From financial scandals to transgender rights, DEI, and Bad Bunny performing in this weekend’s Super Bowl, there’s no shortage of sports stories to tell. However, investigative sports journalism is a shell of its former self. That’s where Pablo Torre comes in. A longtime sports journalist and now host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Torre prides himself on digging into the important stories that affect not only sports, but American culture and politics. And that often means investigating the intersection of money and sports. “In sports, unlike in business, you can even argue, there is something resembling a meritocracy that is enforced and cared about by fans, let alone the officials that are meant to tend the store of what it is to have integrity in professional sports,” he says. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Torre’s reporting has shined a light on many stories that have gone unnoticed or  underreported, like his investigation into LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer potentially violating the NBA salary cap. He also recently collaborated with Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly on a story about former college swimmer Riley Gaines’ rise to MAGA prominence through anti-trans activism. Gaines, Torre says, turned her grievance against one trans athlete into a career and political platform, “such that she is in real intimate connection with not just the White House, but the superstructure of political organizations that crop up to turn her cause as this supposed victim into a way to truly victimize trans people in America.”  On this week’s More To The Story, Torre sits down with host Al Letson to discuss what it’s like investigating the complicated world of sports. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Donica Brady lost her job after the Trump administration cut grant funding to bring solar power across the country, including to tribal nations. She picked up multiple jobs to make ends meet. That, in addition to caring for children, whittled down Brady’s free time. So she invited reporter Ilana Newman over when she found a quiet moment—while skinning a deer—to talk about what the loss of solar funding meant to her and her community.  “When the opportunity came up to work and help us get something established…it was huge,” she said. Brady was one of many Indigenous people working to build energy sovereignty for tribal nations—work that continues despite the administration clawing back federal funds.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week on Reveal, we’re diving into how small communities across the country are navigating the current administration’s policies and how they show up in everyone’s lives, no matter where you are in this country. We’ve partnered with The Daily Yonder to share a story about the solar energy hopes of tribal nations; The Tributary in Jacksonville, Florida, to learn how local and state DOGE are complicating efforts to run the city; and Idaho-based reporter Heath Druzin to hear how the Trump administration’s immigration policy is rupturing the state’s Republican Party.

On January 24, a US Border Patrol agent shot and killed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis after he was held down by multiple federal agents. The Trump administration alleged that Pretti threatened agents with a gun. But videos appear to show Pretti, who was carrying a licensed handgun, holding only his phone in his hand when he was tackled and agents disarming Pretti before he was shot and killed. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. The Trump administration has since signaled that it’s scaling back the federal immigration operation in the city. Multiple news outlets are reporting that Gregory Bovino, the top US Border Patrol official, has been demoted and will leave. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, is now expected to manage immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, according to multiple reports. Following Pretti’s death, thousands of protesters once again flooded the streets of Minneapolis. One of them was Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who once routinely lobbied legislators to adopt a Christian conservative agenda and worked to persuade Supreme Court justices to rule in favor of the religious right. But Schenck began doubting the movement and his own role in it—especially once President Donald Trump came to power. Since then, he’s made a moral and political 180 and is now working to undo his decades of activism that he believes helped lead to this moment.  On this week’s More To The Story, Schenck sits down with host Al Letson to talk about what led him to the streets of Minneapolis, his emotional visit to Renée Good’s memorial, and why he’s become “guardedly optimistic” about the ultimate direction of this current political moment in America. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

During an NCAA women’s swimming championship in March 2022, two seniors tied for fifth place. The race was unremarkable except for one fact: One of the swimmers, Lia Thomas, was a transgender woman. The swimmer she tied with, Riley Gaines, believed the NCAA never should have allowed her to participate. The matchup, and Gaines’ subsequent transformation into a leading anti-trans activist, has fueled a growing movement to “save women’s sports” from trans women—and a conservative crusade against trans rights more broadly.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week on Reveal, we examine Gaines’ rise and radicalization, as her rhetoric shifts from calling out NCAA policy to calling trans women sexual predators. Over the last year, the anti-trans movement has reached a tipping point. Trans girls are banned from girls’ school sports in the majority of states. The NCAA and US Olympic and Paralympic committees have banned trans women from women’s competitions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the issue, too. Then we dive into the science to understand how gender-affirming hormone therapy affects trans women’s performance—and what questions science still has not answered around fairness in women’s sports. Finally, we return to the swimming pool, as reporter Imogen Sayers speaks with Meghan Cortez-Fields, one of the last transgender swimmers to compete as a woman in the NCAA.

Over the last few weeks, Minneapolis has looked like a city under siege. The Trump administration has sent roughly 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota in what Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has called the “largest immigration operation ever.” This comes as protests have spread around Minneapolis and across the country demanding that ICE leave Minnesota and other states following the death of Renée Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and US citizen who was killed by an ICE officer as she observed federal agents. While the Trump administration has labeled her a “domestic terrorist” who tried to run over the agent with her car, multiple videos show Good appearing to drive away. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. As protests continue, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has mobilized the state National Guard, while President Donald Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act to send in the military. The Pentagon has since readied 1,500 soldiers for deployment. ICE and other immigration agents are operating in ways we’ve never seen before in this country. But their tactics and weapons are not entirely new. Investigative journalist Radley Balko is the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop and host of Collateral Damage, a podcast about America’s war on drugs. He’s been tracking police militarization for decades and how it’s tied to America’s long-running drug war. On this week’s More To The Story, Balko describes what he’s seeing today from law enforcement as one of his “worst fever dreams.” “Law enforcement leaders around the country are horrified by what they’re seeing,” Balko says. “Nobody thinks that how Trump is using law enforcement right now is appropriate or consistent with the principles of a free society.” Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Journalist Mariana Zúñiga woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of explosions and military planes in Caracas, Venezuela. Her WhatsApp chats flashed the news: The ruling dictator, Nicholás Maduro, had just been captured by the US military. She was surprised and felt uneasy about what was to come. In the days that followed, Zúñiga would go into the field, despite the dangers journalists face, to report on what the country feels like at this tumultuous moment.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week on Reveal, we speak with Venezuelans about witnessing this moment of history from up close and afar. For Freddy Guevara, an exiled Venezuelan opposition leader living in the US, there is little confidence in the country’s new leadership.  “They are not moderate at all,” Guevara says. “They are super radical, and they believe they are smarter than everyone.”  And historian Alejandro Velasco explains the role Venezuela’s most valuable resource—oil—has played in the country’s history and relations with the US.

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.

Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.  “At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen.  This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.

In 2023, Marlena Arjo adopted a one-eyed kitten with a penchant for destruction. She named him Otto, and over the next eight months, Otto grew into his own little chaotic personality. “ He’s laying on houseplants, he’s tearing books out of the bookshelves, ripping the calendar off the wall…I wasn’t prepared for having a criminal in my home,” Arjo joked. Within months, Otto got sick and stopped eating. Arjo rushed him to a vet and learned he had feline infectious peritonitis, better known as FIP, a disease that kills nearly all cats that contract it.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. The vet said there was nothing the clinic could do. But there was something Arjo could do. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” Arjo recalled the vet telling her. “But by the way, you can get drugs for this if you go to this Facebook group.” This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Hyperfixed podcast, we tell the story of the cat drug black market, why it was even necessary, and how cat lovers fought for big changes to make the black market obsolete.

Bill McKibben isn’t known for his rosy outlook on climate change. Back in 1989, he wrote The End of Nature, which is considered the first mainstream book warning of global warming’s potential effects on the planet. Since then, he’s been an ever-present voice on environmental issues, routinely sounding the alarm about how human activity is changing the planet while also organizing protests against the fossil fuel industries that are contributing to climate change. McKibben’s stark and straightforward foreboding about the future of the planet was once described as “dark realism.” But he has recently let a little light shine through thanks to the dramatic growth of renewable energy, particularly solar power. In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, McKibben argues that the planet is experiencing the fastest energy transition in history from fossil fuels to solar and wind—and that transition could be the start of something big. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “We’re not talking salvation here,” McKibben says. “We’re not talking stopping global warming. But we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in.” On this week’s More To The Story, McKibben sits down with host Al Letson to examine the rise of solar power, how China is leapfrogging the United States in renewable energy use, and the real reason the Trump administration is trying to kill solar and wind projects around the country. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025. 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: Bill, how are you this morning? Bill McKibben: I’m actually pretty darn good, which one feels bad about saying in the midst of planetary ecological trauma and the collapse of our democracy, but it’s a beautiful day in the mountains of Vermont and in the midst of all that bad stuff, I’ve got one piece of big good news, which it’s actually kind of fun to share. Yeah, I think in the midst of all the stress and pressure and sadness about the way the world is heading at this moment, I think having joy is a revolutionary act and it’s good. I think when you come outside and the sun is shining and it feels good outside, I don’t know. I don’t think we should be ashamed of it. I think we should bask it and hold onto it as long as possible because good Lord, who knows what’s next? Amen. One of the results of having spent my whole life working on climate change is I never take good weather for granted. If there’s a snowstorm, I make the most out of every flake. If there’s a beautiful cool fall-like morning like there was today, nobody’s out in it quicker than me. So I take your point 100%. How long have you been working in the field of environmental justice and thinking about the environment? Al, when I was 27, I wrote a book called The End of Nature, so this would’ve been 1989 because I’m an old person. So, wrote a book called The End of Nature that was the first book about what we now call the climate crisis, what we then call the greenhouse effect. And that book, well, that book did well, it came out in 24 languages and things, but more to the point, it just made me realize that this was not only the most important question in the world, what was going to happen to the Earth’s climate, but the most interesting, that it required some understanding of science, but also more importantly of economics, of politics, of sociology, of psychology, of theology, of pretty much everything you could imagine. And so for 38 years now, I guess, it’s been my work and at some level, I wish I’d been able to spend my life on something not quite so bleak. On the other hand, I have to confess, I haven’t been bored in any point in there. Yeah. How would you describe the environmental causes in America since you’ve been watching it for so long? It seems to me that there’s a lot of one step forward, three steps back, one step forward, three steps back. I’d say it’s been more like one step forward, three quarters of a step back over and over again. And that’s a big problem because it’s not only that we have to move, it’s that we have to move fast. Climate change is really probably the first great question we’ve ever come up against that has time limit. As long as I’ve been alive and as long as you’ve been alive, our country’s been arguing over should we have national healthcare? I think we should. I think it’s a sin that we don’t, people are going to die and go bankrupt every year that we don’t join all the other countries of the world in offering it, but it’s not going to make it harder to do it when we eventually elect Bernie and set our minds to it than if we hadn’t delayed all this time. Climate change isn’t like that. Once you melt the Arctic, nobody has a plan for how you freeze it back up again. So we’re under some very serious time pressure, which is why it’s incredibly sad to watch our country pretty much alone among the world in reverse right now on the most important questions. Yeah. Is that forward movement and regression tied to our politics, i.e., is it tied to a specific party? If the Democrats are in office, we move forward, if Republicans come in office, we move backwards? Yeah, in the largest terms. The fossil fuel industry, more or less purchased the Republican Party 30, 35 years ago. Their biggest contributors have been the Koch brothers who are also the biggest oil and gas barons in America. And so it’s just been become party doctrine to pretend that physics and chemistry don’t really exist and we don’t have to worry about them. Democrats have been better, and in the case of Joe Biden actually, considerably better. His Inflation Reduction Act was the one serious attempt that America’s ever made to deal with the climate crisis, and it was far from perfect, and there were plenty of Democrats like Joe Manchin that got in the way and so on and so forth. But all in all, it was a good faith effort driven by extraordinary activism around the Green New Deal. And it’s a shame to see it now thrown into reverse in the Trump administration, especially because the rest of the world is at different paces, some of them very fast, starting to do the right thing here. So given all of that where we are and kind of stepping back away from the progress we had made forward, you just wrote a new book that is pretty optimistic, which is a little bit different for you because you’ve been described as dark realism. Tell me why are you feeling optimistic in this moment? About 36 months ago, the planet began an incredible surge of installation of renewable energy, solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops. That surge is not just the fastest energy transition play on the planet now. It’s the fastest energy transition in history and by a lot, and the numbers are frankly kind of astonishing. I mean, the last month we have good data for is May. In China, in May, they were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. Now, a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. So they were building the equivalent of one of those worth of solar panels every eight hours across China. Those kind of numbers are world-changing if we play it out for a few more years, and if everybody joins in. And you can see the same thing happening in parts of this country. California has not done everything right, but it’s done more right than most places, and California has hit some kind of tipping point in the last 11 or 12 months. Now, most days, California generates more than a hundred percent of the electricity it uses from clean energy, which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply on their grid is batteries that didn’t exist three years ago. And the bottom line is a 40% fall in fossil fuel use for electricity in the fourth-largest economy in the world is the kind of number that, adopted worldwide, begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And we know that every 10th of a degree Celsius, that the temperature rises, moves another a hundred million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one. We’re not talking salvation here, we’re not talking stopping global warming, but we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change, that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in. Yeah, so I own a home in Jacksonville, Florida. In the Sunshine State. In the Sunshine State. I was planning on getting solar panels for the house, but then I was told A, one, it would be really expensive, and then B, it wouldn’t save me that much on my bill because of the way some local ordinances are configured. And so for me, somebody who wants to have solar panels and wants to use solar power, it’s just not cost-effective. So how do we get past that? Well, there’s a lot of ways. One of the ways was what Biden was doing in the IRA, which was to offer serious tax credits. And those, despite the Republican defeat of them, remain in effect through the end of this year through New Year’s Eve. So if people move quickly, they can still get those. Probably more important in the long run, and this was the subject of a long piece I wrote for Mother Jones this summer, we need serious reform in the way that we permit and license these things. Putting solar panels on your roof in Florida is roughly three times more expensive than it is to put solar panels on your roof in say, Australia, to pick someplace with a similar climate, or Europe, someplace with a more difficult climate, costs three times as much here. A little bit of that’s because of tariffs on panels. Mostly it’s because every municipality in America, they send out their own team of inspectors, permits, on and on and on. It’s a bureaucratic mess, and that’s what drives the price up so dramatically. There’s actually an easy way to do it. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a piece of software called the Solar App Plus that allows contractors to just plug in the name of the type of equipment they’re going to put on the roof and the address that they’re doing it, and the computer quickly checks to see if it’s all compatible, and if it is, they get an instantaneous permit and get to work right away. And then, for apartment dwellers, because there’s almost as many apartment dwellers as homeowners in this country, who don’t have access to their own roof usually, we need another set of easy technology. We’re calling this balcony solar. And across Europe over the last three years, three and a half, 4 million apartment dwellers have gone to whatever you call Best Buy in Frankfurt or Brussels and come home for a few hundred euros with solar panel design just to be hung from the railing of a apartment balcony and then plugged directly into the wall. No electrician needed nothing. That’s illegal every place in this country except that progressive bastion in the state of Utah where the state legislature unanimously passed enabling legislation earlier this year because some Libertarian Republican state senator who I’ve talked to, an interesting guy, he said, “Well, if people in Stuttgart can have it, why not people in Provo?” And no one had a good reason, so now there’s on YouTube lots of videos of Happy Utahns putting up their balcony solar arrays. So let me just to clarify that because I never heard of this before. In overseas, in different countries, they can go to, I don’t know, an Ikea and grab a solar panel, come home and plug it in the wall to power their apartment? It often powers 25% of the power that they’re using in their apartment. It’s a real amazing thing and it’s for a few hundred euros. And among other things, it really introduces people to the joy of all this. There was a big story in The Guardian a few months ago following all sorts of people who’d done this and almost to a person, they’d all become fascinated by the app on their phone showing how much power they were generating at any given moment. Solar power is kind of a miracle. It exists in so many different sizes, from your balcony to big solar farms, all of which we need. But the thing that’s a miracle about it is precisely that it’s available to all of us. I mean, no one’s going to build a coal-fired power plant on their balcony. This is something that everybody can do, and it’s something that once you’ve got the panel, no one can control. We’re talking about energy that can’t be hoarded, that can’t be held in reserve, and that essentially the sun delivers for free every day when it rises above the horizon. So that is an extraordinary boon to especially poor people around the world and an extraordinary threat to the fossil fuel industry, which is why you’re seeing the crazy pushback that marks the Trump administration. So with the Trump administration and this bill that they passed, The Big Beautiful Bill, that impacts tax credits for renewable projects like solar, how is that going to affect the solar power industry in the United States? It’s going to decimate it. There are already companies laying people off and going out of business because that tax credit was important and it’s, since we can’t do anything in Washington at the moment, why we need state and local governments to step up big to change the rules here and try to keep this momentum going in the States. The United States accounts for about 11% of emissions in the world. The other 89%, things are going much better than they are here, not just in China, but in all the places that China touches. In some ways, the most powerful story for me in the book was what happened in Pakistan last year. Now, Pakistan’s been hit harder by climate change than any country on earth. Its cities now routinely report temperatures of 125, 126 degrees. The two worst floods that really we’ve ever recorded on the planet happened in Pakistan over the last 15 years. Right now there’s big major, not quite as bad, but really serious flood across the Punjab. Pakistan also has an expensive and unreliable electric system. So about 18 months ago, people began importing in very large numbers, cheap Chinese solar panels from across their shared border. And within six months, eight months, Pakistanis, without government help, just basically using directions you can get on TikTok, had installed enough solar panels to equal half of the existing national electric grid in Pakistan. It’s the most amazing sort of citizen engineering project in history and of incredible value to people. Farmers in Pakistan, I don’t know if you’ve traveled in rural Asia, but the soundtrack of at part of the world is the hum of diesel pumps, often the cough of diesel generators because you need to bring up this irrigation water from quite a great depth to wells that came with the green revolution. Often for farmers, that diesel is the biggest single input cost that they have. So farmers were very early adopters here. Many of them lacked the money to build the steel supports that we’re used to seeing to hold your solar panels up. They just laid them on the ground and pointed them at the sun. Pakistanis last year used 35% less diesel than they did the year before. Now the same thing is happening in the last six months across large parts of Africa. Pretty much any place where there’s really deep established trade relations with China, and it’s not just solar panels. What the Chinese are also doing is building out the suite of appliances that make use of all that clean, cheap electricity. The most obvious example being electric vehicles and electric bikes. More than half the cars sold in China last month came with a plug dangling out the back, and now those are the top-selling cars in one developing nation after another around the world because they’re cheap and they’re good cars and because if you’re in Ethiopia or Djibouti or wherever you are, you have way more access to sunshine than you do to the incredibly long supply chain that you need to support a gasoline station. But my understanding, and my understanding is definitely dated, which is why I’m glad I’m talking to you, but for a very long time, my understanding of solar power was that it wasn’t that efficient, that you wouldn’t be able to get enough power to really do much of anything versus fossil fuels. Is it true that the Chinese have really invested in the technology and really pushed it forward? Yeah, I mean Chinese are now, you’ve heard of petro states, the Chinese are the first electro state in the world. This stuff works great and it works great here. I mean, I was telling you about what’s going on in California. In some ways, an even more remarkable story, given the politics, is that Texas is now installing clean energy faster than California because it’s the cheapest and it’s the fastest thing to put up. If you’re having to build data centers, and God knows, I’m not convinced we have to build as many data centers as we’re building, but if you do, the only thing that builds fast enough to get them up is solar or wind. You can put up a big solar farm in a matter of a few months as fast as you can build the dumb data center. Your question’s really important because for a very long time, all my life, we’ve called this stuff alternative energy, and it’s sort of been there on the fringe like maybe it’s not real big boy energy the way that oil and gas is. I think we’ve tended to think of it as the Whole Foods of energy. It’s like nice, but it’s pricey. It’s the Costco of energy now. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf ready to go. 95% of new electric generation around the world and around the country last year came from clean energy, and that’s precisely why the fossil fuel industry freaked out. You remember a year ago, Donald Trump told oil executives, “If you give me a billion dollars, you can have anything you want.” They gave him about half a billion between donations and advertising and lobbying. That was enough because he’s doing things even they couldn’t have imagined. I mean, he’s shut down two almost complete big wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. I mean, it’s craziness. We’ve never really seen anything like it. Do you think we’ll be able to bounce back? As we’re watching all of these forward movements that have happened before Trump came back into office, it feels like he is burning it all down and not just burning it down, but salting the earth. Nothing’s going to grow there again. Yeah, I completely hear you. Yeah. This one possibility. Look, 10 years from now, if we stay on the course that Trump has us on, any tourist who can actually get a visa to come to America, it’ll be like a Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. People will come to gawk at how people used to live back in the olden days. I don’t think that that’s what’s going to happen. I think that at some point, reality is going to catch up with this, and everyone’s going to start figuring out we’re paying way more for energy than else in the world, and that means our economy is always on the back foot. That means that our consumers are always strapped. I mean, electricity prices are up 10% this year so far around this country because he keeps saying, “We’re not going to build the cheapest, fastest way to make more electricity.” I don’t see how that can last. But then I don’t see how any of this, none of it… I mean, I confess, I feel out of my depth now, the hatred of immigrants, the racial hatred, the insane economic policy around tariffs, none of it makes any real sense to me politically or morally. So I could be wrong, but I hope that America, which after all was where the solar cell was invented and where the first solar cell came out of Edison, New Jersey in 1954, the first commercial wind turbine in the world went up on a Vermont mountain about 30 miles south of where I’m talking from you speaking in the 1940s. That we’ve now gifted the future to China is just crazy no matter what your politics are. The idea that we are ceding ground to China is not just about solar energy, but in all sorts of ways. The move of the Trump administration to be sort of isolationists is actually hurting us way more than being open and growing and advancing. Yep, I couldn’t agree more. Look, I’ve been to China a bunch of times. I’m glad that I’m not a Chinese citizen because doing the work I do, I would’ve been in jail long ago, and I’m aware of that and understand the imperfections and deep flaws in that country. But I also understand that they have a deep connection to reason. They’ve elected engineers, or not elected, appointed engineers to run their country now for decades while we’ve been electing lawyers to run ours. And as a result, they’re not surprisingly better at building stuff. And so they have. And I think now, they’re using that to build a kind of moral legitimacy in the world. If the biggest problem the world faces turns out to be climate change, and I have no doubt that it is, then China’s going to be the global leader in this fight because we’ve just walked away from it. Yes. The question that comes to mind when you say that is, it’s clear to me that what some climate change skeptics and renewable energy skeptics have been able to do is to wrap things like solar power and wind energy into the culture war. So now that it’s a part of the culture war, people just stand against it because, well, they’re on the wrong team. Instead of looking at the economic reality that their bills could go down significantly if they dived in. It’s super true, but it’s also true that solar power is remarkably popular across partisan lines. The polling we have shows that yeah, the Republican voters are less enamored of it now because Trump’s been going so hard after it, but still like it by large margins and want more government support for it. I think the reason is that there are several ways to think about this. I’m concerned about climate change. I’m a progressive. I like the idea that we’re networking the groovy power of the sun to save our planet, but I’ve lived my whole life in rural America, much of it in red state, rural America. I have lots of neighbors who are very conservative. There’s lots of Trump flags on my road, and some of them fly in front of homes with solar panels on them because if you’re completely convinced that your home is your castle and that you’re going to defend with your AR-15, it’s a better castle if it has its own independent power supply up on the roof, and people have really figured that out. So this can cut both ways, and I hope that it will. That’s that story from Utah about the balcony solar. That’s the one place where people have said, “Well, there’s no reason not to do this. Let’s do it.” Yeah. So you’ve been doing this work for a really long time. I’m curious, when you started doing this work, could you have ever imagined the place that we are in right now as a country? No. Remember I was 27 when I wrote this first book, so my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. Turns out that that’s not exactly how it works. It took me a while to figure out. Really the story of my life is first 10 years after that, I just kept writing more books and giving talks and things because I thought being a journalist that we were having an argument and that if we won the argument, then our leaders would do the right thing because why wouldn’t they? Took me too long, at least a decade, to figure out that we had won the argument, but that we were losing the fight because the fight wasn’t about data and reason and evidence. The fight was about what fights are always about, money and power. And the fossil fuel industry had enough money and power to lose the argument, but keep their business model rolling merrily along. So that’s when I started just concluding that we needed to organize because if you don’t have billions of dollars, the only way to build power is to build movements. I started with seven college students, a thing called 350.org that became the first big global grassroots climate movement campaign. We’ve organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. And in recent years, I’ve organized for old people like me, what we call Third Act, which now has about 100,000 Americans that work on climate and democracy and racial justice. And so this is a big sprawling fight, we don’t know how it’s going to come out. The reason I wrote this book, Here Comes the Sun, was just to give people a sense that all is not lost, that we do have some tools now that we can put to use. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.