year ago, certain of the tyrannical acts my co-author, Thomas Jefferson, cited as grievances in that founding document are uncannily evocative of the usurpations of our current presidential administration.

You can agree with that or not. But whether you are MAGA or a democratic socialist, it’s worth reading our founding document in full. It’s not too terribly long, and—problematic language notwithstanding—it offers some perspective as to the frustrations of the men, flawed as they may have been, who laid down a case for independence and a foundation for the American experiment.

Ben Franklin famously responded, in 1787, to the question of whether we had a republic or a monarchy: “A republic, if you can keep it.” And with that, I turn over this post to Mr. Jefferson and his peers.

In Congress, July 4, 1776 — The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

John Hancock [et al]

Happy Birthday, America!

If you want to understand U.S. politics, take the train.

The Trump administration’s federal budget request for the next fiscal year includes steep cuts to passenger rail. According to an analysis by the High Speed Rail Alliance, a pro-rail advocacy group, the budget proposal would slash Federal Railroad Administration funding by 81 percent. This includes a 69 percent funding cut to Amtrak.

But rural Republicans have historically relied on passenger rail. They also elected the same administration now cutting this service that they rely on. At this point, this paradox is nothing new: From cutting healthcare subsidies to immigration dragnets to costly and devastating wars, President Donald Trump’s assault on human rights and domestic programs has ensnared the very people whose support he has relied on.

So, how is this playing out with voters in real time, particularly ahead of the midterm elections?

I took the train to find out.

From Newark to D.C. to Pittsburgh, I met people across political lines. People who love Trump, and people who want to invoke the 25th Amendment. People who hope cuts to trains and other services will change conservative hearts and minds, and people who can imagine passenger rail funding going to things they view as more important.

Across these differences, one common theme emerged: Daily life in the U.S. right now costs way too much. To me, it underlined the way power has worked before Trump and will work after. If people who have been deprived of wealth and influence unite against the power players leveraging those things against us, then what could we achieve?

“Loitering is not permitted in this area,” an audio recording sternly warns, as uniformed National Guard troops patrol Washington’s iconic, algae-plagued reflecting pool. “Please proceed to a designated location.”

Journalist Amanda Moore’s dystopian video, shot last weekend just steps from the Lincoln Memorial, instantly went viral—a perfect 8-second encapsulation of American democracy under Donald Trump. Amanda has spent the past 18 months documenting the chaos and brutality of the administration’s militarized takeovers and immigration raids in cities across the country. Her footage has been shocking, often horrifying. But it’s never before been quite so absurd. (Well, maybe once.)

In her latest video report for Mother Jones, Amanda takes us on a tour of the Trumpified National Mall as the nation attempts to celebrate its 250th birthday. Not far from the reflecting pool’s nanobubblers and security theater, there’s a very different scene: Trump’s Great America State Fair. When Amanda visited this marquee anniversary event, she found a dearth of visitors, a shortage of napkins, and a decaying model of the triumphal arch the president wants to build across the Potomac.

The symbolism here is about as subtle as a Jon McNaughton painting. If I hadn’t seen Amanda’s reporting, I never would have believed it was real.

In the four months since the US and Israel initiated their ongoing joint military campaign against Iran, the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iranian leadership to end the war have been predictable in their unpredictability.

On Monday, President Trump said US officials would meet with Iran in Qatar the next day. Iran said that no negotiation meetings were scheduled. (They ultimately conducted low-level talks on Wednesday.) Both countries have launched strikes despite signing a memorandum of understanding on June 17 that included a ceasefire and was designed to help bring an end to the war. But—despite the US celebrating a security deal between Israel and Lebanon last week—Israel has continued strikes on southern Lebanon and Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, rejected the Israel-Lebanon deal, which it was not a party to. 

According to data from multiple Iranian government ministries, as of June 10, about 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since the war began. Lebanon’s health ministry reported on Wednesday that about 4,300 people have been killed in that country.

All to say, as I wrote shortly after the memorandum of understanding was signed, the Iran war doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.

Nate Swanson, a resident senior fellow at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council, spent nearly two decades as a State Department official, most recently as the Biden administration’s director for Iran at the National Security Council.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, Swanson told me, took a wrecking ball to many of the US’ already tenuous relationships in the region, and made a region-spanning war with Iran much more likely even before 2026.

I spoke with Swanson last week about what could be next for US relations with Iran, Israel, and the Gulf states.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Given how the second Trump administration has handled relations with Iran, I was curious what you think a different negotiator could have gotten out of this situation.

I don’t want to say the US-Iran relationship has ever been good in my time working on this، for almost 20 years, but I think Trump walked into a situation in 2025 where Iran was in a historically bad spot.

They just had these two direct exchanges with Israel. They had no air defense. Their proxies at the time seemed like they were much weaker. Domestically, they had very acute economic and environmental crises. They had also come off massive protests in 2023. So I think Iran was very interested in the deal right there. 

I think they approached negotiations not sure what Trump wanted to do. I was there—and I wasn’t quite sure what Trump wanted to do—but I think up until the June 2025 war, the US had a great hand in terms of leverage. And I think Iran was very open to a potential arrangement that was stronger [in restrictions] than the JCPOA. After the 12-day war though, it’s been a declining chance for a real deal and certainly US leverage. Iran knew that more war was coming and that was where their focus was.

I’m curious if you think the Biden administration would ever have launched strikes against Iran like those last June and this February—or how you think they would have handled the aftermath.

Yeah, there’s no way those strikes would have happened.

To some extent, you had a path that was drawn with October 7, 2023. For Israel, that was a game-changing event. They went after Hamas and Hezbollah, and both of those, from their military perspective, were relatively successful. You had conflicts with Israel and Iran directly for the first time in October 2024, right before the election.

I think the priorities in the Biden perspective was one, to make sure that Israel and our Gulf allies were protected. Second is to, wherever possible, deter escalation. We were very clear that we were not going to support larger escalation, while Israel definitely was considering a larger war at multiple points across 2024.

[The June] 2025 and 2026 [wars] would not have happened at nearly the same level if it had not been Trump. Netanyahu has been pushing some form of an Iran war forever. He’s Mister Iran. And the major difference between Trump and any other administration before him—including Bush, Obama, and Biden—was that [the Israelis] were always told no, and that we weren’t going to support [a war]. Trump said yes, and that is fundamentally the difference.

How has the US’ ongoing role with the war in Gaza changed its relationships with the Gulf states?

[The US had] a pretty strong relationship with all the GCC members [Gulf Cooperation Council, constituting Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates].

Prior to [October 7], there was a movement to normalize relations between Israel and the rest of the Gulf. It has been a long-standing goal across multiple administrations, and Trump [partly] did it with the Abraham Accords.

But it was happening without a solution to the Palestinian issue. We were able to do it with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, and Biden spent a lot of time trying to facilitate Saudi-Israel normalization. 

It went out the window on October 7, especially from the Saudi perspective. Bibi was willing to prioritize his number one objective to have this military conquest in Gaza.

But the relationship [with the Gulf states] has been shifting significantly forever. A significant moment in our history was when the US pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018. Iran responded by attacking the Gulf, which was a harbinger of what happened in this war. So the US pulled out of the JCPOA, put maximum pressure on Iran, [which] attacked oil tankers [in UAE waters] and Saudi energy infrastructure. This was the [2026] playbook, at a much smaller scale.

For the first time, you saw [Gulf states] try to de-escalate with Iran. There was a recognition that we weren’t going to be there for them in the way they hoped. The relationship has been slowly evolving through then, and then we put on turbo burners during this war, where the US relationship with the Gulf became a liability. If [a Gulf state] had a real US base, not only did it not protect, it encouraged attacks.

Recent reporting suggests that the US may effectively be returning to aspects of the JCPOA—such as JD Vance saying last week that Iran agreed to nuclear inspections. If the current negotiations come through, do you see the JCPOA-era relationship as partially restored?

Yes, in the best-case scenario; but ultimately, no. I don’t think we’re going to get the bigger phase two deal that the MOU outlines. The US doesn’t seem to be interested in complicated deals, and I’m not sure Iran is willing to do a big deal with Trump—just and uniquely him. 

I also think you can’t recapture what we did in 2015 with the JCPOA. The JCPOA was done to stall out Iran’s nuclear program at that moment in time. But you can’t turn back time. Even if Iran agreed to all the Trump administration requests of no enrichment and getting rid of all the stockpiles of enriched uranium, the time it would take Iran to break out for a weapon is about half the time it was under the JCPOA.

Iran has learned so much about the process, specifically their ability to install vastly more technologically efficient and proficient centrifuges and to install them a lot faster. It’s like six times stronger centrifuges that can install at three times the speed. 

And those [demands from the US] aren’t going to be met, so I think we are in a significantly worse off position.

What were the years under the Biden administration, after the US left the JCPOA, like regarding relations with Iran? I know Iran had resumed nuclear enrichment at that point after the US had reinstated sanctions.  

Different Biden officials have different takes on this. My opinion is that there was a deal achievable but there were a few mistakes made on both sides, but more on Iran’s.

Iran expected, when Biden came in the door, to immediately indicate a desire to get back to the JCPOA as quickly as possible. We were slow; it took us a month. There was a conversation that happened both inside and outside the government about whether you should go back into the JCPOA directly or a deal that could be hypothetically more sustainable. At that point it was clear that Iran wanted a clean return to the JCPOA. By early April, the US had put together a comprehensive return to the JCPOA. 

But at that point it was too late for Iran. While I think their negotiators wanted a deal, they had elections coming up a couple months later and their Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] didn’t want the outgoing administration to get credit for it. So as much as we were trying to move forward a deal, they couldn’t say yes. 

The new [Iranian] team came in and spent three or four months getting their act together and eventually decided that they wanted to get back into the JCPOA too, basically under the exact same terms. A deal was possible, but Iran thought that the longer they held out, the more we would give them. And so they kept stalling and pushing for more and more. 

The Russia war broke out [in which Iran backed Russia], and then Iran went through massive protests. By the end of fall 2022, a return to the JCPOA wasn’t viable politically and timing-wise. And in the midst of all this happening, there were significant advances made in the nuclear program. 

So the deal was less valuable than it was in 2015, and even as it would have been in early 2021. 

I do think they wanted to get to yes, but they never could.

Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal meant economic sanctions were put back on Iran. How do you think that played into the events you mentioned during the Biden administration?

By the time Trump left office in his first term, you had a significant increase [in sanctions] under “maximum pressure.” For instance, the key part of JCPOA sanctions relief was delisting their central bank, their shipping sector, their oil sector, etc. All that got re-sanctioned not only when we pulled out of JCPOA, but then they also listed this vital JCPOA sanctions relief as terrorism. That complicated any potential deal.

But I think the bigger difference is oil. Obama signed language that reduced Iranian oil, but it was capped to not destabilize oil markets and it was agreed on with other countries. I think Trump’s approach was that no one can buy any Iranian oil. The net effect is everyone went down to zero eventually but China. China ended up buying the Iranian exports at that point and has ever since. China has become a beneficiary of the system and has basically kept Iran alive because they’re not adhering to the US sanctions.

Is there a good way to understand how the US leaving the JCPOA impacted Iran’s economy and the global oil market?

Oil exports are the best number. Pre-JCPOA they were doing about a million barrels a day. During the JCPOA, they’re at max capacity over two million barrels a day. And then under Trump’s maximum pressure—including during COVID when [production] went away, it went down to a couple hundred thousand barrels a day. It’s been creeping up ever since, including through [the second] Trump [administration]. They are now doing 1.7 million barrels a day—all that illegal, all to China, and at a discount. Iran has figured out how to evade sanctions and how to get oil to China. 

As a part of this [2026] deal that we signed, Iran could sell all the oil again with no repercussions for the first time since the JCPOA. They will now be able to recruit new purchasers who used to buy Iran oil—like Japan, South Korea, and India would be the biggest.

How do you think the re-implementation of US economic sanctions in 2018 affected the negotiations under Biden?

It definitely made it harder. It added layers of complexity that were time-consuming and difficult to figure out. You basically had to go through one by one and say, “is this actual, real terrorism or is this [an additional terrorism designation from] Trump’s sanctions?”

Some experts I’ve talked to have emphasized the 1953 CIA-backed coup in shaping Iran’s attitude to negotiating with the US. What do you think about that?

It’s very much in Iran’s political ideology and statecraft. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was founded on anti-imperial and anti-US ideas that came out of 1953. They view the US as supporting Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and it’s just one living continuous piece of history that hasn’t ended. I don’t know if that’s wise or not, but I think it’s reality. 

There is no trust on either side. I think the difference between now and the JCPOA, though, is at least there was a desire to try to work through the mistrust to get somewhere that’s mutually beneficial. I am not sure that environment exists at all anymore, and I think it’s evidenced by the fact that Iran won’t sit down with the US directly. It has to be with an intermediary or a mediator in the room or just not at all. They’ll only pass messages right now through Qatar or Pakistan. 

And it goes both ways. When I started at the State Department in 2007, the door across from me had a sticker of an American flag and the inscription was like “save our hostages” from the hostage crisis. There’s still these survivors of this hostage crisis left over. There are still victims of Iranian violence and terror around the world, through Hezbollah or others.

It goes both ways, and the level of mistrust and animosity has got to be an all-time high coming out of this war.

The US and Israel’s bombing campaign has killed a lot of Iranian officials. Do you have any idea who is negotiating now, and if they have any different priorities?

I’m not really sure of the answer. On one hand, the foreign ministry guys are the same—they’re not dead. So the foreign minister and [longtime] lead negotiator [Abbas Araghchi], and his surrounding team have been around—with a minor blip from 2021 to 2024 during the Raisi presidency—since 2013.

To your real question of who’s making decisions, I don’t know. We knew before the Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] died that it was him. We don’t even really know if the Supreme Leader’s son [Mojtaba Khamenei, who was elected after his father’s assassination] is alive or not. We know the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian armed forces accountable only to the Supreme Leader] has a bigger role than they have in the past, but we don’t really know what that means. There’s a new lead negotiator, the Speaker of Parliament [Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf]. There’s clearly five, six—probably more—people who are making decisions in a collaborative manner.

It’s much more complicated than the JCPOA. You have to have something that seven people agree on to get to yes. I think that’s why you see this MOU is in Iran’s favor—because they couldn’t say “yes” to anything less. 

I do think it reflects the correct desire by the president to get out of this war, which is a debacle and getting worse. But the terms are terrible, and it’s like the ultimate indictment of the war itself.

Foreign Service Officers play a pivotal role in the US Department of State—and in the world. According to the agency’s website, these high-ranking officials “engage with foreign governments, advocate for American interests, and help shape global policy across political, economic, and humanitarian priorities.” Because of the importance of their duties, the vetting process for Foreign Service Officers is famously intense and includes both a rigorous screening process and a difficult multi-hour exam.

Last year, the Trump administration announced sweeping changes to the program, vowing to end hiring practices that it said relied too heavily on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The Secretary of State was to “remove any reference to the Core Precept entitled ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility,'” Trump ordered in a March 2025 memo. “The Secretaries shall promptly direct all employees of their Departments not to give this Core Precept any force or effect.”

Later that year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly recalled 29 ambassadors and fired 246 Foreign Service Officers. The moves were part of a restructuring that, Rubio wrote in a Substack post, aimed to rid the State Department of a culture where “radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to…push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the President and undermine the interests of the United States.”

Now, the US Department of State is looking to hire a new generation of Foreign Service Officers. To recruit applicants for these coveted and vital positions, the agency just signed a contract with a company called Military Hire, a subsidiary of the employment firm RedBalloon, which describes itself as “America’s non-woke job board.” At $978,750, the amount of the contract is not particularly high, but the company nevertheless has lofty ambitions. It aims to give the Foreign Service an anti-woke makeover by attracting ideologically “aligned” candidates—hopefully Christians. 

Earlier this week, RedBalloon CEO Andrew Crapuchettes appeared on CrossPolitic, a podcast that says it is “helping Christians apply God’s law to politics.” CrossPolitic is a project of CanonPress, the publishing house connected to Christian nationalist Idaho pastor Doug Wilson’s Church. Perhaps not coincidentally, Crapuchettes is an elder at Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and Wilson has robust connections to the Trump administration through defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

In the CrossPolitic episode–called “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”—Crapuchettes says that before the current administration, “a lot of the recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in Black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.”

Those DEI hires, Craphuchettes charges, were often reluctant to follow directives that aligned with the administration’s “America First” ethic. “What they’re finding is all these Foreign Service Officers are like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really want to. Yeah, that sounds really hard, so I’m not going to,’ because they’re, more than not, leftists, and they don’t want to do President Trump’s agenda,” he says. “They want him to look bad, and they want to drag their feet.”

Because of this mismatch of values, Crapuchettes says, the State Department “got rid of the entire recruiting department…like 50 people,” and now is in the process of “cleaning house.” That means “removing a lot of people who are not aligned with the current administration’s agenda, and they want to get people who are more aligned.”

Crapuchettes then invites Christians to apply for jobs in the foreign service. “I would love to see a lot of Christians applying, taking the test, doing the hard work, becoming a foreign service officer, going to Germany for two years, or Botswana, or Thailand,” he says. “You’re working for the ambassador; you’re going to build connections and relationships that you can’t get any other way, and all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the US government.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Crapuchettes explains that RedBalloon is working on developing similar recruiting contracts with the Department of War and the Department of the Interior. He also claims that the company “just got another contract” with the Department of Veterans Affairs to perform “political appointee level recruitment for them.” Neither the State Department nor the VA responded to our questions; a spokesperson from the Department of War declined to comment.

Crapuchettes founded RedBalloon in 2021. At first, the company attracted applicants who were seeking jobs without Covid vaccine mandates. But as the pandemic faded into the background, the company’s remit expanded. A 2023 Wired profile noted that Donald Trump, Jr. called RedBalloon “a HUGE advance in the culture war.” Today, it boasts a network of “tens of thousands” of job seekers “who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition.” The employers hiring through it include Turning Point USA, the Christian cell phone service Patriot Mobile, and the conservative media company The Daily Wire.

In the podcast, Crapuchettes boasts that RedBalloon has developed a reputation for working with government agencies unpopular with the political left. “We’re already doing stuff for like Border Patrol, which gets us in trouble—ICE, Border Patrol, we do hiring for them,” he tells Wilson. He suggests that Military Hire is a less controversial brand. “RedBalloon’s a little hotter to handle than Militaryhire.com, and so on a PR front, Militaryhire.com’s got the contract, not Red Balloon,” he says, “which is fine with me.” (A Border Patrol spokesperson clarified in an email to Mother Jones that the agency “has worked with Military Hire since 2022 and was under contract with them when they were acquired by RedBalloon.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Doug Wilson, who heads the Idaho church where Crapuchettes is an elder and also oversees a small fiefdom of businesses and schools connected to his church, is increasingly influential in national politics. A spiritual adviser to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he delivered a sermon on manly, godly warriors at the Pentagon earlier this year. A self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, Wilson is a firebrand online. In previous interviews, he has told me that women’s suffrage was “a mistake” and that in his ideal version of the United States, public flogging would largely replace prisons. In a 2024 address at the National Conservatism conference, he described a society under siege by identity politics and anti-Christian bias. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he said. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.”

On matters of woke-ism, Wilson appears to be firmly aligned with the Red Balloon ethos. In a post on his blog last year, he thundered against DEI initiatives. “It is not enough for us to be against woke, or DEI, or social justice, or whatever new term our lizard overlords have decided to foist upon us,” he wrote. “We must be hostile to all such verbal iterations.”

Job seekers don’t pay to use RedBalloon and Military Hire; rather, employers pay to recruit through these companies—hence the State Department’s contract. Crapuchettes says in the podcast that his platform will offer opportunities to take practice tests—an important feature because applicants are only allowed to take the test once a year. In an emailed statement, RedBalloon spokesperson Isaac Lopez said that the company does not “screen, filter, or evaluate any applicant based on political affiliation, religion, or ideology, and we have no policy, written or unwritten, that does so, consistent with federal hiring law.” Lopez added that Crapuchettes’ comments on the podcast “reflected a personal hope that more public-service-minded people of faith consider federal careers. His sentiment was not a company screening criterion.”

Update July 2: After this story was published, a State Department spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to Mother Jones, “The State Department is committed to recruiting the best and brightest from all across America to the Foreign Service, without regard for political or religious background and in accordance with all law. Under the Trump Administration, interest in joining the Foreign Service has skyrocketed.”

The Trump administration’s July 4th fireworks show will likely produce unhealthy levels of pollution at the National Mall and the surrounding area—a fitting byproduct of the president’s 250th American anniversary celebration. 

Internal documents from the National Park Service, which hosts the annual DC fireworks celebration, and obtained by the Washington Post, say that people in the area should “remain indoors as much as possible during and after the show” and “wear an N95 mask when outdoors” to prevent “irritation symptoms.” 

A significant contributor to these warnings is the scale of the fireworks display: the approximately 850,000 fireworks for 40 minutes. This is about 50 times more than the usual number of fireworks and double the typical show duration. 

To fund the extravagance, Trump is using $1.6 million in revenue from entry fees to national parks—five times more than what’s usually spent on the show. According to the Washington Post, the president is funneling a total of at least $90 million from national park entry fees for his plans to remake DC in his own image. This includes $76 million for repairing fountains, such as the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. 

Surely, this is the best use of these funds, considering the US Department of the Interior states that, as of September 2025, it needs $35.4 billion for maintenance and repair tasks that have already been postponed.

As my colleague Dan Friedman noted in May, some watchdog groups say the Trump administration skipped past congressional oversight by funneling money to the public-private partnership Freedom250.

It’s just another set of opaque business deals to serve one man’s vanity.

Chief Justice John Roberts famously promised that he would run the highest court like an impartial umpire calling balls and strikes. Instead, Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees have studiously moved forward a radical agenda. This term, the justices in Roberts’ six-three majority not only advanced their priorities, they accomplished them. As a result, Americans now live in a different constitutional order. The court reshaped the government, shifting it away from a multiracial democracy and toward a racially-stratified autocracy. 

The Roberts Court is predictable. Not because it follows the law, but because it never passes an opportunity to push its ideological vision. Once you know where Roberts and his colleagues want the country to go, you can figure out how almost every relevant case will end. The roadmap is simple.

First, Roberts and the majority fundamentally disagree with the premise that we have three co-equal branches of government. They believe in the idea of a “unitary executive” with total control over the machinery of government, with the justices themselves serving as the main check on the president. The biggest loser is Congress. Despite it being designed as be the most powerful branch, the court takes every opportunity to trample legislative authority. Second, this court has allies it seeks to help whenever it can, namely, the Republican Party, President Donald Trump, and the wealthiest Americans and the businesses they run. Finally, this majority is animated by a dislike of the Reconstruction amendments, civil rights laws, and using the laws or the Constitution to protect disfavored groups. If they have a chance to strike a blow to a minority group, they take it.

This term, the court didn’t move the ball down the field, they scored tournament-changing goals. In two major cases, Roberts and his allies can claim victories for the conservative movement decades in the making. The country is already feeling the consequences. 

First, on April 29, the court effectively killed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law that for 61 years guaranteed racial minorities a political voice. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court ruled that states can gerrymander communities of color so that they never have a shot at electing their choice of representative. Not only did the court deal a death blow to the VRA, its ruling also took away Congress’ ability to enforce the 15th Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. The Reconstruction amendments are worth little if the court won’t enforce them and Congress can’t. Yet the Callais decision all but forecloses Congress’ ability to protect voters of color. “I can’t even imagine what statute Congress would enact protecting racial equality in voting, especially when it comes to dilution, that would survive a Supreme Court judgment that will rely on Callais,” said Berkeley law professor Bertrall Ross.

Some Republican-controlled states immediately set about eliminating majority-minority Congressional districts ahead of this year’s midterm elections, including in Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee. But that’s only the beginning. Not only will Congress grow whiter as GOP states, mostly in the South, draw Black and brown people out of power as they were free to do before the VRA, but so will state and local governments. Legislatures, school boards, municipal councils—states can now cut minorities out of all levels of government, rendering them, effectively, subjects rather than equal citizens. 

In another case that is an earthquake to government, the court eliminated independent agencies in Trump v. Slaughter. This case fundamentally shifted the balance of federal powers in America, neutering Congress and handing vast new authority to the president. It’s an anti-democracy, pro-corruption decision that will affect everyone. 

Since the country’s earliest days, Congress has had the ability to create what we now call independent agencies, insulated in various ways from direct presidential control. These proliferated in the 20th century as the federal government adapted to the exigencies of modernity. In 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of independent agencies whose members can only be removed by the president for cause, as opposed to political disagreement. Relying upon this decision, Humphrey’s Executor, Congress created dozens of independent agencies over the last 90 years, to regulate everything from major mergers to the safety of consumer products. Until Monday, these agencies were run by bipartisan, multi-member commissions whose members have removal protection.

But on June 29, the court’s 6-3 majority declared that the president can remove the heads of these agencies for any reason. It overturned Humphrey’s Executor and effectively handed all the powers of these agencies over to one man. It’s clear where this will lead: allies and donors can ask for favors when it comes to any regulatory decision that concerns them, and the president can reward them. Likewise, the president can weaponize these agencies—which were supposed to be insulated from presidential politics—for his own political and financial gain. If any commissioner chooses not to act at the president’s behest, Trump can simply remove them. In fact, the opinion may ripple down from the commissioners to the civil servants who work for them. The ruling’s logic, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in dissent, could lead the court to overturn civil service protections and herald a return to a spoils system.

The decision is not just a boon to corrupt government and presidential power, it is a body blow to Congress. The legislative branch is simply not equipped to make every regulation, decision, or adjudication necessary to carry out its laws. As a result, it created agencies to do that work. And in some cases, Congress determined the agencies should have at least some insulation from presidential control. By taking away that independence, the court has done violence to Congress’ ability to ensure its laws are followed. Lawmakers can still hold hearings if they are concerned about an agency’s actions, or even withhold funding—although doing that undercuts its ability to see that its laws are carried out. This decision is a “nuclear bomb for the separation of powers,” Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck wrote. If the president doesn’t want to follow the law, there’s little Congress can do to enforce its directives. 

In his majority opinion in Slaughter, Roberts lets his loathing for Congress spill onto the page. He chided Congress for “taking more power for itself” by creating independent agencies, and decried how they result in an “‘increased subservience to congressional direction.’” But ironically, it is the court that is grabbing power. The only explicit exception to its holding is the Federal Reserve Board, which the court claimed had a different history, but which was transparently an acknowledgment that placing the board’s monetary decisions under one man could destroy the economy. The 6-3 majority reserved the right to exempt other agencies from presidential control on a case by case basis, placing their own judgement about the necessity of independence over Congress’. 

This disdain for Congress was a theme in three major immigration cases, in which the same GOP-appointed majority let the administration ignore laws passed by Congress commanding how the president should implement immigration laws. In a decision that will have massive human consequences, the majority allowed the Trump administration to eliminate Temporary Protect Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, even though, in the case of TPS for Haitians, the administration did not follow the rules Congress laid out to legally end such a designation. Now, Trump can unilaterally take legal status from some 1.3 million people without following the required process. The court’s message to the president was clear: the law is not binding, and we will not stop you from ignoring it. In a case over the rights of asylum seekers, the court ruled the administration doesn’t have to process asylum seekers as mandated by law if border officers can simply block them from physically stepping into the US. Finally, the court gave immigration officers more discretion to take away a lawful permanent resident’s green card at the border, a decision that, in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words, undermines the “benefits and security that come with having” that status. In all three cases, the president’s prerogatives took primacy over the law.

As if going after Congress’ ability to enact voting rights laws, to determine who carries out its laws, and the legitimacy of its immigration laws wasn’t enough, the court dealt a serious blow to its authority to enforce rules it attaches to its spending. Under the Constitution, Congress can spend money for the “general welfare,” which is called spending clause legislation. Sometimes these laws dole out money, but come with strings attached: Famously, highway funding requires states to set the drinking age at 21. But in a case called Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the 6-3 majority weakened Congress’ ability to enforce such rules.

One such spending clause law requires that prisons that receive federal funds respect inmates’ religious rights. In violation of this law, guards in Louisiana shaved the head of an incarcerated Rastafarian man, despite the religious dictate that he not cut his hair. The court found that the former inmate, Damon Landor, could not sue the guards. This will likely result in more disregard for prisoners’ religious rights. But the broader picture is even more troubling. “The Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party,” Jackson warned in her dissent. If Congress can’t enforce the terms of its spending, it has lost an enormous source of power, with victims left in the lurch.

On the final day of the term, the court struck down one of Congress’ last standing campaign finance rules, giving the wealthiest Americans another way to influence politicians. The ruling in NRSC v. FEC limits how Congress can guard against corruption through campaign finance regulations, and specifically allows wealthy donors to circumvent the $7,000 limit they can directly give to a candidate by routing over half a million to them through the party apparatus. As Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent warns, this promotes corruption, degrades our system of government, and substitutes the court’s judgement for Congress’. Again, because the biggest winners are Republicans and billionaires, and the loser is Capitol Hill, this 6-3 outcome was predictable. 

Just as the Roberts Court has dedicated itself to destroying the VRA and ending independent agencies, it has likewise taken every opportunity to weaken campaign finance laws, allowing billions of dollars to flow into American elections, reorienting American politics toward rewarding the biggest donors. Callais, Slaughter, and NRSC v. FEC are all creatures of this 20-year agenda. All three cases rely almost exclusively on other Roberts court decisions. Again and again, they fail to find any help for their arguments that date back to before Roberts’ 2005 ascension to the high court. (The only exception is that Slaughter uses a 1926 case, Myers v. United States—but it’s a contrived reliance that takes the precedent beyond its bounds and ignores its deep and well-documented flaws.) The combined result of the rulings is stunning: these major cases have rolled back civil rights and reshaped the government in the image of the current permutation of this court. 

The conservative bloc also continued its march against civil rights for minorities. Beyond Callais, the court upheld state laws that ban transgender women and girls from participating in school sports. The decision locks transgender girls and young women out of the educational and social benefits of athletic competition in 27 states with bans, continuing this court’s anti-transgender turn. But all girls and women are likely to be affected. The court’s reasoning would logically extend to laws that treat the sexes differently, enabling more laws that discriminate on the basis of sex.

Though the court gave Trump massive wins over the course of the term, it held back when it deemed the consequences too potentially damaging to the economy. These losses for Trump demonstrate an understanding of what is best for the president and his allies, even if he doesn’t agree. In particular, Trump claimed the power to impose emergency tariffs on any nation, as well as the power to fire governors of the Federal Reserve over flimsy allegations. Both would have enormous economic consequences that would imperil Trump’s reigning political coalition. So in two opinions, both by Roberts, the court struck down most of his tariffs, and it blocked his attempt to immediately remove Lisa Cook from the Fed. (The Cook decision was narrow, leaving the robustness of Fed independence uncertain.) 

Hanging over the entire term was a case over the Trump administration’s attempt to take birthright citizenship away from the children of temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants. The policy, an executive order signed on Trump’s first day back in office, violates the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, which states unequivocally that “all persons born” in the country and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. This sacred provision overturned Dred Scott and with it the era of inherited status. There is no American dream—the idea that anyone born here can get ahead through hard work—if all Americans are not born citizens on equal legal footing. Perhaps because this case struck at the heart of what this country is and what it stands for, it was widely presumed that a large majority would strike down Trump’s unconstitutional order and uphold the 14th Amendment. 

But when the decision came down on June 30, it was shockingly close. A bare majority, 5-4, ruled that birthright citizenship applied to virtually all people born in the country. Though spared this time, the closeness of this case did not settle the issue but brought on more nativist, anti-immigrant agitation on the part of Trump and his allies. Justice Brett Kavanaugh invited Congress to limit birthright citizenship, writing that he believed lawmakers could redefine citizenship. The decision is a warning that the entire project of multiracial democracy and legal equality hangs by a thread. 

The court ended a term in which it disempowered minorities and shifted power to the wealthy, to the president, and to itself, by unambiguously showing just how radical it is—a single vote away from undoing the basic tenet of a nation of equals. The court not only made radical changes to our system of government: it showed how much worse it could get.

The Supreme Court dealt Big Brother a blow on Monday with a landmark ruling for digital privacy rights in Chatrie v. United States. Conservative Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch joined the liberal bloc of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in finding that smartphone location data is subject to privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment. Though consequential, the case has gone largely overlooked amid this week’s deluge of high-profile rulings, including the decision to block President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order attempting to overturn the guarantee of birthright citizenship. It marks the Court’s first decision on digital surveillance since 2018, when it found that law enforcement’s warrantless search of cell site location history violated the Fourth Amendment.

To better understand the implications of Chatrie, I hopped on the phone with Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. The Center filed an amicus brief in the case alongside the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU. Glaberson helped break down Chatrie and what the Court’s ruling means in an age of growing digital surveillance.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At the center of Chatrie is law enforcement’s use of a “geofence warrant” to identify the potential suspect of a bank robbery in 2019. What are geofence warrants, and how do they differ from regular search warrants?

A geofence warrant is one of the kinds of warrants that people sometimes refer to as “reverse warrants.” When you think about a traditional warrant, the police are supposed to have particularized suspicions—they’re supposed to be going to a neutral decision maker, like a judge or a magistrate, to show their reasons for suspecting that a certain person or a certain place has evidence of a crime that they’re investigating.

In the case of geofence warrants, [the police] don’t have a particular person in mind, and they sort of work backwards from a location. They draw a line around that location and ask the company, in this case Google, for all the devices that can be found within that location at the relevant time.

In this case, the police drew a line around the bank and asked Google for all of the devices that could be found within that space during the time the robbery occurred. That space didn’t just involve the bank. There was a church in the immediate area, and there might have been people’s homes or other businesses.

Have police increased their use of geofence warrants in recent years? How long has this search tactic been used?

This technique did not exist previously. It’s only possible because of the way technology works now, and a big part of what the Court said in its opinion is that what was happening here is something that the founders could not have imagined when they were debating the Fourth Amendment—a kind of surveillance and a kind of police investigation that would not have been possible. It was not previously possible for the police to retroactively tail all of us into private businesses and homes, throughout our days, at this level of granularity.

The interesting thing about the Chatrie case is that the particular three-step process that happened here, Google had already said that they are no longer doing it the same way. But that does not mean that there are not other ways for the police to access this type of information.

Can you explain that three-step process ?

The more common thing is for police to just ask a company or a person for a specific thing in a specific location. Here, the warrant described this three-step process that, once the judge approved it, Google and the police would just go through [the data] on their own without returning to the magistrate. 

First, Google would look in that physical location, the box the police had drawn, and return anonymized information about all the devices. The police would then look at what Google gave them and try to narrow down which of the devices they wanted more information about. In this case, the initial step returned 19 devices. And the police said, Okay, we want information about these nine. 

And what’s important to note is that in this case they were only looking for one suspect. So, at each of these steps, they’re getting the data of people that are affirmatively not the suspect. And it’s important to recognize that these kinds of searches could draw in all of us, regardless of any suspicion or not. 

So the police asked Google for more information about those nine accounts to look at where else those devices went before and after the crime. The identities of the people were still not being revealed to the police, but they could now see two hours of really granular location information about all the places those devices came from and went to during that period. Google captures location data once every two minutes, and it’s pretty precise about where a person is. It also can capture elevation data—if this person went to the doctor’s office on the third floor, rather than the insurance salesman on the tenth floor. 

From that return of nine sets of more granular information over two hours, the police then were supposed to look through that and identify the devices they wanted unmasked, to learn the identities of the people who owned those devices. And in this case, they didn’t just ask for the person they eventually prosecuted, Mr. Chatrie. They asked Google to de-anonymize three accounts—so, once again, people who affirmatively were not then the suspect.

What did the Supreme Court have to say about this process?

Six justices got in line behind the idea that the decision [from a lower court] should be vacated—that a search did happen here according to the Fourth Amendment and needs to be more closely reviewed. Five justices signed on to the main opinion written by Justice [Elena] Kagan. And Justice Gorsuch wrote his own opinion that gets to the same place, but through a different avenue.

Justice Kagan’s opinion goes through the most recent, really seminal opinion on Fourth Amendment privacy in the digital era, which is Carpenter. That’s a case about cell site location information, which is pretty similar to the Google location history that was at issue here. And the majority opinion decides that, in accordance with Carpenter in 2018, a search did occur here when the government went to Google and asked for all of this information, and so we need to look very closely at whether the warrant that the police got was appropriate. The opinion leaves for another day the questions that will ultimately resolve the case about whether the warrant itself was appropriate, but it decides that, for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, the government did conduct a search here.

One thing that’s really important about this decision is that it says a third-party doctrine does not apply in this case. The third-party doctrine is an exception to the Fourth Amendment that risks really swallowing the rule for all of us in today’s digital economy. It’s the idea that once you voluntarily share information with someone else, a third party [like Google], you lose all reasonable expectations of privacy in that information and the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. And in this case, Justice Kagan’s opinion really importantly says the third-party doctrine does not apply here—just by using a cell phone the way cell phone users do, we don’t give up our rights to our private information.

What are the broader implications of the Court’s ruling? Do you expect this case to have a ripple effect?

So if you read Justice [Samuel] Alito’s dissent, he basically says this is coming for all digital surveillance—which in our book is probably a good thing, but he says it as though it is a terrible thing.

I think this is probably the most significant Supreme Court ruling on the Fourth Amendment since Carpenter. What practical impact it will have remains to be seen, but I think it is an incredibly important development that the Supreme Court is not just extending the third-party doctrine to to all cases and saying that the introduction of a layer of corporate interaction in our lives removes all expectations of privacy.

Because basically, in the last few decades, every single thing we do—from communicating with our families to managing our finances to even thinking our own private thoughts—corporations have sort of wormed their way into all of those processes and are mediating all of our human interactions, sometimes the most sensitive facets of our lives.

And if the mere fact that a corporate tool was in the middle of all of that meant that we had no expectation of privacy whatsoever, that would be the exception that swallows the Fourth Amendment. I don’t know whether this opinion will meaningfully change our day-to-day, but it is a step in the right direction to say that the Fourth Amendment really does still mean something. Privacy is still a value, and one that we’re going to protect.

It seems like people are increasingly aware of and concerned about surveillance, but thinking about things like First Amendment concerns, why does this decision matter for everyday people who haven’t committed or aren’t suspected of having committed any crimes?

All of these techniques—from geofence reverse location searches to police use of facial recognition technology—impact all of us. The companies and the police and the federal government don’t necessarily distinguish when they vacuum up information—when they buy information from data brokers, or when they use facial recognition on a crowd, they don’t distinguish between folks that they have a particular interest in and folks that they don’t. They are just vacuuming up information on everybody.

We found in our research that the majority of American adults, as of 2021, were in Department of Homeland Security immigration databases and could be located by ICE and CBP. So, at a practical level, it impacts all of us, and it has really serious implications on our ability to live our lives and do the things that we want to do together. Because very quickly information about one of us becomes information about a whole group of us, and the police can use these kinds of techniques to surveil and track us from afar, without our knowledge, and identify when we go to protests or come together in community.

So everybody should recognize that placing these limits on police and on government is vital to maintain any kind of any hope for communal action for community and for democracy.

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

Temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high, raising fears of another burst of extreme heat this summer.

On June 21, temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time in 2023 and 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Wednesday.

It warned the new peak would probably bring “consequences for weather patterns, global climate, and marine ecosystems,” not least because it would coincide with the earliest phases of an El Niño event they forecast to be the strongest in decades.

When the previous ocean record for June was set in 2023, scientists described the trends as “worrying,” “terrifying,” and “bonkers” because they were so far outside their expectations. That presaged an El Niño and a period of devastating global heatwaves, floods, and storms.

That 2023 record has now been surpassed and much of the world is once again seeing an alarming rise in temperatures. Last month, the UK and many other countries in Europe sweltered amid new heat records while Antarctica experienced unprecedentedly balmy winter conditions.

Although the focus is usually on land temperatures, oceans give a fuller picture of how much the climate is being pushed out of balance by human-caused warming.

Surface temperatures are affected by solar radiation, water currents, and the buildup of heat in the depths.

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal, and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs per second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions per second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.”

Scientists said it was too early to say whether the sea surface heating would prove temporary or even worsen because annual peaks are usually registered in July and August.

But Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, warned it could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory: “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”

Copernicus is part of the EU’s space program.