A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell is one of the most prominent Black conservatives in President Donald Trump’s orbit. It all started last summer when the president visited Sewell’s 180 Church while campaigning in Detroit. A month later, Sewell spoke at the Republican National Convention. And in January, he prayed for the new president during his inauguration inside the US Capitol. As Sewell’s voice echoed around the domed rotunda, the prayer sounded familiar to many. That’s because Sewell adapted Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. As Trump dismantles DEI policies around the country and pushes efforts to erase Black history from schools and museums, Sewell remains one of the president’s most prominent Black defenders and argues that the Trump presidency is actually improving Black Americans’ lives. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “I believe that racism is when you close the door of opportunity to people because of their skin color, intentionally or unintentionally,” Sewell says. “And I believe President Trump is a anti-racist because he opened the door of opportunity to somebody like me, in a context where nobody would vote for him.” On this week’s More To The Story, Sewell sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his upbringing as a drug dealer in Detroit, his conversion to Christianity, and his inauguration prayer. Letson challenges Sewell’s ideas about racism, his support of Charlie Kirk, and his defense of the Trump administration’s rollback of DEI policies.

The Supreme Court, with its six-to-three Republican-appointed majority, appears ready to kneecap what remains of the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority political representation. During Wednesday’s oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais, at least five conservative justices seemed ready to enfeeble the seminal civil rights law such that it will no longer stop white majorities from locking racial minorities out of elected office. After oral arguments, it’s clear that this cornerstone of American multi-racial democracy is in grave peril. > The conservatives are ready to wind the clock back to 1982, if not earlier. At issue in the case is Section 2 of the law, which requires that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in the electoral process. This provision has been used to strike down districting schemes and maps that prevented Black voters and other racial minorities from electing their preferred representatives. Since 1965, Section 2 has given people of color a seat at the table, from school boards to the halls of Congress. It appears this 60-year era is coming to an end.  “Race is a part of redistricting always,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, addressing the solicitor general from Louisiana, who was arguing against an existing map that had enabled the election of two Black members of Congress in his state. “What you’re saying to us [is]…’You can use [race] to help yourself achieve goals that reduce particular groups’ electoral participation, but you can’t use it to remedy that situation.'” Several GOP-appointed justices appeared uneasy with striking down Section 2 outright, and instead gravitated toward an approach advocated by the Trump administration which would preserve Section 2 in name only. The administration’s approach would allow states and localities to cut racial minorities out of the halls of power by claiming their maps were simply the consequence of respecting a state’s traditional redistricting principles and the legislature’s prerogative to seek partisan gain. While people of color could still go to federal court to claim they are being targeted by racial gerrymandering, it would be very difficult to prove that their plight was not the incidental result of partisan politics and historic district lines.  The Supreme Court’s recent precedents virtually ensure that this is a trap few disenfranchised plaintiffs will be able to escape. In 2019, in a decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, the GOP appointees held that federal courts have no role in policing partisan gerrymandering—a decision that greenlit our current moment in which President Donald Trump has demanded that his allies in state capitals redraw their congressional maps to give Republicans more seats. Then last year, in a decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the GOP majority ruled that lower courts should presume good faith on the part of legislatures charged with racial gerrymandering, if they maintain that party, not race, guided their map-drawing.  Being able to cite partisan motivation to deny minority voters equal opportunity in the electoral process would “swallow Section 2 whole,” Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued Wednesday. “Party cannot trump the responsibility of states to ensure that all voters have an equally open electoral process,” she continued. “The idea that you have to show that party is the reason for the racially polarized voting would eclipse the entire Section 2 analysis, which is focused on ferreting out and ending race discrimination in the political process.” For several of the justices, however, that may not be a bug, but an alluring feature. Indeed, the Justice Department’s position gives the Republican appointees the opportunity to say they are simply interpreting Section 2 to comply with their own recent precedents on gerrymandering. Such a holding would make it extremely difficult to prove discrimination, without dirtying the GOP justices with the stain of wiping a hallmark civil rights law entirely from the books.  This case arose out of Louisiana, which drew a congressional map in 2021 with one black majority district out of six, even though Black Louisianans make up nearly a third of the state’s population. Multiple courts found this was a likely violation of Section 2, and so Louisiana redrew its map with a second majority-Black district. A group of non-Black voters then sued, alleging that this new majority-Black district was a racial gerrymander that discriminated against white voters. The question the court ostensibly considered at oral argument Wednesday was whether the creation of this second Black opportunity district violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. > “The racially polarized political environment in Louisiana has become worse, > not better.” In their briefs, the lawyers for these non-Black voters, as well the state of Louisiana, pushed for a more aggressive rollback of Section 2. They argued that it should only address intentional discrimination, and not maps or policies with a discriminatory effect. Based on the justices’ reactions at oral argument, they might prevail in that claim. But it would be awkward for the court to outright ban a Section 2 effects test because it already did so in a 1980 case, Mobile v. Bolden. Two years later, Congress overruled the court’s interpretation and explicitly said that Section 2 can block apparently neutral electoral practices that nonetheless have discriminatory effects. If the court baldly overturns Congress’ sanctioning of such an effects test more than forty years later, it would be hard to make it look like anything besides defiance of the legislative branch. Instead, at Wednesday’s arguments justices considered other means to diminish or extinguish Section 2, including, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed multiple times, enacting a time limit on its ability to require race-conscious maps to ameliorate racial discrimination. Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared sympathetic, seemingly adopting the idea put forward by the non-Black voters that Section 2 may have been constitutionally warranted to enforce equality in 1965, but is no longer constitutional given current levels of discrimination. The idea, essentially, is that we have achieved some undefined benchmark of racial harmony that suddenly made Congress’ vision of Section 2 unconstitutional. There’s an irony to claiming that race-conscious remedies to racial discrimination are no longer warranted at the same time racial animus surges in our politics. In an amicus brief, Black legislators in Louisiana tell the court that “if anything, the racially polarized political environment in Louisiana has become worse, not better in recent years.” You don’t have to take their word for it. Just this week, Politico reported that a group chat of young Republican Party officials and staffers texted each other a constant stream of racial epithets and other derogatory language toward minority groups. Over approximately seven months of chat logs, “epithets like ‘f—-t,’ ‘retarded’ and ‘n–ga’ appeared more than 251 times combined.” But the reality is that the chat logs aren’t always leaked. It’s hard to prove intentional discrimination because it’s easy to hide, especially with the tools that the Supreme Court has already given to legislators to obscure racial targeting behind partisan maneuvering and the presumption of good faith. If the court’s conservative wing takes this path, it would ultimately be winding the clock back at least to 1982, if not earlier—a goal the chief justice has worked toward throughout his entire career. Roberts, then a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, led the fight to weaken the Voting Rights Act during the 1982 reauthorization that overruled the court after Mobile v. Bolden. “Violations of Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes,” he wrote at the time. Roberts penned upwards of 25 memos opposing Section 2, arguing that it would lead to “a quota system in all areas.” The future chief justice argued that Section 2 should only be used to strike down instances of intentional discrimination, not laws that have the effect of discriminating against people of color. He lost that fight when Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized the law and reinstated the effects test—but now opponents of the VRA have resurrected Roberts’ arguments forty years later in the Louisiana case. Roberts has already succeeded in gutting the VRA on other fronts, most notably writing the majority opinion in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, which held that states with long histories of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That eliminated the most effective part of the law. At the time Roberts wrote that the Shelby County ruling “in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in Section 2,” but to no one’s surprise, opponents of the VRA are now on the verge of gutting the remaining provision of the county’s most important civil rights law. A decision overturning or crippling Section 2 would turbocharge the GOP’s current gerrymandering efforts. The loss of Section 2 would be devastating for communities of color and the Democratic candidates they tend to support, costing Democrats up to 19 House seats. As much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats, according to a report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund. Even by conservative estimates, Republicans could easily eliminate a half-dozen Democratic seats, leaving no Democratic representatives or majority-minority districts in Tennessee and Deep South states including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where voting discrimination has historically been most prevalent.   Edward Greim, the conservative lawyer who represented the group of non-African-American voters that challenged the Louisiana map, asked the court to rule quickly so that Louisiana could draw a new map that would eliminate the seats of one or more Democratic representatives. The Supreme Court has already fast-tracked the case, which means that a ruling eviscerating Section 2 could come well in advance of the 2026 midterms, giving GOP-controlled states ample time to surgically eliminate Democrats seats and representation for communities of color. Beyond the midterms, weakening Section 2—however the justices choose to go about it—would almost certainly reconstitute state legislatures, city councils, judicial districts, and every other type of political boundary in which racial minorities could be excised from government. “The result,” as the Legal Defense Fund’s Nelson said at oral arguments, “would be pretty catastrophic.”

The current Supreme Court, helmed by Chief Justice John Roberts, has been focused on chipping away at civil rights laws and policies for 20 years. On Wednesday, the justices will hear oral arguments in a case that could represent not just another chip, but a fatal blow to the load-bearing pillar of American multi-racial democracy: The 1965 Voting Rights Act.   > The Republican wing is ready to jettison a seminal protection for minority > voters. Section 2 of the VRA requires that people of color have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. The goal of the legislation was to end the Jim Crow system in which Black people were shut out of the political process, particularly in the former confederate states. Over the past 60 years, the section has curtailed a wide range of discriminatory practices, while fostering the creation of districts where communities of color can elect candidates of their choice. To further weaken or dismantle Section 2 would allow states, cities, and other localities to lock racial minorities out of power, from Congress to school boards, across the country, and particularly in the South.  This challenge to Section 2 came from a group of non-Black Louisiana voters and their Republican-aligned lawyers who allege that the creation of a second majority-Black district in the state in compliance with Section 2 has actually violated their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. Their theory of the case is that creating equal voting rights for Black people is unconstitutional racial discrimination against white people. As they explicitly state in their briefing: “Rather than eliminating hard-to-reach discrimination, Section 2 is now discrimination’s main source and aggravator.” This case should have been decided last term when it came before the court. But rather than rule on the fate of Louisiana’s second majority-Black district on narrower grounds, the justices scheduled the case for reargument this week to address the question of whether using Section 2 to provide political opportunities to racial minorities is itself unconstitutional race-based discrimination against white people. The fact that the court, with its 6-3 GOP-appointed majority and its long history of going after voting rights and civil rights, chose to take up this specific question is a strong indication that the Republican wing will adopt a version of this argument, weakening or jettisoning a seminal protection for minority voters across the country. Legally, this is a perverse argument. The Reconstruction Amendments were adopted to end slavery and provide Black people with equal rights, including the right to vote. To use those same amendments as weapons of white supremacy today is not just legally incorrect—it is a tragedy.  The justices may want to focus on theoretical questions of how to apply the Constitution’s promises of a right to vote and the equal protection of the laws, as their framing of the arguments suggest. But the case isn’t just an academic dispute. It’s actually a case about facts, even if they may be largely absent from Wednesday’s oral arguments and the majority’s eventual opinion. The non-Black voters and their lawyers claim Section 2’s requirements burden states with intrusive federal oversight that is unjustified by current conditions. And so the question is, on their terms, if the state of Louisiana and the others have moved so far beyond where we were in 1965 that this law is no longer warranted. To ask Black people in Louisiana, the answer is clearly no. Take an amicus brief from the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, an association of state legislators, which details case after case of discrimination against their members and Black voters in the state. “Black candidates face both open and subtle racial indignities when campaigning and some have observed that open racism has only increased in recent years,” the brief states. “Without this vital bulwark against anti-Black policies and practices, ongoing efforts to gerrymander and dilute the Black vote will proceed uninterrupted. Black voters will be deprived of their right to meaningfully participate in the political process, plunging Louisiana into a new era of racial ignominy.” Here are a few choice examples from the brief:  > When one LLBC member recently went door knocking in a predominately white > neighborhood, he was questioned by a constituent as to why he was campaigning > there (despite it being squarely within his district). The not so subtle > message was that even as a Black elected leader, he was not welcome to walk in > this predominately white neighborhood. Another member, who has held public > office in various capacities for almost fifty years, has experienced open > racism on the campaign trail that is just as terrible, if not worse, than when > he began his career in the 1970s. Earlier in his career, neighbors who > disagreed (or took issue with the color of his skin) were still cordial and > polite as he went door to door for his campaigns. During his most recent > campaign, doors were slammed in his face. Racist comments were uttered as he > sought to engage with voters and constituents. > > In August, the mayoral race in New Orleans was marred by a leaked email in > which a major donor queried whether and when to inject racial conflict into > the campaign. The email referenced an allegedly fabricated story that the > staff of a Black candidate had called the donor’s preferred mayoral candidate > a “white devil.”… > > In 2018, LLBC member Representative Steve Jackson received a death threat when > running for mayor in Shreveport. Upon returning home one day during the > campaign, he found a computer printout on his doorstep in which someone had > placed a photo of his face with a noose around it. Representative Jackson had > been advocating to remove a Confederate statue from the local courthouse > property. Below the image, the perpetrator typed out: “LEAVE OUR STATUE & > PROPERTY ALONE & GET OUT OF THE RACE N——” on the sheet of paper. The brief goes on to describe how white legislators ignore the concerns of their Black constituents, making the creation of Black opportunity districts imperative to Black people’s political power in the state. The legislators say the situation has become so grievous, with Black people unable to get attention from their non-Black representatives for crumbling roads and sewage systems, that Black representatives from other districts effectively must represent those people. The LLBC has even created “an informal network” to connect Black residents to the nearest Black representative in order to get their concerns aired in the state capital.  Without Section 2, they warn, the legislature will strip away as much Black representation as possible. “LLBC members received a text message while preparing this brief informing them that they must hold dates in late October for a potential special session shortly after the hearing for this case,” the brief states. “There is no question that the goal of the majority in such a session is to redistrict the State’s congressional map… The Legislature is poised to act to roll back the progress made over the past several decades—forecasting how rapidly and aggressively Louisiana will act if this Court removes protections.” (After pushback, the Louisiana legislature is expected to wait until after the Supreme Court issues a decision to redraw its maps.) On the other side of the ledger, the group of non-Black voters and their lawyers are light on the facts. The non-Black voters who make up the allegedly injured party bringing the case don’t seem particularly harmed. A New York Times investigation found some of the plaintiffs weren’t even aware they were part of the case, and as their original complaint in district court states, many of the plaintiffs won’t even be moved into a new district under the map they are challenging. > The plaintiffs argue amendments protecting Black citizens must be interpreted > to ignore their plight. What little harm they can muster seems to be a weaker version of the harm the LLBC brief claims Black people already suffer: “The harm is felt by African American and non-African American voters alike, who no longer can influence their communities,” the complaint states. “Instead, both sets of voters are separated from their communities and thrust into districts with other voters hundreds of miles away, with whom they have little in common apart from race. The result is they do not have the same power to appeal to their congressional representatives—some of whom may have no knowledge of their region or culture.” Whereas this alleged harm is speculative, the real harm of representatives ignoring their constituents is actually one factor Congress has articulated for determining whether a minority opportunity district is appropriate under Section 2—and as the LLBC brief points out, it’s already happening to Black voters in Louisiana. One of the more startling aspects of the plaintiffs’ arguments against Section 2 comes at the end of the non-Black voters’ September brief to the Supreme Court, in which the lawyers seem to abandon the suggestion that racial polarization and animosity have receded to instead paint Black and white Louisianans as engaged in an eternal struggle over a limited number of congressional seats. Drawing from Roberts’ decision two years ago ending affirmative action in higher education, they allege that congressional representation is a “zero-sum” situation that pits racial groups against each other, in the same way that Black and white applicants vie for a limited number of spots in a freshman class. Ensuring representation for Black voters, they continue, “perpetuates discrimination.” This claim doesn’t actually make sense, nor is it followed by any sort of explanation—but it does allow them to make reference to a 2007 Roberts opinion in which he famously wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” In other words, the lawyers admit that there is currently racial disharmony and then suggest that the only way to end it is to let white people take representation from Black people. The plaintiffs’ arguments in favor of ending Section 2’s protections for racial minorities in the creation of political maps starts out as an assertion that current events no longer warrant federal intervention but, in the course of a single brief, come around to the idea that white people can’t be fairly represented by Black representatives and that the two races are locked in a battle over a limited number of Congressional seats. In this contest, they argue, the Constitution mandates that the amendments enacted to protect Black citizens after the Civil War must now be interpreted to ignore their plight. Eviscerating the VRA’s protections for Black voters will not end the use of race in map drawing. Rather, it will green light rampant racial gerrymanders that disadvantage minority groups, including Black people in Louisiana and across the south. These will be race-conscious and racist maps specifically designed to dismantle black political power as well as Democratic seats. The justices can call it colorblind, but both sides know that’s not the case.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners will be the first movie on a streaming platform that will also be available in Black American Sign Language at the time of its digital release when it hits HBO Max on the Fourth of July. “By amplifying Black Deaf voices and honoring the culture, identity, and history at the heart of this powerful film, Max’s ongoing commitment to accessibility builds off a growing ASL program,” reads a press release from Warner Bros Discovery, HBO Max’s parent company. Black American Sign Language is distinct from American Sign Language—and it developed because Black Deaf students were segregated in their own Black schools for the Deaf. Around eight percent of Deaf people in the US are Black, but not all have access to learning BASL due to ASL being more widely taught now. Franklin Jones, Jr., a lecturer in deaf studies at Boston University, has compared BASL to African American Vernacular English, describing it as: > Compared to those who use standard ASL, BASL signers are sometimes seen as > less animated, Jones says. There are fewer mouth movements (a feature known as > facial grammar) in BASL, for example. In other ways, though, it’s perhaps more > expressive. The sign space for BASL users tends to be higher, closer to the > forehead, and generally wider overall, whereas standard ASL tends to be > farther down and to rely on tighter, more economical choices. People fluent in > BASL also tend to use both hands for signs that might require only one in > standard ASL. Still, BASL is not a monolith. As with any language, there are > noticeable dialects and regional accents.  The film, set in 1932, follows two Black twin brothers, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to their hometown in Mississippi, when they have to face a supernatural force. The 1930s were definitely a time period where BASL was more common among Black Deaf people who had access to sign language education. Writer Ashley C. Ford remarked on BlueSky that she had once seen director Coogler sign with another person who he noticed was wearing hearing aids, though it is unclear whether Coogler speaks BASL, ASL or both. > When I met Ryan Coogler several years ago, we were standing in a group of > people chatting, when a woman with visible hearing aids walked up, and he > casually began to sign the whole conversation so she could participate. She > mouthed “thank you”. He nodded and just kept doing his thing. > > [image or embed] > > — Ashley C. Ford (@smashfizzle.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 2:38 PM “The release of SINNERS with BASL is a major step forward in accessibility, representation, and visibility in streaming,” the press release also noted.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. As an ice storm slicked roads across eastern Michigan on February 6, representatives from four houses of worship arrived at the offices of Democratic US Sen. Gary Peters.  They wanted Peters to pressure the Trump administration to lift the funding freeze on $20 million in “community change grants” promised by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to houses of worship across Detroit to create community resilience hubs. Powered by renewable energy, the hubs offered residents shelter during weather emergencies and utility outages. More than three months later, spring has come to Michigan—and yet the expected $2 million in funding for the St. Suzanne Cody Rouge Community Resource Center in Detroit remains on ice. St. Suzanne executive director Steve Wasko says his organization—which provides meals, clothing, daycare, and other programs for residents of this predominantly Black neighborhood—has “received conflicting and sometimes contradictory communication about the grant.” Wasko had been promised funding to install heat pumps, solar panels, and a generator, among other upgrades. The retrofit would allow St. Suzanne to help more people while cutting an energy bill that can run up to $15,000 a month in the winter.  Steven Wasko is executive director of the St. Suzanne Cody Rouge Community Resource Center in Detroit.Courtesy of Michigan Interfaith Power & Light The funding freeze is just the latest setback for poor communities of color across the United States—including in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia—that are being left behind in the transition to cleaner, cheaper power. Neighborhoods like Cody Rouge suffer from underpowered electrical service, more frequent power outages and high energy bills—a legacy of the once-legal practice of redlining that robbed communities of color of financial and public services, Floodlight found. In formerly redlined neighborhoods like Cody Rouge, shutoffs for nonpayment are more likely. And poverty limits access to renewable energy: Aging roofs can’t support solar panels, outdated wiring can’t handle new heaters, and old electrical infrastructure struggles to accommodate electric vehicle charging and solar arrays. “It’s now very clear that energy services, ranging from quality of service to price of service, are disproportionately poor if you are a minority, a woman or of low income,” said Daniel Kammen, professor of energy at the University of California-Berkeley. High energy costs are a burden across Detroit. A quarter of the metro area’s poorest households spend at least 15 percent of their income to power and heat their homes, according to a Floodlight analysis of data from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). Across the United States, a quarter of all low-income households—roughly 23 million people—struggle to pay their energy bills. In most major US cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, these one out-of-four low-income households pay 15 percent or more of their incomes on average on electricity, cooling and heat. In Los Angeles, this group pays just over 14 percent of their household income on utility bills. These energy burdens have persisted for decades, despite billions of dollars from federal and state governments subsidizing electricity bills in low-income communities. And now, Trump’s administration has gutted the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides heating and cooling subsidies for 6 million households.  A group of representatives from four Detroit houses of worship stand outside the federal building in downtown Detroit on February 6, 2025. From left: Bob Chapman, Kenneth Jamison, Leah Wiste, Steve Wasko, and Abdur Rasheed. Ethan Bakuli / Planet Detroit Other policy solutions face significant challenges. Energy subsidy programs suffer from low enrollment. Collective “community solar” efforts capable of bringing cheap renewable power to renters and the urban poor are stymied by utilities or not made available to folks with lower incomes.  During the Biden administration, tens of billions of dollars were allocated by Congress to help socially vulnerable groups participate in the energy transition. Trump froze much of that funding. Repeated court orders to resume the funding have been ignored or only partially honored. The chaos has only deepened advocates’ concern that the disparities in America’s electric grid will persist—and perhaps even deepen. “The current energy system has this imbalance, but if we don’t fix that, we’ll continue down that path, even as we transition to a cleaner, greener energy system,” said Tony Reames, professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan. In some states, minority communities are more likely to lose power. And in others, Black and brown residents are more likely to have their power shut off for nonpayment. Because of gaps in data collection, a clear national picture of energy inequality is difficult to see. Across the United States, counties with high minority populations in Arkansas, Louisiana and Michigan are disproportionately prone to having long blackouts, according to a 2023 study in Nature Communications. At least 3 million Americans face disconnection each year because they can’t afford utility bills, with Hispanic and Black households being four and three times more likely to be disconnected, respectively, according to the Energy Justice Lab, which tracks disconnections.  That number could be much higher, though, since only 28 states require their utilities to disclose disconnections, meaning no data is available for 44 percent of the country, according to Selah Goodson Bell, an energy justice campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity.  And in certain cities, the inequality extends to the very structure of the grid itself. In Detroit and California, advocates and scientists have found that outdated utility infrastructure is concentrated in predominantly minority areas. This barrier may limit those neighborhoods’ ability to access renewable energy technologies such as rooftop solar, battery storage, and electric-vehicle charging, which can lower energy costs. When the lights flicker or go out in Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods, it’s often because of the electrical distribution grid.  Solar installers set up the array on the roof of the New Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit.(Courtesy of Michigan Interfaith Power & Light) Today in Motor City, many low-income residents get their power through DTE Energy’s 4.8-kilovolt (kV) electric system, which struggles to keep up with the changing climate. Whiter, wealthier suburbs of Detroit are serviced by a more modern 13.8-kV grid. In rate cases, activists have accused DTE of prioritizing infrastructure upgrades in wealthier, whiter communities while leaving Black and brown neighborhoods with outdated and unreliable service. Across the city, power lines and transformers are decades past their intended lifespan, leading to frequent outages and prolonged blackouts. Aging infrastructure, beset by summer heat waves and winter storms, led to almost 45 percent of customers suffering eight or more hours of service disruptions in 2023. A company spokesperson notes it improved reliability by 70 percent between 2023 and 2024. “I know after three days without power, the strands of civilization get tested,” said Jeff Jones, Detroit resident and executive director of Hope Village Revitalization, a nonprofit community development corporation. “It can get really frightening.” DTE says it has committed to improving the grid, citing a $1.2 billion investment in downtown Detroit’s infrastructure and a push to prioritize grid upgrades in vulnerable communities.  Lauren Sarnacki, a senior communications strategist at DTE, said the company also helped connect customers to nearly $144 million in energy assistance last year. And the utility runs a pilot program for households earning up to 200% of the federal poverty level, capping their energy costs at 6% of their income. One Black church in Metro Detroit did not wait for the grid to improve. Last fall, New Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church weatherized, upgraded its heating system and installed solar panels and a battery with the assistance of the nonprofit Michigan Interfaith Power & Light and a state grant.  The Rev. Alex Hill, pastor of New Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit.Courtesy of Michigan Interfaith Power & Light The solar array and battery give community members a chance to warm up or cool down in the building when the power is out in the neighborhood, said the church’s deacon, Wilson Moore.  “For the church itself, we’ve cut costs as far as energy consumption almost 40, 45 percent—and that’s without even solar panels up,” he said. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power also operates a 4.8-kV distribution grid in certain neighborhoods, including in Boyle Heights, a predominantly hispanic East LA enclave that was once redlined and has now begun to gentrify. There, aging transformers and outdated service lines mean that businesses installing EV fast-charging stations or anyone trying to plug in a large solar array may have to pay for grid upgrades, according to an NREL study. “Grid limitations could limit the success of other clean energy equity programs,” the study concluded. Old roofs also are a major barrier to rooftop solar adoption across Los Angeles, according to Alex Turek, deputy director at GRID Alternatives Greater Los Angeles, a nonprofit that deploys renewable energy in low-income neighborhoods. “I think 70 percent or more of our folks who we build trust with, who are ready to move forward, can’t then adopt solar because their roofs are old and can’t support the weight,” Turek said. Floodlight spoke to 18 organizations attempting to deploy renewable energy in low-income communities across the country. All of them said that poor housing stock, which is often concentrated in formerly redlined neighborhoods, was a major barrier to their work. For renters and apartment dwellers, community solar may be a solution by allowing low-income residents “a way of dividing up an array and sharing it among multiple people,” said Alan Drew, a regional organizer with the Climate Witness project, a faith-based climate nonprofit. Programs in 24 states and Washington, DC, support this form of collective solar energy, which generates enough energy to power more than million homes, according to a yearly survey from the NREL. Most of the locations also offer financial assistance for low-income households to access this form of energy, according to the NREL study. However, in Michigan and Pennsylvania, investor-owned utilities have stymied the adoption of community solar. California has 13 solar projects built on the community solar model, but only one—the Anza community solar project in Santa Rosa—is dedicated to low- and medium-income customers.  Parishioners and supporters of New Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church celebrate the installation of a solar panel system. Courtesy of Michigan Interfaith Power & Light The state does have the Solar on Multifamily Housing (SOMAH) program that has subsidized over 700 solar arrays on multifamily affordable housing units, bringing costs down for some 50,000 apartments. The program makes sure that the cost savings don’t just go to the landlord.  “The smart policy design feature of the SOMAH program is that at least 50 percent of the system has to benefit the tenants,” said Turek, of GRID Alternatives. On sweltering afternoons in Hunting Park, the heat rises in waves from the asphalt, baking the brick rowhouses. The Philadelphia neighborhood’s sparse tree cover offers little relief—only 9 percent of it is shaded, compared to 20 percent of the city overall.  The effect is brutal. With much of its land covered in concrete, brick and blacktop, temperatures in Hunting Park can soar as much as 22 degrees higher than in other parts of Philadelphia. That difference translates directly into higher electricity bills as residents struggle to cool aging homes never built for such extreme heat. Charles Lanier, executive director of the Hunting Park Community Revitalization Corp., said some residents pay as much as 40% of their incomes just to heat and cool their homes. “I’ve seen bills as high as $5,000,” Lanier said. “It’s a problem across the board in marginalized communities here in the city of Philadelphia.” In Hunting Park and in low-income neighborhoods across the City of Brotherly Love, the Philadelphia Energy Authority has braided together several grant and funding streams to repair, weatherize, electrify and add solar power to some 200 low-income homes across the city in a state where community solar is not allowed.  The agency also runs Solarize Philly, a program that has helped install solar on some 3,300 homes, including low- to moderate-income households. “We think low-income solar is the best way to create long-term affordable housing,” said Emily Schapira, CEO of Philadelphia’s Energy Authority. Lanier has seen the value of solar firsthand. “Here at our office we have installed rooftop solar panels. Our electric bill has gone from $100,” he added, “to almost zero.” Ethan Bakuli reported from Detroit for Planet Detroit, an independent, nonprofit local news organization designed to inform residents about the environment and public health in Detroit and Michigan. This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

President Donald Trump’s second term has swung a wrecking ball at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and programs throughout the country. Few writers seem better suited to explain this unique moment in America than Nikole Hannah-Jones. A New York Times journalist and Howard University professor, Hannah-Jones has spent years studying and shaping compelling—and at times controversial—narratives about American history. In 2019, she created The 1619 Project, a series of stories and essays that placed the first slave ship that arrived in Virginia at the center of the US’ origin story. Today, the Trump administration is pushing against that kind of historical reframing while dismantling federal policies designed to address structural racism. Hannah-Jones says she’s been stunned by the speed of Trump’s first few months. “We haven’t seen the federal government weaponized against civil rights in this way” since the turn of the century, Hannah-Jones says. “We’ve not lived in this America before. And we are experiencing something that, if you study history, it’s not unpredictable, yet it’s still shocking that we’re here.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks to Hannah-Jones about the rollback of DEI and civil rights programs across the country, the ongoing battle to reframe American history, and whether this will lead to another moment of rebirth for Black Americans. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Mike Hixenbaugh first knew things had changed when someone on a four-wheeler started ripping up his lawn after his wife placed a Black Lives Matter sign outside their home on the suburban outskirts of Houston. Hixenbaugh is an award-winning investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s covered wrongdoing within the child welfare system, safety lapses inside hospitals, and deadly failures in the US Navy. But when his front yard was torn apart in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he saw a story about race and politics collide at his own front door. “They’re targeting us,” Hixenbaugh recalls. “My wife, my kids, me—and it’s about race.”  So like any investigative journalist, he started investigating and soon discovered that “the ugliness of our national politics was really playing out at the most visceral level in these suburbs.” Hixenbaugh’s reporting about the growing divides in his neighborhood soon led him to the public schools, specifically those in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas where parents were engaged in heated, emotional battles over race, gender, DEI programs, and the role of public education in the US. As more than a dozen states sue the Trump administration over its policies aimed at ending public schools’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Hixenbaugh about how America’s public schools have become “a microcosm” for the country’s political and cultural fights—“a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

On March 31, the Social Security Administration will cease allowing people to confirm their identity over the phone when enrolling or changing their bank information, according to a memo obtained by journalist Judd Legum’s Popular Information. The policy change means that anyone who cannot confirm their identity independently online will have to appear in person, a shift framed as minor but likely to harm a large number of the program’s approximately 70 million beneficiaries. The move came as Elon Musk continues to claim—without providing any evidence—that there is a sweeping Democratic conspiracy to orchestrate supposed benefits fraud among noncitizens. This is not the only move that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken to undermine the Social Security Administration and the disabled and aging adults who need its services. DOGE is, among other things, closing 10 of the agency’s field offices throughout the country, which will compel some of those users drive up to 100 miles for appointments—like the in-person appearances the agency’s new phone rules would entail. SSA also plans to terminate 7,000 workers, around 12 percent of its workforce.  > Retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole > source of income. Last week, 13 senators—including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—sent a letter to their colleague, Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Michael Dean Crapo (R-Idaho), urging him to hold a hearing on Musk’s attacks on Social Security. “At a time when the agency’s workforce is at a 50-year low,” the letter reads, the potential loss of centuries’ worth of agency experience will risk worsening backlogs, lengthening wait times, and interrupting benefit payments,” the senators wrote.  Advocates say that the changes will have a greater impact on aging adults living in rural areas, who are less likely to have steady internet service. The Affordable Connectivity Program, launched in 2021 under the Biden administration to ease the cost burden of internet use, ended in June 2024; moreover, not all older adults have access to a smartphone and computer, or the ability to use them unaided for sensitive, high-stakes tasks like identity checks. Pew Research Center reports that 61 percent of aging adults, defined as people 65 and older, have a smartphone; 44 percent, likely with some overlap, have a computer. There are also reasons to believe that Trump and Musk’s attacks on Social Security will disproportionately impact retirees of color. According to the National Academy of Social Security Insurance, retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole source of income in comparison to white retirees—a consequence of being more likely to have jobs that don’t contribute to retirement funds or provide pensions, and of being less likely to have generational wealth. “Adding additional barriers such as discontinuing some phone services, imposing new online requirements, and closing field offices will harm low-income older adults of color disproportionately,” Tracy Gronniger, managing director of economic security at advocacy group Justice in Aging, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “When Social Security is your sole source of income, losing even one month of benefits can lead to hunger, poor health, and housing precarity.” According to research from the National Equity Alliance, people of color across different income levels are also less likely to have access to a car, making it more difficult to travel between cities (or even within a city with less-than-robust public transit) to get to a Social Security Administration office for identity verification—none of which appears to be of any concern to Musk.

During his campaign, President Donald Trump frequently repeated the inflammatory and outrageous lie that, without parents’ knowledge, schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries. During a campaign stop filmed by Fox News at a Bronx, New York, barbershop, Trump answered a voter’s question about failing school systems by saying, “No transgender, no operations—you know, they take your kid—there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.” Obviously, this is untrue, but now, he’s trying to solve the problem he invented as part of his anti-trans campaign strategy—by going much, much further than the earlier lies, and threatening to prosecute teachers who take steps to acknowledge or support the identities of trans or nonbinary students. In the executive order issued Wednesday evening, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump directs the attorney general to work with local and state officials to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” The order defines “social transitioning” to include using a trans student’s name and pronouns, recognizing a student as nonbinary, or allowing them to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity. The same section of the order suggests that K-12 teachers and school officials who take action to support trans students’ identities be prosecuted under laws banning sexual exploitation of minors and practicing medicine without a license. There are 3.8 million public school teachers in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The threats don’t stop there. Federal funding for schools and programs that teach lessons about gender or race is also in jeopardy. Trump’s order instructs the Departments of Education, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to come up with an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within the next 90 days, identifying federal funding streams that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” in classrooms and teacher training. But what does “discriminatory equity ideology” actually mean? The order defines it as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” In context, this seems to be Trump’s new phrase for what conservative activists used to call “critical race theory”—a term that itself mischaracterizes academic concepts around systemic and institutional racism as being anti-white. The order is a transparent attempt to inject schools with whitewashed American history. It directs federal agencies to promote “patriotic education,” which it defines as teaching an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding.” To achieve that goal, it reestablishes the 1776 Commission, which Trump created during his first term to cultivate “patriotic citizens ready for the workforce, not political activists.” The original 1776 Commission’s report on US history identifies progressivism as one of the foremost threats to American principles and derides social justice policies as antithetical to the “color-blind civil rights” movement. Wednesday’s order is the latest in a string of executive actions targeting diversity initiatives and trans rights that Trump has signed since taking office just over a week ago. These orders include redefining sex, banning trans people from the military, curtailing access to gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, and ending DEI initiatives in the federal workforce. Trump provided the blueprint in his first term to target antiracism and LGBTQ inclusion. His 2020 executive order to abolish DEI initiatives from the federal government armed conservative organizations and politicians with the language to target government entities, particularly schools, at the local and state levels. While former President Joe Biden quickly undid that order, it became the catalyst for the introduction of nearly 900 similar anti-DEI policies across the United States.