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Team Trump is preparing to paint the Florida governor as an establishment hawk who'll put Social Security on the chopping block
“This is where…Trump kicks him in the nuts,” one person close to the ex-president says.
The former president’s determination to obliterate his ascendent rival underscores just how unwilling Trump is to pass the torch and surrender his stewardship of the GOP — even if it shreds the party. As Trump and his ideological heir DeSantis vie for control of the Republican Party, the victor in that power struggle will help determine the precise kind of extreme politics that modern conservatives see as their future: the authoritarian personality cult of a Trump, or the more disciplined MAGAism of a DeSantis.
With everyone on Team Trump expecting DeSantis to challenge the former president in the upcoming GOP presidential primary, Trump and his advisers are plotting a new scorched-earth campaign against DeSantis as soon as he declares his 2024 candidacy.
In the past two months, Trump has talked to political allies about effective ways to pummel DeSantis on both personal issues — recurring concerns about his “likeability” and supposed charisma deficit — and on policy matters such as DeSantis’ hawkish foreign policy, trade stances, COVID-19 posturing, closeness to the party’s “establishment,” and the past votes to slash the social safety net, sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Trump has participated in a handful of discussions on this topic so far, but campaign advisers are trying to keep the finer details of their oppo blitz under wraps for now. Still, that hasn’t stemmed Trump’s enthusiasm for going after DeSantis — his former MAGA-friendly ally — whom the former president now sees as his greatest intra-party foe. In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly quizzed some of those close to him: “What else do we have on [Ron]?” he has asked, according to two sources who’ve heard his query.
On a host of issues, Trump and his lieutenants are itching to portray DeSantis as the “establishment” figure — the one who is preferred by the supposedly squishy party bigwigs like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. One of Trump’s biggest impacts on the GOP was largely shelving the budget-slashing austerity economics of former Speaker Ryan and ushering in a free-spending, debt-ballooning era that combined tax cuts for the rich, with a rhetorical cease-fire on threats to the bennies of the masses — ranging from Social Security to Medicare.
One area in which Trump and his allies smell that kind of weakness in DeSantis is on Social Security (even though President Trump himself displayed an openness toward eventual significant cuts to popular entitlement programs).
“In a Republican primary, only Donald Trump could effectively go after Ron DeSantis for wanting to cut Social Security,”a Republican close to the 2024 Trump campaign tells Rolling Stone. “Trump has a track record of saying the right things on this issue both when it comes to a general election and also Republican voters in a primary. DeSantis’ record in the House [on this topic] is very much of the Paul Ryan, privatize Social Security platform, which is just not where our voters are now.”
For Trump, DeSantis may be easy to paint as a heartless budget-slasher. During his stint in the House from 2013 to 2018, DeSantis was a founding member of Freedom Caucus — the hardest of the hardline members of the GOP conference. “He was part of the team,” Freedom Caucus founder and former Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon tells Rolling Stone. Salmon further praises DeSantis as “one of the most principled people I ever got a chance to work with.”
At the time before the rise of Trumpism in 2015 and 2016, those principles were all about constraining government spending by repealing Obamacare and pursuing “entitlement reform.” In 2013, during DeSantis’ first year in office, he voted for a far-right budget resolution that sought to balance the federal budget in just four years — twice as fast as a competing measure by Ryan that got the Republican budget wonk lampooned as a “zombie-eyed granny starver.”
The draconian cuts DeSantis voted for would have raised the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 70. It would have weakened Medicare by offering seniors “premium support” instead of comprehensive health coverage. And it would have eroded Social Security by giving recipients miserly annual adjustments for inflation. Taken together, the two measures would have cut these bedrock safety-net programs for seniors by more than $250 billion over a decade.
Furthermore, two people who’ve spoken to Trump in the past couple of months about how DeSantis is the “establishment” candidate — a claim Trump likes to hurl, even though Trump is the literal leader and standard-bearer of his own party — say that the ex-president has brought up foreign policy as a means to differentiate himself from the Florida Republican. During at least one dinner late last year, the former president told a longtime associate that DeSantis was fine with “endless wars,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the exchange.
On foreign policy, Trump represented a partial break with the interventionist neoconservative foreign policy that had defined the GOP since the George W. Bush era. Trump trashed GOP hawks like John McCain, hectored NATO allies to cough up more cash for their own defense, played footsie with Vladimir Putin, regularly lambasted U.S. commitments in Afghanistan and Syria (even as he’d escalate military involvement abroad), and forged an open bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
DeSantis has a far more conventional Republican profile. That starts with his decorated military service — during the Global War on Terror he served as a JAG officer at Guantanamo, and deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, as the top legal adviser to SEAL Team One.
MAGA politicians are frequently Russia apologists, seeing Putin as an avatar of the kind of authoritarian Christian nationalism they’d prefer to install in the United States. But on Russia, in particular, DeSantis sounds like a throwback, McCain-style hawk, blasting Putin as an “authoritarian gas station attendant… with some legacy nuclear weapons.”
And when it comes to other aspects of his international and domestic platform, the former president has been using a familiar playbook, and appears to be sticking to it. In a throwback to 2016, he’s described DeSantis in several private conversations in recent weeks as: “Bad on trade.”
True to his belligerent brand of politics, Trump made trade wars a centerpiece of his administration. In a display of executive power, Trump slapped tariffs on everything from solar panels to washing machines to steel — offending geopolitical foes (China), frenemies (India), and allies (Canada) in equal measure. For Trump, hiking taxes on cheap imports became a politically potent — if economically incoherent — display of economic nationalism.
Quietly, DeSantis is far more mainstream on trade. While taking rhetorical swings at “Communist” China, DeSantis has been solicitous of top U.S. trade partners as Florida’s governor, recently hosting a trade conference with Japan in Orlando.
In recent huddles with longtime confidants, Trump has signaled his intention to cudgel DeSantis for the former congressman’s role in advancing a Pacific-rim free trade pact called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). In a 2015 vote, DeSantis voted to give president Obama “fast track” authority to pursue that trade deal with dozens of Asian nations. He joined an unusual bipartisan coalition with some far-left Democrats — including former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Rep. Earl Blumenaur, who represents Portland, Oregon. In Trump’s words, this makes DeSantis somehow “pro-Obama” on trade policy.
Whatever the policy merits of the trade deal, it was bad politics amid rising economic nationalism. Public opinion broke so sharply against TPP that even Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton ran against it in her 2016 presidential bid, and Trump spiked U.S. participation shortly on his first full day in office, having crusaded against it as a “bad, bad deal for American businesses, for workers, for taxpayers.”
But in perhaps his most brazen effort to brand himself as Trumpier than Trump, DeSantis has for months tried to fully ingratiate himself to the anti-vaccine factions of the GOP. It’s a move that Trump — as he told at least one Republican strategist late last year — sees as completely “phony,” given how DeSantis has tried to have it both ways on the coronavirus shots. Several people currently working to get Trump reelected tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his campaign fully intend to troll this hypocrisy in a primary.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis’ approach to controlling the spread of the deadly disease was not much different from governors in blue states, including a move to quarantine visitors from states like Louisiana. And in 2020, he praised then-President Trump for the administration’s determination to cut through red tape to speed the development of vaccines. In May 2021, DeSantis encouraged citizens to get their jabs, telling the public: “The vaccines protect you. Get vaccinated and then live your life.”
But DeSantis has since flip-flopped to cater to the kind of hyper-partisan vaccine rejection that has been championed by many in the MAGA base and in conservative influencer communities. By Jan. 2022, he refused to even say whether he’d received a COVID booster shot (a stance Trump called “gutless”) while insisting vaccination was a “personal decision.”
DeSantis also appointed a prominent vaccine skeptic as surgeon general, who infamously advised young men not to get mRNA vaccines. These days, instead of barnstorming Florida to get the state’s vulnerable population vaccinated, DeSantis holds himself out as crusader against health mandates. This week, he introduced a “Prescribe Freedom” package of legislation to permanently ban mask mandates in schools and businesses, and prohibit “employers from hiring or firing based on mRNA jabs.”
On DeSantis’ end, the MAGA-molded governor has become a star among influential conservative media for delivering a “red wave” in the 2022 election, swaying many top Republican donors and conservative voters who are open to moving on from Trump’s excesses and baggage. Though DeSantis has refused to respond directly to Trump’s ongoing jabs, the governor has occasionally stressed the contrasts between himself and Trump, typically by attempting to get to Trump’s right on select issues, such as pandemic restrictions. However, DeSantis has declined to name Trump when doing so, and has falsely claimed that there’s no tension or feud between him and the ex-president.
“Strategically, I would say DeSantis is probably well inoculated on some of these attacks from Trump,” says David Kochel, who served as a chief strategist in 2016 for Jeb Bush, who of course fell to Trump. “On the pandemic, DeSantis can say,‘You kept Dr. Fauci around, I would have fired him; you locked us down, I opened Florida back up,’” Kochel says. The strategist adds that attacking DeSantis on substance doesn’t play to the former president’s strong suit. “Trump is never at his best when he’s talking about policy; he’s at his best when he’s going after people about culture wars, which DeSantis has kind of perfect pitch on.”
Similarly, Kochel says Trump will have a hard time casting DeSantis as a tool of the establishment. “It’s going to be tricky [because] Trump is the establishment now. He’s the one who ran an administration, recruited a bunch of candidates to look and sound like him. The way Trump went after Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, I do not believe that’s going to work against Ron DeSantis.”
Assessing the odds of Trump’s strategy to take down DeSantis, Kochel simply says: “It will be tough.”
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A missile with a 2,000-pound warhead hit a large residential building last weekend in Dnipro, Ukraine. (photo: Nicole Tung/NYT)
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Force a Crime Organization
Despite the ever-present danger of war, life in Ukraine proceeds almost normally at times. Then, suddenly, it all changes, as it did in Dnipro after a missile struck an apartment complex.
As it was descending through a gray sky last Saturday, traveling at supersonic speed, Rostyslav Yaroshenko, 12, was watching TikTok videos in his kitchen on the third floor at 118 Victory Embankment, a sprawling apartment complex in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Six floors up, Yevgeniy Botvynov had just curled up with his wife, Olha, under a blanket, trying to keep warm during yet another power outage.
On the other side of the building, two couples had gathered in their kitchens on the fourth floor, one of them warming a late lunch, the other doting on their 1-year-old son.
It was what passes for an ordinary Saturday for ordinary Ukrainian people these days, in a place far from the front lines of the war with Russia, but never fully at peace. All day, air-raid warnings were sounding, forcing people to make calculations that have become habitual: Go to a shelter or stay home? Take the elevator or the stairs?
Most of the time, life appears to be normal. And then, suddenly, it does not.
Around 3:40 p.m. on the 325th day of Russia’s full-fledged war in Ukraine, an ordinary Saturday turned extraordinary when the Russian Kh-22 missile slammed into 118 Victory Embankment.
More than 30 apartments were instantly incinerated, with nothing left but a column of swirling ash. Along the singed periphery, some units were sliced apart with almost surgical precision, exposing the contents of people’s living rooms, bathrooms and kitchens to the open air. A bowl of fruit sat unscathed on the table in one kitchen that had been opened up like a dollhouse; in another unit, a painting of a dog hung crookedly on a kitchen wall — though the kitchen was no longer there.
On Thursday, the authorities raised the death toll to 46, including six children; 80 were wounded. It was one of the deadliest single attacks against civilians since the early weeks of the war.
The apartment building, an enormous Soviet-era edifice, forms a large inverted J that curls around an internal courtyard, with the largest section facing the Dnipro River. An estimated 1,700 people called it home.
The missile hit just above the joint where the building began to curve away from the embankment. For those at the center of the impact, death came instantly: The explosion simply vaporized some residents, according to the authorities.
Olha Usova, a 36-year-old dentist, happened to be walking by on her way to a newly opened gym when the missile struck. A single piece of shrapnel pierced her heart, her husband, Eduard, said, killing her instantly. He said he felt that with normal attacks, you had a decent chance of surviving just by remaining indoors. This one was different.
“In this case,” he said, “such a rocket left no chance for survival.”
Many did manage to survive, but that often depended on where in their homes they were at the moment of impact. Many found themselves trapped, the missile’s force having sheared off the stairwells on two sides of the building.
Mr. Botvynov, who had been cuddling with his wife under a blanket, first had to pull himself free from the twisted remains of a balcony that had crashed through his living room. Then he grabbed his heavily bleeding wife and rushed to the front door. When he opened it, there was nothing but a nine-story drop into the smoking rubble below.
Across the void, he saw a woman curled in fetal position, partly buried in debris from her destroyed apartment.
“I thought that it was a corpse,” said Mr. Botvynov, 48. “And then I see her waving her hand.”
It is impossible to say whether the apartment complex in Dnipro was hit intentionally. The Kh-22 is a 1960s-era anti-ship missile launched by Russian bombers that is designed to attack warships at sea, and it may have more limited abilities to accurately attack targets on land.
A power station directly across the river from the complex could have been an intended target, part of Russia’s strategy of starving Ukrainians of electricity, though it was roughly two miles away. The Kremlin has denied that a Russian missile was involved, blaming an errant Ukrainian air-defense missile. Military experts have dismissed this claim as yet another Russian fabrication, pointing to the colossal damage.
The day of the attack was a holiday in Ukraine, when many celebrate what is known as Old New Year, based on the Orthodox Church’s pre-modern calendar. That made Olha Afanasieva, 49, anxious. After 11 months of war, Ukrainians believe that the Kremlin takes a twisted pleasure in attacking on holidays.
“For me, it was such an anxious day,” she said, adding that she had insisted that her husband not go fishing as planned. “I felt like something was about to happen.”
Ms. Afanasieva’s husband, Oleh Valovyi, took things in stride, though. Rockets had rained down on a number of cities that day, and the entire country was under an alert for hours.
“There are not that many bomb shelters,” Mr. Valovyi said, “and you get tired of running there because the air-raid alarms sound practically every day, several times a day.”
The couple were seated at their kitchen table when the missile hit, she with her left side facing a window, he directly in front of it. The blast blew out the window, and glass and debris shredded half of Ms. Afanasieva’s face. But her husband bore the brunt of it.
“He was just all black and bloody,” she said. “His face started to turn black under the eyes, and all that, my God.”
Finding their apartment door jammed, she went to the window screaming and waving a towel and a bathrobe, trying to catch the attention of firefighters who had started assembling below.
At the same time, Mr. Botvynov, facing the nine-story drop with no stairs, was frantically signaling with his cellphone’s flashlight, worried that his wife, who was bleeding profusely from her head, would lose consciousness.
On the fourth floor, Kateryna Zelenska, who is 27 and deaf, was trapped under the rubble, unable to signal emergency workers. Her husband, Oleksii Zelensky, 28, and their 1-year-old son, Mykyta, were somewhere nearby, but she did not know their conditions. Slabs of concrete had collapsed onto their apartment from the floors above. Somehow, Ms. Zelenska managed to make a brief call to her mother, apparently to say goodbye.
“She said, ‘Mom, I love you, I love you,’ and that’s it, it broke off,” her mother, Oksana Kulak, said through tears.
Over the next 24 hours, rescuers using cranes and ladders saved dozens of people trapped on upper floors. It took about three hours to reach Mr. Botvynov and his wife. Ms. Afanasieva got out first, but said she regretted leaving her husband to manage by himself. He passed out on the balcony as firefighters were trying to guide him onto a platform atop a ladder.
Later at the hospital, he was in surprisingly good spirits for someone whose body had been pierced by glass head to toe. But he expressed confusion over Russia’s choice of target.
“I work at a company that deals with agriculture, selling parts for the tractors, a completely peaceful profession,” he said. “Surely, my death would not have any military significance.”
How rescuers noticed Ms. Zelenska, the deaf woman, is unclear, but by Sunday morning, firefighters attached to safety lines and standing on a platform suspended by a crane were working furiously at the spot where her apartment had been. They cut away debris for hours. Finally, she appeared covered in dust, alive but visibly distressed.
For the next 48 hours, firefighters continued to hack at the concrete slabs that had pancaked onto Ms. Zelenska’s apartment, searching for her husband and son.
By Tuesday morning, the couple’s families had gathered at the site in what was a mostly silent vigil, until, as the sun came up, Ms. Zelenska’s father, Mykola Kulak, vented his anger.
“The Russians, let them all perish, these devils,” he screamed, holding up his phone to show a video of his grandson. “This child is still lying under the rubble! I am cursing them, and I wish that every Russian family has two or three, just like this, lying there like our child.”
Shortly afterward, rescuers brought down the bodies — first Mykyta, then Oleksii — using a special crane. They were placed on the ground in black body bags as their family waited to carry out the wrenching task of identifying them.
Oleksii’s parents knelt in front of their son’s body, unzipped the bag and for several interminable minutes caressed him, sobbing.
Ms. Zelenska’s parents had rushed off earlier to join their daughter, who had been hospitalized since being rescued two days earlier. She had found out on the internet that the bodies of her husband and son had been recovered, the first confirmation she had that they were dead.
On Tuesday afternoon, the authorities declared an end to the search, but by evening, firefighters had returned to 118 Victory Embankment for an unexpected rescue mission. One that came at the behest of Rostyslav, the boy who had been watching TikTok videos before the missile hit.
He had managed to escape his mangled apartment by climbing out a window and scrambling down the building’s facade with the help of bystanders. But in the confusion, he had been unable to locate his white cat, Belyash.
“I was more frightened for my cat,” he said.
And so firefighters once again climbed into the building as Rostyslav, his mother, Nadiia, and a small crowd of onlookers gathered in the darkness below. After about 20 minutes, a firefighter emerged from the kitchen window, a red and white cat carrier in hand. Inside, was a dirty and frightened Belyash.
“We’re going home,” said Rostyslav, peering into the carrier when at last he and his pet were reunited. “Not this home, of course, but everything will be OK.”
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Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
In scathing ruling, US district court judge writes, ‘misuse of the courts by Mr Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law’
The penalty caps a bruising case for Trump, who had the suit dismissed in September and Trump was ordered to pay tens of thousands in November after one defendant sought sanctions. The latest order came after a group of the remaining defendants, including Clinton, filed a separate request for sanctions.
The end of the lawsuit marks the latest legal setback for Trump as he grapples with an array of civil and criminal investigations, including the inquiry into his retention of sensitive documents, while some of his lawyers are under scrutiny themselves for conduct in those cases.
In a scathing ruling, US district court judge Donald Middlebrooks castigated Trump and his lead attorney, Alina Habba, for abusing the legal system by advancing a lawsuit that furthered his political grievances over the 2017 Russia investigation using arguments replete with misinformation and errors.
“We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote in the 46-page order imposing sanctions of $937,989.39 against Trump and Habba.
The lawsuit, originally filed by Trump in March 2022, alleged that Clinton and the Democratic National Committee conspired with senior FBI officials and others before the 2016 election to fabricate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in order to damage him politically.
But Middlebrooks dismissed the case after he found that Trump engaged in a scattershot pleading that amounted to an obstruction of justice, and which included allegations that were known to be false. His legal arguments, including racketeering and conspiracy, were found to be without foundation.
The judge noted for instance that Trump’s allegations that former FBI director James Comey conspired with Clinton to prosecute him was wrong – as Trump was never prosecuted – while such a conspiracy was implausible since Comey probably damaged Clinton’s 2016 campaign by reopening the investigation into her emails.
“I find that the pleadings here were abusive litigation tactics. The complaint and amended complaint were drafted to advance a political narrative; not to address legal harm caused by any defendant,” Middlebrooks wrote of Trump’s lawsuit.
The judge also found that Trump’s racketeering and conspiracy lawsuit appeared to be part of a pattern by the former president of misusing the courts by filing frivolous lawsuits in order to serve a political purpose.
“Misuse of the courts by Mr Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm,” he wrote.
Middlebrooks examined other seemingly politically motivated lawsuits filed by Trump and wrote that they all followed a playbook of including provocative rhetoric, political language carried over from rallies, attacks on political opponents and, typically, a lack of legal analysis.
“Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process,” the judge wrote. “He knew full well the impact of his actions.”
The immediate fallout of the sanctions order was not clear. Trump had wanted to drop the lawsuit after the case was assigned to Middlebrooks, an appointee of Bill Clinton, but Habba told Fox News in a segment referenced in the ruling that she had advised him to press ahead.
On Friday, Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, which was also being overseen by Middlebrooks and was cited as an example of “vexatious” litigation from Trump in his order imposing sanctions in the suit against Clinton and the DNC.
Trump and Habba – as well as her law firm Habba, Madaio and Associates – are jointly liable for the $1m penalty, though the former president indicated to associates that he essentially believed it should be paid by his attorney instead of him, according to sources familiar with the matter.
A spokesperson for Trump could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for Habba did not provide comment.
The penalty handed down by the judge, designed to discourage future frivolous lawsuits, is in addition to a $50,000 fine imposed in November and $16,000 in reimbursement of legal costs for Charles Dolan, a Democratic public relations executive, who filed the first sanctions request.
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Pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
Seven months after the fall of Roe, the battlefield has shifted.
Her friend said the gridlock was probably because of the march. Carmona was skeptical. But when they stopped in Delaware for gas, she was surprised to see throngs of women asking people to sign petitions. “This is something completely different,” Carmona remembers thinking. Mobilized by Trump’s election, millions of people marched that Saturday in cities across the country. A year later, Carmona joined the Women’s March organization, where she now serves as executive director.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and decimated nearly 50 years of abortion rights, Carmona anticipates another strong showing for this year’s march. It is slated for January 22, the anniversary of the court’s 1973 ruling in Roe. But instead of Washington, D.C., this year, the main event will be held in Madison, Wisconsin. “We wanted to send a clear message to elected leaders, to our base, to the people that we’re going to where the fight is,” Carmona said. “And that’s at the state level.”
The fight to protect reproductive rights has largely shifted to the states. While the Supreme Court has determined that the U.S. Constitution provides no guarantee of reproductive freedom, that document is hardly the final say. The U.S. Constitution is the floor, not the ceiling — a baseline guarantee of rights afforded to the people — and many state constitutions provide much broader protections.
With this shift there’s a lot on the line for reproductive rights, including in Wisconsin, where a suit challenging the validity of an 1849 abortion ban is winding its way through the courts. This spring, voters will decide whether the state’s Supreme Court — final arbiters of the Wisconsin Constitution — will flip to provide a 4-3 liberal majority. “We have a lot of infrastructure in Wisconsin, and so we … have the ability to make an impact there,” Carmona said. “We have a mandate to do so.”
State of Play
Since Dobbs, 12 states have banned abortion entirely (save for some exceptions that exist in name only), and state court challenges to those bans are pending in Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Abortion is unavailable in two states: North Dakota, which saw its sole clinic moved to Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where clinics stopped providing care while the legality of the pre-Roe ban is in limbo. Four states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Utah — currently allow abortion with gestational limits, ranging from six weeks in Georgia to 18 weeks in Utah. In Indiana, Ohio, and Wyoming, lawmakers have passed draconian bans on care that have been blocked by state courts pending litigation.
Since June, the state of play has been in near constant flux; earlier this month, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution contained no right to abortion, just hours after the South Carolina Supreme Court found the opposite true of its constitution. In a fiery opinion, Justice Kaye Hearn (only the second woman to serve on the South Carolina court) struck down a six-week abortion ban on the grounds that it violated the constitution’s explicit right to privacy. “We hold that the decision to terminate a pregnancy rests upon the utmost personal and private considerations imaginable, and implicates a woman’s right to privacy,” she wrote.
Hearn noted that in passing the restriction, lawmakers discussed the importance of making an informed choice about having an abortion — a professed desire laughable in the face of a six-week ban. Most people don’t even realize they’re pregnant at six weeks, Hearn wrote. “At the risk of stating the obvious, in order for a choice to be informed, a woman must know she is pregnant.”
While the Idaho Supreme Court found that there was no protection for abortion in the state’s constitution, it noted that voters had the power to change that — by electing new legislators or amending the constitution. Voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont did just that last year, enshrining constitutional protection for reproductive freedom. Voters in Kansas and Kentucky defeated amendments that would have stripped their constitutions of such protections.
The state ballot successes have inspired plans for initiatives in other states, including Missouri and Ohio. In response, Republican lawmakers have sought to make it harder to get citizen-led initiatives on the ballot. “Those lawmakers know their ideological views are out of sync with their voters,” Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, told The Guardian. “They are trying to change the rules of the game.”
Unprecedented Times
Although the destruction of Roe motivated voters in November’s midterm elections, turning an anticipated “red wave” into a mere trickle, Republicans in Congress seem to have zero desire to read the room. Once House Republicans finally managed to elect a speaker, they passed two largely symbolic attacks on abortion: a resolution condemning attacks on churches and anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers,” despite the fact that threats of violence targeting actual abortion providers have skyrocketed, and a measure that would create new criminal penalties for doctors who fail to provide specific care to a child “born alive” after an attempted abortion, which, it should be said, is rhetoric divorced from medical reality.
“The offensively named ‘born-alive’ legislation is another cruel and misguided attempt to interfere with evidence-based medical decision making between parents and their physicians,” Iffath Abbasi Hoskins, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said of the bill. “It is meant to incite emotions.”
But there is no doubt that anti-abortion lawmakers in states around the country will follow suit. The Texas legislature, which only meets every other year, has teed up a slate of anti-abortion measures — including a strategy for punishing people who travel out of state for care. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, thought to have 2024 presidential ambitions, has pushed for a 15-week abortion ban and said he would “gleefully” sign any anti-abortion measure that lands on his desk. A special election this month to fill a state Senate seat vacated by a Republican was seen as a referendum on Youngkin’s glee; on January 10, voters flipped the seat, electing Democrat Aaron Rouse, who ran on an abortion rights platform. The election has strengthened the state Senate’s Democratic majority, making it unlikely that Youngkin’s anti-abortion priorities will go anywhere anytime soon.
In recent weeks, the Biden administration has taken steps to blunt the impact of some anti-abortion legislation. In December, the Food and Drug Administration announced labeling changes for emergency contraceptives, making clear that they do not induce abortion (long an anti-science talking point of the anti-abortion crowd). Weeks later, the FDA announced regulatory changes that would allow retail pharmacies to dispense medication abortion pills — a move that could significantly expand access ahead of attempts to restrict its availability. Medication abortion, available in the earliest weeks of pregnancy, now accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S. The Department of Justice also issued an advisory opinion to the U.S. Postal Service announcing that a prudish federal law initially enacted in 1873 did not prohibit sending medication abortion pills through the mail, even to people in states that have banned abortion.
Lawmakers elsewhere are moving to enact greater protections for reproductive autonomy. Earlier this month, the Illinois Legislature passed an omnibus bill to expand and protect access to care, which has since been signed into law. The state has become a haven in a vast abortion desert; according to Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, which operates an abortion clinic in Illinois just over the Missouri state line, the law couldn’t come a minute too soon. Since Roe fell, wait times for care in Southern Illinois have jumped from three or four days to two-and-a-half weeks. There’s been a nearly 80 percent increase in abortion patients — and a more than 300 percent increase in the number of patients coming from outside Missouri or Illinois.
“Providers and patients are navigating unprecedented times,” Southern Illinois abortion providers said in a joint statement prior to the bill’s passage, encouraging lawmakers to act swiftly. “What we once hypothetically planned for has now become our reality, and the impact and burden abortion bans have on providers and patients is a public health crisis that affects all Illinoisans.”
Bigger Than Roe
In recent years, Wisconsin has been ground zero for conservative activism, funded in no small part by the Koch brothers. The state is among the most gerrymandered in the nation and was one of seven states implicated in Trump’s fake electors scheme. According to Carmona, it’s time to push back. The decision to hold the Women’s March in Madison reflects just how much is at stake, she said. So does the theme of the march: “Bigger Than Roe.”
“Women are not just the battleground for the right around reproductive freedom. … We’re making decisions about when and how to have a family,” she said. “Like, can we afford it? Do we have a job? Do we have a house? What is our outlook on the future? Are we optimistic? Do we trust our institutions? Do we trust our elected officials? Do we trust our elections that get them there?”
The energy on the ground is encouraging, she said. In advance of the state Supreme Court election, the organization has rallied thousands of donors and nearly 1 million “action-takers”: people who have signed up for the march, signed on to petitions, and volunteered to knock on doors. Spring elections are often won by a slim margin, she noted. “We feel very, very well positioned to take up this fight because, honestly, mobilizing a thousand people is well within our ability.”
“We want to be clear that … this isn’t a single-issue march because we don’t lead single-issue lives,” she said. “And that women are coming for more than just the bare minimum, which should be bodily autonomy. We’re actually coming for a future where we can thrive.”
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Members of Arizona Border Recon at the U.S.-Mexico border near Arivaca, Arizona. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
The Tech Transparency Project says its researchers found several border militias actively using Facebook, despite appearing to violate the platform's policies.
The report, which was shared exclusively with Yahoo News ahead of its publication on Thursday, is part of a series of investigations by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), an industry watchdog that looks at misinformation targeting migrants on social media. Earlier reports in the series found that Facebook is a primary source for much of the harmful misinformation that migrants encounter along their journey to the U.S.
“Our new findings show that Facebook is creating even more dangers for migrants by hosting armed border militias driven by fringe conspiracies,” the new report concludes.
In an emailed statement to Yahoo News ahead of the report’s publication, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said, “We will review this report as soon as we receive it and will remove any groups that we find to be in violation of our policies.”
In August 2020, Meta announced that it was updating its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy to crack down on “Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts tied to offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, U.S.-based militia organizations and QAnon.”
Since then, the social media giant says that as of Aug. 15, 2022, it had “identified over 1,151 militarized social movements to date and in total, removed about 4,200 Pages, 20,800 groups, 200 events, 59,800 Facebook profiles and 8,900 Instagram accounts.”
But researchers at TTP say they found dozens of border militias currently active on Facebook. Their report singles out three groups in particular whose activities, they argue, appear to clearly violate Facebook’s policy.
The findings raise questions about the limits of Facebook’s militia policy, and the company’s ability, or willingness, to enforce it.
The TTP report also comes after three Democratic senators, led by Ed Markey of Massachusetts, publicly called on the Biden administration to investigate potential illegal activity by militia groups on the southern border.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Troy Miller, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the senators warned that “Recently, many of these groups have stepped up their efforts, and some are even carrying out their missions in collaboration with, or with approval from, local, state, and federal law enforcement agents, creating an escalating crisis that must be a priority for both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).”
The letter focused on the activities of two militia groups in particular, Veterans on Patrol and Patriots for America, both of which are also highlighted in the TTP report.
Spokespeople for DHS and CBP did not respond to a request for comment on the letter, nor did a representative for the Justice Department.
Patriots for America is perhaps the most well known and organized of the civilian militia groups operating on the southern border. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was founded in 2015 to purportedly protect conservative protesters at Black Lives Matter events, including protests over the potential removal of a Confederate statue in North Texas, but in recent years the group has turned its focus to the southern border.
Since last fall, Patriots for America (PFA) has been deploying volunteers from all over Texas, and other parts of the country, to conduct armed patrols along Texas’s border with Mexico, in collaboration with local law enforcement, who allow militia members to stop and question migrants. Their activities have garnered a wide variety of national media attention. The group’s founder, Samuel Hall, declined to be interviewed by Yahoo News.
Though PFA does not appear to have an official Facebook group or page (according to the L.A. Times, it was taken down last summer), the Tech Transparency Project found that Hall and other militia members regularly post easily accessible photos and videos from their border “operations” with hashtags like #PFAStrong, as well as links to the militia’s website.
The group’s Facebook videos, such as one posted by Hall in December 2021, which depicts armed militia members clad in military-style tactical gear questioning a group of Spanish-speaking migrants before turning them over to local sheriff’s deputies, have drawn scrutiny from civil rights advocates like the ACLU, which characterizes Patriots for America as racist — a label Hall vociferously rejects.
The ACLU of Texas has repeatedly called on the Justice Department to investigate PFA’s activities at the southern border, citing such videos as evidence that militia members may be unlawfully detaining migrants — something only trained law enforcement agents are authorized to do.
In an email to Yahoo News, Hall explicitly denied that his group has ever detained migrants, writing, “We have been there simply as a presence.
“We also do not present ourselves as law enforcement nor have we ever presented ourselves as law enforcement,” Hall wrote.
The Tech Transparency Project also found a private Facebook group linked to Veterans on Patrol, an Arizona-based vigilante group that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has designated as an antigovernment militia.
According to the TTP report, the Facebook group “VOP and ALLIES” features updates on the group’s operations and solicitations for volunteers that appear to be passed along from the group’s founder, Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer. Meyer has been arrested multiple times for allegedly damaging water tanks belonging to humanitarian groups and trespassing on private property while searching for supposed child sex camps that, he says, are being run by cartels in the Arizona desert — a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by local officials.
According to the SPLC, Veterans on Patrol is part of a wave of antigovernment militia groups that have been driven to the border by a mix of anti-immigrant ideas and QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories, which paint migrants as predators and cartel members and blame billionaire George Soros and the Clintons for the recent influx of migrants.
Veterans on Patrol (VOP) was also named in the letter from Senate Democrats, who expressed concern about the group’s apparently cozy relationship with Border Patrol officers. The letter cites a video uploaded to Facebook in May 2021, which shows VOP members providing drone footage to a Border Patrol agent, who praises their work.
In an email to Yahoo News, Meyer pushed back against the “militia” label, writing that “The Southern Poverty Law Center has defamed us with outright lies.” Meyer did not respond to a request for comment on the letter from the Senate Democrats.
Freddy Cruz, a senior research analyst with the SPLC’s Intelligence Project who has reported extensively on border militias and their relationships with federal authorities, said “it is incredibly dangerous” for groups like Veterans on Patrol and Patriots for America to be allowed to promote their activities, and the misinformation motivating them, on platforms like Facebook.
He argued that these groups engage in the same kind of paramilitary activity, including firearms training, as other militia groups that have been banned from Facebook, such as the Oath Keepers. Like those groups, border militias have not been sanctioned by any government entity to perform law enforcement functions.
“They’re basically just out there spreading conspiracy theories,” he said.
According to Facebook’s public Community Standards, prohibited Militarized Social Movements include “Militia Communities, defined as non-state actors that use weapons as a part of their training, communication, or presence; and are structured or operate as unofficial military or security forces and ... Distribute information about the tactical use of weapons for combat.”
Facebook’s policy also prohibits pages, profiles and other entities associated with “Violence-Inducing Conspiracy Networks,” such as QAnon, which has been linked to numerous incidents of real-world violence and labeled a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI.
“Facebook I think still has a lot of work that they need to do in order to crack down on some of these groups,” Cruz said.
In a statement to Yahoo News, Sen. Markey said he is “concerned by new evidence that Facebook is failing to even live up to its meager, inadequate standards for countering toxic misinformation and hate on its platform.”
“Vigilante groups are using the platform as their soapbox to amplify white supremacist content and endanger the lives of migrants,” Markey’s statement continues. “Self-regulation has failed. Congress has an obligation to step in to stop Big Tech from putting profits over people and allowing social media sites to function as hotbeds of vile, dangerous content.”
TTP Director Katie Paul suggested that without congressional oversight or other potential consequences, Facebook and its parent company, Meta, have little incentive to invest in the kind of technology and staff needed to adequately police this kind of activity. She noted that misinformation researchers were among the 11,000 employees the company laid off in November.
“The platform has faced zero repercussions for facilitating any of this,” Paul said.
Instead, she said, Meta seems to take a “whack-a-mole” approach, often taking action only when prompted by media scrutiny.
Paramilitary groups have existed along the U.S.-Mexico border for the better part of the last two centuries. According to a 2006 report from the Congressional Research Service, since the early 1990s, civilian patrols have proliferated along the southern border, “partly due to the increasing numbers of aliens entering the country illegally.”
Per the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) at Georgetown Law, all 50 states — including Arizona and Texas — have laws prohibiting unauthorized paramilitary activity. ICAP, which brought a successful lawsuit on behalf of the city of Charlottesville, Va., against private militia groups that participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, defines unauthorized private militias as “groups of armed individuals that engage in paramilitary activity or law enforcement functions without being called forth by a governor or the federal government and without reporting to any government authority.”
In 2019, a viral Facebook video showing members of the United Constitutional Patriots militia holding migrants at gunpoint near the border in New Mexico led to the arrest and conviction of the group’s spokesperson for impersonating a federal Border Patrol agent, as well as that of the group’s leader on federal weapons charges.
The latest wave of militia activity at the border can clearly be attributed, at least in part, by record numbers of migrants attempting to cross the border in recent months. However, the groups highlighted in the TTP report seem to conflate the very real border apprehension numbers with dangerous conspiracy theories that don’t necessarily reflect the reality on the ground. For example, while it’s true that unaccompanied migrant children are vulnerable to exploitation by criminals on both sides of the border, anti-trafficking organizations say children are rarely smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico as part of sex trafficking schemes.
Some advocates have voiced concerns that vigilantes professing to rescue children at the border may actually present additional dangers for vulnerable migrants, whose faces and, in some cases, personal information are often broadcast by these groups on social media.
“It tends to, I think, draw attention away from actual issues that might be happening at the border, if there are real cases of human trafficking or drug trafficking,” said Cruz, adding that “a lot of these people that are engaging in this militant vigilante activity don’t even speak like a basic level of Spanish.”
Especially alarming is the “invasion” rhetoric embraced by many of these groups. Such language echoes the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which has inspired a number of violent attacks, including the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that killed 23 people in 2019, and the white supremacist attack at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store that left 10 people dead last spring.
Among the most egregious pieces of content featured in the TTP report were a series of posts shared by members of a private Facebook group called Texas Border Patriots, which had 2,700 members as of Wednesday afternoon. Yahoo News made multiple attempts to connect with administrators for the Texas Border Patriots group, but they could not be reached.
As with Patriots for America and Veterans on Patrol, administrators of the lesser-known Texas Border Patriots group post photos and videos of themselves and other camouflage-wearing militia members engaging with migrants at the border, and encourage others to join their operations. Their rhetoric, however, often takes on a much more explicitly anti-immigrant and militant tone, regularly referring to migrants as “invaders” or “trash” and encouraging members to “arm up.”
Some members have even engaged in discussions of violence, TTP found. The report highlights a particular thread of posts from June 13, in which a member of the Texas Border Patriots group called for a “MASSIVE SHOW OF FORCE ON OUR BORDERS” to stop “the ILLEGAL ALIEN caravan making their way up through mexico.” In a response to that post, another member of the group wrote: “Are we talking about killing people to stop it? Because blood will fall on both sides!”
While the original poster responded, clarifying, “We ARE NOT talking about killing anyone! We are talking about taking a stand,” a third person chimed in, writing, “blood will spill its the only way.”
Notably, both the original poster and the commenter who asked about killing people both predicted that their posts would run afoul of Facebook’s policies, acknowledging that either they or their posts could soon be removed from the site.
However, as of Wednesday evening, the entire conversation remained visible to the group’s members, even after it had been flagged to Meta in a request for comment.
In their letter earlier this month, Democratic senators echoed concerns expressed by civil rights groups that the recent activities of border militias not only may be illegal, but could also inspire more vigilante activity and, possibly, violence.
“Absent federal action cracking down on their unauthorized behavior, vigilante groups will continue to operate and weaken the government’s ability to maintain migrant safety, protect human rights, and defend the rule of law at the border,” the senators wrote.
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Supporters of Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro react during a demonstration against President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, outside Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, January 8, 2023. (photo: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
Brazil's attorney general has filed an indictment against 39 people for their alleged involvement in the storming of the Senate building on 8 January.
The indictment says the individuals - who are not named - used violence and threats to try to abolish democracy.
Mr Bolsonaro has voiced "regret" for the unrest, but denies he caused it.
Perceived threats to democratic order are a sensitive subject in a country where military rule ended in 1985.
The far-right leader is currently in the United States, having left Brazil to avoid attending the inauguration of his successor - the veteran leftist politician Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (widely known as Lula).
Lula's election win in October outraged Bolsonaro supporters. Lula, a former president, was found guilty of corruption in 2017 and spent time in prison before his convictions were annulled.
Hundreds of arrests have been made following the 8 January violence - during which the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court were vandalised after rioters forced their way in.
Dozens of police officers were injured, and the scenes were condemned by President Lula and other world leaders.
Authorities in Brasília have pledged to more than double the security presence at locations that came under attack.
Monday's indictment, presented to the Supreme Court, accused 39 people of offences including coup activities and damage to public property.
But the filing said it had not been possible to show the group had broken anti-terror laws - despite prior suggestions from the government that suspects could be charged on this basis.
The attorney general ordered a freeze on $7.7m of the group's assets to cover repairs to damaged buildings.
During an address to a group of supporters in Florida, quoted by the Reuters news agency, Mr Bolsonaro called the recent scenes "unbelievable".
In an apparent discussion of what happened, the former army captain said: "Unfortunately, people learned, understood what politics is, got to know the political powers, and started to value freedom".
The Supreme Court has already said it will investigate whether the former president encouraged the violence - something he denies.
Mr Bolsonaro also faces separate probes over comments made while in office over alleged anti-democratic statements.
In his latest remarks, the ex-leader appeared to offer rare acknowledgement of errors during his presidency. He conceded: "There are some holes, of course, we make some slips at home."
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A southern elephant seal takes a peek as it swims in the icy waters of Antarctica. (photo: Sam Eves/Shutterstock)
Scientists tagged a southern elephant seal on the island of Kerguelen, an extraordinarily remote spot in the far southern Indian Ocean, in 2011. The seal was a male close to 11 feet long weighing nearly 1,800 pounds, and they fitted his head with an ocean sensor, a device that these massive seals barely notice but that have proved vital to scientific research.
Elephant seals like this one swim more than 1,500 miles south from Kerguelen to Antarctica, where they often forage on the sea floor, diving to depths that can exceed a mile below the surface. As summer in the Southern Hemisphere peaked, the seal made a standard Antarctic journey, but then went in an unusual direction.
In March 2011, he appeared just offshore from a vast oceanfront glacier called Denman, where elephant seals are not generally known to go. He dove into a deep trough in the ocean bed, roughly half a mile below the surface. And that is when something striking happened: He provided an early bit of evidence that Denman Glacier could be a major threat to global coastlines.
The seal swam through unusually warm water, just below the freezing point, but in the Antarctic, that is warm. Given its salt content and the extreme depths and pressures involved — in some regions Denman Glacier rests on a seafloor that is over a mile deep — such warm water can destroy large amounts of ice. And it certainly could have been doing so at Denman.
Yet scientists do not appear to have seen the significance of the seal data. Back then, Denman had not received much scientific attention. It did not help that the glacier is extraordinarily difficult to study directly. It lies between the two Antarctic research bases of Australia. The logistics are challenging for a voyage from either side, especially as the glacier is often locked in by extensive sea ice.
Researchers had already observed that the glacier was losing some of its mass, which is a worrying sign. They also knew something else: Denman serves as potential doorway into a region of extremely deep and thick ice, even for Antarctica.
With Denman and several other neighboring glaciers in place, the doorway remains closed. Opening it would allow warmer ocean water to start eating away at this thick ice, leading to gradual melt and eventually, a massive influx of new water into the ocean. That would have the potential to unleash over 15 feet of sea level rise, remaking every coastline in the world. So the scientists flew a few planes over Denman and watched with their satellites. And they waited.
The Robot
A striking discovery came in 2019. Using satellite data and other techniques, scientists published a new elevation map of all the crushed-down land beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. And it showed that beneath Denman lay the deepest point of them all, about the depth of two Grand Canyons, or two miles below sea level. If water, rather than ice, were to someday fill this valley, Denman Glacier could raise global sea levels by nearly 5 feet.
Almost simultaneously, scientists reported something else: Denman was reeling. The region of its “grounding line,” where the glacier touches both the seafloor and the ocean, had retreated backward more than three miles toward the center of Antarctica since 1996, bringing the sea to edge of the newly discovered canyon.
It was in this context that researchers now unearthed the nine-year-old measurements from the seal. “We dug out these data because we wanted to find out if warm water can indeed reach this glacier,” said Eric Rignot, an Antarctic expert at the University of California at Irvine and one of the authors of the paper. “The answer seemed to be yes.” But while the seal sensor proved the presence of warm water, it did not reveal how much of it might be hitting the glacier.
Enter the robot.
A group of scientists based in Australia, led by Esmee Van Wijk of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, were trying in 2020 to study Totten, a gigantic glacier hundreds of miles from Denman.
Denman and Totten are two main gateways into one of the largest lodes of thick ice in Antarctica. They both sit atop deep channels leading into the Aurora Subglacial Basin, an enormous inland region of East Antarctica where the ice largely rests below sea level, sometimes more than a mile deep. If the ocean reached here it would be catastrophic, making the sea level rise from a full melt of Denman look small.
Van Wijk and her fellow scientist and partner Stephen Rintoul weren’t actually present at Totten — they were at home in Tasmania. But a scientific vessel in the region deployed their research tools called Argo floats. These clever robots dive to great depths, taking temperature and other readings periodically, and then surface again as long as there is not any ice above them. Then they radio the data back to the humans who are anxiously awaiting it.
But not unlike that seal a decade earlier, one of the floats wound up in an unexpected place. It was carried off course by currents but, eight months later, fortuitously surfaced in front of Denman Glacier. It appeared “in a region we really wanted to sample, but is very difficult to sample with ships, it is often covered with quite heavy sea ice,” said Van Wijk. “So for us it is a case of getting very lucky.”
The robot was a little more thorough in its explorations than the seal. It also measured water that was even warmer at very, very close to zero degrees Celsius. Thanks to these measurements, the scientists were able to determine just how much of this warm water is flowing toward Denman Glacier. It was massive.
There are “about eight Mississippi Rivers going into the cavity,” according to Rintoul. The scientists calculated, in a paper recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, that with this volume of water and its temperature, there is the potential to melt 71 billion tons of ice from the underside of Denman Glacier, where its “ice tongue” floats out over the ocean, ever year.
The warm water in question is technically called “circumpolar deep water.” It encircles the Antarctic within the middle depths of the ocean, but recently, for reasons that may have to do with changing patterns of winds, a likely result of climate change, the circle around the continent appears to have grown tighter.
As a result, the warm water has been increasingly climbing onto continental shelves and assailing glaciers at their weak points: their bases where they rest on the bedrock. “You can think of it like a blanket that is draped across the seafloor,” said Van Wijk of the water layer.
The increased interest in Denman is significant because scientists have long been focused on West Antarctica. It is well-known that this warm water has been melting the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, causing them to spill billions of tons of ice into the ocean every year.
While East Antarctica has so far not been losing much, if any, ice, it has much more to potentially give than any other Antarctic region. Like these West Antarctic glaciers, Denman also has a dangerous configuration. It has a “retrograde” slope, which means that the glacier gets thicker, and the seafloor slopes downward, as you move inland from where the ice sits.
Glaciers in this position are prone to rapid retreat called “marine ice sheet instability,” and it makes a kind of intuitive sense. As a glacier perched on such a slope begins to melt at its base and move backward downhill, more of its surface area is exposed to the ocean. That increases both the ability of the ice to flow outward and the extent to which the ice can melt.
The Humans
Based on measurements from the robot, Van Wijk and her colleagues can confirm that a lot of warm water is heading toward Denman. But they do not know what happens after that. There are complicated seafloor contours, including several shallower ridges, that the water must traverse before reaching the ice.
Considering that Denman has been retreating, scientists are operating from the working assumption that some of the warm water is getting all the way to its base. Several experts said the new research is an important step forward, but there is much further to go.
While satellite images of massive loss of the West Antarctic glaciers have taken up much of the scientific community’s attention, East Antarctic glaciers are vulnerable to the same mass loss, said Helen Amanda Fricker, an Antarctic expert at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the study. The East Antarctic basins are “starting to show signs of change,” she said, and the new paper shows there is “enough heat flux in the ocean” to drive melting of some of the very large glaciers in the region.
There is still a great deal of uncertainty about what Denman will do next, and scientists — hobbled by how little they know about this region — cannot predict it at this point, said Don Blankenship, an Antarctic expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “The ocean is delivering its heat, and now we need to ask the question, what is that heat going to do in the interior?” he said.
The precise details of what kind of bedrock the ice sits upon, and the exact contours of the ocean floor and the rock walls surrounding the wide glacier, will matter. These will determine how rapidly Denman, which is 10 miles wide, can slip out of place and start retreating further backward into the canyon, and whether it will get stuck anywhere along the way. And scientists just do not know many of those details.
“Denman is on the want-to-do list for everybody,” Blankenship said. Australian researchers are planning a Denman expedition aboard their country’s new icebreaker, but that will not happen until the Antarctic summer in 2024. The German research vessel Polarstern is also scheduled to reach the glacier next year.
One of the most disconcerting things about climate change is that what we do not know may hurt us the most. When it comes to Denman, said Van Wijk, “we probably know more about parts of the moon.” It is thanks in part to good fortune that we know as much as we do. We have had news from a seal and a robot, but it looks like it is time to send in the humans.
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