New federal figures reveal 1 in 3 US households struggle to pay energy bills, but the reality is likely even worse

 By Diana Hernández 

 

Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.

The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.

As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.

The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won’t be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren’t finalized until August 2025.

Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can’t afford to properly heat and cool.

 

Energy costs are hitting more American households harder than in past years. Olga Rolenko/Moment via Getty Images

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Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.

The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.

As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.

The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won’t be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren’t finalized until August 2025.

Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can’t afford to properly heat and cool.

Transparent, research-based, written by experts – and always free.

A pandemic success story

The survey asks respondents whether, in the prior 12 months, they received a disconnection notice threatening to terminate their home’s electricity, gas or other fuel service because they hadn’t paid the bills. It also asks whether any of those services were in fact disconnected; whether they bought less food or skipped taking medication to be able to afford their energy bills; or whether they left their home at an unhealthy temperature because running or repairing the heating or cooling equipment would be too expensive.

The result is a portrait of a significant swath of the population that has a hard time affording housing and energy, and who adopt various coping strategies to get through.

A closer look at the data over time reveals that more Americans live with energy insecurity now than in years past. In 2024, 43.6 million American households – 32.9% of all homes – reported experiencing some form of energy insecurity. In 2015, that figure was 31.3%, and in 2020 it was 27.2%.

The lower rate in 2020 confirms that pandemic-era government policies, including cash relief payments and bans on utility shutoffs, were effective, though they were too short-lived to last through the 2024 survey data.

Recent surge hits new households

Middle-income households, those earning between $60,000 and $200,000 a year, were hit hardest by post-pandemic inflation of housing costs, food prices and interest rates on loans and mortgages. The new survey data shows that energy costs added to the squeeze.

In 2020, 20.1% of households earning between $60,000 and $100,000 reported experiencing problems affording their energy. In 2024, 32.1% of those households did – a 12 percentage point increase, more than double the overall national increase of 5.7 percentage points.

There were also racial differences. Historically, Black, Hispanic and American Indian households have been disproportionately likely to have trouble affording energy bills. And between 2020 and 2024, those households’ risk grew.

But white households’ risk climbed even more steeply: In 2020, 20.1% of white households reported trouble with energy costs. By 2024, 26.4% of them did.

 

Working-age adults and seniors are increasingly insecure

In 2024, higher proportions of householders under 60, and of householders with children, reported struggling to meet their home energy needs than in 2020. The similarities in these increases verify that younger, working-age households are more strained.

Yet working-age adults without children, particularly moderate-income renters, don’t have as much potential support as seniors when they fall behind on utility bills. That’s because energy assistance programs direct support toward those who have historically been the most vulnerable.

 

Seniors have historically been among the most protected, partly by the designs of government and corporate programs to assist with energy costs and partly because wealth usually peaks in later life. Even so, the share of older Americans experiencing energy insecurity climbed to 1 in 4 in 2024 from roughly 1 in 5 in 2020 – a sign that long-standing safeguards for older Americans are no longer making as much of a difference as they used to.

Housing in good repair is no longer enough protection

An efficient home has long been considered a solution to high energy bills. But the data shows that’s not enough anymore. People who live in well-insulated homes and those with double-pane windows saw their likelihood of energy insecurity rise by a similar amount as those who live in poorly insulated homes.

People in uninsulated homes still have the highest risk of being unable to afford their energy costs, though their risk grew more slowly than those in homes with better insulation.

And people with single-pane windows, already in a tenuous position, saw their risk of being unable to afford their energy costs rise by 7 percentage points.

 

Where need is greatest, help is least available

Geographically, the steepest increases in energy insecurity were found in warm-weather regions. The Southwest experienced the largest increase of any climate category – 10 percentage points – followed by the Southeast and Gulf Coast, which rose from 30.1% to 35.6%.

Though rising temperatures are increasing the need for cooling in warm-weather climates, most attention and government assistance for energy costs continue to be concentrated on the need for home heating in cold-weather states.

But even in the Northeast, where federal assistance with energy costs helps large proportions of the population, higher percentages of households had trouble affording energy costs.

 

A problem that has outgrown its framing

The severity of energy insecurity remains highest among the most disadvantaged Americans, which includes low-income people, renters and Black, Hispanic and American Indian households.

But the trend lines show that energy insecurity is now spreading into middle-income, white, working-age families in efficient homes in warm-weather climates – families that previously had relatively little trouble meeting their household energy needs.

The 2024 RECS data indicates that the safety net designed to address energy affordability is insufficient and does not match the regions or populations where energy insecurity is actually growing.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides money to help families pay their utility bills, was created in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s. It was built to prioritize home heating assistance – not cooling – and help for people in immediate danger of having life-preserving utilities shut off. Little has changed in its focus or funding level since its inception.

Meanwhile, the economics of household energy costs have shifted dramatically and are quickly evolving.

New wars are sustaining old energy regimes, driving price volatility through the same fossil-fuel supply chains the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program was designed to buffer against half a century ago. On the domestic front, meanwhile, data centers are increasing residential electricity rates. Clean energy developments that might have shielded households from price shocks have been politicized and curtailed, harming both affordability and public health.

The 2024 data – high-quality and reliable as it is – is already behind in an escalating energy affordability crisis. Many more Americans are having trouble keeping the lights, heating and cooling on in recent years, and it’s a trend that may already be worse than what the most recent data shows.

Evangelicals amplify Trump's religious framing of Iran war by Nathan Layne and Tim Reid

April 8 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is using Christian rhetoric to rally core supporters behind the increasingly unpopular war with Iran, religious and political experts say - a message amplified from pulpits by evangelical leaders who cast it as a struggle between good and evil. Trump, who announced a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday, ​has struggled to persuade Americans to back the war, which has triggered a surge in energy prices, killed American servicemen and Iranians, and further eroded his standing among voters. Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone further, citing scripture to justify the use of "overwhelming violence" against enemies he said "deserve no mercy." That message has been echoed by conservative Christian leaders - from those close to Trump like Robert Jeffress, an influential Texas pastor, to small-town preachers. They have emphasized the biblical significance of the modern state of Israel, which many evangelicals associate with a prophecy about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

 

EVANGELICALS SEE IRAN WAR AS GOOD VS EVIL

Jackson Lahmeyer, an evangelical pastor and Trump supporter ​who is running for the U.S. Congress, said in an interview he has told his Tulsa, Oklahoma, congregation in some Sunday sermons that wars are typically battles between good and evil and that Iran was no exception.

"Evil people exist, and ​if you don't deal with them, they'll deal with you," he said. "Good and evil, that's the story of the Bible. The good news is that at the end good always wins."

White evangelicals are ⁠among Trump’s strongest supporters: more than 80% voted for him in 2024, according to exit polls, and surveys have shown they account for about one-third of his support.

This political reality is a major reason why Trump and members of his cabinet are increasingly leaning ​into religious framing of the conflict, several political and religious experts told Reuters.

 

"Look at Mr. Trump's standing in the polls and recognize he only has a little more than a third of the public on his side. A big part of that constituency is made ​up of white evangelical Christians," said Jim Guth, a political science professor at Furman University in South Carolina who studies religion in U.S. politics.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump's use of Christian rhetoric but spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement that the president had taken bold action "to eliminate the threat of this terrorist regime, which will protect the American people for generations to come."

To be sure, U.S. presidents have throughout history invoked the Christian faith in times of war. But the experts interviewed by Reuters said the Trump administration's use of stark, unequivocal language to frame and ​justify violence in explicitly religious terms sets it apart.

 

"It's the same language as the crusades of the Middle Ages. You know, we must stop the infidel, we must defeat the wicked," said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah University who has written extensively ​about evangelicals and politics. "We've never seen anything like this in American history."

The overt religious messaging has drawn criticism from some Democrats and left-leaning Christian leaders, who see it as a misguided use of faith to justify an unpopular five-week-old war that has left 13 U.S. service members and ‌thousands of Iranians ⁠dead.

Addressing tens of thousands in St. Peter's Square on Palm Sunday, which opens Holy Week ahead of Easter for 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Leo called the conflict "atrocious" and said the name of Jesus should never be invoked to propagate a war.

Doug Pagitt, a progressive evangelical pastor, said he believes the administration was deploying a "very specific Christian narrative" to keep evangelicals onside and Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) coalition intact.

 

"What they are saying is Trump is on God's side. You can rest easy at night," he said. "Because without the Christian coalition, the MAGA support base gets very fractured."

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published last week, 60% of respondents opposed U.S. military strikes on Iran. The survey highlighted a deep partisan divide, with 74% of Republicans backing the war versus only 22% of Democrats.

TRUMP LIKENED TO JESUS IN ​WHITE HOUSE MEETING

The prominent evangelist Franklin Graham has praised the strikes ​on Iran in biblical terms and likened Trump to the ⁠biblical figure of Esther, a Jewish queen who, according to the Bible, was elevated by God to save her people from annihilation in ancient Persia, now modern-day Iran.

Ken Peters, leader of the Patriot Church in Tennessee, delivered that message to his congregation this past Sunday, voicing hope that the war would yield a "pro-Israel, pro-America Iran" — a comment that drew applause, according to a video recording the pro-Trump ​pastor shared with Reuters.

"We see Trump as a man of the world that God is using to help us," Peters said in an interview, adding that he was supportive of framing ​the war in religious terms.

Hegseth in ⁠particular has used overtly religious language to frame the war. On Sunday, he likened the rescue of the U.S. airman inside Iran to the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.

"A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing," he said. "God is good."

In a statement to Reuters, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said wartime leaders have long invoked the Christian faith, pointing to the example of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt distributing Bibles to troops during World War Two.

"Secretary Hegseth, along with millions of Americans, is a proud Christian. Encouraging the American people ⁠to pray for our ​troops is not controversial."

Similar religious rhetoric was used by evangelical pastors close to Trump at an Easter event with Trump at the White House last week. ​Televangelist Paula White-Cain, senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, likened Trump to Jesus, saying both were "betrayed and arrested and falsely accused."

Jeffress, the First Baptist Church pastor in Texas who was among the faith leaders who laid hands on Trump during the meeting, told Reuters he did not believe the Iran war was against ​Islam or Muslims, but "a spiritual war between good and evil, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan."

Reporting by Tim Reid in Washington and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Additional reporting by Jason Lange in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin and Edmund Klamann

Trump budget seeks $1.5T in defense spending alongside cuts in domestic programs By LISA MASCARO and KEVIN FREKING

 

President Donald Trump has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027 budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs.

The sizable increase for the Pentagon had been telegraphed by the Republican president even before the the U.S.-led war against Iran. The president’s plan would also reduce spending on non-defense programs by 10% by shifting some responsibilities to state and local governments.

 

“President Trump is committed to rebuilding our military to secure peace through strength,” the budget said.

The president’s annual budget is considered a reflection of the administration’s values and does not carry the force of law. The massive document typically highlights an administration’s priorities, but Congress, which handles federal spending issues, is free to reject it and often does.

 This year’s White House document, prepared by Budget Director Russ Vought, is intended to provide a road map from the president to Congress as lawmakers build their own budgets and annual appropriations bills to keep the government funded. Vought spoke to House GOP lawmakers on a private call Thursday. 

 

Trump, speaking ahead of an address to the nation this week about the Iran war, signaled the military is his priority, setting up a clash ahead in Congress.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said at a private White House event Wednesday.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal.”

 

Immigration enforcement, air traffic controllers and national parks

Among the budget priorities the White House called for:

-Supporting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and deportation operations by eliminating refugee resettlement aid programs, maintaining Immigration and Customs Enforcement funds at current year levels and drawing on last’s year’s increases for the Department of Homeland Security funds to continue opening detention facilities, including 100,000 beds for adults and 30,000 for families.

 

A 13% increase in funding for the Department of Justice, which the White House said would be focused on violent criminals.

-- A $10 billion fund within the National Park Service for beautification projects in Washington, D.C..

-- A $481 million increase in funding to enhance aviation safety and support an air traffic controller hiring surge.

With the nation running nearly $2 trillion annual deficits and the debt swelling past $39 trillion, the federal balance sheets have long been operating in the red.

About two-thirds of the nation’s estimated $7 trillion in annual spending covers the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs, as well as Social Security income, which are essentially growing — along with an aging population — on autopilot.

The rest of the annual budget has typically been more evenly split between defense and domestic accounts, nearly $1 trillion each, which is where much of the debate in Congress takes place. 

 

The GOP’s big tax breaks bill that Trump signed into law last year boosted his priorities beyond the budget process — with at least $150 billion for the Pentagon over the next several years, and $170 billion for Trump’s immigration and deportation operations at the Department of Homeland Security.

The administration is counting on its allies in the Republican-led Congress to again push the president’s priorities, particularly the Defense Department spending, through its own budget process, as it was able to do last year.

It suggests $1.1 trillion for defense would come through the regular appropriations process, which typically requires support from both parties for approval, while $350 billion would come through the budget reconciliation process that Republicans can accomplish on their own, through party-line majority votes.

 

Congress still fighting over 2026 spending

The president’s budget arrives as the House and Senate remain tangled over current-year spending and stalemated over DHS funding, with Democrats demanding changes to Trump’s immigration enforcement regime that Republicans are unwilling to accept.

Trump announced Thursday he would sign an executive order to pay all DHS workers who have gone without paychecks during the record-long partial government shutdown that has reached 49 days. The Republican leadership in Congress reached an agreement this week on a path forward to fund the department, but lawmakers are away on spring break and have not yet voted on any new legislation.

Last year, in the president’s first budget since returning to the White House, Trump sought to fulfill his promise to vastly reduce the size and scope of the federal government, reflecting the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

As DOGE slashed through federal offices and Vought sought to claw back funds, Congress did not always agree.

 

For example, Trump sought a roughly one-fifth decrease in non-defense spending for the current budget year ending Sept. 30, but Congress kept such spending relatively flat.

Some of the programs that Trump tried to eliminate entirely, such as assisting families with their energy costs, got a slight uptick in funding. Others got flat funding, such as the Community Development Block Grants that states and local communities use to fund an array of projects intended mostly to help low-income communities through new parks, sewer systems and affordable housing.

Lawmakers have also focused on ensuring the administration spends federal dollars as directed by Congress. This year’s spending bills contained what Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, described as “hundreds upon hundreds of specific funding levels and directives” that the administration is required to follow.

 

Traveling Along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail

 

Nine Black College Students Were Arrested in 1961 for Reading at a Segregated Public Library. Their Contributions to the Civil Rights Movement Have Long Been Overlooked

by  Kayla Randall - Digital Editor, Museums

 When nine Black college students walked into a segregated public library in Mississippi on March 27, 1961, they knew what to expect next: Staff would call the police, and they would probably be arrested if they refused to leave. According to local laws, being Black in a space designated only for the white public constituted a breach of peace. By stepping through the doors of the Jackson Municipal Library, they would be risking physical harm and verbal abuse. They might even face an angry crowd.

 But the students, from the historically Black Tougaloo College, had trained for this moment. This was a sit-in, a nonviolent direct-action protest, and they were prepared. They’d been guided by the likes of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first Mississippi field officer, who was known for his public investigation into the murder of Emmett Till and his fight against Jim Crow laws in the state; Ernst Borinski, a Jewish lawyer who’d fled Nazi Germany, then accepted a position teaching sociology at Tougaloo after World War II; and Tougaloo chaplain John Mangram.

 The civic-minded students wanted to effect change in Mississippi. Entering that library would boldly oppose the state’s unyielding system of segregation and highlight the disparities they experienced as Black residents.

 The Tougaloo Nine’s demonstration would etch their names in Mississippi history: Meredith Anding Jr., James Bradford (better known as Sammy), Alfred Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson Jr., Albert Lassiter, Evelyn Pierce and Ethel Sawyer. Nationally, though, their story is “often overlooked” in the broader civil rights narrative, says historian Daphne Chamberlain, chief program officer at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Mississippi and a Tougaloo College alumna.

 

At the library, most of the students found the books they were looking for and sat down to read. As expected, a librarian called the police. Despite the presence of law enforcement, the Tougaloo Nine didn’t move. Eventually, the officers told them they were under arrest.

“Why can’t I go in and read a book? It comes back to that, the simplicity of it all,” says Tony Bounds, an archivist and institutional historian at Tougaloo College. The response to this question at the time was, “Well, you have a Black library across town,” he adds. But the Tougaloo Nine had done their homework. They’d specifically requested texts that weren’t available at the Black library.

 

Following their arrest, the students were held in jail for more than 30 hours. Behind bars that night, Jackson Jr. reflected “on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” as he told OC Weekly in 2015. “The later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.”

Black community members, particularly students at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University), a nearby historically Black public school, rallied around the Tougaloo Nine and began protesting in support of them. Although authorities had arrested the Tougaloo students without resorting to violence, the Jackson State students’ demonstrations sparked a brutal crackdown. As the young people marched, police officers armed with billy clubs, tear gas and dogs forcefully dispersed their gathering.

 When the Tougaloo Nine appeared in court on March 29, police beat a crowd of Black onlookers, including Evers, who had gathered outside the courthouse. They also attacked the group with dogs.

 

Law enforcement officers had recruited canines for policing long before 1961, but their use in Jackson represented what the author and researcher M.J. O’Brien, in his book The Tougaloo Nine: The Jackson Library Sit-In at the Crossroads of Civil War and Civil Rights, describes as “the first attacks by police dogs on nonviolent crowds during the civil rights era, two years before the more sensational attacks in Birmingham grabbed national headlines.”

The students pleaded not guilty to the breach of peace charge, but a judge found them guilty anyway. As first-time offenders, they were each fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days in jail, although the court ruled that this time would be suspended if they pledged to avoid participating in other protests. They all agreed.

 In a letter to NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, Evers wrote, “These young people exhibited the greatest amount of courage in the face of mounting tension and were reported in our local newspapers as being ‘orderly, intelligent and cooperative.’”

 

The Black community’s embrace helped keep the students afloat in the aftermath of their sit-in. While they were in jail, this assistance “was demonstrated most tangibly in the cookies, cakes, hot food and snacks that individual families, mostly Black women, brought to the jail to help support this newly forming resistance movement,” O’Brien writes.

The college’s leadership also supported the Tougaloo Nine. “After they’re released from jail, they go back to class,” Bounds says. “They’re not expelled.” All eventually went on to earn bachelor’s degrees, most from Tougaloo but some from other institutions. Their sit-in and the protests that followed had reverberated in Jackson. College students were helping the NAACP lead the fight against segregation and anti-Black discrimination in Mississippi’s capital.

“It’s a game-changing moment, certainly within Mississippi, which at one point in time had the highest lynching rate in the 20th century,” Bounds says.

 For the students, simply reading in the Jackson library “was an act of defiance,” Bounds says. “It was an open act. Jackson had never seen anything like it.”

 

The Tougaloo Nine have only recently had their collective story told in detail, most notably in O’Brien’s book, which was released in the fall of 2025.

“It’s a project that is long overdue, but he had been working on it for several years,” says Chamberlain, who was one of the book’s early reviewers. Through interviews and deep research, O’Brien wove together the events of March 27, 1961, and beyond. He was able to talk to all but one of the nine students, as Pierce died before O’Brien started working on the book.

The author places the Tougaloo Nine’s actions in the context of state and local history. “Such a direct assault on segregation had never been tried before in Mississippi’s capital city,” O’Brien writes. He provides insights on the day of the sit-in, down to the weather.

 That morning was cold with rain on the way.

“Lassiter remembered specifically deciding to wear a trench coat to keep off the chill and the rain, yes, but also ‘to provide an extra layer of protection’ against whatever beatings might come,” O’Brien writes. According to O’Brien, Edwards later recalled, “I was very concerned that I dress well and that I dressed warm. That I was comfortable. That I was well protected.”

 As the students approached the building, the significance of their protest dawned on them. Janice Jackson remembered walking into the municipal library as a “surreal” experience. “It was like I was there doing what I was supposed to do, but I felt like I was lifted out of my body or something,” she added, per O’Brien’s book.

The Tougaloo Nine were determined, though, and they continued in their mission.

 Evers had helped the students plan the read-in. He was “an energetic man who was committed to bringing about integration in public facilities,” Jackson Jr. told OC Weekly. The protest was executed exactly as planned: The Tougaloo Nine aimed to get arrested only for breach of peace. As soon as they were placed under arrest, they got up and followed officers’ instructions to avoid charges of resisting detainment.

 

The students’ time at Tougaloo primed them all to become leaders in their own ways. After graduating, four of the nine went on to become educators. Lassiter served three decades in the Air Force. Anding pursued careers in both the military and education, enlisting in the Air Force before teaching at universities.

A tenth student who was part of the demonstration but has long been excluded from the story is Jerry Keahey. A graduating senior at the time, he was the photographer behind a frequently distributed group picture of the nine ahead of their read-in. “That’s a really important role because he was able to document by way of camera what was going on at the time,” Chamberlain says. Keahey also helped the students travel to the library that day. Driving in two separate cars, Mangram and Keahey dropped the students off near their destination.

 Tougaloo is a small private school with a big history. Known as “the oasis,” it was founded in 1869 by the American Missionary Association, a Christian abolitionist organization. For the past 15 years, its enrollment has hovered around 600 to 900 students; that number would have been even smaller in the 1960s.

 The college is located “off the beaten path,” Bounds says, yet it has welcomed such distinguished visitors as Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael.

 

“You cannot detach Mississippi’s civil rights movement from Tougaloo,” Bounds notes. “Those are two synonymous terms.”

The school fostered an environment in which the Tougaloo Nine could grow into activists. Previous protests also laid the foundation for these students. One of the earliest library sit-ins took place in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1939, when a group of Black men visited a public facility that was open only to white community members. As the men picked up books and began reading, library staff called the police, who arrested them and escorted them out of the building.

 In 1960, the year before the Tougaloo Nine’s protest, four Black men participated in one of the most well-known sit-ins of the era—at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. This protest inspired an array of similar demonstrations across the American South.

 “You had sit-ins, you had read-ins, you had church-ins,” Bounds says. “On the coast, you had wade-ins, because the beaches were segregated.”

 

In an email, Kevin Strait, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, says, “By targeting public spaces like lunch counters and libraries, participants directly confronted the daily practice of racial exclusion and helped spark the public awareness and pressure that made desegregation possible.” The Tougaloo Nine’s action was “a powerful statement about access—and who gets to learn, gather and belong in our shared public spaces,” he adds.

Making the public library the focus of the their demonstration put a spotlight on the uneven distribution of educational resources to segregated public schools. Often, Black students received “secondhand books that are years old,” Chamberlain says. Despite 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which deemed segregation in American public schools unconstitutional, “states like Mississippi were rolling out desegregation as slow as they possibly could,” she notes.

 The books that the Tougaloo Nine picked up in the Jackson library, while obscure and selected for strategic reasons, symbolized freedom. Bradford chose Introduction to Parasitology, while Cook picked Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology—a text that “would become central to his later profession but n

Following the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, “one of the definitions of freedom became access to education,” Chamberlain says. “As an enslaved person, you could not be learned, you could not know how to read. It was to keep people powerless and of course ignorant to the world around them, and to also keep them subservient in this status that they were born into.”

It took another three years for the goals of the Tougaloo Nine’s sit-in to be enshrined in federal law. The students—and the broader civil rights movement—lost a leader along the way.

 

In June 1963, 37-year-old Evers was murdered, shot in the back in his own driveway. Byron De La Beckwith, a known white supremacist, was convicted of the killing three decades later, in 1994. Evers had been working tirelessly right until the end: Two weeks before his death, he shepherded another Jackson sit-in that became national news. Several Tougaloo students sat at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter, where they were harassed and attacked by a hostile crowd.

The struggle for desegregation continued, and in July 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation of public facilities and race-based discrimination in the U.S.

 Later, in the 1980s, some members of the Tougaloo Nine received notices that the City of Jackson had absolved them of their breach of peace violations. But they still faced difficult realities: “Some complained that the misdemeanor continued to show up on their formal criminal record for years to come,” O’Brien writes.

 Today, four of the Tougaloo Nine are still living: Jackson Jr., Edwards, Sawyer and Lassiter. Edwards wrote about her life in the 2011 book Back to Mississippi. Members also gathered periodically for anniversary celebrations of their sit-in.

In 2017, the state dedicated a historical marker outside the Jackson Municipal Library to the students and their groundbreaking action. The group’s surviving members and their families were also honored at a local baseball game in 2022.

 Back in 1961, the Jackson library’s sea of books represented everything that the Tougaloo Nine were trying to achieve. Chamberlain says, “Just by being able to pick up a book and having access to that knowledge, it opened a world of opportunity for those nine young people.”

ow was a convenient foil,” according to O’Brien.

 

 

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Former Alex Jones employee says: 'It was nonsense, it was lies' by Dave Davies

 

Alex Jones, founder of the media company Infowars, had made a fortune promoting conspiracy theories online. He's insisted that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job and claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, staged by the government to justify seizing the firearms of American citizens.

Josh Owens spent four years in his 20s as a video editor and field producer for Jones and his media company. "In Jones' world, it was all about making things look cinematic," Owens says. "We would go out there, we would shoot videos and almost like Vice News — like, we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on. ... But it was nonsense, it was lies."

At one point, Owens was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, because a conservative website had alleged that ISIS had established a training base just across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Finding no evidence of ISIS, Owens says the Infowars team dressed a reporter up to look like an ISIS operative and filmed him crossing "the border" while holding a prop of a severed head. Except it wasn't actually the border.

 

"We just happened to find a little stream that looked like it could be the Rio Grande," Owens says. "We said we were on the border. The reporter I was with simulated the beheading, walked across, and that's what we posted."

Owens says the video of the fake ISIS agent garnered a million views overnight. Infowars did not respond to a request for comment.

Though he was troubled by work, Owens says he stayed because the pay was good and Jones was an engaging force. He says a turning point came when he was seated next to a Muslim woman with a young girl on a flight home from a different reporting trip. 

 

"I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn't do anything. There's no reason for suspicion; it's just racism," he says. "It's not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently."

Owens left Infowars in 2017. He has since appeared in the HBO documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones and provided a deposition in the successful defamation case the parents of Sandy Hook children brought against Jones. Owens' new memoir is The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones' Conspiracy Machine.

How Jack Smith connected the dots between GOP lawmakers, Trump aides in 2020 election probe by Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney

 

Former special counsel Jack Smith’s office sought to map a vast web of contacts between President Donald Trump’s most vocal Republican allies in Congress and key players in his bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to newly released records of the Smith-led investigation.

Emails from January 2023 circulated among Smith’s deputies show how top GOP lawmakers communicated directly with individuals later identified by Smith as Trump’s co-conspirators in his election interference plot, including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

 

Those contacts became the Smith office’s justification for pursuing subpoenas of phone logs for more than a dozen Republican officials. That includes former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who were previously known to be of interest to Smith’s investigators — as well as then-Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, who is now Trump’s head of the EPA and is among other lawmakers not previously known to be under Smith’s microscope.

A spokesperson for Zeldin did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment.

These Republicans and others are featured in the materials released Tuesday by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, who has been leading a probe into Smith’s work. The Iowa Republican made the documents public to help support the party’s widely held position that Smith was politically motivated in his pursuit of criminal charges against Trump during the Biden administration — for efforts to overturn the election and his mishandling of classified documents.

“They were not aiming low. They were trying to take out everyone on the other side,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose data Smith’s office sought to obtain via subpoena, said Tuesday.

Cruz delivered the remarks while presiding over a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing comparing Smith’s investigations into Trump to the Watergate scandal that took down former President Richard Nixon and led to new rules cracking down on government corruption.

 

But the newly public documents also offer a more expansive picture of who Smith’s team believed might have had information that could bolster their probe into the campaign to undermine the 2020 election results that culminated in a deadly riot.

The special counsel’s office found that Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) had communicated with Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is now director of the CIA. A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zeldin corresponded with Meadows and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who was a close Trump ally in the effort. Cruz had calls with Meadows, Eastman and Ratcliffe and was one of several senators who received a call from Giuliani on Jan. 6.

 

Those contacts explain Smith’s interest in obtaining subpoenas for the phone logs for a dozen current and former Republican members of Congress, which his team said would be used to “establish logical evidentiary inferences regarding Trump and his surrogates’ actions and intent.”

The list of potential subpoena targets also includes Arizona Republican Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar. Spokespeople for Biggs, Gosar and Perry did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the documents, Smith’s team methodically reviewed information provided in a report produced by the Democratic-led House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, suggesting a nexus between the two parallel inquiries.

New documents released by Grassley Tuesday also revealed the scale and scope of Smith’s scrutiny of Kash Patel, a longtime Trump ally who now serves as FBI director. Patel was previously established to have been a target of the special counsel’s investigation, but it was not known that Smith sought to obtain Patel’s phone and text message logs spanning two years.

A FBI spokesperson pointed to a comment FBI spokesman Ben Williamson previously gave to Reuters, in which he said, “The FBI under prior leadership was weaponized in ways the American people are only now beginning to fully grasp.”

 

The materials also provide new details about the backchanneling between former Vice President Mike Pence and Smith’s team regarding Pence’s grand jury testimony, and the efforts investigators took to screen out privileged information before they accessed devices they seized from targets of their probe.

At the Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Democrats continued to defend Smith’s work and urged Republicans to schedule a public hearing with the former special counsel.

“Apparently when the Trump DOJ does it, it’s nothing new; when Jack Smith does it, it’s a modern Watergate,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. “With Patel, it’s obvious why Jack Smith was looking at him.”

 

Grassley has said Smith will receive an invitation to address the full Judiciary panel in the coming months, following testimony the attorney gave to the House Judiciary Committee late last year.

A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment.

 

The Future of E-books in School Libraries by Shannon Maughan

 

School libraries face shrinking budgets and a shifting vendor landscape for digital materials

 

The trajectory of e-book usage in K–12 schools is well-known. Demand was ramping up in the mid- to late 2010s, then took off when Covid lockdowns necessitated a pivot to remote and hybrid learning. After the pandemic, gains continued but at a much lower rate, as educational technologies and publishers’ e-book business models continued to evolve.

Now that federal relief funding through the American Rescue Plan Act has ended and grants from the government’s embattled Institute of Museum and Library Services are far from certain, school library budgets are tighter than ever. And with the recent announcement that Follett Content has partnered with Sora, OverDrive’s student reading app, to deliver digital content to schools, the e-book distribution landscape has become more consolidated. With schools facing limited funds, higher prices, and fewer vendors to choose from, how are they procuring digital book access for their students?

“The goal is to have the most access for our kids,” says Amanda Kordeliski, director of libraries and instructional technology for Norman Public Schools in Oklahoma, and president of AASL. Achieving that aim looks different in different states and school districts. Among the basics, school library vendors are vetted at the state level for their privacy compliance, and school librarians want e-books that align with academic standards and easily integrate with their existing digital library and learning management systems and available electronic devices to assure ease of use for educators and students.

 

In Texas, school boards must now approve library materials proposed for purchase. According to Becky Calzada, district library coordinator for Leander Independent School District (LISD) in central Texas, “A challenge this year has been the implementation of Texas Senate Bill 13, requiring that all new books get approved, so that’s another layer.”

Major distributors of e-books to K–12 school libraries include Sora and Mackin, as well as educational publishers ABDO and Capstone, and larger library database providers EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest, which also host e-books within their products. Other players include such publishers as Lerner, ReferencePoint Press, and Rosen, and digital reading platforms like Epic, which are primarily consumer focused but also offer educational market products. Many school districts use more than one e-book vendor, and pricing structures and business models among those companies vary. But the librarians we spoke with agree that the post-Covid e-book marketplace has generally become more restrictive and more expensive.

 

Decisions, decisions

Kordeliski’s district has maintained an OverDrive account for each school level—elementary, middle, and high school—for more than a decade. “It was really easy to grow the collection initially, because we were able to purchase one copy per one user,” she says. “But most everything has moved to a lending model, where you only get access to an e-book title for a year, or for 26 checkouts. That makes it difficult for smaller districts or rural schools to be able to maintain a robust collection, because they have to repurchase everything almost every year. And that’s inaccessible for a good chunk of the schools in the country, because they just don’t have the e-book budget to be able to do that right now.”

Calzada notes that LISD has been using OverDrive as its primary e-book vendor—it also purchases from Mackin and Capstone—for close to 17 years. When it was first considering OverDrive as a portal, that conversation was rooted in devices, she says. “Was it device agnostic? We also had to think about accessibility in terms of internet access. One of the positives for OverDrive is that when a student downloads an e-book on their device, they can take it home and they don’t need additional internet access for it.”

 

But Calzada realizes that Sora may not be the best fit for everyone, which is worrying for some schools and librarians that had previously relied on Follett Content for e-books. “I have heard a lot of chatter among not just librarians within our institution but beyond, asking, Well, what do I do now?” she says. “There are budget impacts when you shift. When you think about OverDrive, in our case, as an institution, we have roughly 42,000 students across 45 schools feeding into this, and district-level support, too. Whereas if you’re a small, maybe rural library with 500 kids total, the cost impacts are huge.”

In Connecticut’s Colchester Public Schools district, instructional technology coordinator Barbara Johnson recalls her purchase practices from the early days of e-books. “If I were buying, say, the winner of our state’s Nutmeg Award, I would buy a hardcover of that book, three or four paperback copies, and one e-book. That way I could, on a very tight budget, have that book available in many different formats to reach all of my readers.”

But as things shifted after the pandemic, new licensing models became a challenge. “The price of an e-book was sometimes unattainable—just a two-year license for an e-book could be upwards of $75–$100—whereas I could buy a hard copy of a novel for $25 or $30,” Johnson says. “It no longer made sense.”

For the roughly 2,000 students in her district, most recently she has ordered e-books from ABDO, Capstone, Follett, and Mackin. In addition, many teachers in her schools use free teacher classroom accounts offered by reading platform Epic. “We’re buying a little bit here and a little bit there to make a more comprehensive platform, instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket.”

Kristen Luettchau, school library media specialist at Morristown High School in New Jersey, had used Follett as one of her sources for e-books, but when she learned of the Follett-Sora partnership, she began investigating other vendors. “Sora is an option, but the cost is a concern for us,” she says. “Realistically, I don’t think I’m going to be able to use it as our primary vendor, because our district is no longer paying for one of our databases, so that’s going to be an extra $8,000. Between that and the cost of the databases going up usually about 5% each year, it doesn’t leave a lot available for e-books.”

 

In the meantime, Luettchau has been proactive this school year in finding a mix of strategies to get the most for her e-book budget. “I’m working with the young adult librarian at our local public library to coordinate her e-book purchases and to encourage the students to utilize those free resources as well,” she says. “We worked for several weeks in the fall on getting students to sign up for a library card and understand how to download the Libby app and access the e-books and audiobooks directly from the public library.”

When the public librarian had extra funds in the fall, Luettchau says, “we talked about which titles we might want purchased as audiobooks or e-books to supplement print copies of the book students are getting in school from the English department.” This collaboration, she adds, “has alleviated a lot of the pressure on me to be purchasing the most current e-books.”

For nonfiction, Luettchau has mostly been purchasing titles through ABDO and ReferencePoint. “If you purchase a set amount of the e-book licenses, and I’ve been getting the multi-user e-book licenses, they’ll give you the print copies for free,” she says. “And it’s not a subscription, so we have these e-books forever.”

Another tack for managing e-book costs involves joining forces with other libraries to build strength in numbers and negotiate better pricing. Once such venture is the Connecticut Library Consortium, which “attempts to create a complete marketplace of discount contracts for all of the things that libraries need to buy,” according to Ellen Paul, the organization’s executive director. “We have had a great relationship with Follett, and we’re deeply appreciative that they have been providing our school libraries with a discount on e-books.” She says it remains to be seen whether CLC members will retain that discount now that Follett has partnered with OverDrive. “That’s where our concern comes in. We don’t currently have a discount with OverDrive, and we’ve never been able to have a conversation with them about that.”

Paul acknowledges that library e-book lending has been in the news of late due to libraries’ frustration over costs and contract terms. But she believes that relief is on the horizon, in the form of legislation designed to level the playing field. “Connecticut passed a first-in-the-nation e-book reform law last June, which governs contracts that public, school, and academic libraries enter into with e-book publishers and aggregators,” she says. “We didn’t necessarily want to go down the legislative route, but we were forced to because it’s been 20-plus years of e-book lending, and terms, conditions, and pricing get worse every year. Without good-faith negotiation, I think that legislation is not only appropriate but necessary.”

Librarians are holding out hope for a solution that bridges the gap between e-book access and pricing. The answer lies in figuring out “how we can balance the rights of readers and the rights of authors and publishers too,” Calzada says.

Kordeliski adds, “It’s so important for libraries to have e-book and audiobook access for all of our learners. To have that be uniform and equitable across the country would be my personal dream.”

In a perfect world, Johnson envisions that every school, and every learner, has access to a well-staffed, well-funded library, and that publishers understand that school libraries are in a unique position to reach an unlimited number of readers. “We’re checking out to students and their families, and we are their central location,” she says. “I have transportation delivering these students to my door and taking them home every single day. School libraries have a captive audience and create such a bang for the buck.”