“Big moves on Day 1,” White House senior policy strategist May Mailman crowed on X the morning of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, linking to a news article about a forthcoming executive order. Even amid the barrage of actions during the first hours of the Trump 2.0 presidency, the order—“Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—was a bombshell. It directed federal agencies to eradicate every trace of what it called “gender ideology” and established new government-wide definitions of the sexes. “Woman” meant adult human female. “Female” was “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Men made “the small reproductive cell.” “Sex,” it decreed, was an “immutable biological reality.” For at least two years, Trump had been promising to “get transgender out” of schools, women’s sports, and the military. “It will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” he would tell his cheering crowds. > Riley Gaines, the swimmer–turned–anti-trans activist, fangirled, “May Mailman > is my Taylor Swift.” But the order’s sweep and audacity seemed to surprise even Trump’s admirers. “It’s perfection,” Megyn Kelly gushed on her SiriusXM show. “In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have drafted something this beautiful.” On X, the kudos flowed in from people in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Brazil. Many of the posts singled out Mailman, a Harvard-educated lawyer quickly identified as the order’s chief author. Riley Gaines, the swimmer–turned–anti-trans activist, fangirled, “May Mailman is my Taylor Swift.” Mailman had spent four years working in the first Trump administration, becoming an immigration hawk and close ally and friend of senior adviser Stephen Miller. During the Biden era, she landed at the Independent Women’s Forum, a Washington power player that rose to prominence by pink-washing conservative economic policies—claiming to champion women’s freedom and equality while actually working to undermine them. There, she threw herself into the anti-trans cause, going from state to state to promote model legislation, known as the Women’s Bill of Rights, that enshrined narrow definitions of “male” and “female” into law. May Mailman, director of the Independent Women’s Forum’s law center, speaks at a 2024 press conference about suing a sorority that allowed transgender women to join.David ZalubowskiAP Now, at the start of Trump’s second term, Mailman was stepping into the spotlight as a White House surrogate and speaking to conservative outlets about the need to “protect” cisgender women. “If men can just assert that they are women and take women’s privacy away, take their opportunity away, take their safety away,” she told a St. Louis radio host, “then there is no such thing as women’s rights anymore.” But there were intimations that the crusade against trans people encompassed something broader. Mailman wasn’t just anti-trans; she was profoundly dismissive of feminism. “There’s something about, you know, swiping right and left in your apartment by yourself at 11 p.m. after working a hard day that, like, doesn’t feel like feminism is the answer to all your problems,” she mocked on one podcast. She was worried about how “gender ideology” would affect men, too. “Who’s going to be our firefighters? Who are going to be our policemen?” she fretted on another. At a Federalist Society webinar last March, she urged listeners not to even use the word “transgender,” so as not to give “credence” to the idea of “this being a category of people.” She also raised an essential question: After defining sex in the law and kicking trans women out of sports and sororities, what comes next? The answer, she suggested, had something to do with sorting out social roles for men and women. “Trying to figure out how much do we care about gender roles, how much should gender roles infect the idea of womanhood, will, I think, ultimately affect our thinking about gender roles absent transgenderism,” she mused. Then she stopped, as if realizing she was treading into dangerous territory, and smiled. “That conversation is maybe for another day.” This is the story of an extraordinary effort by the second Trump administration to shape our ideas about who and what men and women are—a campaign that began with the targeting of trans people but has vast implications for the rights of cisgender people as well. At the center is Mailman, who describes herself as “one of the most effective and connected veterans of the Trump West Wing,” the get-it-done woman for Trump’s get-it-done man. “Stephen [Miller]’s the ideas guy,” she told Blaze News in April. “And then I’m trying to be the one who makes it happen.” In her whirlwind tour through the White House last year, Mailman made quite a few things happen very quickly—including a high-profile pressure campaign against her alma mater Harvard University to adopt Trumpian priorities in hiring and admissions or lose federal funding. Then, after six months, she left the administration, returning to IWF—now rebranded as just Independent Women—to direct its law center. There, she co-authored amicus briefs in two of the biggest Supreme Court cases of the year, both involving transgender students trying to overturn laws that forbid them from playing girls’ sports. The day after oral arguments, Mailman was on Fox News complaining that some of the justices had dared to call the students “transgender girls.”   > “The executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender > women. Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.” Her Defending Women executive order—and the other anti-trans federal decrees that followed—had an immediate, sweeping impact on the estimated 2.8 million trans Americans over age 13. On the phone several days after January’s Supreme Court hearing, Mailman tells me the push to enshrine definitions of sex had two goals: to prevent courts and administrators from interpreting existing laws in ways that are inclusive of trans people and to make voters feel alienated from Democrats. She frames the idea that transgender women are women as an “elite” concept. “If the left can’t agree that ‘woman’ means ‘female,’” she says, “there is something very othering about that to most Americans.” Now feminist scholars are also starting to raise alarms about the order’s implications for non-trans women. They warn it could be used to undo 50 years of legal and economic progress in the workplace, health care, education, and much more. “At the moment, the most painful, prejudicial consequences are for trans people,” says Kathryn Abrams, a University of California, Berkeley law professor studying sex discrimination. But “the executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender women,” she says. “Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.” For decades, much of the conservative movement has been fighting to undermine anti-discrimination protections based on sex, explains legal historian Mary Ziegler of the University of California, Davis. These include landmark laws like Title IX, which applies in education, and court decisions like United States v. Virginia, which said the government must have a strong reason, based on more than just stereotypes about physical capabilities, to treat men and women differently. Those protections profoundly reshaped American society, giving women more freedom to pursue the lives of their choosing. But they imposed new requirements on powerful institutions that balked at being regulated, and, Ziegler says, they outraged Christian conservatives who believe that “God has a plan for marriage and sexuality and the family” and “God’s plan should be written into the law.” The right slowed the momentum for women’s equality when it killed the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1980s and turned abortion into a wedge issue. Decades later, the anti-trans movement’s emphasis on strictly defining sex as “biological” has given conservatives a new weapon to claw back the feminist movement’s earlier gains, Ziegler says. The term “biological sex,” she says, has become “the new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law.” Related HOW RIGHT-WING SUPERSTAR RILEY GAINES BUILT AN ANTI-TRANS EMPIRE Mailman, not surprisingly, disputes that the sex definitions are part of a wider effort to weaken sex discrimination law. “Simply cementing the case that sex is real doesn’t change anything,” she tells me. “It is the status quo.” Nor does she think enshrining sex definitions based on eggs and sperm will lead to women being treated differently from men in, say, classrooms and workplaces. “There’s nothing about that that forces a woman into a separate calculus class.” But Mailman’s allies in the conservative movement—groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the religious right legal organization that has led many of the biggest attacks on abortion and LGBTQ rights—have their own agendas. “What they’re trying to do is to replace sex discrimination law with a Trojan horse sex discrimination law that no longer prohibits sex discrimination,” Ziegler says. Rather than attacking protections head on, she explains, “they’re going to say, ‘American anti-discrimination law means you can treat men and women differently because they have different bodies.’” If courts embrace this logic, Ziegler says, it would be much harder to fight back against potential restrictions on women’s lives—laws that limit job options for pregnant workers, for example, or that ban women from military schools—by arguing they violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.   > “The administration is telling us what their long game is, which is to treat > women’s bodies as commodities and to create laws to exert control over these > commodities.” Other Trump 2.0 priorities, like its fixation with increasing birth rates, add to this growing sense of feminist dread. “They’re so open about the fact that they want women to leave the workforce and have babies—the earlier, the better—and fulfill the role of motherhood,” says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at the NYU School of Law. “The administration is telling us what their long game is, which is to treat women’s bodies as commodities and to create laws to exert control over these commodities.” “The foundational piece,” Cheng adds, “is defining people by their biology—to essentially see women as people who have one manifest destiny to fulfill.” Last spring, to mark Trump’s 100th day in office, Mailman spoke with Debbie Kraulidis, vice president of Moms for America and host of its podcast. Inevitably, the conversation turned to trans kids in schools. Mailman recalled her own childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s: “When I was growing up,” she declared, “it was okay to be a feminine guy. It was okay to be a masculine girl.” Nowadays, she lamented, “you can’t be a tomboy anymore, because you’ll get your body parts chopped off.” The first child of a surgeon and his Korean-born wife, Mailman (née Davis) remembers her upbringing in “middle-of-nowhere” Kansas with great fondness: “For kids who are from small towns,” she told another podcaster, “you really get to build up your self-esteem and try a lot of things.” At Clay Center Community High School (class of 2006), she was a student council officer, drill team member, and athlete (lettering in cheerleading, tennis, and track), as well as the star at the top of the “Singing Christmas Tree.” By college, she was also a committed conservative, serving as treasurer for the University of Kansas College Republicans and interning for US Sen. Sam Brownback, a GOP stalwart who later became governor. But she didn’t seem to take herself too seriously, entering Spike TV’s “sexiest co-ed” competition in 2007 and earning a write-up in the college paper. “If somebody was doing it who wasn’t me, I’d probably be judgmental,” she told the reporter. Then again, “Why not, for $5,000?”   Graduating into the Great Recession with a journalism degree, she joined Teach for America, landing at Pathway Academy, a majority-Black charter school in Kansas City, Missouri. The school’s executive director, Jennifer Fleming, recalls her as “extremely intelligent, very self-motivated, goal-oriented,” building relationships with students and their families. Mailman would later describe implementing strict discipline, like “standing silent lunch,” in her classroom. Her sixth-grade class scored so high on state tests that the school got its accreditation back, Fleming says. The experience seemed to reinforce Mailman’s conservative beliefs. “I had always thought that Teach for America would help me equip people to be responsible for themselves,” Mailman later recalled for a profile on IWF’s website. “But my kids didn’t have the home environment necessary to do school…I became much more focused on what we can do to build families.” After two years and a master’s degree in education, Mailman headed to Harvard Law, where she chafed at automatically being made a member of the Women’s Law Association, she told me in an email after we spoke in January. “They gave us ladies a little pep speech, saying that women should support each other in class by applauding other women’s contributions,” she wrote. Men had no equivalent. “I hated this. It felt so infantilizing.” Mailman wanted me to know that as a conservative, she’s in favor of treating women equally; it’s left wingers who seek, through such “race and sex based identity groups,” to treat women as “weak or ill equipped” in her view. (Equal doesn’t mean identical, however: “At the same time, sex exists,” she wrote, citing differences between men’s and women’s LSAT scores.) May Mailman (née Davis, standing on left) poses with the girls’ tennis team in her 2006 high school yearbook.Clay Center Community High School From her 2006 yearbook, Mailman was the star at the top of her high school’s “Singing Christmas Tree.”Clay Center Community High School Mailman’s aversion to groups like the Women’s Law Association would echo, years later, in her Trump 2.0 campaign to eliminate diversity and inclusion measures at Harvard and other higher education institutions. The problem with universities, she told the New York Times last fall, is their “culture of victimhood—a glorification of victimhood—that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country.” During her Harvard years, she’d felt very much outside the Obama-era political mainstream. “Conservatism was a lonely place,” especially for women, she told a podcaster last year. But that isolation was also empowering: “You end up being very comfortable with yourself, comfortable with your arguments, comfortable not having a lot of friends.” She became president of the ultra-elite Harvard chapter of the ultra-connected Federalist Society. Post-Harvard, she landed a prestigious clerkship with a federal appellate judge in Denver, then moved on to a private law firm. When a Harvard friend reached out with an offer to work at the “center of the universe”—the first Trump White House—she accepted immediately. Mailman started on day one of Trump 1.0 and stayed until the bitter end. According to emails reported by the New York Times, as deputy White House policy coordinator in 2018, she floated a proposal to send detained migrants to sanctuary cities. She describes herself as part of the “cleanup crew” for the administration’s family separation policy at the border. Later, she was promoted to the powerful White House counsel’s office, where her portfolio included social issues and the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Trans issues were also on the White House’s radar, including a military ban. In 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services even considered an order that would have narrowly defined sex as “immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” But the conservative base reacted with crickets to proposed anti-trans policies, Mailman recounted on a podcast. “Nobody seemed to care, except for people who didn’t like it.” Indeed, public support for trans rights was at an all-time high. When North Carolina passed a law in 2016 restricting trans students’ bathroom access in schools, Fortune 500 companies boycotted the state. Then in June 2020, the Supreme Court stunned conservatives by ruling 6–3 that firing someone for being gay or transgender violated the federal law banning sex discrimination in the workplace. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointee to the high court, reasoned in Bostock v. Clayton County. Mailman hated the decision: “I would argue there’s no logic to Bostock,” she told me. Mailman was still working for Trump when his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That very day, she accepted a job offer from the Ohio attorney general, anticipating that her colleagues were about to become “unhirable for a very long time,” she later admitted. One month after Trump left office, Mailman also began a fellowship with the Independent Women’s Forum. Like many conservative organizations, IWF was starting to invest in anti-trans politics—putting Mailman at the center of the next big culture war. The organization Mailman joined had its roots in the 1991 Supreme Court nomination that was itself a turning point for the role of women in American politics. President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the nation’s highest court was greeted with howls of liberal outrage. Even before Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations threatened to tank his nomination, Thomas’ close friend Rosalie Silberman organized “Women for Judge Thomas” to vouch for his character. Thomas’ confirmation activated a generation of left-leaning women around the issue of sexual harassment. Silberman and her comrades created the Independent Women’s Forum to counter them. “We listened to the spin of those days—the litany that women are victims and men just don’t get it—and decided that those woebegone women did not speak for us,” Silberman said in 1998. “Nor did we think that they spoke for the vast majority of American women.” IWF’s policy agenda was defined by being anti-regulation and anti–“female victimhood.” At various points over its 35-year history, the organization has opposed the Violence Against Women Act, women’s admission to the Virginia Military Institute, the Affordable Care Act, and paid family and sick leave. It claimed Title IX was being used to defund men’s sports, that sexual violence rates were overblown, and that the gender pay gap was the result of women’s choices. For a time, it was run in tandem with the Koch brothers–affiliated interest group Americans for Prosperity. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas appears at his Senate confirmation hearing in 1991.Lee Corkran/Sygma/Getty Members of the Independent Women’s Forum gather in a Northern Virginia conference room in 1995.Mary Lou Foy/Washington Post/Getty From the beginning, much of IWF’s influence was derived from its messaging, starting with its claim to be “independent”—seeming to stand apart not just from feminists, but from ultra-right groups, in part because it didn’t take a public stance on abortion. “Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know-know that you’re actually conservative, puts us in a unique position,” IWF Board Chair Heather Higgins, a pharmaceutical heiress, explained at an event for potential 2016 donors. “Our value…is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable.” IWF’s first public, tentative forays into anti-trans politics seem to have started around 2017, with news releases ridiculing colleges for putting free tampons in men’s restrooms and for recommending that professors ask students their pronouns. Then in 2019, the conservative anti-trans movement suddenly got serious. That’s when the far-right American Principles Project turned a Kentucky gubernatorial election into a petri dish for anti-trans messaging—and found that a video about a boy in girls’ wrestling struck a nerve. > It didn’t matter that trans athletes were—and continue to be—vanishingly rare, > or that lawmakers in some states were unable to identify a single player who > would be affected by their bans. The Democrat won anyway. But conservatives had identified a compelling narrative: Trans people were victimizing female athletes. Within months, Republicans in 17 states introduced a new type of bill, banning trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams. It didn’t matter that trans athletes were—and continue to be—vanishingly rare, or that lawmakers in states like Tennessee and South Carolina were unable to identify a single player who would be affected by their bans. The sports issue became the turning point for an anti-trans coalition that included juggernauts of the religious right like the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom. IWF stepped up to provide a female face and voice for the message. Never mind that the “women are victims” narrative contradicted so much of its past work. By 2022, threat of trans athletes had become a central theme of IWF’s messaging. It snapped up aggrieved athletes like college swimmer Riley Gaines, training her to communicate her story of tying for fifth place with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and eventually hiring her as a spokeswoman. Payton McNabb, a high school volleyball player injured from a spike by a transgender girl, became another “ambassador.”    Mailman embraced the message too, testifying on behalf of IWF against trans athletes in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee. IWF’s media training was a big part of why she joined the group. “I wanted to be on liberal media as a conservative person,” she says, “trying to talk to people,” the way pundits of old used television to shape public opinion when she was a kid. As Mailman sees it, female messengers have been critical to shifting the narrative around trans issues because—stereotype alert!—they are better at conveying empathy than men. For a long time, she tells me, progressive messages of acceptance and affirmation held sway, and “women do want to be kind, and we do want to be empathetic.” So conservatives needed women to challenge “the empathy play,” she went on. For men, it’s “not their natural language.” Differentiating the sexes based on such stereotypes is exactly the type of thing that causes left-leaning women to shudder. But one of the most confounding aspects of the Defending Women executive order is its connection to a group of activists who define themselves as radical feminists. In 2022, IWF announced an ambitious new project that would serve as a prototype for the Defending Women order: a model bill, then known as the Women’s Bill of Rights, that defined male and female in law according to a narrow view of biology. At a press conference, IWF and other social conservatives spoke alongside current and former members of Women’s Liberation Front, a small left-wing group vehemently opposed to the very idea of transgender identity. IWF leaders described their legislation as merely ensuring that policymakers were all on the same page about the meanings of “female” and “male.” But former WoLF board member Kara Dansky, speaking on the call, made it clear that the bill’s goal was to end legal recognition of transgender people. “Everyone is either female or male,” she declared on the call. “Everything else is a lie.” Sometimes known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, activists like Dansky believe that women’s rights will be lost if the category of “women” includes people assigned male at birth. They’ve pushed for decades to exclude trans women from women’s spaces. (Some who adhere to these views—including, famously, Harry Potter author JK Rowling—consider the TERF acronym a slur and describe themselves as “gender critical”; others embrace it.) Mailman tells me that TERF activists, particularly Dansky, were the intellectual force behind the effort to enshrine sex definitions. “The ones that were really driving the charge and had just a lot more knowledge and background, and had been thinking about these issues, writing about these issues, for such a long time, tended to be people on the left,” she says. (Dansky, in an email, says she did not contribute directly to the model bill’s language or strategy, though she does call Mailman an “extremely intelligent lawyer.” Like Mailman, she doesn’t believe that enshrining sex definitions could turn back the clock on women’s equality under the Constitution. “Radical feminists are gender abolitionists who fully support women who do not conform to sex stereotypes,” she writes.) Former Women’s Liberation Front board member Kara Dansky speaks at a 2020 event at the Seattle Public Library.Lindsey Wasson for the Washington Post/Getty The Women’s Bill of Rights wasn’t the first time radical feminists had teamed up with social conservatives on transgender issues. In 2016, WoLF received a $15,000 grant from the Alliance Defending Freedom to fund a lawsuit over trans students’ access to bathrooms and locker rooms. In 2021, WoLF took another $50,000 from ADF to sue California over a law that allows transgender women to be housed in women’s prisons. “It would be foolish to let performative virtue-signaling prevent us from using available resources,” WoLF legal director Lauren Bone emailed when I asked about the group’s work with the far right. Both sides have benefited from the strange alliance, Joanna Wuest, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, points out. Right-wing money and connections allow fringe TERF groups to “punch above their weight,” she says. And conservative Christian groups get “a lot of rhetorical leverage out of saying [that even] radical feminist organizations are opposed to this interpretation of sex as gender identity.”  > Conservative Christian groups get “a lot of rhetorical leverage out of saying > [that even] radical feminist organizations are opposed to this interpretation > of sex as gender identity.”  Soon after the Women’s Bill of Rights was unveiled, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) introduced a version of it in Congress. With the midterms approaching, IWF targeted hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in swing states with ads touting the model bill as part of its supposed crusade for women’s empowerment, boosted by a $100,000 “Innovation Prize” from Heritage. In 2023, versions of the legislation began popping up in statehouses around the country. To promote it, IWF sent Riley Gaines and Mailman—a trip Mailman would later describe as her “first foray into TERFdom.” Mailman, by then married to former professional baseball player David Mailman, leaned on her own experiences as a woman to advocate for the bills. “‘Identification’ replaced the biological reality that we have been living our entire lives—that I am particularly 32 weeks into living right now,” she said on a stage in West Virginia, visibly pregnant with her second child. Her blitz through the state “was terrifying to watch,” says Khadijah Silver, director of gender justice and health equity at Lawyers for Good Government. “She did an incredible job of flooding legal and political environments, partnering with the right groups, to normalize a regressive and anti-scientific and extremely unfeminist analysis of gender—and make it pretty hard to break through that messaging.” The Kansas legislature became the first state to pass the bill in the spring of 2023, and when Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed it, the Republican supermajority overrode her. (“Victory!” WoLF declared in a press release.) Today, 16 states have similar laws, and two more have issued executive orders likewise defining sex. Logan Casey of the Movement Advancement Project describes the Women’s Bill of Rights as “more existential” than other anti-trans bills. “They’re not targeting just one policy area,” he says. “They’re zooming up and saying across the entire government, here’s how we define the word ‘sex’ so that we can basically apply it everywhere that we want, until somebody stops us.” Mailman drew on the state sex-definition bills as she drafted the Defending Women executive order. But the ink on Trump’s signature was barely dry before scientists began to push back, arguing that for all the order’s claim to “biological truth,” a modern understanding of sex involves far more than eggs and sperm.  Today, many biologists view sex as measured by multiple indicators—hormones, chromosomes, genitalia, brain physiology—that typically but don’t always align. > Scientists began to push back, arguing that for all the order’s claim to > “biological truth,” a modern understanding of sex involves far more than eggs > and sperm. More outcry came from reproductive-rights advocates, because the order defined sex as existing “at conception”—language that nods to anti-abortion religious activists who argue that fetal rights begin at fertilization. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for one, was elated about that phrasing, vaunting it during the 2025 March for Life in Washington. Mailman tells me the “at conception” language was added not for abortion policy purposes, but to make the point that sex is determined by DNA prior to birth. Still, “there’s a nice flavor to respecting fetal personhood,” she says. “That’s an added benefit.” So far, the Trump administration has not used the Defending Women order to pursue anti-abortion policies. Instead, it has zeroed in on attacks on the transgender community. The order had an immediate impact on passports, federal funding for gender-related health research, and transgender prisoners. Soon came more executive orders targeting teachers who supported trans students, schools that let them play girls’ sports, and doctors who provided them gender-affirming health care. Another order stated that being trans “conflicts” with a soldier’s “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” The Departments of Justice and Education formed a special team to investigate schools for promoting “gender ideology”—and some universities, in this new climate, fired instructors and censored Plato. The changes have been so drastic that federal judges have put many of the federal government’s anti-trans policies on temporary hold. But the ultimate decider will be the Supreme Court, which already has signaled its willingness to interpret sex discrimination law in ways that exclude trans people. Last June, conservative justices ruled 6–3 that states can ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. In November, the Supreme Court allowed the State Department to stop changing trans people’s gender markers on their passports. Mailman appears on Fox News on January 14, 2026, to discuss the transgender sports cases before the Supreme Court.Fox News The court is currently considering a pair of cases that directly ask how much different treatment for the sexes based on “biology” is allowable. The cases involve two states, Idaho and West Virginia, which have both passed laws banning trans girls and women from playing on women’s school sports teams. During oral arguments in January, ultra-conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed to view the cases as an opportunity to enshrine a constitutional definition of sex: How can a court determine whether there’s discrimination on the basis of sex, he asked, “without knowing what sex means?” But Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared to understand that there would be greater consequences to a decision that gave states more leeway to treat men and women differently, so long as the state claimed the reason was biological. “Your whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences, right?” Barrett asked the lawyer for West Virginia. But, she hypothesized, what if a state could produce studies showing that women’s presence in calculus classes held back men’s learning? Could women be excluded from calculus? “Seems to me like there would be some risk on your understanding that that would be okay,” she said. The exchange showed that even the Supreme Court justices are thinking about how an anti-trans ruling could have wider consequences for sex equality, says Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. “They’re opening up the possibility of much broader potential exclusions,” she says. Such a decision could call into question decades of progress fighting sex discrimination. After all, differences between men’s and women’s bodies have been used for much of human history to justify treating women as inferior to men. The Trump administration has been open about its desire to return to those old days—from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat to the White House’s reported consideration of proposals for “baby bonuses” to incentivize women to have more children. Even the title of the Defending Women executive order reflects early-1900s logic that the government needs to protect women due to their inherent fragility—an idea the Supreme Court rejected during the sex equality revolution of the 1970s, Shaw argues in a recent law journal article. And at a December press conference announcing a rule targeting trans teenagers’ medical care, Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill described gender roles as divinely ordained. “Men are men. Men can never become women,” he paraphrased Mailman. “Women are women. Women can never become men.” Then he went a step further: “At the root of the evils we face—such as the blurring of lines between sexes and radical social agendas—is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived.” It’s the focus on transgender people that gives the administration “cover” to pursue this broader regressive agenda, Ziegler argues. For that strategy, she credits Mailman and her allies. The Defending Women order “is about to matter in a big way,” she says. “It created political cover for all of these changes that are going to affect trans people, queer people, along with cis, straight men and women.” Mailman left the White House in early August, pregnant with her third child. But she’s found it hard to step away entirely. In addition to rejoining Independent Women, she has launched her own consulting firm and is representing Netflix as it attempts to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery (reportedly alongside Kellyanne Conway, a Trump 1.0 loyalist who used to be on IWF’s board). She also continued to work for the administration in its negotiations with Harvard. At the time we spoke, she hadn’t turned in her government laptop. On her last official day in the White House, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled, “The Conservative Women Who Are ‘Having It All,’” with Mailman prominently featured. She’d been flying on weekends from DC to Texas, where her husband, who owns a tree-transplanting company, took care of their children with a nanny’s help, the Journal reported. “In theory, I would love to be a trad wife,” Mailman confided. She’d intentionally picked a husband who made more money so she “wouldn’t feel trapped” in the workplace, she said. But she didn’t feel guilty about missing time with her kids: “I don’t have a victimhood mentality.” For all the praise that conservatives heaped on Mailman for her work in the White House, these details about her home life rubbed some the wrong way. A few weeks later, the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank, started publishing rebuttals to the Journal article—and to the lifestyles of the conservative women it featured. “There is no boss, no industry, no political administration or nation who needs a woman more than her children need her,” one writer, Maria Baer, reprimanded. Baer was calling out Mailman for defying the gender ideals that social conservatives were working so hard to promote. And then Baer stuck in the knife: It was a matter of biology for women to devote themselves to mothering. “We pursue high-powered careers because we want to make an impact, to leave a legacy, to be remembered, or to change the world,” Baer wrote. “There is no surer way to accomplish each of these than by mothering our own children—a job which, by definition, no one else in human history can do.” Mailman probably shouldn’t have been surprised. But the criticism from an organization she respects came as a blindside. “It was frustrating,” she tells me on the phone, her baby fussing in the background. “I felt like I was getting critiqued on something that I literally was actually doing the opposite on.” She’d joined the Trump transition team thinking her tenure would be brief, she says, then accepted a job in the administration to “help my friends,” but only for six months. She’d repeatedly said no to working in the White House “because I wanted to be around my young kids and my husband, not for any cultural pressure reason, but that’s what’s best for me and for what I wanted.” It was yet another reminder that, despite Mailman’s insistence that defining sex narrowly wouldn’t affect women’s equality, right-wing groups can’t be counted on to go along with that rosy thinking. Nor did it seem to strike her as contradictory that being able to pursue “what’s best for me and for what I wanted” depends on the very feminist gains that those groups—now armed with the Defending Women order—are working to undermine. But Mailman was too busy to be upset at her allies-turned-critics. “Everybody is going to have their own opinion about everybody else,” she says. “You just move on.”

Tragedy is a powerful shaper of narratives. In the aftermath of the horrific assassination of MAGA champion Charlie Kirk, a husband and father of two, it was natural that his allies, including President Trump, lionized him as a patriot, free-speech advocate, and activist. And political opponents somberly denounced the terrible killing, as they should, with some hailing Kirk’s devotion to public debate. There’s a tendency in such a moment to look for the best in people or, at least, to not dwell on the negatives. That can be a good thing. Yet as Kirk is quickly canonized by Trump and his movement—on Friday Trump announced he would bestow upon Kirk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom—a full depiction of his impact on American politics is largely being sidestepped. In promoting a story on the murder of Kirk—headlined “Charlie Kirk killing deepens America’s violent spiral”—Axios described him as a “fierce champion of the right to free expression” whose “voice was silenced by an assassin’s bullet.” New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein, wrote, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Klein added that he “envied” the political movement Kirk built and praised “his moxie and fearlessness.” > Kirk’s advocacy of vigorous debate ought not be separated from what he said > while jousting in the public square. Here’s the problem: Kirk built that movement with falsehoods. And his advocacy was laced with racist and bigoted statements. Recognizing this does not diminish the awfulness of this act of violence. Nor does it lessen our outrage or diminish our sympathy for his family, friends, and colleagues. Yet if this is an appropriate moment to assess Kirk and issue bold statements about his participation in America’s political life, there ought to be room for a true discussion. Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded and led Turning Point USA, an organization of young conservatives, was a promoter of Trump’s destructive and baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Two days before the January 6 riot, Kirk boasted in a tweet that Students for Trump and Turning Point Action were “Sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” After the attack, Kirk deleted the tweet, and he claimed that the people his group transported to DC participated only in the rally that occurred before the assault on Congress—where Trump whipped up the crowd and encouraged it to march on the Capitol. The New York Times subsequently reported that Turning Point Action sent only seven buses to the event. Turning Point also paid the $60,000 speaking fee to Kimberly Guilfoyle, a MAGA personality, for the brief remarks she made at the rally. “We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections,” Guilfoyle told the crowd. (Kirk took the Fifth when he was deposed by the House January 6 committee.) Even prior to the election, Kirk helped set the stage for Trump’s attempt to subvert the republic. In September 2020, the Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action was running a “sprawling yet secretive campaign” to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda “that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.” The messages Turning Point generated spread the charge that Democrats were using mail balloting to steal the election and downplayed the threat from Covid. (Kirk’s group called the story a “gross mischaracterization.”) Whatever Kirk’s group and supporters did on January 6, he was part of the MAGA crusade that largely broke US politics. Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 loss, his conniving to stay in power, and his encouragement of a lie that led to massive political violence greatly undermined American democracy and exacerbated the already deep divide in the nation. Kirk was a part of that. Yet Klein overlooks that in praising Kirk. And a New York Times piece on Kirk’s political career made no mention of this, though it did report that he had been “accused” of “antisemitism, homophobia and racism, having blamed Jewish communities for fomenting hatred against white people, criticized gay rights on religious grounds and questioned the qualifications of Black airline pilots.” Kirk’s advocacy of vigorous debate ought not be separated from what he said while jousting in the public square. He hosted white nationalists on his podcast. He posted racist comments on his X account, including this remark: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.'” He endorsed the white “replacement” conspiracy theory. After the October 7 attack on Israel, he compared Black Lives Matter to Hamas. He called for preserving “white demographics in America.” He asserted that Islam was not compatible with Western culture. He derided women who supported Kamala Harris 2024 for wanting “careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” Or, as he also put it, “Democratic women want to die alone without children.” When Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was brutally attacked in 2022, Kirk spread a conspiracy theory about the crime and called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the assailant. He routinely deployed extreme rhetoric to demonize his political foes. Kirk did enjoy debating others. He visited campuses and held events in which he took on all comers, arguing over a variety of contentious issues. He was a showman, and his commitment to verbal duking was admirable. He appeared proud of the harsh opinions he robustly shared. Which means there’s no reason now to be shy about them while pondering his legacy. Moreover, as a movement strategist, he relied upon and advanced lies and bigotry—including falsehoods that fueled violence and an assault on our national foundation. That was not a side gig for Kirk. It was a core component of his organizing. He did not practice politics the right way. He used deceit to develop his movement and to weaken the United States. His assassination is heinous and frightening and warrants widespread condemnation. It should prompt reflection on what is happening within the nation and what needs to be done to prevent further political violence. It should not protect him or others who engage in such politics of extremism from critical review.

When Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, went looking for someone to head the National Counterterrorism Center, she landed on Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, past CIA officer, and twice-failed MAGA congressional candidate in Washington state, who, as the Associated Press reported, “stands out for the breadth of his ties to a deep-seated extremist fringe.” During his first campaign in 2022, Kent consulted with white nationalist Nick Fuentes on social-media strategy. He also had a member of the Proud Boys on his campaign staff, and he embraced as a supporter and ally Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer, a Christian nationalist group. But his associations with far-right extremists began prior to his attempt to win a congressional seat. In 2020, Kent helped boost the organizing message of a new right-wing paramilitary outfit that called itself the 1st Amendment Praetorian. On September 20, 2020, Robert Patrick Lewis, a former Green Beret and QAnon supporter, posted a long thread on Twitter (now X) that announced the formation of the group. Lewis declared that a band of “military, law enforcement & intel community veterans” had come together to protect the First Amendment rights of conservatives. He presented a harsh, conspiratorial, and paranoid view, claiming, “There are Marxist & leftist politicians aiming to lock down total control over our populace.” He asserted, “Their tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups such as ANTIFA & BLM demand total subservience to and adulation of their specific view of the world.” And he maintained the “corrupted Main Stream Media does their best to tarnish the reputation and destroy the lives of any public or private citizen who dares step up to them or fight back against their narrative.” Lewis called on “military, law enforcement or intelligence community” veterans to join 1AP and fight back. In an apparent sign of support, Kent reposted this thread. Lewis noted that 1AP would be providing security services for right-wing rallies and marches, including those “with a large number of high-profile, conservative VIPs speaking & attending.” For one event, he said he needed veterans to provide “physical security, intelligence/surveillance and to serve as team leaders for small security & intelligence and intelligence cells.” He promised, “we will keep your names confidential and our personnel records & communications will be encrypted.” He added, “This group was formed to protect attendees at President Trump’s campaign rallies.” Soon after forming 1Ap, Lewis presented it not only as a security service for the right but as an intelligence operation. He told Fox News, “Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they [Antifa] are planning a massive ‘Antifa Tet Offensive,’ bent on destroying the global order they are not beholden to any one party. Their sole purpose is to create havoc, fear, and intimidation.” (No such uprising occurred.) After the election, 1AP claimed it was collecting evidence of fraud. On January 6, as the riot began at the Capitol, Lewis tweeted, “Today is the day the true battles begin.” (He later said he was at the Willard Hotel, not Capitol Hill, that day.) Lewis’ 1AP did provide security at various events featuring far-right extremists. According to the final report of the House January 6 committee, during a December 12, 2020, rally of pro-Trump election deniers in Washington, DC, Stuart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing, anti-government militia, “coordinated” with 1AP “to guard VIPs, including retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne.” (Both Flynn and Byrne were prominent promoters of the crackpot conspiracy theory holding that the 2020 election was stolen form Trump.) Months later, Lewis and 1AP provided security at a QAnon conference in Dallas, where Flynn essentially called for a military coup in the United States. On social media, Kent has often boosted posts from Lewis. At one point each complimented the other for a podcast appearance. When Kent ran for Congress, Lewis expressed his support for him on social media. In a 2022 Telegram post, Lewis said that he knew Kent “personally” and “wish I could personally vote for him.” In January, 1AP posted on Telegram that there were “mumblings” that Kent could be appointed to lead the National Counterterrorism Center and that this “would be a very good thing. I could not support this more strongly.” Mother Jones sent Kent, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center a list of questions about Kent’s support for 1AP and his relationship with Lewis. Neither Kent nor the agencies responded. Kent has an established record as an extremist and promoter of conspiracy theories. During his 2022 run, he called for charging Dr. Anthony Fauci with murder to hold him “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” He promoted Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged against him. He backed the idea the January 6 riot was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Trump and his supporters. He referred to the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.” He pushed the notion that billionaire Bill Gates was seeking to “control the food supply” and “control housing” to force people to “live in the pod eat the bugs.” Like Gabbard, Kent has no experience in leading a large intelligence organization. (After serving in the Army, he was a field operative for the CIA for a short time.) As head of the NCTC, Kent will have the responsibility for monitoring and preventing both foreign and domestic terrorism. But his past as a conspiracy theorist and his association with far-right extremists raise questions about his analytical abilities and his capacity to assess threats of domestic terrorism that arise from the right. His association with 1AP and Lewis is just one more reason to wonder about his judgment.

The day before the German election, I was sobbing uncontrollably over a video that my German family sent me. It shows a table on a sidewalk, set with pretty porcelain and a sign “Feel like coffee like at Grandma’s?” As passersby sit down, a young man with a guitar carefully pours a cup and offers cream and sugar. Then he sings: “Oma, you’ve been gone a while, but I remember how you’d sit down at our kitchen table and say ‘Never again is now.’”  The viral video, created by a Hamburg singer as part of a day of action against the extreme right, is a little corny. It’s definitely part of the “remembrance culture” that some sneer at. But for, I dare say, anyone who grew up in Germany somewhere between the 1950s and 2000s, it’s a gut punch. The grandmother in the song would have been, give or take, my dad’s generation—someone who was a child during the Nazi era, maybe didn’t talk about it much, but when they did, had this to say: Never, ever, ever again.  Right now, even as we mourn the last of those who remember the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Germany and other countries are electing parties that are, at the very most generous, fascist-adjacent. Twenty percent of Germans voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Sunday’s election, twice as many as did so four years ago. That’s the gut punch part. But tears are not going to get us out of here. So what will? From my perch here in the US—where I arrived decades ago, thinking that having grown up in a country that experienced fascism was never going to be relevant again—here are a couple of thoughts on what we might learn from the German election.  1: Multiparty democracy is a mess, but it has one big plus: It creates options for people who are mad at the status quo. The German campaign echoed a lot of Trump v. Harris 2024: Immigration and inflation were the drivers, and underneath that was the discontent with “those in charge” that has been a theme in virtually every recent election in the West. But unlike Americans, Germans who wanted to send a message to a government they didn’t like had options. 2: One of those options—but only one—was the AfD. Call them the Make Germany Great Again movement, but unlike MAGA they were not able to take over one of the dominant parties. They had to create their own. The AfD is where you’ll find traditional conservatives who’ve been radicalized, people who were always radical but couldn’t say so in polite society, and people who are simply mad as hell. It’s not a Nazi party: That would be illegal in Germany, and politically nonviable too, at least for now. But the AfD absolutely has created a space for fascist-adjacent politics and ideas, from forced “remigration” of immigrants including those with German citizenship, to rehabbing Third Reich slogans and questioning whether SS members were criminals.  3: Twenty percent for the AfD is about exactly what the polls predicted; they’d hoped for 25 percent, which would have been seismic. I can’t help thinking of my dad, who used to say that in any country, 20 percent of voters will vote for the nutbags, if nutbags are on offer. The big problem is when they sweep in a bunch of other folks. 4: But again, those other folks had options. The left-wing party (which has pretty thoroughly repudiated its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party) looks to be landing at close to 9 percent, up from just over 5. The libertarian party was punished for having been part of the unpopular governing coalition, but the new left-populist party BSW—anti-immigration, anti-aid to Ukraine, anti-pronoun, but pro-labor, pro-welfare state, and decidedly anti-Nazi—looks close to making it past the 5-percent threshold that would get it seats in Parliament. Think of BSW as if the Obama-Trump voters had made their own party. It’s a fascinating development and one we might see replicated elsewhere at some point. 5: More parties means more options for forming a non-fascist government. The “firewall” that Germany’s democratic parties have erected against the far right, pledging never to let them govern, has eroded, but it will hold. For now.  So what’s next? To be sure, being the strongest opposition party is the ideal scenario for the far right: They get to demagogue everything the government does and everything it can be blamed for, such as the soaring energy prices caused by its pal Putin and his war in Ukraine. That posture is where the far right is most comfortable (other than complete control). But throwing rocks also has its limits in a country that is divided not along a single line, but along a spectrum. Others, especially the emboldened left party, will challenge the AfD as the voice of protest.  And here’s who else turned out to be less popular than feared: Putin and Elon Musk. Musk, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported, campaigned hard for the AfD, and Putin’s courtship of them may have extended to paying one of its officials. But being the puppet of either an American billionaire or a Russian dictator is not a great look anywhere in Europe. What should we take away from this for US politics? For one, that people vote in protest for lots of different reasons. It’s a mistake to assume (as Trump and Musk seem to believe, and some in the media too) that a MAGA victory means a MAGA country. America’s two-party system does a lot to mask the differences between voters, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And just as importantly, small-d democrats were an overwhelming majority in Germany—and they might be here, too. Eighty percent voted for parties that vowed not to make common cause with the far right. That can’t happen in the US in quite the same way because of the far right’s takeover of the GOP. But America’s small-d democratic coalition still exists, and capital-D Democrats might capitalize on that by showing that their tent is big enough. Disagreement is healthy, if you can agree on the most important part—that democracy is about agreeing to disagree.  The next few years will be hard on small-d democrats everywhere. Bad things will continue to happen—maybe another pandemic, almost certainly an economic slowdown, quite possibly more armed conflicts. Demagogues and authoritarians will exploit those things as hard as they can. But 20 percent is about their ceiling, unless they get extraordinarily lucky or democratic forces cave. So let’s dust ourselves off and get to work. Because never again is now.

In emergency updates, American Sign Language interpreters are crucial to the safety of Deaf people—close to a million of whom live in the Los Angeles area alone. They’ve also become the latest target of right-wing online influencers like Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, who offered a very obnoxious take on his eponymous Charlie Kirk Show last Wednesday, calling live ASL interpretation a “distraction” in the context of the fires; other right-wing media figures have piled on, adding ASL to the increasingly preposterous list of “woke” practices somehow related to the fires. But the Americans with Disabilities Act protects the right to equal information, as National Association of the Deaf board president Lisa M. Rose wrote in a response to Kirk. “Sign language interpreters provide crucial visual context, emotional nuance, and cultural mediation that captions alone cannot convey,” Rose wrote. “This real-time interpretation can be life-saving during emergencies, when clear and immediate understanding is vital.” Kirk was far from the only right-winger to attack ASL interpreters: “critical race theory” profiteer Christopher Rufo said on X that no “wild human gesticulators [are] necessary,” referring to a video of a Los Angeles County emergency management news conference; Richard Hanania said ADA requirements to have ASL interpretation “have led to a nightmare.” Bad takes on ASL interpreters and their purpose are not new, but given the current hold of anti-DEI activists on the Republican Party, and the speed with which other social and news media organizations have capitulated to Trump on advertising, fact-checking, and diversity initiatives, those attacks may soon lead to fewer ASL interpreters on emergency news broadcasts. There are already gaps in meeting that requirement, and not just from the right—in 2020, for instance, a judge had to force Andrew Cuomo to include an ASL interpreter in his lauded Covid briefings. Kirk and Rufo obviously know little about ASL if they’re criticizing it for being expressive—which it’s supposed to be. As Arika Okrent wrote in a 2012 Atlantic article “signers are animated not because they are bubbly and energetic, but because sign language uses face and body movements as part of its grammar.” What’s for certain is that interpretation is vital, not annoying—the exact opposite of Kirk, Rufo, and Hanania’s takes.

On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding. For reasons that no one has yet explained, attorneys for X, formerly known as Twitter, the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk, entered an appearance during the hearing and asked to be included on any future communications about the case. “I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said during a live broadcast on X. After Infowars was seized and the site shut down, Jones promptly began operating under the name and branding of a new venture, dubbed the Alex Jones Network, which streams on X. Jones noted that lawyers for X were present at the hearing, adding, somewhat mysteriously, “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed.” (He later elaborated that “Trump knows I’m one of his biggest defenders.”) > “I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said. An attorney who entered an appearance for X didn’t respond to a request for comment; nor did X’s press office. Onion CEO Ben Collins, previously a journalist at NBC News covering disinformation, told Mother Jones on Friday morning, “We won the bid. The idea that he was just going to walk away from this gracefully without doing this sort of thing is funny in itself.” In a statement reprinted by Variety and other outlets, Collins said that the sale is “currently underway, pending standard processes.” Collins had said previously that the plan was to relaunch Infowars as a satirized version of itself in January. As this odd situation played out, however, Infowars’ website came back online on Friday afternoon; soon after, Jones and his staff had also returned to Infowars‘ studios. Throughout Friday and Saturday morning, the site was full of stories preemptively declaring Jones’ victory over the Onion.  “I told you,” Jones crowed during a Friday night broadcast, back behind his usual desk. “If you want a fight, you got one.” Jones also vowed that even if Infowars is sold he would sue anyone who “impersonates” him, as well as “the big Democrat gun control group,” involved in the sale. (The New York Times has reported that Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun law reform, plans to advertise on the relaunched, satire version of the site.) Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas’ Southern District has been overseeing the years-long bankruptcy process for Infowars. The company and Jones personally filed for bankruptcy protection amid civil lawsuits brought by the parents of children who died at Sandy Hook. Jones was found liable by default for defaming the Sandy Hook families by repeatedly claiming that the mass shooting was a “hoax” and suggesting some of the parents were actors. In the Thursday hearing, Lopez said, “nobody should feel comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing was held. Christopher Murray, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who declared the Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron LLC, to be the auction’s winner, considered the bids in private. According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors.  “I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.”  Jones has made it clear that he was working with a group of what he dubbed “good guy” bidders, who he hoped would buy the site and keep him on air. The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store.  The evidentiary hearing is expected to be held on Monday. 

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands. This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsed Donald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.) One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.”  Ties to Miller back in 2022 illuminate Musk’s current penchant for posting about immigrants. Musk has increasingly aligned himself with xenophobic anti-migrant plans and trans hysteria championed by Miller within the Trump administration.  As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, Trump has vowed to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Miller and others have worked for years to develop a plan—including deploying the National Guard, constructing massive detention camps through executive order, and packing the federal government with their own people.  In recent months, Musk’s posts have sunken to lies of mass voter fraud to help Trump win. As I reported, the billionaire recently posted a rant about how Democrats are the true threat to democracy by fast-tracking asylum seekers for citizenship so that they can vote in swing states. Simple fact-checking finds that asylum seekers are not being flown to battleground states, are not being given a facilitated citizenship process, and are not being allowed to vote—it is all false.  As we previously noted, these statements fall within the 2024 iteration of the Republicans’ “Big Lie.” If Trump loses in November, then Democrats stole the election through noncitizen voters.  Musk has also directly aligned himself with Trump, founding a super PAC called America PAC to get 800,000 people to vote for the former president in key battleground states. According to the Guardian, Trump’s ground operation in swing states are now mostly outsourced to America PAC, and Business Insider said that Musk is now shelling out millions to Republicans in 15 competitive House races. Yesterday, Politico reported that America PAC was teaming up with Turning Point Action, the political advocacy division of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, to fund hundreds of “ballot chasers” in Wisconsin.  Musk also announced yesterday on X that he would attend Trump’s comeback rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the location of an assassination attempt against the former president in July.  So much for claiming to be politically moderate.

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted a lengthy diatribe about Democrats being the real “threat to democracy.” In his tweet, Musk claimed that Democrats are flying “asylum seekers” to swing states (this is not happening), fast-tracking them for citizenship (asylum seekers are not fast-tracked), and ensuring said noncitizens can vote (noncitizens cannot vote). (In the tweet, Musk also lists Ohio as an example of a swing state; it is not.) In short: Almost every claim in Musk’s rant is factually incorrect. As we previously stated, Republicans’ “Big Lie” this time has been that Democrats are stealing the election by pushing noncitizens to the ballot box. Trump backed the claim in the presidential debate earlier this month when asked about whether he acknowledges that he lost in 2020. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” the former president said. “And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”  But, as my colleague Isabela Dias reported, this is not accurate. There are not masses of noncitizens registered to vote. In fact, as she wrote, “a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.” Musk’s logic, though, goes beyond the idea of noncitizens voting. He claims 1 in 20 “illegals” will become citizens per year, resulting in two million new legal voters for Democrats in four years. “America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over,” the billionaire wrote. “The only ‘elections’ will be the Democratic Party primaries.” > Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the > last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to > save it! > > Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something > that the Democrats are expediting as fast… https://t.co/u3HBdd5Bv0 > > — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2024 But this is far from the truth. Last year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, only 29,000 asylees became naturalized citizens. They all entered the US before Joe Biden’s presidency and were engaged in the five-year process of demonstrating legal permanent residence to apply for citizenship.  Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also weighed in, replying to Musk’s post, with another theory. “It’s a two prong strategy,” he explained. “When they bring illegals to blue states, the blue states get extra electoral votes in the presidential election and extra congressional districts, even though the illegals can’t vote. This is because we count them in the census and for apportionment.” As our reporter Ari Berman wrote in 2020, this has been a long-term complaint from the right. Political representation in the 14th Amendment includes “all persons”—not only those eligible to vote. And elected officials, in turn, represent the total population, including those who cannot vote (kids, for example). Republicans want to exclude noncitizens from the census and change the paradigm to reinforce Republican voting power.  Massie’s communications director, John Kennedy, did not respond to a request for comment.  Musk has been driving his claims of noncitizens voting for months. The Washington Post reported earlier in September that the false claims had election officials worried. Many told the newspaper that the posts coincided with a rise in requests to toss voter rolls and made them fearful over the possibility of violent threats in the lead-up to November.  The owner of X also targeted a story from the Los Angeles Times that found that immigration authorities were approving citizenship applications “at the fastest speed in years.” The Times highlighted that right-wing figures were making “baseless claims” and included a statement from Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security.  She said that the agency has processed naturalization petitions within a six-month period for decades and that the department “does not take actions based on electoral politics or upcoming elections. Period.”  So, all of it is was wrong. But Musk has not let facts get in the way of posting through it.