As if Elon Musk didn’t already have enough advantages, between his billions and his leverage over President Donald Trump, he appears to have another ace up his sleeve: the US Marshals Service.

In February, members of Musk’s private security detail were deputized by the Marshals Service, the enforcement and security arm of the federal judiciary, giving them federal law enforcement powers. On top of that, Musk appears to have some of the agency’s career staffers looking out for him: After an official at his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) complained that too many January 6 defendants were still in jail, a marshal reportedly prodded judges to release them faster.

That’s not the only way Musk’s relationship to the marshals has raised eyebrows. In March, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that marshals helped DOGE barge into a small federal agency that Musk wanted to dismantle. “I will admit to being a little unnerved,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said in a segment afterward. The suggestion that federal law enforcement officers had turned against another federal agency seemed so strange that it caused Maddow to wonder whether the press had bad information: “We have reason to question whether the men reported as US marshals, now in multiple press accounts, are actually US marshals in the usual sense,” she said.

Maddow didn’t elaborate on who else the men might be—maybe Musk’s private security officers, the ones who’d been deputized. Could they and the regular marshals be wielding their law enforcement powers in ways that are less about public safety and more about furthering Musk’s personal agenda? And what kind of oversight exists to keep them in line?

Nailing down answers to these questions is a challenge. The Justice Department wouldn’t comment when Maddow’s team asked about the identity of the men. And at least one nonprofit watchdog is suing after its Freedom of Information Act requests about DOGE and the Marshals Service were ignored.

Some of the confusion may stem from the fact that the Marshals Service is not an especially well known agency, making it harder for the general public to gauge whether its officers are acting within the scope of their normal duties by helping Musk. Neither the Justice Department nor White House spokespeople responded to my questions for this story, so I turned to former deputy marshals and other experts to try to understand what’s going on. Here’s what you should know.

What is the US Marshals Service, and what does it normally do?  

For many people, the term “marshals” conjures Hollywood portrayals like Tommy Lee Jones chasing down a fugitive in the 1998 action flick US Marshals, or Wild West mythology about lawmen like Wyatt Earp trying to bring order to an unruly American frontier. But chasing escaped criminals is only a fraction of what the marshals do on a daily basis.

The Marshals Service, which was established in 1789 when President George Washington signed the Judiciary Act into law, is the country’s oldest federal law enforcement agency and has handled a wide array of responsibilities over the centuries, according to historian Michael Green at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the beginning there were 13 marshals, one for each federal district, and their main task was to enforce court orders, though they also took the census and collected taxes. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln hired marshal Ward Hill Lamon as his bodyguard. Decades later, marshals registered and arrested immigrant Germans during World War I, enforced Prohibition in the 1920s, and provided security to Black students desegregating schools in the 1960s. They oversaw the witness protection program in the ‘70s, established the 15 Most Wanted Fugitive Program in the ‘80s, and helped secure airports after September 11.

Today, there are 94 marshals around the country, all appointed by the US president. They manage thousands of deputy marshals, the boots-on-the-ground officers who still apprehend fugitives and run the witness protection program, and whose main job is still to enforce judicial orders and provide security for courts. As part of that, deputy marshals watch out for federal judges and magistrates, preserve order during hearings, and transport prisoners.

What does it mean that members of Musk’s security detail were deputized?

The Marshals Service regularly deputizes people outside the agency—often local or state cops—to help with specific tasks for a set period of time. These deputized officers are known as special deputy marshals, and they usually have the power to make federal arrests, execute search warrants, serve subpoenas, and carry firearms in federal buildings, just like regular deputy marshals do. In January, 11,000 special deputy marshals provided extra security for Trump’s inauguration in DC.

In February, CNN reported that members of Musk’s private security detail had been deputized, too. Details were scarce; it was unclear how many members of his team got the additional powers and what their credentials were. They “may have needed to be deputized because they are entering areas where Elon is going to be, such as the White House grounds,” says Robert Ledogar, who worked as a supervisory deputy marshal in New York until 2020.

According to Marshals Service policy, a person is eligible for deputation if they’re employed by a federal, state, local, or tribal law enforcement agency or another agency approved by the Justice Department; have at least one year of law enforcement experience; and undergo basic training. Private security officers may be deputized, too, though they generally do not have arrest authority.

Musk is not the only high-level official to be assisted by special deputy marshals. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advised the government during the coronavirus pandemic, had a security team that included deputy marshals from the Marshals Service and special deputy marshals from the Department of Health and Human Services. “They pulled marshals to stay on him 24/7, even when he was not working for the government anymore,” says Ledogar, noting that the HHS staffers needed to be deputized so they could investigate threats against Fauci. (Trump revoked Fauci’s security in January.)

The Marshals Service also provided security for Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former secretary of education, and deputy marshals regularly look out for Supreme Court justices. “There were times we’d have to take Justice Sotomayor to a Yankees game,” Ledogar says.

So, what’s strange about the situation with Musk?

Even though federal policy allows the Marshals Service to deputize private actors, it’s rare for the agency to do so. The former USMS officers I spoke with had never witnessed it happening. All the special deputy marshals that Ledogar interacted with were from law enforcement agencies like the NYPD. “It’d be unusual to deputize someone who wasn’t a law enforcement officer or didn’t have the law enforcement experience required,” says James Meissner, who became a special deputy marshal while working with the US Coast Guard after September 11.

Historians point out that the Marshals Service did deputize private actors during the Wild West era; deputy marshal Virgil Earp granted powers to his brother’s friend John Henry Holliday, or Doc Holliday, the dentist who shot up cowboys at the OK Corral in 1881. But “deputizing purely private actors” is “not really a thing that’s been done in the 21^st century or the 20^th century,” says David Noll, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies private enforcement of the law.

Ledogar, a self-proclaimed Musk fan, said he had confidence that Musk’s private security officers had enough prior law enforcement experience to work as special deputy marshals. Other experts I spoke with expressed concern. “If you have a private security force that is exercising the power of the marshals, you have to start worrying about whether they are acting in the public interest and whether they understand the rules that apply to marshals,” Noll says.

“The risk to people’s civil rights is enormous,” adds Jonathan Smith, who helped lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Obama administration, investigating law enforcement agencies. Generally when private actors gain policing power, “there are real questions about who they’re accountable to and what rules they’re going to play by.”

Last year, a federal audit showed that the Marshals Service had not consistently documented misconduct allegations against special deputy marshals. The audit, which covered fiscal years 2020 to 2023, also found that the agency lacked policies to ensure all special deputy marshals met program requirements. Biden officials said they were responding to the problems exposed by the audit, but it’s unclear whether those fixes remain in place under Trump. “Without adequate policies, controls, and oversight processes, there is an increased risk that the USMS will provide law enforcement authority to ineligible individuals for unauthorized purposes,” the auditors at the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General wrote.

Lauren Bonds, executive director of the nonprofit National Police Accountability Project, recalls instances of deputations gone wrong. In 2020 during Trump’s first term, the city of Portland, Oregon, filed a lawsuit alleging that the Marshals Service unlawfully deputized dozens of Portland police—despite objections by city officials—to respond to racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (The lawsuit was dismissed after Trump left office and the Biden administration agreed to resolve the case without litigation.) In another lawsuit, the ACLU accused agents from the Marshals Service and the Homeland Security Department of wrongdoing during those same protests, including indiscriminately using tear gas and rubber bullets against journalists and legal observers. (A judge declared the case moot against the federal government after Trump left office and protests died down, and the city of Portland recently paid the injured plaintiffs in a settlement.)

Under Trump, what have the marshals been up to?

In addition to deputizing Musk’s private security, the Marshals Service and its regular officers appear to be helping Musk, an unelected figure whose DOGE is arguably not an official government agency, downsize the federal government in other ways.

In early March, DOGE staffers and Pete Marocco, the State Department official in charge of foreign aid, threatened to call the Marshals Service when employees of the US African Development Foundation, a small agency they were hoping to dismantle, would not let them inside the agency’s headquarters in DC. A day later, they returned with five marshals in tow and successfully gained entry, changing the locks to keep the agency’s leaders out. USADF’s president then sued DOGE, Trump, and other administration officials in an attempt to keep the agency intact.

The incident set off alarm bells. “Usually you don’t see the marshals being used against different parts of the federal government,” says Noll, the Rutgers professor. “There’s some question of whether it falls under the marshals’ duties,” adds Green of the University of Nevada. “You have an extragovernmental agency assigning marshals to do something that’s questionable in the first place.”

Later that week, the marshals popped up in the news again. The Justice Department announced more firings of career officials in DC, and it put two federal prosecutors on leave who had worked on the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. Those prosecutors were walked out of the building by none other than US marshals. Once again, it seemed, Trump officials were turning to the law enforcement agency as the muscle to oust federal employees.

Other law enforcement appear to have been roped into Musk’s work, too. In late March, DC police escorted DOGE staffers into the US Institute of Peace, another agency they’re dismantling. (The Institute is suing DOGE, Trump, and other administration officials as well.) “For the first time in a very, very long time, street level police officers have to ask themselves whether they’re being told to do something that is itself lawful,” Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University, who was previously a DC reserve police officer, told NPR. “I don’t think they can fully trust the politically appointed people who are giving them direction, which places them in a really impossible position.”

On top of all that, Musk’s influence seems to be seeping into federal court proceedings. In January, DOGE reached out to the Marshals Service to “express concern” that judges weren’t acting quickly enough to release Jan. 6 defendants, according to the Washington Post; DOGE added that if the releases did not come faster, there could be protests at the federal courthouse in DC.

After that, the acting marshal in charge of security at the DC courthouse went to the chambers of at least four judges to check on the status of Jan. 6 cases and explain the possibility of protests. The incident “astonished and angered a number of judges,” the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus reported. One judge told Marcus that DOGE’s attempt to influence the judiciary via the marshals was “beyond the pale.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this before—pressuring the court to issue a decision by a certain time,” the judge added. Ledogar, the former supervisory deputy marshal in New York, told me that USMS personnel are supposed to communicate with judges about courthouse security, “but as far as speaking about working faster, that is totally out of the normal.” 

“It strikes me as a moblike tactic, to get to the people who are responsible for protecting judges and use them to ‘send a message’ to judges that the president would like them to rule in a certain way,” Noll says.

Why should judges—and the rest of us—care about marshals’ allegiances?

Judges aren’t just angry about DOGE trying to influence their decisions; they are also afraid for their safety right now.

“For judges to feel secure, they have to have confidence in the people protecting them,” Smith says. “To convert the Marshals Service away from that neutral function of protecting is very troubling; we’re breaking down the various functions that agencies have and turning them toward whatever the current will of the president and his minions are.”

The federal judiciary is facing an unusually high number of violent threats, according to a Reuters report, as Trump administration allies badmouth judges for legal decisions. In dozens of social media posts since January, Musk himself has referred to them as “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil.” Some judges have even been identified by name in viral posts calling for their impeachment, such as US District Judge Amir Ali, who ruled in February that the Trump administration must resume foreign aid payments. Someone on X, Musk’s social media site, suggested that Ali be beheaded, and another person asked “why so few judges are hanged.”

“The consequences are, quite starkly, that we’re going to get a judge killed if we’re not careful,” John Jones III, a former US district judge in Pennsylvania, told Reuters. (The Trump administration said it had no position on whether judges should be impeached and that Musk was posting in his personal capacity. “The White House condemns any threats to really any public officials, despite our feelings that a lot of these people are leftist, crazy judges that aren’t following the Constitution,” spokesperson Harrison Fields told the news agency.)

Some experts question whether the politicization of the marshals could have constitutional implications. That’s because the marshals have another important job: arresting defendants who are held in contempt of court for repeatedly refusing to follow judges’ orders.

What happens if that defendant is Trump himself, or Musk, or another administration official? The Marshals Service “plays a critical role in enforcing court orders, which couldn’t be more important as the courts continue to serve as a bulwark against the Trump administration’s abuses of power,” Skye Perryman, who leads the watchdog group Democracy Forward, said in a statement after suing for information about the marshals’ recent activity. “The American people deserve for the USMS to fulfill its role protecting their interests, not for it to act as the personal security force in DOGE and Elon Musk’s campaign of government overreach.”

President Trump’s absence at the dignified transfer of four US servicemen who died during a training exercise in Lithuania is being noticed. While thousands gathered in Lithuania—including the Lithuanian president—to send the soldiers off, our commander in chief was busy (as he has been for over a quarter of his second presidency) playing in his Saudi-backed golf tournament at Mar-a-Lago.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mother Jones (@motherjonesmag)

This is not the first time that Trump has missed a dignified transfer—he only attended four out of 96 during his first term, per an investigation by HuffPost. Presidents are not required to be at the transfers and generally only attend a handful each term. (These four were met on US soil by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and several Democratic senators.)

However, there is a particular ire since Trump is missing the transfer for such a trivial reason. Chris (who asked us not to use his last name) is an Air Force veteran who spoke to my colleague Peter Berger at a Hands Off rally in San Francisco on Saturday, calling Trump’s choice “the ultimate lack of respect to our military.” He held a sign that said “4 US Soldiers bodies returned home, where is their Commander in Chief? In Florida—Golfing.”

He also decried the administration’s cuts to the Veterans Affairs. “[Trump] really needs to look at what he is doing to the VA because after these military service members leave the military, it’s our duty as a nation to take care of them.”

The Trump Administration has announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the VA. It has already announced the end of a program that saved the homes of 17,000 military veterans facing foreclosures and ended specific healthcare for trans and intersex veterans.

I spoke to T Dianne Smith, a Navy vet, at a protest in Eugene, Oregon. As a retiree, Trump’s tariffs and proposed changes to Social Security and Medicaid threaten her entire income.

She felt most compelled to come not because of the effects on her, but because it was her duty. “When you enter the military, you take an oath to defend the Constitution and to obey the orders of the president, but the Constitution comes first,” she explained. “If someone gives you an unlawful order, you are required by law to not follow that order and to follow your conscience.”

A whistleblower who testified in Congress today is accusing the Trump administration of trying to “intimidate” her with help from the US Marshals Service, the law enforcement agency of the federal judiciary.

Liz Oyer, the former US pardon attorney who was fired last month, says Justice Department leaders dispatched two special deputy marshals to her house on Friday night—days before she was scheduled to speak with lawmakers about her concerns with the firing of career employees and what she describes as “corruption” at the department. “You appear to be using the Department’s security resources to intimidate a former employee who is engaged in statutorily protected whistleblower conduct,” Oyer’s attorney Michael Bromwich, a former Department of Justice inspector general, wrote in a letter to Justice Department leadership on Monday. He said dispatching special deputy marshals to Oyer’s home was “both unprecedented and completely inappropriate.”

As I reported earlier today, this is not the first time US marshals have acted in strange ways since President Donald Trump came to office. In a deep-dive, I looked at how the law enforcement agency has been recruited recently to help Elon Musk, Trump’s right-hand man. Since January, the US Marshals Service has deputized members of Musk’s private security detail, helped his Department of Government Efficiency get inside a federal agency it was trying to dismantle, and even prodded federal judges to move more quickly on Jan. 6 cases.

For more on Oyers’ testimony, check out some of today’s news coverage. And if you’re confused about the Marshals Service and its recent activity—or if you’re curious to hear experts explain why we should care about it—head to my explainer. As one former DOJ official told me, “the risk to people’s civil rights is enormous.”

Oyer: Perhaps the most personally upsetting part of the story is the lengths to which the leadership of the department has gone to prevent me from testifying here today. On Friday night, I learned that the Deputy Attorney General’s office had directed the department’s Security… pic.twitter.com/Ah3wx9HD37

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 7, 2025

On April 1, Republicans and Elon Musk decisively lost their bid to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. But three days later the GOP came closer than ever to overturning the election of a Democratic justice to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

On April 4, two Republican judges on the North Carolina state court of appeals issued an extraordinary ruling tossing out more than 60,000 votes challenged by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who trails Democratic justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes in the last uncalled race of the November 2024 elections. Two recounts affirmed Riggs’ victory, but instead of accepting that outcome, Griffin and his allies on the bench have followed Donald Trump’s 2020 Big Lie playbook to build support for invalidating the election. The key difference is, this time, Republicans could actually succeed in changing the rules for an election that has already occurred to flip the result. It’s January 6 without the insurrection, or if the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Trump’s bogus election challenge.

The decision to overturn the election, if upheld, will have ramifications far beyond North Carolina. It will give Republicans a playbook for how to overturn future ones, institutionalizing election denial within the party at a time when democracy is under threat in so many escalating ways.

“This does not just affect North Carolina,” Riggs told Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. “This is like dropping a match in a really dry forest. And if we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it. So this is a fight for the very soul of democracy.”

Like Trump, who sought to overturn the votes of large urban centers in key swing states in 2020, Griffin has cherrypicked the type of ballots he wants thrown out.

He’s specifically challenged the eligibility of 60,000 voters with incomplete voter registration records, such as a missing driver’s license or Social Security number. But those registrations were incomplete only because that information was not required at the time or did not appear in state databases because of clerical errors. All of those voters showed identification when voting in 2024. And all of them voted by mail or during early voting, a group that is disproportionately nonwhite, young, and less likely to be registered Republicans. His list of challenged ballots included example after example of lawful voters—including Riggs’ own parents.

“The scale of this should be deeply troubling to anyone who has any respect for the rule of law,” Riggs told me after the election. “With 60,000 people, it is everyone’s friend, it’s everyone’s family member, it’s everyone’s neighbor. There’s no one who doesn’t know someone on that list.”

The second group of ballots Griffin challenged—and the court ruled should be thrown out—came from voters who lived overseas, including members of the military. Even though Griffin voted that way twice as a member of the Army National Guard, he said those ballots should not count because they did not show strict forms of photo ID when submitting their votes, even though the State Board of Elections specifically exempted overseas voters from the state’s new voter ID law, which went into effect for the 2024 cycle. The election board unanimously rejected Griffin’s effort to invalidate those ballots during a hearing in December.

Griffin contested the votes of overseas voters only in four heavily Democratic counties where Riggs won an average of 65.5 percent of votes. It was akin to Trump asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2020 to throw out 221,000 ballots only in the counties encompassing Milwaukee and Madison, which the court rejected. “This calculated challenge to voters in just four Democratic-leaning counties would pose a clear equal protection problem under the US Constitution,” Riggs wrote in a legal brief.

The last group of ballots Griffin challenged, and the court invalidated, came from 267 North Carolina residents who have never lived in the state but whose parents were eligible North Carolina voters, such as military members or religious missionaries, before leaving the United States.

The Republican judges on the court of appeals voted to reject these 60,000-plus votes because “the inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively ‘disenfranchises’ lawful voters,” they wrote.

But perhaps the most galling part of Griffin’s challenge is that he hasn’t uncovered a single instance of an ineligible voter casting a ballot. He just doesn’t like the voting methods they used, where they voted from, or who they may have voted for.  

“Every single voter challenged by Petitioner in this appeal, both here and abroad, cast their absentee, early, or overseas ballot by following every instruction they were given to do so,” Democratic Judge Toby Hampson wrote in a fiery dissent. “Their ballots were accepted. Their ballots were counted. The results were canvassed. None of these challenged voters was given any reason to believe their vote would not be counted on election day or included in the final tallies.”

He said the court’s ruling would set a dangerous precedent. “Changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes in an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution,” Hampson added.

Riggs appealed the decision to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has a 5–1 Republican majority with her recusal. It issued a temporary stay on Monday, but is likely to ultimately affirm the court of appeals given its hard-right leanings.

Election law experts believe the federal courts could step in, given how Griffin is seeking to change the rules of the election after the fact and challenge only certain types of ballots. “The court’s decision appears to violate the well-established federal due process principles that govern the resolution of state (and federal) election disputes,” wrote Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University Law School. Ben Ginsberg, who represented the Bush-Cheney campaign during the 2000 Florida recount, said that the state appellate court “has gone where no court has gone before.” Riggs, herself a longtime voting rights lawyer, said on Friday that she believed “this fight ends in federal court.”

The appellate court gave voters with incomplete registrations or those who did not submit photo ID from overseas 15 days to affirm their eligibility before instructing the state election board to toss their votes and readjust the count, which Griffin believes will result in his victory. Hampson called that step “a fiction that does not disguise the act of mass disenfranchisement the majority’s decision represents.”

Confirming the eligibility of 60,000 otherwise lawful voters in a two-week period five months after the election will be a massive hurdle for Democrats and pro-democracy groups. “There can be no doubt that tens of thousands of voters—through no fault of their own—will be unable to cure their registrations or ballots in time,” Riggs’ campaign said in a legal filing.

“The judges went rogue and just created this cure process,” added Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina For The People Action. “It’s a logistical nightmare to track down 60,000 people to get them to correct something they shouldn’t have to correct. Their votes count for all the other races but not for this race. It’s an incredibly desperate attempt to rewrite the rules for just this race.”

Unlike the courts that rejected Trump’s effort to overturn the election on more than 60 occasions in 2020, Republican judges in North Carolina have bent over backward to help Griffin.

The chief judge of the appeals court, Chris Dillon, chose the panel of judges that heard Griffin’s appeal. Chief Justice Brian Newby, who Griffin has called a “good friend and mentor,” appointed Dillon as the top judge last year, breaking with precedent to oust sitting Republican judge Donna Stroud, who was deemed too liberal by hard-right Republicans. Fellow Republican judges, including Griffin and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr., donated to a primary campaign against Stroud. One judge who ruled in favor of Griffin, Fred Gore, ran a “joint campaign” with him in 2020 where they shared the same platform. (The other Republican judge who sided with Griffin, John Tyson, was charged with misdemeanor assault in 2021 for reportedly almost striking Black Lives Matter protesters with his car.)

As the case winds its way through the courts, the effort to overturn the election has been gathering momentum, like a slow-moving train crash that no one is willing to stop.

“The North Carolina Republican Party is one step closer to stealing an election in broad daylight,” said state House Minority Leader Robert Reives said on Friday.

Democracy isn’t dying in darkness this time. Republicans are nullifying it in plain sight—and using this as a road map for 2026 and beyond.

“I absolutely believe it’s a test case,” said Price Kromm. “It’s a test case for whether an election can be overturned after the election with different rules. If this is allowed to go through, it creates a blueprint for how future losing candidates can subvert the will of the voters by litigating through partisan courts.”

This story was originally published by Public Domain, a Substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

When rancher Ammon Bundy and his armed posse stormed into Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 in a failed attempt to seize public land for themselves, Kathleen Sgamma, then the vice president of the Western Energy Alliance, issued a brief condemnation. She described the militants as “serious lawbreakers.” Sgamma reserved the bulk of her ire, though, not for the armed men in Oregon, many of whom were inspired in part by a fringe Mormon theology, but for the US government itself.

In a 2016 blog post that appears to have been deleted, she went on a lengthy diatribe against the land management policies of the United States that, in her view, led to the Bundy takeover. Among her chief complaints: “The situation arises from too much federal ownership of land in the West,” she wrote. “Whereas in the East and Mid-West lands were transferred as private property to individuals for farms, by the time the West was settled the government retained a vast amount of land.”

Sgamma, who thinks there is too much federal public land, is now President Trump’s choice to lead the federal government’s largest land management agency. Trump nominated her in mid-February to be the next director of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that oversees more than 246 million acres on behalf of all Americans. In addition to enforcing bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the BLM director oversees oil and gas drilling on federal land. The agency is also responsible for the conservation of iconic western species, including the greater sage grouse. In all of these realms, and others too, Sgamma will have to contend with a thicket of conflicts of interest.

Sgamma is best known as a passionate activist on behalf of oil and gas corporations. She is a long-time leader and current president of the Western Energy Alliance (WEA), a litigious trade group that represents drillers and other fossil fuel companies that operate on federal land. In that role, she has served as industry muscle, so to speak, attacking in court, in the media, and in the halls of power any policy, rule or regulation that hinders the oil industry’s ability to profit on public lands. Her organization’s methods have sometimes sparked controversy.

In 2014, for instance, a secret recording of the WEA’s annual meeting revealed that the trade group had invited the Washington, DC, public relations operative Richard Berman to speak to its members. Berman was there to solicit money to fund a PR campaign called Big Green Radicals that would target environmentalists opposed to the oil industry.

During his speech, Berman told the audience they should think of their fight against environmental organizations as “an endless war.” He told them that they could either “win ugly or lose pretty.” He assured the assembled oil industry operatives that if they funded his campaign he could protect their anonymity while going on the offensive against environmentalists, using emotions like “fear” and “anger” to try to turn public opinion against green groups.

In the end, Berman’s Big Green Radicals campaign did just that. Among other things, it put out a report titled “From Russia with Love” that portrayed American environmental groups as the puppets of shadowy Russian interests. Republicans in Congress quickly latched onto the report despite its thin sourcing, recycling many of its claims to argue that groups like the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club are the “useful idiots” of Russia.

The Western Energy Alliance used similar tactics to undermine greater sage grouse conservation in the American West. When the Obama administration was considering listing the greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act due to the species’s precipitous population decline, WEA launched a PR campaign, running ads that disparaged grouse advocates and scientists. The Obama administration ultimately declined to list the species under the ESA, instead opting to have the BLM and Forest Service issue land-use regulations that could help prop up the species. Though those regulations have not stopped the continued loss of grouse habitat across the West, they are likely to be further weakened under the new Trump administration.

WEA frequently turns to the courts to prevent new rules, regulations or fees that could inconvenience public land oil drillers. In May of last year, for instance, the group and its industry allies sued the Bureau of Land Management after the Biden administration raised royalty rates on public land drillers, from 12.5 percent to 16.7 percent.

If she is confirmed, Sgamma’s appointment will likely raise thorny questions about conflicts of interest. She will have substantial influence over sage grouse policy, royalty rate policy, public lands oil leasing, and many other issues that have been at the center of her work for the fossil fuel industry. Will she sign an ethics pledge that recuses her from these and similar policy matters? Will she be too conflicted to function?

Sgamma’s appointment to the helm of BLM also complicates Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, the sweeping policy blueprint that MAGA operatives compiled to guide Trump in a second term. Sgamma co-authored a section of the manifesto’s chapter on the Interior Department, in which she and others accuse Biden of waging a “war on fossil fuels” and bemoan the amount of land and minerals under federal ownership.

The Project 2025 chapter that Sgamma contributed to was authored by William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of BLM during Trump’s first term and has a long record of advocating for federal lands to be transferred to states or sold to private interests. It stops short of calling for the outright pawning off of federal lands. Instead, Pendley casts the federal government as a bad landlord and argues that a Republican president should “draw on the enormous expertise of state agency personnel” and “look for opportunities to broaden state-federal and tribal-federal cooperative agreements.”

When it comes to how federal lands are managed, Project 2025 contains a comprehensive fossil fuel industry wish list written by Sgamma and two other industry allies. The manifesto calls for opening vast swaths of the federal estate to increased drilling, rolling back already-protected landscapes, expediting permitting, slashing the royalties that oil and gas companies pay to drill on federal lands, and weakening regulations that might complicate increased development. If confirmed as BLM director, Sgamma would play a pivotal role in carrying out Trump’s pro-fossil fuel energy vision to the direct benefit of her trade group’s members.

As she prepares to lead the BLM, does Sgamma still believe there is too much federal land? Is she a partisan of the so-called land transfer movement, a movement led by Utah politicians who would like to divest the American public of their ownership stake in millions of acres of federal land? Will she seek to sell off BLM land? Given her record, how will she avoid conflicts of interest as she oversees the government’s vast onshore oil and gas leasing program? Will she manage public lands for multiple use, including conservation and recreation, or will extractive industries be her sole priority?

Sgamma did not respond to these and other questions, nor did the WEA make her available for an interview. Berman’s organization did not respond to a request for comment.

Sgamma’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday, April 10 before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

A couple of years ago, Andrew Isker, a pastor and father of six, made a big decision. He would move his family away from Minnesota, where six generations of his ancestors had lived before him, to a rural community in Tennessee. Leaving his home state wasn’t easy, he told Tucker Carlson on Carlson’s YouTube show in March. But he had no choice; the progressive excesses of Governor Tim Walz simply had become too much to bear. Isker was especially concerned about his autistic son, who had attended a program at a local public school. “They could be putting him in a dress and calling him a girl name, and I would have no idea,” said Isker, echoing an unfounded claim that President Trump made during a September debate with Kamala Harris. “And then when I find out and I oppose it, boom. [Child Protective Services] comes, takes him out of our custody, and he’s gone forever.”

So Isker decided to move to rural Appalachia—choosing that particular location to help launch a new community near the small town of Gainesboro, Tennessee, in the central northern part of the state. Isker’s new neighborhood sounds idyllic, with “bucolic pastures, waterways teeming with over 140 species of fish–including some of the country’s premier trout fishing, rolling hills, thick hardwood forests, and abundant wildlife,” according to the real estate website.

There were reasons other than just its natural beauty that this area was appealing. The community that Isker is helping to build in Tennessee is part of the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America: “Thick communities that are conducive to a natural, human and uniquely American way of life,” places where “your neighbors are people who seek a self-determinative lifestyle and a return to a more natural human way of living for themselves and their families.”

But the Highland Rim Project is not just another old-fashioned utopian fantasy. Rather, it is deliberately forward-looking, infused with Silicon Valley techno-libertarian values. The communities will be designed around “digital self-governance” including cryptocurrency and a culture “in which our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”

For Isker, a podcaster and prolific poster on X, the Highland Rim Project is an example of how Christian communities that have previously existed only online might soon coalesce in physical spaces. On Carlson’s show, he described the line of reasoning he has observed as something like, “‘I like this pastor. I like the sermons that he preaches, I agree with this theology, and I’m being formed and shaped.’ So you band into groups online where you sort of self-sort,” he said. “It’s like, what if we took this digital community that exists, and what if we made it in real life?”

There’s a name for the rough concept that Isker describes: the “Network State,” an ascendant and buzzy tech movement where internet groups are beginning to explore what it might be like to start their own new countries. At first, these new countries would appear online, and eventually in actual physical locations. Simply put, the Highland Rim Project is the Christian nationalist take on that idea. As New Founding CEO Nate Fischer put it last year on X, “Nation states are not the principal form of government today. I see no reason Christian nations or peoples couldn’t organize network states.”

As with many things tech, the Network State movement began in Silicon Valley. The concept is the brainchild of investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of PayPal titan Peter Thiel, and a former partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, the firm run by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In a 2021 article on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision of a plan for people seeking to build a new utopia, or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there were the old-fashioned conventional ways to do this—such as forming a new country through revolution or war. But these options are not only, well, really hard, but also unpredictable. A cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing possibilities for new countries, but both presented logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, and, of course, laws.

Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could move into the analog space and acquire actual physical property where people would come together and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders.  The community did not have to be on contiguous land, however, but instead a “reverse diaspora,” he said. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online, and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.”  

Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like a giant live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that this was a serious proposition. “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many individual influencers have more than 1M followers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world.” Imagine the network state as a kind of a Pac-Man gobbling up little pieces of land.

Consider the possibilities! Eventually, the new nation would be so big with so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it as legitimate. And once that happens, conventional laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant along with the nations themselves. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company choose to spend billions of dollars and decades of testing on a new drug when they could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time?

In 2022, Srinivasan turned his seminal article into a bestseller, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. Srinivasan’s book is still in the top 20 lists in both the political philosophy and general technology and reference sections on Amazon—and in the three years since its publication, the ideas in it have gained a robust following. My former colleague Ali Breland wrote a 2023 investigation about Praxis, a “cryptocity” concept that drew tens of millions of dollars in investment from Thiel and other Silicon Valley luminaries—though the physical city has yet to materialize. There is also Próspera, a deregulated economic zone in Roatán, Honduras, and a somewhat different model, California Forever, an ongoing effort by a group of tech billionaires to turn part of California wine country into a “tech colony.”

In an email to Mother Jones, New Founding cofounder Josh Abbotoy, a former fellow of the right-wing thinktank the Claremont Institute, said the network state concept doesn’t perfectly capture the Highland Rim Project; he prefers the term “charter communities,” which he describes as places “chartered around particularized lifestyles or affinities. In our case, we emphasize traditional American values like faith, family, and freedom, in a rural and vintage small-town American setting.” New Founding, he says, offers “a platform on which many localists can build their more particularized projects.”

Nevertheless, he says, Srinivasan is an influence. “I have definitely learned from his theories about how digital conditions encourage more tribal social organization across the board,” Abbotoy said. “Whether one is excited or horrified by Balaji’s predictions of the future, dismissing them out of hand isn’t good business.”

Back in Tennessee, the Highland Rim project is still in its infancy. According to New Founding’s Abbotoy, so far, it has sold about 40 parcels of land in both Tennessee and adjacent Kentucky. (Technically, the properties have been sold through Abbotoy’s other business, RidgeRunner, which he says has a “strategic partnership” with New Founding.) The lots range in acreage from less than one to hundreds and in price from about $30,000 to just shy of $300,000. In the Tennessee communities where Isker bought property, he has founded a church (invite-only, so far), and there are plans in the works for a country club and events venue.

While Abbotoy didn’t provide details on plans to incorporate cryptocurrency into the communities, the people who have bought property so far, “are high agency and prioritize sovereignty in their personal lives, including digital and financial sovereignty,” he said. “So naturally many of them love crypto. We encourage crypto adoption and use, and eagerly welcome entrepreneurs operating in this space.” He estimates that about 60 households “have bought or moved to our target regions as a result of our efforts,” and the website assures interested parties, “We see rising demand and capacity for new types of communities built around a shared vision for local life in America.”

But whose shared vision? The people who already live in the communities that New Founding is targeting already have their own vision for local life, and many of them are not thrilled about the idea of wealthy Christian nationalists moving in and taking over. Last year, Nashville’s Newschannel 5 aired an investigation about the movement. A few months later, Phil Williams, the investigative journalist who broke the story, talked with locals in Gainesboro, Tennessee. “Mainly people are scared,” said the chair of the county’s Republican party. “It scares me that they are very clear about taking over.” A local restaurant owner added, “I don’t want to lose what we already have.” In response to the segment, Isker’s podcast cohost C.J. Engel, who also moved to the area to help launch the community, posted on X, “Phil and the entire journalist class at large are terrified that conservative Christians are asserting themselves in the face of dwindling media power. This is why they double down on their strategies of provoking fear through distortion.” Abbotoy reiterated that rejection of Williams’ investigation in an email to Mother Jones.

Despite the damning interviews in Williams’ investigation, Isker, who didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment, insists that the locals love him. They’re conservative Christians, so they’ve told him, “‘Oh, it just seems like you really like Donald Trump and the United States and Americans and the Constitution and our freedoms,’” he told Carlson. “’And you seem like a just normal, conservative kind of guy.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I am. I’m an open, open book. What you see is what you get.’”

But elsewhere, Isker is less wholesome. To his 43,000 followers on X, he makes statements that sometimes cross the line into antisemitism. “I don’t hate Jews,” he posted in 2023. “Their religion is literally blasphemous and anti-Christian. You cannot be a Christian without recognizing this.” On that same platform, he has referred to Indian people as “cow worshippers,” called the United States a “gynocracy” where “the only way out is men telling women ‘no,’ and thundered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying it biases “our laws against Christians, men, and white people.” In July 2023, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer.

And yet for all his extremist views, Isker, whom Abbotoy described as “a part of the broader project” and “a friend,” is well connected in Washington and Silicon Valley. The New Founding staffers hobnob with Vice President JD Vance. Andreessen—the venture capitalist and Srinivasan’s friend—has invested in New Founding. New Founding’s Nate Fischer has invested in the startup societies venture firm Pronomos Capital, Pronomos head Patri Friedman recently told me. Through the online magazine American Reformer, which Abbotoy and Fischer cofounded, New Founding has robust connections to the world of the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists, believe women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and idolize authoritarian leaders like Francisco Franco.  

Because Isker is also Abbotoy’s customer—he bought his land from New Founding—New Founding could not weigh in on Isker’s statements on social media, Abbotoy said.

As the network state concept gains traction, Srinivasan has offered still more details about exactly what he has in mind. Last year, writing for the New Republic, journalist Gil Duran chronicled a rambling, four-hour interview that Srinivasan gave on the podcast “Moment of Zen.” In it, Srinivasan described his vision for a new San Francisco, one in which citizens would show their loyalty to tech companies by donning gray shirts. The ultimate goal is for the Grays to drive out the “Blues,” Srinivasan’s word for progressives:

So you put up some kind of, I don’t know, like a sign which says Y Combinator on it, or a Bitcoin sign, or something like that. It should look cool, but it’s also meant to lose because someone’s going to come, some crazy guy, addict will come and smash it, or a Blue will come and spray paint it, or they’ll try and the city official will come and tell you to take it down because it’s unlicensed, or something like that…Syringes on the street. Greta Thunberg on the wall. Those are blue symbols that signal that Blues control a territory. So it’s like a dog pissing and marking its territory. After you’ve got a building, you need to start figuring out how to control the streets.

The “Grays” would have access to exclusive zones of the city, and they would also enjoy protection through a special arrangement with the police, whom they would win over with lavish banquets.

Dystopian and preposterous though this may sound, fans of the Network State are trying to convince the Trump administration to scale up their vision—and there are signs that the president is listening. In 2023, during the leadup to his presidential campaign, Donald Trump proposed building “freedom cities,” which would convert federal land in rural areas into zones with laws specifically designed to attract industry and manufacturing in specific sectors. Earlier this year, a group called the Frontier Foundation—one of whose founding members is New Founding’s Josh Abbotoy—drafted an open letter to Trump urging him to act on that idea. The group’s policy memo explains that the new cities “should be exempt from certain federal regulation under special oversight by the executive branch.” Asked whether New Founding had plans to lease any of the Highland Rim Project land back to the US government, Abbotoy answered, “This is unlikely at this stage, but I won’t rule it out entirely.”

Meanwhile, Patri Friedman of Pronomos Capital, the startup societies venture firm, told me that both the Frontier Foundation and a separate group called the Freedom Cities Coalition, had met with the Trump administration, though he declined to provide details. Last month, Wired also reported that the Freedom Cities Coalition had been meeting with the Trump administration. “The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Honduras’ Próspera special economic zone told Wired. “You can tell in meetings with the people involved that they have the mandate to do some of the more hyperbolic, verbose things Trump has mentioned.”

But from the perspective of the Highland Rim guys, what’s more important than the Washington lobbying is the sense the cultural and political winds are at their backs. “Now that Trump has bought us four years,” Isker posted on X the morning after election day last November, “it is the perfect time for you to begin building the restored America in rural Tennessee.”

Correction, April 8, 2025: A previous version of this story misidentified the location of Gainesboro, Tennessee. The sentence has been updated.

On Friday, March 28, Alina Habba, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, was sworn into office as the interim US attorney for New Jersey. As the state’s top federal prosecutor, she will oversee the work of 170 lawyers responsible for everything from prosecuting terrorism, public corruption, and gang activities to defending federal agencies in court. The high-profile post was once held by such luminaries as US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

So it came as a bit of a surprise three days later when I received this text: “Join Eric Trump & Alina Habba Sept 25-26” for promoter Clay Clark’s “Make American Business Great Again” conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Clicking the accompanying link, I learned that, for $250, conference attendees will hear inspirational words from Habba and other minor MAGA celebs and learn how to grow their business through search engine optimization, branding, sales training, and more!

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

It’s an unusual event for a US attorney, even an interim one, to participate in. But then again, Habba isn’t your typical federal prosecutor. Indeed, she has no prosecutorial experience of any kind. One of her most famous cases led a federal judge in Florida to sanction her and Trump for nearly $1 million in 2023 for filing a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks wrote of the suit in his order for sanctions. “Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”

While she may not have a typical prosecutor’s résumé, Habba has loads of experience headlining Clark’s conferences.

This will be epic. Making your business great by getting tips from successful businesses people. Tickets are limited Get yours today.
With @TheClayClark @EricTrump @AlinaHabba @AmandaGrace_AOG pic.twitter.com/uGbsUFHN1v

— Dr. Stella Immanuel MD (@stella_immanuel) April 1, 2025

Clark is a former DJ and failed Tulsa mayoral candidate turned conspiracy theorist who rose to conservative prominence fighting mask mandates during the pandemic. “Make American Business Great Again” is a spin-off of the far-right Christian nationalist ReAwaken America tour that he created in 2021 with Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn. For three years, the pair barnstormed across the country doing events that featured a mash-up of MAGA luminaries, anti-vaxxers, election deniers, “prophets,” and QAnon devotees.

The last ReAwaken America event took place in North Carolina in October shortly before the election. Habba was there along with a rogue’s gallery of MAGA stars who’d once been prosecuted by the very Justice Department she is now part of. There was Simone Gold, the anti-vax doctor who served nearly 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge related to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. International underwear model John Strand, who’d joined the mob inside the Capitol alongside Gold, took the stage only a few months after serving a year in prison on a felony conviction related to the riot. (Strand and Gold were among the 1,500 or so January 6 rioters Trump pardoned after taking office.)

Former (and current) Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro appeared, fresh off a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a January 6 committee subpoena. And let’s not forget Trump confidant Roger Stone. Just before Stone headed to prison on a 40-month sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction charges related to the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump commuted his sentence and later granted him a full pardon.

Trump’s election seemed to have dampened the demand for more ReAwaken events, especially now that regulars like Habba are in the administration. (FBI Director Kash Patel used to peddle his children’s books about Donald the King in the tour’s exhibit halls.) But Clark has continued to host periodic conferences focused on business development.

The September event will include some veterans of the ReAwaken tour. Not only will it feature Habba and the president’s son Eric, but attendees will be treated to talks from Stella Immanuel, a Texas doctor and pastor who rocketed to fame during the pandemic and became one of the nation’s leading prescribers of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which she promoted as cures for Covid despite evidence that the drugs don’t work for it. Immanuel also believes that sex with “tormenting spirits” is responsible for gynecological problems. Rounding out the lineup will be Amanda Grace, a self-proclaimed prophet who warned attendees at a 2023 ReAwaken conference about the proliferation of technologically advanced “mermaids and water people” spreading perversion across the United States.

A Federalist Society meeting this is not.

Generally, Justice Department officials shy away from political appearances. “It harms public confidence in the rule of law for a United States attorney to be a prominent speaker at a conference with a partisan political or ideological focus,” says New York University law school ethics professor Stephen Gillers. “To avoid that, we have traditionally relied on good judgment and self-restraint.”

Good judgment and self-restraint, though, seem to be in short supply in the Trump administration thus far. Habba isn’t the only interim US attorney who seems to be blurring the boundaries between political activity and government service. Last month, acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin headlined a Florida fundraiser for Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, a conservative group he ran before joining the administration. The event was attended by January 6 defendants, including former members of the Oath Keepers militia who are still appealing their seditious conspiracy convictions in cases overseen by his office.

Over the weekend, the Nevada Independent reported that interim US Attorney for Nevada Sigal Chattah had called in to a state Republican Party meeting, potentially in violation of Justice Department rules that prohibit political appointees from participating in political activities or holding party positions. Chattah has been a national committeewoman for the Republican National Committee, and the meeting agenda indicated that she was scheduled to give a report. As of Monday, she was still listed on the RNC website as holding the party post.

Habba was tapped for the US attorney post in spite of her regular appearances at Clark’s events, or her fondness for Flynn, the ReAwaken tour’s animating force. Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the US during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump pardoned him in November 2020. Last year, he premiered an eponymous documentary about his legal ordeal. When it was released, Habba tweeted: “Thrilled to congratulate my friend and one of the all-time greatest patriots General Michael Flynn on his new movie sharing his incredibly important story.” 

Like the conferences he emceed, Flynn has been a prominent promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that Democrats and Satan-worshipping elites are running a secret global child sex ring, one they believe Trump will vanquish. The ReAwaken America tour frequently featured Q-related figures, such as the editor of George magazine. Originally created by the late John F. Kennedy Jr., George has been revived by QAnon believers who think Kennedy is still alive and is going to help Trump fight the pedophile cabal. (The magazine recently featured Habba’s fellow conference headliner Amanda Grace in a long Q&A.)

Habba, too, has appeared on QAnon-adjacent podcasts and suggested that many of the court cases brought against President Trump were the work of Satan. “There’s God’s plan and then there’s the demonic plan,” Habba explained to Grace in January 2024 when she appeared on the online prophet’s YouTube show. “We need to fight these people that are obviously coordinated and are trying to have a crusade of election interference.”

Obsessed with pedophile rings, QAnon adherents have turned human trafficking into their cause célèbre. Flynn himself now heads a nonprofit group that purports to fight child trafficking. Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that one of Habba’s first acts as New Jersey’s interim US attorney was to create a task force to combat human trafficking. “There will be zero tolerance for human trafficking in New Jersey,” she tweeted on April 1. “One of my first orders of buisiness [sic] was creating a Human Trafficking Task Force and appointing an incredibly talented and passionate Assistant US Attorney to lead it.”

The New Jersey US attorney’s office did not respond to questions about whether Habba still intends to attend the conference in September, nor did Clay Clark. As interim US attorney, she is allowed to stay in her post for only 120 days unless Trump formally nominates her for the job and the Senate confirms her. Should that not work out, her tenure could end just in time for her to hit the circuit in September.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Authoritarianism cannot exist with free thought. It must dominate the societal discourse and prevent debate. That means it must also dictate history. The Nazis knew this. In April 1933, two months after Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda chief, proclaimed that “the year 1789” would be “expunged from history”—meaning that the animating ideas of the French Revolution, such as liberty, civic equality, and human rights, were to be crushed. Germany, under Hitler’s rule, was to be tied in narrative to a millennium that skipped recent European history and stretched back to the Viking era and the earlier Greek and Roman empires. The Soviets routinely photoshopped out-of-favor officials from official accounts, literally erasing inconvenient history. George Orwell, naturally, put it well in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

There’s much spewing out of Donald Trump’s firehose of chaos and destruction these days: his war on government, the rule of law, and decency; his reckless tariffs that threaten the economy here and abroad; his revenge-a-thon attacks on universities and law firms; his annihilation of the public health and biomedical research communities; his assault on American allies; and his effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war in Vladimir Putin’s favor. These all have dire and concrete consequences. Trump’s demolition of USAID certainly led to more deaths in Myanmar following the tragic earthquake, given that in previous years this agency would have been on the ground offering assistance within days of the disaster. Yet we also need to pay heed to Trump’s more abstract efforts, such as his war on culture and history.

Late last month, Trump signed an executive order falsely titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The document declared:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. 

Trump was referring to long-standing attempts to explore the dark veins of American history—racism, sexism, genocide, and other nasty business—that have been crucial components of the national story. He called for a sole focus on the nation’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” and assailed this wider perspective for deepening “societal divides” and fostering “a sense of national shame.”

The order essentially declared that Trump is the ultimate arbiter of US history and had the right to police thought.

Conservatives who once upon a time howled about the suppression of free thought and groused that Big Government was telling people what to think voiced no objections. Just as Republicans, who slammed both Barack Obama and Joe Biden for governing through executive orders, have not muttered a word of concern about Trump’s unending flood of EOs.

Trump’s diktat targeted specific examples, including a Smithsonian American Art Museum sculpture exhibit that noted the United States has “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” But what’s inaccurate about that statement? That’s precisely what slavery did. Serving the right-wing theology of anti-wokeness, Trump seeks to white-out the nation’s original sin.

In the order, Trump stated, “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” In other words, no dirty laundry—no references to the mass murder of Indigenous people, the suppression of workers, Jim Crow, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, the mistreatment of Chinese laborers, ugly interventions in Latin America and elsewhere, and so on. Only the glories of the United States shall be acknowledged—that is, worshipped.

Trump named Vice President JD Vance as head of an effort to whitewash US history, most notably by vetting exhibits and programs at the various Smithsonian entities. He also directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to review whether public monuments, memorials, statues, or markers have “been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history” or “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures.” In short, bring back the Confederate heroes.

This past week, the Trump administration forced the cancellation of most of the grants made by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides funding for museums, historical sites, scholarship, and various cultural and historical projects, including books, films, and radio programs, such as Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary The Civil War. Grantees were told the agency would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.” And, no doubt, in furtherance of Dear Leader’s self-serving claptrap about the nation’s past.

Racism—and anti-anti-racism—runs through Trump’s executive order. The document denounced the view “that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” But this approach to race has become the general consensus. Those who have pushed the idea that race is a biological matter have often done so to establish a hierarchy of races. Guess which race they put at the top? And, yes, we can turn to the Nazis for further edification on this point.

Trump has launched a crusade not only against public servants, legal and governmental norms, commonsense economics, science, higher education, DEI programs, and his critics and political rivals, as he vies for wide-ranging power that will allow him to rule as an autocrat. He is striving to become the Big Brother who determines which parts of the American story are legitimate and which are to be suppressed and deleted.

During the 2024 election, Trump’s campaign was more a disinformation machine than a political operation. He peddled a fictitious tale: The nation was being overrun by violent migrants who ate cats and dogs and who were taking over entire towns in Middle America, while schools were performing transition operations on kids without informing parents and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were purposefully flooding the country with dangerous criminals and mental patients released out of prisons and hospitals…and while the US economy was collapsing. If a voter believed this false narrative, he or she really had no choice but to pull the lever for Trump.

As president, Trump is still running a disinformation con. Now it’s just bigger. Like other authoritarians, he seeks to manipulate and define reality—of the present and of the past. He is attempting to stymie the sometime messy and occasionally disturbing business of history and, to borrow a term once deployed by conservative hero Allan Bloom, close the American mind.

Trump has never been a fan of the truth. For him, reality is whatever works to his benefit. In his multi-front war on American society, he is applying his well-developed lying ways to the nation’s story—and following in the footsteps of despots who realized that the robust pursuit of history is a vital component of democracy and, thus, a threat to tyranny.

In a Monday evening ruling, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to resume the removals of Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang under the unprecedented use of the wartime Alien Enemies Act. The decision, lifting a district court’s temporary restraining order halting the removals, was 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the Democratic appointees in dissent.

The ruling is a significant win for the Trump administration. Still, it did set limits on President Donald Trump’s plans for mass, summary deportations—each detainee must be afforded a chance to challenge their removal under the Act in court.

The justices did not address the underlying question in the case: whether Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act, a law intended to be invoked during times of war, to claim a non-state actor like Tren de Aragua is perpetrating an “invasion” of the United States. Instead, the decision focused on a procedural question of how and where the plaintiffs should have brought their case. The majority ruled that “legal challenges to an individual’s removal under the Alien Enemies Act must be brought in habeas petitions in the district where they are detained.”

But this is no mere technicality: How and where the question is asked in court will have massive implications—and not just for Venezuelan nationals who must defend themselves from inside detention, possibly without lawyers. While the justices required meaningful opportunities to challenge removal in court through a habeas corpus petition, there is no certainty that the government will provide that opportunity, nor that there will be any way to remedy the situation if anyone (including a US citizen) is whisked away without first getting their day in court. As Georgetown Law’s Stephen Vladeck wrote, in forcing plaintiffs to fight their removal through individual habeas petitions, “the Court is effectively bringing a pea-shooter to a gunfight.”

Still, “to the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, “it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court.”

The majority’s decision raises the likelihood that individuals will be deprived of their rights and removed. The decision brought to a halt class-wide relief under the Administrative Procedure Act, without any deliberation about whether that was an appropriate decision, and requires detainees to challenge their removal in the jurisdiction where they are detained. That discussion will likely be in the most conservative courts in the country—because the administration can transfer anyone to the Southern District of Texas before informing them of their impending removal.

The court green-lit Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act despite implicitly acknowledging that it may as well have been illegally applied up to this point to the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador without due process. Moreover, it did so without considering that the administration had sought to dodge judicial compliance in its zeal to deport hundreds of Venezuelans in what had all the traits of a public relations gimmick. This willingness to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt despite the history of this case is a sign that a majority of the justices either agree with Trump’s actions or are willfully blind to the danger they pose to the rule of law. “The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent. “For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning.” For the majority, however, concern seemed lacking.

The decision prompted strong dissents from both Sotomayor and Jackson, who warned of irreparable harm to those wrongfully removed, while chiding the court for using its so-called “shadow docket” to make consequential decisions outside the regular judicial process—no lower court decisions, no full briefing, no oral arguments, no reasoned opinion. Just an edict a few paragraphs long with enormous consequences.

Sotomayor scolded the Trump administration for whooshing off hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador “in a shroud of secrecy” on March 15, as well as for taking the position that there’s nothing they can do to bring the men back from a notorious Salvadoran prison. She raised the question of what happens if someone is sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, by mistake, or if the courts later decide that the president didn’t have the authority to use the Alien Enemies Act in this way. Indeed, the Supreme Court allowed removals under a regime more prone to error without first deciding what happens to someone who is unlawfully removed.

“The Government’s resistance to facilitating the return of individuals erroneously removed to CECOT,” Sotomayor wrote, “only amplifies the specter that, even if this Court someday declares the President’s Proclamation unlawful, scores of individual lives may be irretrievably lost.” Sotomayor continued: “The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”

In a sign of how seriously wrong Jackson believes this decision to be, she compared it to Korematsu, the disgraced ruling upholding the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II. “Make no mistake,” she wrote, “we are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences.”

On February 7, Luz Zambrano gave birth to her second child, Alana Samantha. She hadn’t expected to do so without her husband, Julio Zambrano Perez, by her side. But Luz went into labor only days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Zambrano Perez, during a routine check-in appointment. Weeks later, the Trump administration sent him, along with 237 other Venezuelan men, to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Luz has been left lost and confused.

“We don’t even know what to do,” Luz tells me. “We don’t understand what they are going to do with him. Nobody answers. Not here, not in Venezuela, not anywhere.” 

Zambrano Perez’s family says ICE misidentified him as a gang member because of two tattoos he has: one of a rose and another of a crown. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.) Now, his fate is uncertain. In the aftermath of his disappearance to a foreign country, the asylum-seeking family—who was building their lives in a suburb of North Carolina—has been abruptly torn apart, perhaps indefinitely. As we speak on the phone, I can hear her infant’s cries in the background. Luz tells me she just went to the hospital. Her two-month-old baby has the flu.

In mid-March, President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to detain and remove, without due process, Venezuelans accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. The administration then swiftly flew three planes to El Salvador, prompting a judicial clash with a federal judge who temporarily halted the deportations over whether the White House disobeyed a court order to return on-air flights to the United States. (On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can resume removals under the Act.)

As our reporting revealed, many of the men dispatched to El Salvador without any notice appear to have been plucked by the US government because of their tattoos—despite the fact that they had no proven ties to the group. An analysis by CBS News failed to find criminal records for 179—or 75 percent—of the Venezuelans. One man whose loved ones we spoke with, Neri Alvarado Borges, has an autism awareness tattoo for his 15-year-old brother. Another is a makeup artist whose tattoos on his wrists depict a crown and the words “Mom” and “Dad’ in English. 

The Trump White House has admitted in court filings to have wrongfully sent another man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador even though he had been granted protection from deportation to his native country by an immigration judge. Still, the administration claims US courts can’t compel them to bring the Maryland father of three back to the United States. During a district court hearing last week, a Justice Department attorney, who has since been placed on leave, acknowledged Abrego Garcia shouldn’t have been removed, saying the government’s “absence of evidence speaks for itself.” 

Federal judge Paula Xinis agreed. “That silence is telling,” she wrote in a 22-page decision. “As Defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador—let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere.” She required Abrego Garcia be brought back to the United States by Monday night; the administration appealed, asking the Supreme Court to pause the order mandating his return. On Monday, Chief John Justice Roberts granted the government’s request while the court considered arguments in the case.

That wasn’t the only victory the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration. On Monday evening, the justices decided in a 5-4 ruling to lift the lower court’s temporary restraining order blocking the summary deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. All the justices agreed, however, that those subject to the proclamation invoking the wartime statute are “entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”

Some of the men the Trump administration disappeared to El Salvador on March 15th had pending asylum cases in the United States. That means there’s a possibility they could have eventually been allowed to stay in the country had they not been denied the opportunity to make their case in front of an immigration judge. Instead, they’re stuck in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, without access to lawyers or their families. 

“We don’t know how he is,” Zambrano Perez’s sister Anaurys Orlimar told Mother jones. “If he’s eating, how he’s doing physically or mentally. We don’t know anything about our brother.” She says their mother cries every day. “They took them there for no reason—purely for politics,” Anaurys adds. “That’s why they took those people there unjustly. And that’s what makes me the most angry.”

Zambrano Perez’s family left Venezuela in 2018 amidst the country’s economic collapse and worsening violence. Initially, they lived in Peru. Their first daughter was born there. They had a small plot of land and Zambrano Perez worked in construction. But they were being targeted for extortion. In early 2023, the family decided to move to Chile, where they stayed for eight months before heading north. They crossed several countries and the jungle between Colombia and Panama until they reached Mexico.

Luz says they had no money to stay in Mexico, so in late November 2023 they surrendered to US border patrol in Matamoros. Zambrano Perez was given a notice to appear before an immigration judge on February 24, 2027, in North Carolina. The family relocated to Davidson, just north of Charlotte, where Zambrano Perez’s sister lives. They applied for asylum last May with the help of a paralegal and Zambrano Perez obtained a work permit. As the breadwinner, he worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant and at a hotel. Their first daughter enrolled in a bilingual preschool.

The family says Zambrano Perez has no criminal history in the United States or elsewhere. (All Mother Jones found were two citations for driving without a license and insurance and having an expired license plate. Luz and Anaurys explained that the man who sold Zambrano Perez a car failed to notify him that the license plates had been surrendered.)

In the early hours of January 29, 2025, the famly went to a regular check-in appointment with ICE in Charlotte. Luz, who was pregnant at the time, says when an officer called Zambrano Perez’s name, they didn’t suspect anything because he had never had issues before. But, then the office started asking him if he was involved with any criminal group and inquiring about his clothing and tattoos. Zambrano Perez has a tattoo on his hand of a crown with his name on it that he got when he was 15 years old. He has another tattoo of a rose. 

Three hours went by, Luz says, and then the officer came back and told her they were going to keep her husband detained for investigation. They suspected he was part of a gang. She protested, saying all he did was go from home to work and back. Luz says they took Zambrano Perez’s work authorization and some immigration documents and told her to go home. ICE then transferred Zambrano Perez to the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia.

Luz and his family gathered letters from community members vouching for his character. “Julio Zambrano Perez exemplifies what America represents,” the director of his daughter’s preschool wrote, “working hard, planning for the future, raising the next generation of responsible citizens.” But at an immigration bond hearing on February 26, he was denied release. A couple of weeks later, ICE moved Zambrano Perez to the El Valle Detention Facility, located near an airport in Harlingen, Texas where deportation flights depart from. 

On Friday, March 14, Zambrano Perez called Luz. “I think they’re going to take us to Venezuela,” he said. He phoned later that evening to say the plane couldn’t take off because of turbulence. The next day, he was in touch in the morning to say they were going to depart. He has not called again.

“We even called and told my mother to go to Caracas to receive my brother,” Anaurys tells me. “We were all left waiting.” No planes arrived in Venezuela.

The family scrambled to find Zambrano Perez. Anaurys says she was frantically searching the news and social media for any information. They also reached out to Ernesto Castañeda, who had appeared live on the Colombian news network NTN24 to provide commentary on the news that the Trump administration was sending planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador, to ask for any information about Zambrano Perez’s whereabouts. (Castañeda, the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies Sociology at American University, tried to look up his information on ICE’s online detainee locator, but he was no longer in the system.)

When the family called the last detention center he had been at in Texas, they were told he was no longer in the United States. “The only thing is that he has tattoos and that he was born in the state of Aragua,” Castañeda says. “But it’s ridiculous to say that everybody from the state of Aragua is a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.”

Although Tren de Arangua has its roots in a prison in the northern state of Aragua, experts say tattoos are not a marker of affiliation with the group. “It’s unfortunate that they that ICE officials made those very distorted and quick assumptions,” Castañeda says. (ICE and DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Zambrano Perez’s relatives feared he might have been sent to El Salvador. Then on March 20, CBS News published a list from an internal US government showing the names of the 238 men who had been sent to CECOT. He was among them. Unlike other families, they haven’t been able to confirm his detention through photos or videos. On the Justice Department’s website, his case still appears as pending and he has an upcoming court hearing on May 13.

“Frankly, it was a forced disappearance,” says Zambrano Perez’s other sister Beymar, who came with him to the United States. “He disappeared overnight, just like that, without a trace.” At one point in our conversation, one of the sisters describes Zambrano Perez’s personality—kind, hardworking—in the past tense, and the other jumps in to correct her, “he is kind and hardworking.”

For Luz, it’s been hard to get by without her husband. Her oldest daughter Danna Lucia, who is turning four soon, asks for her father daily. She wonders why he doesn’t come see her, if he doesn’t love her anymore. For now, Luz tells her he’s at work but that he’ll come back. “Every day you get up and think about what is going to happen,” she says.