The ‘sacred’ pledge that will power the relaunch of far-right militia Oath Keepers by Alexander Lowie

 

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Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia, announced in November 2025 that he will relaunch the group after it disbanded following his prison sentence in 2023.

Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other crimes committed during the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump granted clemency to the over 1,500 defendants convicted of crimes connected to the storming of the Capitol.

Trump did not pardon Rhodes – or some others found guilty of the most serious crimes on Jan. 6. He instead commuted Rhodes’ sentence to time served. Commutation only reduces the punishment for a crime, whereas a full pardon erases a conviction.

As a political anthropologist I study the Patriot movement, a collection of anti-government right-wing groups that include the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Moms for Liberty. I specialize in alt-right beliefs, and I have interviewed people active in groups that participated in the Capitol riot.

Rhodes’ plans to relaunch the Oath Keepers, largely composed of current and former military veterans and law enforcement officers, is important because it will serve as an outlet for those who have felt lost since his imprisonment. The group claimed it had over 40,000 dues-paying members at the height of its membership during Barack Obama’s presidency. I believe that many of these people will return to the group, empowered by the lack of any substantial punishment resulting from the pardons for crimes committed on Jan. 6. 

 

In my interviews, I’ve found that military veterans are treated as privileged members of the Patriot movement. They are honored for their service and military training. And that’s why I believe many former Oath Keepers will rejoin the group – they are considered integral members.

Their oaths to serving the Constitution and the people of the United States are treated as sacred, binding members to an ideology that leads to action. This action includes supporting people in conflicts against federal agencies, organizing citizen-led disaster relief efforts, and protesting election results like on Jan. 6. The members’ strength results from their shared oath and the reverence they feel toward keeping it.

Who are the Oath Keepers?

Rhodes joined the Army after high school and served for three years before being honorably discharged after a parachuting accident in 1986. He then attended the University of Nevada and later graduated from Yale Law School in 2004. He founded the Oath Keepers in 2009.

Oath Keepers takes its name from the U.S military Oath of Enlistment, which states:

“I, , do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States …”

 

Informed by his law background, Rhodes places a particular emphasis on the part of the oath that states they will defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

He developed a legal theory that justifies ignoring what he refers to as “unlawful orders” after witnessing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Following the natural disaster, local law enforcement was assigned the task of confiscating guns, many of which officers say were stolen or found in abandoned homes.

Rhodes was alarmed, believing that the Second Amendment rights of citizens were being violated. Because of this, he argued that people who had military or law enforcement backgrounds had a legal duty to refuse what the group considers unlawful orders, including any that violated constitutionally protected rights, such as the right to bear arms.

In the Oath Keepers’ philosophy, anyone who violates these rights are domestic enemies to the Constitution. And if you follow the orders, you’ve violated your oath.

Explaining the origin of the group on the right-wing website “The Gateway Pundit” in November 2025, Rhodes said: “… we were attacked out of the gate, labeled anti-government, which is absurd because we’re defending the Constitution that established the federal government. We were labeled anti-government extremists, all kinds of nonsense because the elites want blind obedience in the police and military.”

Rebuilding and restructuring

In 2022, the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets leaked more than 38,000 names on the Oath Keepers’ membership list.

The Anti-Defamation League estimated that nearly 400 of the names were active law enforcement officers, and that over 100 were serving in the military. Some of these members were investigated by their workplaces but never disciplined for their involvement with the group.

Some members who were not military or law enforcement did lose their jobs over their affiliation. But they held government-related positions, such as a Wisconsin alderman who resigned after he was identified as a member.

This breach of privacy, paired with the dissolution of the organization after Rhodes’ sentencing, will help shape the group going forward.

In his interview with “The Gateway Pundit,” where he announced the group’s relaunch, Rhodes said: “I want to make it clear, like I said, my goal would be to make it more cancel-proof than before. We’ll have resilient, redundant IT that makes it really difficult to take down. … And I want to make sure I get – put people in charge and leadership everywhere in the country so that, you know, down the road, if I’m taken out again, that it can still live on under good leadership without me being there.”

There was a similar shift in organizational structure with the Proud Boys in 2018. That’s when their founder, Gavin McInnes, stepped away from the organization. His departure came after a group of Proud Boys members were involved in a fight with anti-fascists in New York. 

 

Prosecutors wanted to try the group as a gang. McInnes, therefore, distanced himself to support their defense that they weren’t in a gang or criminal organization. Ultimately, two of the members were sentenced to four years in prison for attempted gang assault charges.

Some Proud Boys members have told me they have since focused on creating local chapters, with in-person recruitment, that communicate on private messaging apps. They aim to protect themselves from legal classification as a gang. It also makes it harder for investigators or activist journalists to monitor them.

This is referred to as a cell style of organization, which is popular with insurgency groups. These groups are organized to rebel against authority and overthrow government structures. The cell organizational style does not have a robust hierarchy but instead produces smaller groups. They all adhere to the same ideology but may not be directly associated.

They may have a leader, but it’s often acknowledged that they are merely a figurehead, not someone giving direct orders. For the Proud Boys, this would be former leader Enrique Tarrio. Proud Boys members I’ve spoken to have referred to him as a “mascot” and not their leader.

Looking ahead

So what does the Rhodes interview indicate about the future of Oath Keepers?

Members will continue supporting Trump while also recruiting more retired military and law enforcement officers. They will create an organizational structure designed to outlive Rhodes. And based on my interactions with the far-right, I believe it’s likely they will create an organizational structure similar to that of the cell style for organizing.

Beyond that, they are going to try to own their IT, which includes hosting their websites and also using trusted online revenue generators.

This will likely provide added security, protecting their membership rolls while making it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to investigate them in the future.

'A large amount of weirdness': The long, strange success of the Grateful Dead by Greg McKevitt

 

The band performed their first concert on 4 December 1965. In 1981, their leader Jerry Garcia talked to the BBC about how they became superstars but "never sold out".

The Grateful Dead began life as kings of the 1960s West Coast psychedelic scene, yet they were untouched by glamour. Long after bad vibes and commercialism soured the hippy dream, their heady mix of lengthy improvised guitar jams and communal celebration remained defiantly unchanged, until the 1995 death of leader Jerry Garcia in rehab at the age of 53. While contemporaries such as the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane adapted to shifting trends, the Dead remained essentially the same.

It was hardly a recipe for superstardom, yet when Forbes magazine listed the world's 40 highest-paid entertainers in 1990–91, the Grateful Dead ranked 20th, with an estimated $33 million – putting them within touching distance of pop sensation MC Hammer. What a long, strange trip it had been for a band who started out three decades earlier playing in San Francisco's Victorian ballrooms to soundtrack hallucinogenic drug experiments.

 With no obvious star performer and a fiercely non-commercial ethos, the Dead were a genuine underground band. Their success wasn't built on record sales – although in 1987 they scored an unlikely MTV hit with Touch of Grey, thanks to a video featuring life-size skeleton marionettes. Instead, they cultivated a devoted tribe of Deadheads who followed them from town to town in a travelling circus of hippiedom.

 

Garcia said in 1988: "To the kids today, the Grateful Dead represents America: the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure." Fans gathered in venue car parks long before showtime for Shakedown Street, informal markets that sprung up and were named after the band's 1978 album. They never sold out, refusing corporate sponsorship and even encouraging the trading of bootleg tapes. They also prided themselves on ever-changing setlists, so devotees still pore over the nightly variations sparked by the band's unique chemistry.

We would come into a town and they wouldn't let us into the hotel, whether we had reservations or not – Jerry Garcia

In 1981, the BBC's Newsnight was on hand to witness the excitement of the faithful at the Dead's return to London for the first time in seven years, playing four epic nights at the Rainbow Theatre. Across the city in the Blitz nightclub, the New Romantic pop scene was in full swing, with bands such as Spandau Ballet reacting with dandyish flair to the ugly aesthetic of punk. 

 While Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia – described as "now an avuncular 38" by Newsnight’s Robin Denselow – could not have stood out more from these musicians, his band had also been forged in the white-hot fires of a subcultural phenomenon. In 1967, the so-called Summer of Love had seen thousands of hippies descend on San Francisco. The small suburb of Haight-Ashbury became the global epicentre of "flower power", and the Grateful Dead were its house band.

 Garcia told Denselow that the times might have changed but the scene remained just as vital all those years later. "[Haight-Ashbury's hippies] are still pretty much doing what they were doing then, but… the difference is now they have 15 years of experience under their belts and have gotten to be experts in what they do, just like we've gotten to be experts in what we do – sort of." He said that when the Grateful Dead first started out, the US was largely unchanged from the staid 1950s era: "A lot of times we would come into a town and they wouldn't let us into the hotel, whether we had reservations or not… As soon as they saw long hair and eccentricity of any sort, you know, that was it."

 

While they may have come in peace, it's easy to see how these wild-haired hippies' transgressive lifestyle might have alarmed the uninitiated. Indeed, the band's formation was inextricably linked to the glorification of taking LSD. The hallucinogenic drug was discovered in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. When a few years later he accidentally ingested some of the drug through his fingertips, he experienced visions of what he described as. "fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours". While Hofmann argued for decades that LSD could help treat mental illness, others envisaged very different applications for its potentially dangerous psychedelic properties.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA created a secret programme to research mind control. Known by the code name MK-Ultra, it funded experiments on unsuspecting patients, among them people in psychiatric institutions and prison inmates, using methods including administering psychedelic drugs, sensory deprivation and electroshock treatment. In 1960, CIA-funded researchers at the Menlo Park Hospital in California were paying students $40 a day to take LSD.

One volunteer was Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Awed by the hallucinogenic power of the still-legal drug, Kesey began to distribute it to his friends and in 1964, he assembled a string of like-minded people dubbed the Merry Pranksters and set off across the country in a brightly painted bus. The trip was chronicled by writer Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A year later in California, he began staging a series of parties he called Acid Tests to promote the taking of LSD. The second event on 4 December in San Jose was where the Grateful Dead played their first gig. The band had played before as The Warlocks, but it turned out that there was another group with the same name, so Garcia's gang switched to the name by which they would be known for the next few decades.

 

Eight months later, the Dead first appeared on the BBC – not on a music show but on the current affairs programme Panorama. In an episode titled California 2000, reporter John Morgan explored San Francisco's psychedelic dance halls, where the "private world becomes public as strange colours and lights created out of oil, water and ketchup are bounced off walls and people".  As the band played The Mind Benders, a swirling organ-driven garage rocker, Morgan noted the aim was to "produce the circumstances of a psychiatric sensorium… new perceptions of reality created by an assault on the senses".

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Garcia was already a fixture on the San Francisco music scene, having been in both folk and blues bands, but LSD was a whole new influence. Interviewed shortly before his death in 1995, he told the BBC: "Frequently with psychedelics, I couldn't talk to anybody. I couldn't make myself understood or understand others, but I could communicate with music." He described the band's early style as "R&B with a large amount of weirdness inserted in it". Improvision, "the first thing I learned in music", was at its heart. "All of a sudden we could be doing a simple R&B song and it would turn into a 20-minute thing," he said.

The band continued to attract new generations of followers, and their lengthy concerts encompassed a range of musical influences from bluegrass to jazz. For the Dead, playing live was everything. Bassist Phil Lesh told the BBC in 1993: "What the Grateful Dead has done is taken the old saw about building an audience and carried it to the absolute ultimate, because all we do is build our audience. I guess the original idea was to build an audience so we can sell records – we just built the audience and kept going back and playing to them."  

As Garcia told Newsnight: "What we're really interested in doing is communicating to minds." Guitarist Bob Weir added: "We learned to play our instruments better. We learn to play off of each other better. We learn to listen to each other better. And at this point, we can play more concisely. We can play more music with less notes." After 16 years of life on the road, Garcia was as committed as ever: "It's who we are. It's what we do with our lives, really."

 

Why is the Federal Reserve independent, and what does that mean in practice? by David Wessel

 What does “independence” mean?

The Federal Reserve was created by an act of Congress in 1913 and, since 1977, has been charged with promoting maximum employment and stable prices. In practice, independence means that the Fed can set interest rates without interference from Congress or the White House even if politicians are unhappy with Fed policy—and say so publicly. 

Congress could, of course, change the law, but no bill to alter the Fed’s mandate or governance has gone very far. That’s because members of Congress generally recognize that if they or the president were able to directly influence the setting of interest rates, higher inflation would be the likely outcome.

Central banks in nearly all major capitalist democracies are similarly insulated: Elected governments set the central bank’s mandate, but the central banks have the freedom to deploy their tools (primarily interest rates) to achieve that mandate. The rationale is that elected politicians will tend to favor lower interest rates now to boost the economy, but this comes at the expense of more inflation later, and that’s not in the best interests of the overall economy. Independent central bankers, the argument goes, can make unpopular decisions, such as raising interest rates, when circumstances demand. Academic research supports the case that economies with independent central banks tend to have lower—and less volatile—inflation rates.

 Here’s how Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, now at Brookings, put it in a 2010 speech: “Policymakers in a central bank subject to short-term political influence may face pressures to overstimulate the economy to achieve short-term output and employment gains that exceed the economy’s underlying potential. Such gains may be popular at first, and thus helpful in an election campaign, but they are not sustainable and soon evaporate, leaving behind only inflationary pressures that worsen the economy’s longer-term prospects. Thus, political interference in monetary policy can generate undesirable boom-bust cycles that ultimately lead to both a less stable economy and higher inflation…”

“To be clear,” he added, “I am by no means advocating unconditional independence for central banks. First, for its policy independence to be democratically legitimate, the central bank must be accountable to the public for its actions … [T]he goals of policy should be set by the government, not by the central bank itself; and the central bank must regularly demonstrate that it is appropriately pursuing its mandated goals. Demonstrating its fidelity to its mandate in turn requires that the central bank be transparent about its economic outlook and policy strategy.”

What authority does President Trump have to hire and fire members of the Federal Reserve Board?

A president can influence Fed policy mainly through his nomination of members of the Federal Reserve Board, subject to confirmation by the Senate. Jay Powell’s term as Fed chair expires in May 2026, but he could remain a member of the Board until January 2028. There is precedent for this: Marriner Eccles was replaced as Fed chair in 1948 by President Truman, but he continued to serve as a Fed governor until 1951. For more on the terms of Fed officials, read this Hutchins Center explainer.

The Federal Reserve Act says that Fed governors can be removed by the president before the expiration of their terms only “for cause.” In a 1935 case (Humphrey’s Executor v. United States), the Supreme Court ruled that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission due to policy disagreements, because the law said commissioners could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” (FDR said FTC’s work could be “carried out most effectively with personnel of my own selection.”) The Supreme Court has distinguished between agencies, such as the Fed, that are overseen by multi-member boards, and those run by a single individual. In the latter, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court has said the president does have the power to fire the director before his or her term expires.

Powell has said that it is “not permitted under law” for the president to fire him and that he will not resign if Trump asks him to do so. President Trump has said that he doesn’t plan to fire him. But the Fed’s vice chair for (bank) supervision, Michael Barr, resigned that post, to avoid a legal showdown over whether the president could fire him. Barr remains a member of the Board.

Trump has tried to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, arguing that her alleged mortgage fraud is sufficient cause. She has not been formally charged with any wrongdoing and denies any.  Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have allowed her to remain on the Board while the dispute is pending. Former Fed chairs Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Janet Yellen, along with other former economic policy officials from Republican and Democratic administrations, advised the Supreme Court in an amicus brief that removing Cook from the Board immediately “would expose the Federal Reserve to political influences, thereby eroding public confidence in the Fed’s independence and jeopardizing the credibility and efficacy of U.S. monetary policy.”

In March 2025, a federal judge, citing Humphrey’s Executor, ruled that Trump could not legally fire Gwynne Wilcox as a member of the National Labor Relations Board because the law says the president can remove an NLRB member “upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.” The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The Trump Justice Department has said that “for-cause removal provisions that apply to members of multi-member regulatory commissions are unconstitutional.” Added Solicitor General D. John Sauer: “The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration’s policy objectives for a single day—much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation.”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in a footnote in a 2024 decision involving the financing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, described the Federal Reserve Board as “a unique institution with a unique historical background … a special arrangement sanctioned by history.”  That suggests he is likely to side with the Fed should its independence or governance be challenged.

In a May 2025 order involving the president’s power to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Supreme Court echoed the Alito view that the Fed is different and reinforced expectations that that the president cannot fire Fed board members. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct history tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the court said.

What about the presidents of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks?

Each of the 12 Federal Reserve banks has a nine-member, private-sector board of directors which appoints its president, subject to approval of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. The presidents are appointed for a term of five years, all of which expire on the last day of February in years ending in 1 and 6 (that is, in 2026 and 2031). In December 2025, the Board renewed their terms through 2031.

At any one time, five of the 12 presidents serve alongside the seven Fed governors in Washington on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets interest rates. In the 1980s, Sen. John Melcher (D-Mont.) challenged this in federal court, arguing that because the five presidents are “officers” of the United States, they must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In 1987, a federal appeals court rejected that argument, reasoning that Congress could change the law if it didn’t like it. The senator appealed. The Supreme Court didn’t take the case.

A 2019 opinion by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that the Reserve Bank presidents are “inferior officers” under the constitution and therefore are subject to “plenary removal” by the Fed Board of Governors in Washington. The Board, however, has never fired any of the presidents, nor has this opinion ever been tested in litigation.

What are the legal constraints on the Fed’s ability to buy securities and lend money?

The Federal Reserve Act says the Fed can (and does) buy and sell U.S. government securities and mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by the federal government, as well as municipal bonds with a maturity of up to six months. Under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, the Fed has emergency lending authority which it can invoke only with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury. The Fed used this authority extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering loans to municipalities and corporations, among other things. (For details, see this Hutchins Center explainer.)

A major function of the Fed and other central banks is to lend to solvent banks when they need cash to meet depositors’ demands, provided the banks are solvent and can post collateral. These loans, by law, must be “secured to the satisfaction” of the Reserve Bank in whose district the borrower is headquartered. 

What about bank regulation?

The Fed is less independent in its role overseeing the safety and soundness of banks and other financial institutions than in monetary policy. It directly supervises and regulates nearly 3,800 bank holding companies, 700 state-chartered banks, and several financial market utilities, such as the Clearing House Payments Company, which operates a bank-to-bank payments system. The Fed shares some of these responsibilities with other federal agencies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Some Fed regulations on banking can be overturned by Congress under the Congressional Review Act. The act, however, specifically exempts Fed “rules that concern monetary policy.”

In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order that, among other things, said that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) shall “review independent regulatory agencies’ obligations for consistency with the President’s policies and priorities.” The order explicitly excluded the Fed “in its conduct of monetary authority,” but said it applies to the Fed’s “supervision and regulation of financial institutions.”

The executive order also said that OMB can adjust agencies’ “apportionments” to prohibit them from “expending appropriations on particular activities, functions, projects, or objects, so long as such restrictions are consistent with law.” (In OMB parlance, “apportionment” is a legally binding, OMB-approved “plan to use budgetary resources” consistent with congressional appropriations.)

It is not clear if or how that applies to the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory operations. In contrast to most other arms of the federal government, Congress does not decide how much the Fed spends on its operations. The Fed’s income comes primarily from the interest it earns on government securities it buys in the secondary market and, when its revenue exceeds its expenses, it turns the surplus over to the Treasury. 

Wisconsin archaeologists identify 16 ancient canoes in a prehistoric lake ‘parking lot’ by TODD RICHMOND

 

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Archaeologists have identified more than a dozen ancient canoes that Indigenous people apparently left behind in a sort of prehistoric parking lot along a Wisconsin lakeshore.

The Wisconsin Historical Society announced Wednesday that archaeologists have mapped the location of 16 canoes submerged in the lake bed of Lake Mendota in Madison. Tamara Thomsen, the state’s maritime archaeologist, said that the site lies near a network of what were once indigenous trails, suggesting ancient people left the canoes there for anyone to use as they traveled, much like a modern-day e-bike rack.

“It’s a parking spot that’s been used for millennia, over and over,” Thomsen said.

Lake Mendota is a sprawling, 15-square-mile (38.8-square-kilometer) body of water on Madison’s west side. The state Capitol building and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are located on an isthmus that runs between it and Lake Monona, a 5-square-mile (13-square-kilometer) lake to the east.

 The discoveries began in 2021 when archaeologists uncovered the remains of a 1,200-year-old canoe submerged in 24 feet of water in Lake Mendota. The following year they found the remains of a 3,000-year-old canoe, a 4,500-year-old canoe under it and a 2,000-year-old canoe next to it, alerting researchers that there was probably more to the site than they expected. 

 Working with Sissel Schroeder, a UW-Madison professor who specializes in Native American cultures, and preservation officers with the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Thomsen has now located the remains of 12 additional canoes, Thomsen said. 

 Radiocarbon dating shows the oldest of the 16 canoes dates back to 5,200 years ago, making it the third oldest canoe discovered in eastern North America, she said. The two oldest were found in Florida, with the oldest of them dating back 7,000 years, Thomsen said.

Wisconsin experienced a drought beginning about 7,500 years ago and lasting to around 1000 B.C., Thomsen said. The lake in the area where the canoes were found was probably only 4 feet (1.2 meters) deep over that period, she said, making it a good place to disembark for foot travel. The canoes likely were shared among community members and stored at designated points like the Lake Mendota site. 

Users would typically bury the canoes in sediment in waist- to chest-deep water so they wouldn’t dry out or prevent them from freezing, Thomsen said.

 Travelers may have been headed to Lake Wingra, a 321-acre (130-hectare) lake on Madison’s south side, Dr. Amy Rosebrough, the state archaeologist, said. The Madison area is part of the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk Nation, which views one of the springs that feeds Lake Wingra as a portal to the spirit world, she said.

“The canoes remind us how long our people have lived in this region and how deeply connected we remain to these waters and lands,” Bill Quackenbush, the Ho-Chunk’s tribal preservation officer, said in a news release.

Thomsen speculated that if the drought did begin 7,500 years and archaeologists are finding canoes beneath other canoes, they may eventually find a 7,000-year-old canoe in the lake. That could mean Indigenous people that predated many of Wisconsin’s tribes may have used the lake, she said.

 Thomsen spends most of her days uncovering Great Lakes shipwrecks and works on the canoe project only one day per week. But she called that work the most impactful she has ever done as an archaeologist because she engages with Wisconsin tribes, learns their history and tells their stories.

“I think I’ve shed more tears over this,” she said. “Talking with the Indigenous people, sometimes I sit here and just get goose bumps. It just feels like (the work is) making a difference. Each one of these canoes gives us another clue to the story.”

 

‘60 Minutes’ story shelved by Bari Weiss streamed in Canada — and instantly spread across the web by Brian Stelter

 

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss decided to shelve a planned “60 Minutes” story titled “Inside CECOT,” creating an uproar inside CBS, but the report has reached a worldwide audience anyway.

On Monday, some Canadian viewers noticed that the pre-planned “60 Minutes” episode was published on a streaming platform owned by Global TV, the network that has the rights to “60 Minutes” in Canada.

The preplanned episode led with correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s story — the one that Weiss stopped from airing in the US because she said it was “not ready.”

Several Canadian viewers shared clips and summaries of the story on social media, and within hours, the videos went viral on platforms like Reddit and Bluesky. 

 “Watch fast,” one of the Canadian viewers wrote on Bluesky, predicting that CBS would try to have the videos taken offline.

 Progressive Substack writers and commentators blasted out the clips and urged people to share them. “This could wind up being the most-watched newsmagazine segment in television history,” the high-profile Trump antagonist George Conway commented on X.

A CBS News spokesperson had no immediate comment on the astonishing turn of events. 

 Alfonsi’s report was weeks in the making. Weiss screened it for the first time last Thursday night. The story was finalized on Friday, according to CBS sources, and was announced in a press release that same day.

On Saturday morning, Weiss began to change her mind about the story and raised concerns about its content, including the lack of responses from the relevant Trump administration officials.

But networks like CBS sometimes deliver taped programming to affiliates like Global TV ahead of time. That appears to be what happened in this case: The Friday version of the “60 Minutes” episode is what streamed to Canadian viewers. 

 The inadvertent Canadian stream is “the best thing that could have happened,” a CBS source told CNN on Monday evening, arguing that the Alfonsi piece is “excellent” and should have been televised as intended. 

 People close to Weiss have argued that the piece was imbalanced, however, because it did not include interviews with Trump officials.

Weiss told staffers on Monday, “We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.” However, in an earlier memo to colleagues, Alfonsi asserted that her team tried, and their “refusal to be interviewed” was “a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”

At the end of the segment that streamed on Global TV’s platform, Alfonsi said Homeland Security “declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.”

The segment included sound bites from President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. But it was clearly meant to be a story about Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador, not about the officials who implemented Trump’s mass deportation policy. 

 “Tonight, you’ll hear from some of those men,” Alfonsi said in her intro. “They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside CECOT, one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons, where they say they endured four months of hell.” 

 “The torture was never-ending. Interminable,” said Luis Munoz Pinto, one of the former detainees interviewed by Alfonsi. “There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating or vomiting on themselves.”

Alfonsi also interviewed a representative of Human Rights Watch, which published an 81-page report in November about abuses at the prison. 

 In a memo to colleagues on Sunday saying that Weiss had “spiked” the story, Alfonsi asserted that it was done for “political,” not editorial reasons.

Philippe Bolopion, executive director at Human Rights Watch, told CNN that Alfonsi’s allegation was troubling, “especially in light of pressures on press freedom in the US.”

“We look forward to the segment airing,” Bolopion said. “The evidence is clear regardless of what airs on 60 Minutes: the Trump administration disappeared these Venezuelan men to a mega prison in El Salvador where they were systematically tortured.”

 

The celibate, dancing Shakers were once seen as a threat to society – 250 years later, they’re part of the sound of America by Christian Goodwillie

Director Mona Fastvold’s new film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” features actor Amanda Seyfried in the titular role: the English spiritual seeker who brought the Shaker movement to America. The trailer literally writhes with snakes intercut amid scenes of emotional turmoil, religious ecstasy, orderly and disorderly dancing – and sex. Intense and sometimes menacing music underpins it all: the sounds of the enraptured, singing their way to a fantastic and unimaginable ceremony.

The trailer is riveting and unsettling – just as the celibate Shakers were to the average observer during their American emergence in the 1780s.

I sit on the Board of Trustees of Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, where some of the film was shot, though I have not seen the film, which is due to be released on Christmas Day. I was the curator at Hancock from 2001 to 2009 and have studied the Shakers for more than 25 years, publishing numerous books and articles on the sect.

Fascination with the Shakers is enduring, as are they. The sect once had several thousand members; today, three Shakers remain, practicing the faith at their village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, as they have since 1783. 

 Many characteristics of Shaker life and belief set them apart from other Protestant Christians, but their name derives from one of the most obvious. Early Shakers manifested the holy spirit that they believed dwelled within them by shaking violently in worship. While they called themselves “Believers,” observers dubbed them “Shakers.” Members eventually adopted the name, although officially they are the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing.

The Shakers developed unique worship practices in both music and dance that expressed their faith. Until the 1870s, Shaker music was monophonic, with a single melodic line sung in unison and without instrumental accompaniment. Many of their melodies, Shakers said, were given to them by spirits. Some of these charmed and haunting strains have permeated through broader American musical culture.

 New form of family

The Shakers first began to organize in Manchester, England, in 1747. By 1770, they came to believe that the spirit of Christ had returned through their leader, “Mother” Ann Lee. However, “Mother Ann was not Christ, nor did she claim to be,” the Shakers state. “She was simply the first of many Believers wholly embued by His spirit, wholly consumed by His love.”

In 1774, Lee led eight followers to North America, settling near what is now Albany, New York. As is still true today, Shakers held their property in common, following the model of the earliest Christians that is recorded in the Bible’s Book of Acts. At its height, the movement had 19 major communities

 

Shakers work out their salvation each day by physical and spiritual labor. They do not subscribe to the common Christian doctrine that Jesus’ death atoned for the sins of mankind. And Shakers are celibate – one of the practices that most startled their neighbors in 18th- and 19th-century America. Lee taught that humanity could not follow Christ in the work of spiritual regeneration, or salvation, “while living in the works of natural generation, and wallowing in their lusts.” For Shakers, celibacy is one way people can reunite their spirits with God, who they believe is dually male and female.

Almost every Shaker, therefore, joined the faith as a convert, or the child of converts. Families who joined their communities were effectively dissolved: Husbands and wives became brothers and sisters; parents and children the same. Early accounts report that, in extreme instances, children publicly denounced their parents and pummeled their genitals in an effort to subdue the flesh and its earthly ties. 

 Shaking with the spirit

The Shakers of Lee’s day – now seen as American as apple pie – were regarded as a fundamental threat to society. In part, that stemmed from their perceived dissolution of families. But many outsiders were also alarmed by their ritual dances, whose intensity and emotion demonstrated a physicality seemingly incongruous with their celibacy.

In the early years, Shaker worship was an unbridled individual expression of spiritual enthusiasm. Eventually, it transformed into highly choreographed dances. At first, these were agonizingly slow and laborious series of movements designed to mortify the flesh – to help the spiritual overcome the physical – and instill discipline and union among the members.

 

What kind of music accompanied such striking movements? The earliest Shaker songs, including ones attributed to Lee, have no intelligible language. Rather, they were sung using vocalized syllables or “vocables,” such as lo-de-lo or la-la-la or vi-vo-vum. Shakers invented a new form of notation to record their songs, using letters adorned with a variety of hashmarks to denote pitch and rhythm.

Early observers of the Shakers noted the effects of their unique musical practice:

They begin by sitting down and shaking their heads in a violent manner, … one will begin to sing some odd tune, without words or rule; after a while another will strike in; … after a while they all fall in and make a strange charm … The mother, so called, minds to strike such notes as makes a concord, and so form the charm.

The Shakers were meticulous recordkeepers regarding every aspect of community life. Music was no exception. More than 1,000 volumes of Shaker music survive in manuscript: tens of thousands of songs dating from Lee’s day to the mid-20th century.

Scholars, musicians and researchers have extracted treasures from this repertoire. Most notably, composer Aaron Copland adapted Elder Joseph Brackett’s famous 1848 tune “Simple Gifts” for “Appalachian Spring”: the ballet that won Copland a Pulitzer in 1945. Hidden gems must still abound in the remaining unplumbed depths of Shaker manuscript songbooks.

In contrast, the Shakers left few detailed instructions for their dance. But eyewitness accounts abound, and scholars have made careful and respectful reconstructions. 

 Living faith

Fastvold’s film evokes the chaotic, violent world of the first Shakers in America, who converted farm families along the New York-Massachusetts border during the Revolutionary War. Some outsiders regarded the sect as an English plot to neutralize the populace with religious fervor, opening the way for a British reconquest of New England. 

 

The director’s vision, incarnated by Seyfried’s bewitching presence and voice, invokes the uncanny atmosphere of early Shakerism. However, Shakerism is a living, ever-changing faith, whose presence in America is older than the country itself. The fact is, Shakers have not regularly danced in worship since the 1880s – or less than half of the total time the sect has endured.

Outsiders judged and named the Shakers in reaction to their external qualities in worship. The movement’s endurance and core, however, lies in its spiritual teachings. As the Believers asserted in their 1813 hymn “The Shakers,” “Shaking is no foolish play.”

America Needs a Tech Skeptic in the 2028 Race by Jonathan Martin

 A long-shot 2028 run by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox could force tech and social media into the center of the presidential debate.

 At the end of a forum in Washington this week dedicated to addressing political violence and featuring Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Spencer Cox of Utah, moderator Savannah Guthrie asked if one of the participants intended to run for president.

“One of us is not,” Cox quickly responded, meaning himself. He should change his mind.

 And not because Cox would be a Good Republican who’d no more indulge in Trumpian race-baiting about “filthy, dirty, disgusting” migrants than he would bring a stash of Maker’s Mark with him to the White House.

No, it’s not the teetotaling Mormon, father-of-four who wants to “disagree better” and modeled bipartisan collegiality through his earnest chat with Shapiro who’d have the most impact on the 2028 campaign.

It’s the other Cox, the one full of righteous indignation about the impact of social media on children and phone addiction on all of us, who believes tech companies should be confronted like the opioid makers of yesteryear. It’s the second-term governor who harnessed the internet earlier than most of his contemporaries, and still fights his Twitter addiction, but who has since become radicalized and, by his own admission, is now fully “a tech pessimist.”

Cox received his loudest applause at the forum, which was held at the National Cathedral, when he said: “If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at the social media companies. These are the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the history of the world, and they’re profiting off of destroying our kids and destroying our country.”

 

There are few political figures in either party more passionate about the impact of technology. And that just happens to be the most consequential, if amorphous, issue looming ahead of the next election. As concern over algorithms gives way to panic over artificial intelligence, it’s clear every candidate will need an answer on what’s poised to reshape education, the economy, geopolitics, warfare and, oh, most every other facet of American life.

That includes our democracy itself. I’ve had more than one would-be presidential candidate privately concede to me that they’ve begun wrestling with whether democracy and social media are compatible.

This isn’t to say the 50-year-old Cox has all the answers or that somebody so radicalized would even be the best to determine how to address an enormously complicated and nuanced challenge.

 

The matter of whether we control technology or it controls us, however, is only becoming more fundamental. And if you don’t believe me, consider how you feel each time you find yourself unconsciously reaching for your phone like a three-pack-a-day smoker — or, worse, how you feel watching your kid stare into his or her preferred screen.

Cox would be a long shot for the GOP nomination, to put it charitably. However, he’d force the debate over technology into the main currents of the next election, same as those contenders who thrust campaign finance or the deficit into past races.

As with other cause candidates, the Utahn would find himself bathed in media attention, the longshot-with-a-slingshot David confronting the market-cap Goliaths of our time.

 

Cox would likely have some company across the aisle.

While the Republican used the Cathedral event to say he’d support a 16-and-under ban on social media access of the sort the Australians just passed, there was a Democrat who beat Cox to the punch earlier in the day.

“I think it’s time for America to pick up its game and do the same,” said former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel about the Australian law. “Look, when it comes to our adolescents, it’s either gonna be adults or the algorithms. One of them is going to raise the kids.”

 

Emanuel, a believer in the Clinton theory that every election is about the future, is convinced 2028 will be more about life after Donald Trump than the present. And he’s taken note of Cox’s denunciations of social media, including the governor’s pleas after the Charlie Kirk killing that people get offline and “touch grass.” (When I joked with Emanuel at the time that he and Cox, the Jew and the Mormon, could form a unity ticket, Rahm said: “We do both believe in Zion.”)

This is all to say there could be two media-savvy candidates in each party’s primary taking a hard line on what’s hardly a niche issue now, a modern-day reform version of how Bill Bradley and John McCain teamed up on campaign finance reform in the 2000 primary.

 Cox and Emanuel would force their competitors to formulate their own positions on the industry that’s single-handedly propping up the stock market while also creating both enormous opportunities and difficulties across every element of society. If you read Puck journalist Peter Hamby’s dispatch from the Democratic Governors Association conference earlier this month, you’ll see how many in politics today don’t know what to say about the topic.

 

After Cox this week came out in favor of the Australia youth ban, Shapiro expressed unease with going quite so far — which was, notably, met with silence from a heavily liberal audience.

“I understand where Gov. Shapiro is coming from, I was there once,” Cox responded, adding, “the damage is just too great on our kids now, we don’t give them a driver’s license when they’re 12.”

Which prompted more applause.

The data keeps piling up.

 

This week, a handful of strategists from both parties released a report from a poll of men aimed at understanding “the Manosphere,” which revealed that a majority of males sampled said their social media feeds had gone more extreme — and that the most controversial “content reaches the men who are online the most, especially young Black and Hispanic men.”

As for 2028, it’s particularly important that Republicans have a candidate willing to force the big tech question into the campaign. That’s because the Trump White House has taken such a laissez-faire approach toward AI and really any check on the Silicon Valley titans. It has let crypto companies run rampant while the Trump family cashes in, allowed Nvidia to sell chips to China (thus giving up our best advantage in the AI race), and generally offered tech moguls carte blanche so long as they pay tribute to Mr. Trump. The administration is not only not wrestling with a great dilemma of our times — they’re acting like it doesn’t exist.

 Add it all up — AI’s impact on jobs and power bills, plus the phone’s impact on kids — and you can see the wave of backlash building ahead of the next presidential election.

 

And with apologies to Steve Bannon — I know Cox is hardly your preferred populist avatar to take up the fight against the broligarchs — there’s no better-positioned figure to take up the cause.

While he first drew widespread national attention for his remarks after the Kirk killing, Cox has been aggressive as governor: Utah is suing Snapchat, has banned phones in classrooms and is now, I’m told by a source close to Cox, crafting legislation to pursue a digital tax a la the sin taxes on tobacco and alcohol.

 

The governor has also been in close contact with mogul Frank McCourt’s group, Project Liberty, which is focused on addressing data ownership. Cox is most consumed with the societal impact of technology, though, whether it’s on children’s brains or adult loneliness. He’s met with a variety of thinkers on the issue, ranging from The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt to Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who last month urged people to “wake the f up” about AI risks.

Mostly, though, it’s personal for Cox, who’s watched the impact of phones on his own children, those of his contemporaries and himself.

“We all thought, at least I did, that social media would bring us together, and it has been the exact opposite,” he told me at the National Governors Association conference this past summer.

 So what can be done?

Run, Spencer, Run.

 

The brawl over the Colorado River is about more than water by Annie Snider

 The lifeblood of the West is drying up — and scrambling state and local politics.

 Western states are brawling over the future of the Colorado River — with President Donald Trump looming in the background.

Talks kicking off Tuesday in Las Vegas will help determine whether the Trump administration has to step in and take the political heat of deciding how to divide the shrinking river’s water supplies among powerful industries and more than 40 million people — a fight that includes the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, politically influential farmers and ranchers, and burgeoning semiconductor and artificial intelligence companies.

 It’s the highest-stakes water fight the U.S. has seen in more than a century. So far, there’s little hope for a breakthrough.

 Instead, local tensions and parochial fault lines have driven leaders of the seven states that share the river’s water — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming upstream, and California, Nevada and Arizona further down — to demonize each other rather than make politically perilous compromises.

“Water politics are not fun. Nobody wants to deal with them,” Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who has said she’d be open to intervention from the Trump administration, said in an interview.

 Driving the stalemate is the steep economic and political price that comes with losing access to water. Deep tensions run between cities and farms within each state. The booming tourist and outdoor industries are intertwined with the river and its landscape. And every governor is keen to lure new residents and industries to their state.

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to the places — and the people — who explain why talks are at an impasse, and what they stand to gain or lose if negotiators can’t come to a solution.

 

Phoenix consistently ranks as one of the country’s fastest-growing cities, with new residents drawn by the relatively affordable cost of living, abundant sunshine and strong job market that’s powered by a booming high-tech sector.

But the city, which gets 40 percent of its water supplies from the Colorado River, is one of the most legally vulnerable users along the waterway. That’s because the 336-mile-long canal system that funnels flows across the central Arizona desert is the first in line for cuts under the century-old legal system that governs Western water.

That risk weighs on Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democratic rising star who represents one of the most politically competitive regions in the nation.

 Gallego has credited her past work on water for helping her win office in 2019. As mayor, she has led efforts to reduce the city’s risk, including with plans for an advanced water purification plant designed to cleanse 8 million gallons a day of treated sewage water for drinking.

 

But she argues it’s not just Arizonans who have a stake in what happens to Phoenix’s water supply. The region has become a hub for chip manufacturing, data centers and other technologies crucial to the national security and telecommunications sectors.

“If you want our nation’s Defense Department to have the best technology to keep us safe, having water in central Arizona is important to you,” she said — a point that Hobbs and top state legislators of both parties made recently to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

 The Colorado River originates in Rocky Mountain National Park northwest of Boulder, but its flows are almost immediately siphoned away from their natural course through the rural, agriculture-heavy Western slope. That water ends up in booming cities on the other side of the Continental Divide.

 Grand County, which sits on the park’s Western doorstep, is home to some of the state’s biggest diversions.

That’s a sore point for residents including County Commissioner Merrit Linke, a fourth-generation rancher who lives on the property his great-grandfather homesteaded in 1883.

“Water flows to money, water flows to people, water flows to voices. And there’s not a lot of people in agriculture,” he said.

 

Voices like his have helped shape Colorado’s opposition to any obligations to reduce its Colorado River water use.

Five years ago, the state explored conservation programs that would pay farmers and ranchers who volunteered to cut their use in a given year by fallowing fields or switching to less thirsty crops. But those efforts stalled out.

“I think some of us — myself included — felt like this was just going to be a research project that solidified the research that says, ‘Yeah, it’s OK to just dry us up,’” Linke said.

While Linke’s three grown children are all involved in agriculture, he doesn’t expect any to take over the family homestead. He believes that the region is becoming increasingly inhospitable to ranchers, thanks to the water fight and policies like the reintroduction of wolves.

“What is the point where it’s so bad that we want to just be done?” he asked

 For years, the Jicarilla Apache Nation leased half its water from a Colorado River tributary to coal-fired power plants in the Four Corners region. The arrangement allowed the tribe to generate income from its water rights, money it put toward building pipelines and other infrastructure that could eventually deliver the water to homes on the reservation.

 

But when those power plants began shuttering, the tribe found itself without a buyer.

Then, over coffee at one of the Las Vegas river conferences, water experts from the tribe, the state of New Mexico and The Nature Conservancy hatched a creative plan.

The idea was to have New Mexico lease the water, giving the state control over a pool it might someday use to meet its legal obligations to send water downstream. In the meantime biologists could use that water to experiment with flows and time releases to benefit endangered fish.

 

We’re hoping it serves as a model, helping support not only water to the communities, but as well to the endangered species and enhancing water security for all the surrounding communities,” said Avery Tafoya, a tribal councilman who has championed the project.

The arrangement had another benefit: It gave the Jicarilla a chance to sit at the table with state and federal leaders.

“It’s a sovereignty flex for all the Native American people involved,” Tafoya said.

 The water lease is exactly the type of innovative arrangement benefiting multiple parties that many experts say the Colorado River region will need to adapt to using less water.

But while the tribe believes its deal is protected because of a unique aspect of New Mexico law, other such efforts would probably depend on states being able to agree on a deal rather than duking it out in court. 

 The Grand Canyon is the crown jewel of the National Park system, and for many Americans, a rafting trip through its majestic walls is the adventure of a lifetime.

But what that trip looks like is fundamentally determined by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the massive dam just upstream. Its decisions on when to release water — based primarily on power demand — have devastated the river habitat through the canyon while bringing in invasive species. The amount of water that comes through also determines whether a rafting journey is an easy float or a roaring adventure.

 “Fourteen thousand cubic feet per second — whoa, that is a very fun flow,” said Clavey Wendt, who runs the rafting company OARS with his brother.

 But now, thanks to long-term drought, state battles and outdated infrastructure, Wendt thinks the minimum flow that rafting companies used to depend on could become the new maximum. That’s not a problem for his company, which rows customers and gear by hand, but would be a major challenge for other companies that use motorized boats.

The rafting industry has transformed dramatically from the “dirty hippie” 1960s, when Wendt’s parents first secured a permit to operate through the canyon, he said. Today his company caters to high-end customers, serving guacamole and steak at camp. It’s part of an estimated $26 billion outdoor recreation economy along the river that is a major factor in states’ calculations.

 Sand dunes line the road to California’s Imperial Valley. But once you arrive, the landscape is dominated by laser-leveled fields dotted with cantaloupe, lettuce and alfalfa.

The agricultural oasis is made possible by an enormous share of Colorado River water — more than the combined volume allocated to Arizona and Nevada — shuttled 80 miles across the desert through the All-American Canal.

 Those rights, held by the Imperial Irrigation District, have one of the strongest legal claims to the river, and for years local leaders jealously defended them. But positions are shifting now, thanks to a new cohort of leaders and an increasing awareness that — legal rights or not — if water levels fall too low to flow out of the dams, there will be no water.

 

“Obviously you want to protect your priority rights as much as possible, but that risk is always in the back of your mind,” said Gina Dockstader, a fourth-generation Imperial Valley resident who runs an organic date and citrus farm, as well as a trucking business with her husband.

Dockstader said the negotiations are why she ran for the irrigation district board, which she now chairs. From that post she’s thinking not just about the valley’s agricultural economy, but also about its efforts to bring in new businesses that could provide good-paying jobs to a region with a high poverty rate. Those include geothermal, lithium extraction and data centers.

The irrigation district reserves a pool of water for new industrial development, but if its supplies get reduced, developing those businesses will be a lot more complicated and expensive.