You Don't Mess With the Zohran

PRESENTED BY ESTÉE LAUDER'S TEARS

In a perfect metaphor for this week, police watched haplessly as Curtis Lear ran donuts on the National Mall in his oversized SUV on Saturday evening. When police pleaded with him to stop, he shouted, “I got plenty of gas!”

Even the glow of the Zohran Mamdani victory couldn’t protect me from the cortisol hit of this news last night: The Trump fascists are evicting the 1,500 employees of the National Science Foundation from its headquarters in Alexandria. Former football player Scott Turner, now Trump’s anti-housing Housing and Urban Development Secretary, is measuring the drapes.

In response to the fossil-fueled heat wave, Congress is implementing energy conservation measures as they work to trash energy conservation laws.

This morning, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee meets to interview Usha-Maria Turner to be Assistant Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency Office of International and Tribal Affairs and David Wright to be renominated as a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Turner is a longtime fossil-fuel-industry lobbyist, most recently for the fracking giant Chesapeake Energy. She previously worked for OGE Energy and TXU Power. So the Senators should really thank her for all the work she’s done personally to give them this heat.

With the heat index around 110°F, at 2:30 pm, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) chairs a Judiciary subcommittee hearing this afternoon on U.S. energy policy and climate litigation with the cartoonish title “Enter the Dragon—China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance.” Public Citizen’s climate expert David Arkush will testify, against the Republican witnesses, Attorney General Kris Kobach (R-Kan.) and professional climate denier Scott Walter. Climate hawk Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is the ranking member on the subcommittee. As Karen Zraick and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey report, oil companies are now trying to stop public climate lawsuits by claiming free-speech rights to spread climate disinformation.

The One Big Brutal Bill Act is so bad that Republicans are trashing it in public, even as their multi-trillion coal-rolling omnibus lurches towards passage this weekend. Punchbowl’s reporters, PRESENTED BY WALMART¹, relate:

They’re not wrong! Today, Moms Rising and Popular Democracy have rallies and a day of action at the Capitol against the brutal bill. Tomorrow, young feminists and SEIU are organizing lobby days to say F the cuts and oppose death by a trillion cuts.

Democratic socialist state Rep. Zohran Mamdani sailed to a stunning victory over sex creep Andrew Cuomo in yesterday’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary. According to the New York Times, the rise of this young, charismatic Democratic politician spells doom for the Democratic Party.

The Lauder family, including 25-year-old scion Jack Zinterhofer, contributed over $1 million to the flaccid Cuomo campaign. That might seem like a lot of money,² but given their $25 billion cosmetics fortune, that’s like a normal family of New Yorkers contributing $10 or $100. Life is different for the 0.0001%!

With Abundance, longtime effective-altruism booster Ezra Klein put his name on a warmed-over effective-altruist screed by Derek Thompson, a dude who once sublet his New York City apartment to EA cult leader Will MacAskill, before Sam Bankman-Fried’s cartoonish corruption blew up the “effective altruism” brand.

I appreciate that the effective-altruism-rebranded-as-abundance grifters like Thompson are smart enough—unlike the New York Times politics desk—to try to claim Zohran as one of their own. Which is difficult, because effective abundance’s techno-libertarianism is virulently opposed to Mamdani’s populist eco-socialism. But Derek is always up for a sophistic challenge!

In a credulous post, Thompson pretends bemusement that progressives criticize his shitty book while many Democratic politicians praise it. He somehow fails to note that Democratic politicians (Jake Auchincloss! Cory Booker!) and abundance grifters are capitalized by the same hyper-wealthy donors, and they both speak positively of an ideological framework that aligns with the interests of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires.

In fairness, the effective abundance cult is grappling with the important challenge of bringing 20th-century American liberalism into the 21st century, and that's something its critics need to do as well. It's been the exercise of Naomi Klein, Cory Doctorow, Alyssa Battistoni, Sandeep Vaheesan, Stephanie Kelton, David Dayen, and Gabriel Winant.

The simple tell of whether a forward-looking political framework is a grift is whether it grapples honestly with climate change or not. On that, effective abundance fails utterly.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
  Nominations of Usha-Maria Turner to be EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of International and Tribal Affairs and David Wright to be a Member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

• 2:30 PM: Senate Indian Affairs Committee
  Nomination Hearing to consider William Kirkland to be Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior

• 2:30 PM: Senate Judiciary Committee
     Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights Subcommittee
  U.S. Energy Policy and Climate Litigation

• 2:30 PM: Senate Appropriations Committee
  A Review of the Rescission Request

• 2:30 PM: Senate Armed Services Committee
     Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee
  Review of Military Energy, Installations, and Environment in Support of the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act

Climate Action Today:

• 10:30 AM: MomsRising
  Stop the Big Bad BEETrayal Bill

• 11 AM: Popular Democracy
  Kill the Bill Before It Kills Us!

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

1  Walmart is a member of the Business Roundtable, National Foreign Trade Council, National Retail Federation, Retail Industry Leaders Association, and RATE Coalition, all of which support the passage of the One Big Brutal Bill.

2  It is.