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JD Vance Proudly Confirms He Forced Usha to Have Another Kid
The vice president will take any opportunity to brag about having sex with his wife.
Risks of Nuclear Power Plant Disasters Overlooked Amid Fears of Nuclear Weapons
Fifteen years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, its long-term impacts are still being felt.
One Democrat Breaks Ranks to Approve Trump’s Extreme DHS Pick
Senator Markwayne Mullin has secured the votes he needed to advance to a final floor vote in the upper chamber, all thanks to Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.Fetterman differed from his colleagues in the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Thursday, voting alongside Republicans to advance Mullin’s nomination to the Senate floor.The final committee tally was 8–7. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Rand Paul joined Democrats in rejecting Mullin’s appointment.Fetterman has displayed a penchant for Trumpian politics since he moved to Washington, despite the fact that he ran on the progressive ticket. Since Fetterman entered office in 2023, he has sided with Republicans dozens of times, frequently leveraging his position to advance Donald Trump’s agenda. He also voted to confirm several of Trump’s Cabinet selections, including the last DHS chief, Kristi Noem, who was transferred to work in an unknown section of the government following a string of embarrassing scandals.“In January, I called on the president to fire Noem—and he did,” Fetterman wrote in an X post Thursday, addressing his vote. “I truly approached the confirmation of my colleague and friend, Senator Mullin, with an open-mind.“We need a leader at DHS. We must reopen DHS,” he continued. “My AYE is rooted in a strong committed, constructive working relationship with Senator Mullin for our nation’s security.”Mullin has had his own tumultuous history in the Senate. In 2023, the Oklahoma Republican tried to brawl with International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. The hostile exchange was halted by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but the fallout continued in the days after as Mullin refused to back down from the violence he started. Speaking with podcasters and broadcasters, Mullin invariably escalated the conflict, claiming he would “100 percent” bite and even duel the union boss.He’s also promoted violence against and attacked his colleagues, spurring accusations that Mullin suffers from severe anger issues.In a fiery exchange during his committee confirmation hearing Wednesday, Paul raked up Mullin’s reaction to a November 2017 incident in which the Kentucky lawmaker was attacked by his neighbor, leaving him with several broken ribs.Paul charged that Mullin “went on to brag” that he had “completely understood and approved of the assault,” prompting Mullin to “explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for ICE and border patrol agents.”Mullin’s response was that he was simply a blunt person and that he has had to “really pray about my attitude,” chalking his beef with Paul up to “political differences.”Mullin also stood by a previous comment that he “understood” where Paul’s neighbor was coming from.This story has been updated.
Trump Disrespects Troops’ Families to Hype Himself Up
Per the families’ requests, media access was reportedly restricted during a dignified transfer of six killed service members at Dover Air Force Base Wednesday. But that didn’t stop the White House from turning the ceremony into content for the internet. The White House shared several photographs across social media, touting Donald Trump’s attendance at the proceedings with all the esteem an American flag and prayer-hands emoji can provide. “Their courage will never be forgotten,” read another post, with a second American flag emoji. On TikTok, the White House posted a slideshow of photographs with a piano rendition of “Amazing Grace” playing over top. “The service and sacrifice of the six American heroes will never be forgotten,” the caption read, sounding copy-pasted from ChatGPT. The images included one of Trump saluting a travel case draped with an American flag. The White House also uploaded a batch of 12 photographs to its Flickr account that showed Trump standing beside House Speaker Mike Johnson and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.The ceremony was held to honor six service members who served aboard a KC-135 refueling aircraft that crashed last week in Iraq, while supporting operations in Iran. The U.S. death toll of Operation Epic Fury has risen to 13 service members.This was the second dignified transfer Trump has attended since launching his war in Iran. But this is the third transfer ceremony of the war so far: Trump skipped the second after he received immense backlash for wearing his own merchandise during the first proceeding. This time, he left his gaudy $55, gold-embroidered “USA” baseball cap at home. The White House also previously used a photograph from a dignified transfer earlier this month to illustrate a fundraising email that offered to sell “private national security briefings.”The White House’s flagrant flouting of the families’ plea for privacy demonstrates that it hasn’t learned anything. Trump is continuing to use dignified transfers for his own political purposes. If not for ads, then for propaganda.
Ex-Counterterrorism Head Tells Tucker Carlson Why He Quit Over Iran
Iran has not gotten anywhere close to developing nuclear weapons over the last year, according to ex-counterterrorism director Joe Kent.Kent blindsided the Trump administration earlier this week when he suddenly resigned from his post as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, citing the war with Iran—and his assessment that Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the U.S.—as the primary cause for his departure.In a sit-down interview Wednesday night with Tucker Carlson, Kent explained that Iran’s nuclear program was basically defunct. “Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon?” asked Carlson.“No, they weren’t three weeks ago when this started, and they weren’t in June, either,” Kent said. “I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling—a fatwa—against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That’s been in place since 2004. That’s available in the public sphere.“But then also, we had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted,” he noted.Kent’s resignation sparked a maelstrom across Washington, where top Republicans and Trump officials spent the better part of Tuesday disparaging Kent and his work, branding the Trump appointee as a “crazed egomaniac.” The size and scope of the MAGA reaction was a message to other Trump officials, warning them of the fallout if they publicly criticize the war.The repercussions continued into Thursday, when Representative Elise Stefanik referred to Kent’s letter as “inappropriate” and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that Kent’s decision to blame Israel for the ongoing war was concerning.In the same interview with Carlson, Kent claimed that U.S. officials had entered a “complacent mode” when dealing with Israel and its shared intelligence, warning that that intelligence could be shared to influence the U.S. administration just as much as it is shared to inform the administration.“We trust a lot of what they have to say, not keeping in the back of our mind that they have their own agenda and we have our own agenda at the end of the day,” Kent said, noting that the U.S. and Israel’s missions are frequently aligned, though he did not believe this was the case with regard to the Iran.“I don’t believe our objective has been clearly defined,” Kent said, citing America’s and Israel’s varied approaches to forced regime change in Iran.Kent also offered some conspiratorial views on Charlie Kirk’s assassination, suggesting that Israel could have been involved in the political operative’s death since Kirk was a vocal opponent of U.S. involvement in Iran.It’s worth noting that Kent is a known extremist with neo-Nazi ties. He has had to disavow a past interview with Nazi sympathizer Greyson Arnold and interactions with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Even his resignation letter included “ugly antisemitic tropes” and “really nasty rhetoric,” Emily Horne, a former National Security Council official under Joe Biden, told The New Republic earlier this week.So far, 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. More than 1,400 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south. Some 3.2 million people have been displaced, as the U.S.-Israeli strikes have damaged more than 42,000 civilian sites—such as homes, hospitals, and schools—across Iran, according to Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani.
ICE Is Deporting Parents Without Letting Them Bring or Find Care for Their Kids
Some parents report being forced to abruptly leave their children in precarious situations — or even entirely alone.
The Shame of Cesar Chavez
There are 27 elementary and high schools named after Cesar Chavez in California, nine in Texas, and three each in Arizona and New Mexico. The New York Times put them in a quandary March 18 by reporting that Chavez sexually molested two minors, from the ages of 12 and 13, and that he raped his longtime aide-de-camp, Dolores Huerta. Now America has to figure out what to do on Cesar Chavez Day this March 31 and, more broadly, how to think about his legacy. This task is complicated by the fact that Chavez’s legacy and his life’s achievement have been out of alignment for some time.The facts laid out in the Times piece are unchallengeable and grim. The 12-year-old, Debra Rojas, wrote Chavez: “I think of you all the time. Do you think of me?” Three years later, Rojas had sexual intercourse with Chavez in a motel, a clear violation of California’s statutory rape law. Had this been reported, Chavez might easily have spent several years in prison. The 13-year-old, Ana Murguia, continued to have sexual encounters with Chavez (never intercourse) until she turned 17, by which time she’d tried to kill herself “multiple times.” Huerta, now 95, confirmed to the Times that she had two traumatic sexual encounters with Chavez.* In one, she wrote Wednesday on Facebook, she felt “manipulated and pressured” because Chavez was “my boss.” The other encounter was an unambiguous rape (“forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped”). That too could have landed Chavez in prison. In both instances, Huerta became pregnant with children whose paternity remained a secret until now.The two organizations most associated with Chavez, the United Farm Workers, or UFW (which he created with Huerta) and the Cesar Chavez Foundation, do not dispute the allegations. The UFW Foundation called them “shocking” and “indefensible,” and canceled its annual Cesar Chavez Day celebrations. The Cesar Chavez Foundation said it was “deeply shocked and saddened.” But neither group seemed wildly surprised. That’s because Chavez was never the plaster saint America tried to make him. Chavez was a genius at labor organizing during the Delano grape strike and boycott of 1965–1970, and a skillful lobbyist in shaping, with California Governor Jerry Brown, the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act. The latter was the first state law to extend collective bargaining rights to farmworkers, who were not included in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA. The brilliance of Chavez’s grape strategy was to turn farm laborers’ exclusion from the NLRA to his advantage by using a tool—the secondary boycott—that Congress had outlawed in the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA enacted in 1947. Since farmworkers were excluded from the NLRA’s labor protections, they were also excluded from the Taft-Hartley prohibition.A secondary boycott is a boycott not against the offending business but against another business that does business with the offending business—in this instance, supermarkets that sold table grapes. Congress outlawed secondary boycotts because they’re a devilishly powerful tool. In the case of the grape boycott, supermarkets caved to UFW boycotts because they didn’t have much stake in whether they carried California grapes or not. Chavez’s decision to target table grapes, as opposed to any of the many other agricultural products produced in California’s Central Valley, was also ingenious, because grapes are not a staple and have little nutritional value. Nobody needs grapes.Another heroic accomplishment of Chavez’s was to get California to ban el cortito, a short-handled hoe that required farmworkers to bend over. Performing such stoop labor as a child bequeathed Chavez (and many others) a lifetime of back pain. But growers insisted the work couldn’t be done as well with a long-handled hoe. The real reason bosses preferred el cortito was that it made it easier to tell when a farmworker was taking a break. All a supervisor had to do was see who was standing upright. Thanks to Chavez and a young lawyer for California Rural Legal Assistance named Maurice Jourdaine, el cortito was banned by the California Supreme Court in 1975. Today it’s on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as “a symbol of … exploitative work conditions.” (Don’t tell President Donald Trump!)These are Chavez’s greatest achievements, and they are reasons to revere his prowess as a labor leader. Unfortunately, Chavez didn’t see himself as a mere labor leader; he sought a more intangible legacy, and, in a way, he got it. Today Chavez is remembered as an exemplary Chicano, but schoolchildren can be forgiven for not knowing exactly why. The Times story introduces Chavez as “one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement.” But although Chavez did some civil rights work, that wasn’t his principal task. Indeed, as time wore on, Chavez’s task got harder to identify as he worked to create a cult of personality.It’s widely known but seldom acknowledged that Chavez seriously botched the job of actually managing a labor union. Miriam Pawel documents this extensively in her books The Union of Their Dreams (2009) and The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (2014), both of which I reviewed, along with the biopic Cesar Chavez, for The New York Review of Books in October 2015. Chavez was uninterested in the day-to-day work entailed in running a union—negotiating contracts, managing hiring halls, creating a credit union, etc.—yet he wouldn’t delegate that work to anyone else. The result was administrative chaos. His grape strike brought growers to the table, but by September 1974, The New York Times was reporting that the UFW retained “only a few fragments of the collective bargaining power it won in 1970.”Instead of building on his organizing, legislative, and legal victories for farmworkers, Chavez got increasingly interested in being a sort of cult leader. He moved the UFW’s headquarters from Delano, near the farmworkers, to an abandoned tuberculosis sanitarium in the Tehachapi Mountains that UFW employees mockingly called “Magic Mountain.” He fell under the influence of Charles Dederich, founder of a creepy 1970s cult called Synanon, and likewise sought to make the UFW more like Hare Krishna and the Unification Church. He sent thugs (“cesarchavistas”) south of the border to beat up “wetbacks” (his term) who were trying to migrate to the United States and, he feared, take UFW members’ jobs. One by one, Chavez either expelled or bullied his closest advisers into leaving as, increasingly, he became obsessed with the idea that they were plotting against him.The evidence of sexual abuses is new, but Pawel’s Chavez biography is full of examples of other cruelties Chavez inflicted on UFW staff, including hosting sessions modeled on a Synanon ritual in which they were instructed to hurl insults at one another. In one session, a staffer was yelled at for being fat. Chavez’s own brother summoned the courage to tell Cesar he was afraid of him. “Everybody’s afraid,” Richard Chavez said. But rather than be chastened, Cesar said: “I have to fuck the organization to the extent that I become a real dictator.… I got to be the fucking king, or I leave.” (We know all this because Chavez had these sessions tape-recorded.)Given such Mister Hyde tendencies, it doesn’t come as a great surprise that the abuse extended into the sexual realm. The Times story suggests there were more victims. I believe it. It’s a sad revision to a biography that still possesses inspirational elements. Chavez was in many respects a good man, with large gifts that helped him create a better world. He was also a tyrant and a bully whose arrogance undid many of his good works, and also, we now learn, a sexual predator. If we can no longer honor the man, perhaps we can find a way still to honor his victories. Heroic deeds, it turns out, can be performed by villains, because life is complicated. That they’re still villains means we’ve likely seen the last of Cesar Chavez Day. But don’t let’s lose sight of the great things Chavez did to command reverence in the first place. We need to find ways to keep doing them.* This article originally mistated Huerta’s age.
Democrats Flat-Out Reject Trump Request for Billions More on Iran War
The Trump administration is requesting more than $200 billion to fund the war with Iran, and Democrats are outraged.The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that the Department of Defense had asked the White House for the hefty sum. Reactions were swift and negative. On X, Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego pointed out the Iraq War of the early 2000s was less expensive.“At the height of combat the Iraq War cost around $140 Billion per year,” Gallego posted. “If the Pentagon is asking for $200 billion they are asking for a long war. The answer is a simple no.”Senator Chris Van Hollen was more blunt.“This should be an absolute nonstarter,” Van Hollen wrote. “The best way to end this war, protect our troops, save civilian lives, and rein in a lawless administration is to cut off funding. I’m a hell no.”The request would come on top of President Trump’s request to Congress in January, before the war, to boost the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, a record high.* And the first six days of the Iran war cost taxpayers more than $11.3 billion. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth defended the additional $200 billion to reporters Thursday, saying that it “takes money to kill bad guys.”“So we’re going back to Congress and our folks there to ensure that we’re properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition—everything’s refilled, and not just refilled, but above and beyond,” Hegseth said. This budget request is not going to sail through Congress, especially if the administration deploys ground troops. Since most Democrats in the Senate oppose the additional funding, Republicans would have to use the budget reconciliation process to pass it. We’ll see if any vulnerable Republicans balk.* This story has been updated with the correct defense budget request.
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