'He made a bad decision'

This isn’t just policy. It’s patriotism.

Movies & TV Cold Storage Cold Storage Is a Fun Midnight Movie that Needs More Midnight Movie Energy But we still get a lot of exploding alien fungus, never fear. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: StudioCanal Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: StudioCanal First things first: Is this is a Disclosure Day prequel? Because that film’s screenwriter, David Koepp, also wrote this screenplay, based on his 2019 novel, and the deer are, as in the latest Disclosure Day trailer, up to some weird shit. Beyond that I will try not to say anything spoilery about the deer, or most of the plot after the first ten minutes or so, because this is a film that twists, turns, allows shenanigans to ensue, and sets a lot of different people on wacky collision courses, and I don’t want to give any of the fun away. Cold Storage begins as a tense, creepy sci-fi-tinged outbreak story, set about 15 years in our past. A space probe has crashed back to earth, and it looks like some of the samples that were sent up have come back… wrong. Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson), Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), and Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon),  are sent in to assess and contain the situation, but naturally things don’t go as planned. The film brings us up to present day, with the civilization-ending fungus in a storage facility built atop the (real life) Atchison Caves in Kansas, where it’s unknowingly guarded by Teacake (Joe Keery), and Naomi (Georgina Campbell). Because, you see, at a certain point the military sold the warehouse off and now it’s a private storage facility, full of people who have no idea what lurks beneath them. Teacake and Naomi have both taken this mind-numbing, low-paying job in a bid to reset their lives. When they find themselves in a gross-out horror movie they try to adapt, but they’re still just normal people trying to survive, not seasoned action heroes like Quinn and Romano. (I will say, as a slight ding, that the two of them do wayyy too well with this situation, but if they were realistically incompetent and terrified there’d be no movie.) Meanwhile, of course, there is a collection of people who all have reasons to be at the storage facility at the worst possible time, and they range from Vanessa Redgrave in a role that achieves a strange poignancy to an especially hapless biker gang. Cold Storage is the kind of movie that ideally you’d stumble across at 2am on HBO, right when everyone at the sleepover was about to actually sleep, to keep everyone awake and giggling for another two hours. Screenwriter/novelist David Koepp is a legend, obviously, but he also wrote two of my favorite movies of last year (Presence and Black Bag) and one of my least favorite (Jurassic World Rebirth). He’s behind the script for Spielberg’s upcoming  Disclosure Day (which I’m excited for both because its Spielberg’s return to aliens, and the trailers indicate that Josh O’Connor will spend the film feeling emotions he can only express through his kind, kind eyes) and I’m seriously wondering if Cold Storage was an early exploration of ideas for that film. The way Cold Storage uses animals, especially deer, is impressively creepy and unsettling. Director Jonny Campbell will possibly be best known to readers of this site as the director of Doctor Who’s “Vincent and the Doctor” (sorry if you just started crying), and was also behind the TV movie Eric and Ernie, and his previous theatrical feature, also a horror comedy, 2006’s Alien Autopsy. The acting is uniformly great. The bad guys are silly and over the top, but not so over the top that they become scary in a way that would outweigh the fungal threat. Georgina Campbell is fun in a role that riffs on Tess in Barbarian without ever being too on-the-nose. Joe Keery is ridiculously appealing as a kind of working class Robert Pattinson, occasionally verging on wacky but never so much that Teacake becomes a caricature. There are real people inside both Naomi and Teacake, and Campbell and Keery allow them to show, especially in the film’s first act. Ellora Torchia is solid as the only reasonable, sane person in a government bureaucracy, and makes the creakiest part of the movie work so well you barely notice the exposition. But maybe best of all are Leslie Manville and Liam Neeson, who ground the film as the two people who know how much danger the world is in, but are also grizzled and sarcastic about it. It’s fun and inventive, but I found myself wishing Campbell and Koepp had stretched even more. I haven’t read Koepp’s novel, but in the film there’s an interesting class element woven into both Teacake and Naomi’s stories—and they talk about that a little bit, but I wanted a more. More loneliness underneath Teacake’s need to fill every silence with chatter. More rawness in Naomi’s life as a single mom finally trying to pursue the degree she wanted years ago, and stuck at a crummy job to make it work. There’s a fun poking at ageism as well, in the way Romano and Quinn come together to be bad asses in their 70s. And there is a lot of splatter and goo. Where I think Cold Storage is stronger is in its matter-of-fact acceptance of climate collapse—and collapse in general. The fungus only becomes a problem because, first, the U.S. government doesn’t take its stewardship seriously enough. The warehouse, that becomes a storage facility, that is then guarded by underpaid, exhausted workers who cannot possibly take over the care of something so sensitive, shows the us the gradual breakdown of infrastructure rather than lecturing about it. And second, the fungus is only able to break containment because the environment has warmed up enough to reawaken it—a process that is made lethally worse by the violent and unpredictable storms that have become a common feature of life in the Midwest. No one debates this fact, it’s just a backdrop to the emergency. I also thought a lot about the latest Toxic Avenger. That movie went for a splattercore midnight movie vibe, but with the serious undercurrent that humble punk janitor Winston Gooze only becomes Toxie because he’s trying to expose a corrupt chemical company that’s destroying the environment and exposing his community to, well, toxic waste—and he only does that in retaliation when they refuse to cover his brain cancer treatment, and he doesn’t want to leave his stepkid an orphan. Heady shit for a Troma production! But as with that film, I think Cold Storage needed to be even more extreme with the gore. The aftereffects of the fungus are horrifying, yes, and the makeup is fantastic, but I think the movie needed to really drip with green vomit—the way it would have if it was made in 1980s by B-movie vigilantes with part-time actors and no permits. I get the sense that filmmakers think today’s audiences are more squeamish or prudish than their parents, but are they, really, or have they just grown up in a world overflowing with Marvel’s CGI oatmeal? Because in my (fairly full) theater, everyone reacted to every bit of green vomit and deer weirdness. Society only collapses if we let it, people—which is kind of the deeper message of Cold Storage? Bring more midnight movie energy into the world, commit to the splatter, let’s turn this ship around.[end-mark] The post <em>Cold Storage</em> Is a Fun Midnight Movie that Needs More Midnight Movie Energy appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Blood and the Beast: On Sundays She Picks Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield Mahvesh Murad reviews Yah Yah Scholfield’s debut novel. By Mahvesh Murad | Published on February 18, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Atlanta, 1965. Ma’am beats her daughter as casually and carelessly as she has done for 41 years, but this time she cracks Jude’s head, and Jude finally snaps. After a lifetime of abuse at the hands of the one person who should have protected her, Jude unleashes all the anger she has been directing at her own self, at her mother: “aren’t there spiders who eat their mothers,” she finds herself thinking, “the only way out is through.” Yah Yah Scholfield’s debut novel On Sundays She Picked Flowers opens brutally, with violence and pain and anger and terrible raw visceral images that linger on, even when there are many other horrors to be witnessed along the course of the story.  After a gruesome escape from her childhood home, Jude finds herself in the swampy forests of southern Georgia, where a somewhat kinder and marginally less racist white woman she encounters tells her that she can go live in an abandoned house on what used to be a plantation. Everyone who comes near that house is frightened away by it, but Jude, who has seen so much worse, experienced so much worse at her own mother’s hands, is not afraid of this haunted space. The old manor’s disquiet reflects Jude’s own; both are haunted by violence, by rage and sadness. The house and the land around it are soaked through by the years of slavery that took place there, the blood and the pain of the enslaved as much a part of the landscape now as the trees and streams are. Scholfield’s descriptions of the house itself are lush and visceral, the language easily setting the house up as something alive, something with its own dark heart beating aggressively.  “It was a plain house, all splintered columns and discoloured wood, its disorder like a caul over a newborn’s face.” Jude knows as soon as she enters that every frightening story the locals have told about the house is, in fact, true. She senses right away that “there were haints in the cellar, ghouls trapped up in the bricks and behind the wallpaper, stashed like jewels beneath the floorboards and crowded up the chimney. Yes, of course, there were spirits there, malignant and benign, festering in the well, clogging the pipes. The grounds, steeped with Black blood, released noxious gases, […]to squat over the house, to sicken it and its inhabitants. Malevolent and sticky, left too long to stew in its ugliness, the house churned as it adjusted to Jude’s presence. Jude, nauseous and vertiginous, felt the house’s discomfort as her own…” Eventually, Jude and the house come to terms with each other. She acknowledges its pain, introduces her own, comforts it and herself, and names the house Candle. “Like a mutt brought indoors, bathed and fed and collared, it came to heel. Naturally it being a wild and possessed thing, it was not always obedient; it had its moments of pique, tantrums of cutlery and petulant furniture, but now when she called its name, it heeded her, and like its namesake, it burned in the dark.” They settle around each other, haunted house and haunted woman, until they each find a home in the other’s existence, no longer fearful. What Jude does not understand and does fear though, is the presence of a threatening beast that hovers around her and Candle, never making itself visible, but remaining just on the periphery. It leaves her gifts of meat in the mornings, “mauled remains of animals thrown haphazardly onto her porch… occasionally there were other gifts, flashy candy wrappers from the town, but death reigned supreme.” Jude, afraid at first, grows to think fondly of this threat too, given it does not actually harm her. She accepts the meat, indulging her hunger for blood, viscera, fear. Years go by like this, and the beast, “her beast, her animal that stalked her and terrified her and fed her so well—kept no schedule. Sometimes, it came daily and sometimes, Jude wouldn’t see it for weeks, months, and once, not for four lonely years.” Buy the Book On Sundays She Picked Flowers Yah Yah Scholfield Buy Book On Sundays She Picked Flowers Yah Yah Scholfield Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Jude is a little lonely in her new home, but learns from the lush forests around the house, evolving and changing from the angry woman she was when she arrived, to a calmer wiser woman, a healer who has some respect from the townspeople now: “All that she was was of her own invention. In sunlight and solitude, she bloomed.”  Then a stranger shows up at the door one day, unannounced, a woman to whom Jude feels an immediate attraction. Nemoira is beautiful but somehow dangerous and strange, and Jude looks at her and “feels a pang of hunger.” There is something odd about Nemoira, not just that she stands as if “new to her body,” but also in the way she causally makes demands of Jude, in the way she comfortably settles into the house with her, in the way she immediately steps in to take care of Jude when she is sick, as if she always belonged there with her. She and Jude share a sexual charge that develops into a relationship that is wild and passionate, and always always on the very edge of something dangerous, as Jude finally gives in to desires she has repressed her entire life. “You can’t deny nature,” says Nemoira, and Jude does not. They fall into a rhythm together, but it remains somehow unsettling, for Jude and for the reader. Nemoira asks about the beast, wondering why Jude doesn’t just shoot it down, and Jude confesses “I don’t want it to leave me. It scares me, but it excites me too, the feeling of something so… so massive caring enough to stalk me and come into my house, to leave deer on my porch. It’s like having a god that looks only at you.” But Jude also looks to Nemoira as if she is something holy, as she is able to satisfy a need in Jude that she has only just been able to name. With Nemoira, Jude is able to really become herself; she is able to let go of insecurities she had as a child, when she was repeatedly told she was “too fat, too Black, too tall, and too damn ugly.” She is desired, and desires in return, and does not need to hide. With Nemoira, Jude has to confront everything about herself, including her deepest feelings about violence. She has to look at her childhood and her past, and take into account things that she hadn’t known or hadn’t wanted to know about herself and her mother. Who is Nemoira? And is Jude really willing to look at everything Nemoira has brought into her life?  While Schofield’s language is lush, images rich and dark and often lovely, the main problem with the overall narrative is that Jude’s story with her mother’s family (which is where we start) never quite sits smoothly alongside Jude and Nemoira’s story. The two plots sort of run in parallel (not in time or space, but just as storylines). But perhaps that is okay. Knowing more about Jude’s mother, her parents, and sisters only adds to our understanding of Jude herself, and to the ideas of generational trauma, buried secrets, feminine rage, and terrible cycles of abuse within families.  On Sunday’s She Picked Flowers is very much a Southern gothic horror, both thematically and in Scholfield’s use of language. It is essentially about Jude’s rewilding, as it were, and the slow blooming of a woman who must learn to accept the darkest parts of herself in order to love freely, and to accept love only in the form she needs.[end-mark] On Sundays She Picked Flowers is published by Saga Press. The post Blood and the Beast: <i>On Sundays She Picks Flowers</i> by Yah Yah Scholfield appeared first on Reactor.

Two former chiefs of staff for Sen. Ted Cruz, who also had senior roles under Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, sparred Tuesday evening over who would be the Lone Star State’s next top law enforcement official. Paxton is currently competing in a high profile GOP Senate primary against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Wesley Hunt. Competing to fill his seat are Rep. Chip Roy, a House conservative with the backing of Cruz, and Aaron Reitz, endorsed by Paxton. Two state senators are also in the mix, Sens. Joan Huffman of the Houston area, and Mayes Middleton, an oil and gas executive who has reportedly raised $12 million.  If no candidate wins 50% in the March primary, the attorney general contest will be decided in a June runoff.  Roy and Reitz squared off during Tuesday evening’s GOP primary debate for the Texas attorney general seat. “Don’t be fooled when Chip Roy tells you that he was Paxton’s chief deputy, and he wants to cite his record there. Remember, he was so ineffective, so bad at serving as Paxton’s deputy, that Paxton fired him,” Reitz said. Roy responded, “That’s simply not true.” Roy was reportedly part of an exodus of senior staff that left Paxton’s office in 2016. “I know someone who both of us worked for that’s endorsed me, and that’s Sen. Ted Cruz, and he has put his full confidence in me to serve as the attorney general of Texas,” Roy continued. “Ted, having served as solicitor general for this great state, knows what is necessary in that office, and I’m proud to have his full support and endorsement.”  The Republican Attorneys General Association sponsored the debate, which included questions via video from GOP attorneys general from Iowa, Kansas, and West Virginia. The Blaze commentator Allie Beth Stuckey was the moderator. There was little difference between the candidates on policy, as all four are pro-life, vowed to stop a Sharia movement in Texas, and promised to crack down on the type of welfare fraud that occurred in Minnesota. While candidates agreed on enforcing the Texas ban on “gender transition” surgeries and hormone treatments for minors, there was some disagreement on who had the strongest position.   “These young people who were used, trapped into making these decisions, tricked into the decisions, whatever it was, it was horrible,” Huffman said. She said as attorney general, she will work with the state legislature “to make sure there are civil remedies for victims.”  “I’ve always stood up for victims, and this is just another class of victims that I would fight for,” Huffman said.  Middleton accused Roy of attempting to water down a House-passed national ban. Roy proposed an amendment to take away federal funding for such procedures and expressed concerns about federal overreach. He dropped the amendment and voted for the bill.   “It was under a state’s rights argument. I’m sorry. There is no right to hurt a child,” Middleton said. “We need to make sure that we ban this completely.” Roy said, “it is amazing to listen to Republican attorneys general candidates standing up saying, they want massive federal laws to step over the state of Texas.” He also noted the bill was sponsored by former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a fervent critic of President Donald Trump. “I stood up to try to improve legislation in December that is dead in the United States Senate, and to make it something that we could pass with a funding string, rather than what my opponents want to criticize me for,” Roy said. “The truth matters, and I’ve stood up alongside those victims, and I will do it as attorney general.” The post Texas AG Contest Includes Cruz-Backed Candidate vs. Paxton-Endorsed Contender appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On Monday, yet another person who identified as transgender carried out a mass shooting—this time during a high school hockey game—highlighting why federal law enforcement should consider designating the threat of transgender ideology as violent extremism. While most people who identify as transgender do not pose a threat to others, a growing number of them and their allies have taken up arms, at times targeting or threatening those who disagree with the ideology. Police described the motive in the Rhode Island shooting Monday as a family dispute, but court records suggest the shooter—who turned the gun on himself after killing two family members—had grown estranged from his family due to his transgender identity. Robert Dorgan, 56, who identified as female and went by the name Roberta, also reportedly warned that he might “Go BERSERK” in response to critics of transgender orthodoxy. When actor Kevin Sorbo posted on X last week that Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del.—a man in Congress who identifies as a woman—is a man, Dorgan responded, “keep bashing us. But do not wonder why we Go BERSERK.” A Radicalizing Movement The transgender movement not only encourages men and women to adopt a “gender identity” as the opposite sex and to alter their bodies to make them conform to this identity, but it also demands that society accept, and even celebrate, the delusion. Activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign not only demand societal acceptance, but also demonize dissent as a form of violence against people. HRC has described the deaths of people identifying as transgender as an “epidemic.” However, the Human Rights Campaign’s own data suggests that these people face a lower homicide risk than other groups, particularly men, women, black, white, and Hispanic people. This claim represents the fountainhead of a constant stream of hyperbolic transgender rhetoric. For instance, MSNBC columnist Katelyn Burns once described a move to restrict the Frankensteinian treatments of “gender-affirming care” as an act of genocide. Supporters of “gender-affirming care” maintain—with a straight face—that people with gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s sex) cannot prevent themselves from committing suicide if they do not receive these interventions. Yet, at the Supreme Court, the lawyer arguing for “gender-affirming care” admitted there is “no evidence” these interventions reduce suicide. Online influencers who identify as transgender have amassed huge followings, and members of their audiences may find themselves bombarded with exaggerated rhetoric about the “hate” of those who dare to disagree. In fact, the influential Southern Poverty Law Center repeatedly compares conservative Christians who disagree with transgender orthodoxy to the Ku Klux Klan. If you legitimately believe that there is an “epidemic” of murder against people like you, that opposition to your agenda is a form of “genocide,” and that Christians’ disagreement with transgender identity is fueling this, you might be tempted to lash out. A Growing Number of Shooters Just last week, Jesse Van Rootselaar, an 18-year-old man who identified as a woman, killed his mother and stepbrother at their home in British Columbia, Canada, before targeting nearby Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, killing six people. Tyler Robinson, 22, who faces murder charges in the September killing of Charlie Kirk, reportedly lived with a boyfriend who identifies as transgender. Robinson appears to have been motivated by this relationship. 1?Tyler RobinsonThe man who allegedly shot and killed Charlie Kirk was dating a man who identifies as a woman, and he started to support "trans rights" in recent years, his mother told authorities.This is the latest in a line of violence, however.?2/15 pic.twitter.com/WQuuHKKxMd— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) September 20, 2025 Authorities confirmed that 23-year-old Robin Westman, a male identifying as a female, opened fire at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis in August, killing two children and injuring 17 others. Mia Bailey, 30, a male who identifies as female, shot and killed his parents in June 2024. A judge sentenced him to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life in prison after a jury convicted him. Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as male, shot and killed three children and three adults on March 27, 2023, at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The man who tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June 2022 identifies as a woman. Nicholas Roske, who was 29 when he pleaded guilty in April, identifies as Sophie Roske in a court document. On May 7, 2019, then-16-year-old Maya “Alec” McKinney and her 19-year-old fellow student, Devon Erickson, opened fire at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, killing one and injuring eight. Both have been sentenced to life in prison. McKinney, a female, identifies as male. In June 2024, a judge sentenced Alexia Willie, a man who identifies as a woman, to one year in prison after he pleaded guilty to threatening to injure people across state lines. Willie, a resident of Nashville, Illinois, confessed to threatening to rape girls in girls’ restrooms, carry out mass shootings at schools, and bomb churches. A Federal Designation Under 18 U.S. Code § 2331, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security maintain categories for domestic violent extremism, but no category specifically addresses transgender ideology. The Oversight Project and The Heritage Foundation have formally called on the FBI to designate transgender ideology violent extremism, and I agree. Such a designation would allow the FBI to tailor specific investigative techniques to address the threat, but it must be careful not to suggest that all transgender people or their allies represent a threat. The FBI told The Daily Signal that it had no comment on the issue. The growing list of violent offenders identifying as transgender suggests this is a serious problem and federal authorities should get to the bottom of it. The post Rhode Island Shooting Highlights the Need for FBI to Investigate Transgender-Motivated Violence appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Three US senators want federal funding to help Iranians bypass censorship and access VPNs. The same three senators have spent years supporting the surveillance systems that track Americans online. We obtained a copy of their letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for you here. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), James Lankford (R-OK), and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) are backing funding for anti-censorship technology and virtual private networks abroad. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose privacy record is largely clean, is also supporting the effort. The bipartisan coalition wants to help people circumvent government internet controls. Just not the American government’s internet controls. Graham’s voting record reads like a blueprint for the surveillance state he claims to oppose overseas. He voted for the Patriot Act in 2001 and has supported every major expansion since. When Section 702 of FISA came up for reauthorization, Graham backed it. When Congress considered making Section 702 permanent in 2017 with no sunset clauses and no congressional review, Graham backed that too. His encryption stance is just as consistent. Graham co-sponsored the EARN IT Act in 2020, which would pressure platforms to weaken encryption to avoid liability. He also backed the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act, a bill that would require companies to build backdoors into their security systems. VPNs work because of encryption. Graham has spent years trying to break it. He’s also pushed to repeal Section 230 protections and supported requiring government licenses for companies offering AI tools. When surveillance mechanisms he championed caught his own communications, Graham complained. Privacy for senators. Mass surveillance for everyone else. Lankford introduced the Free Speech Fairness Act, which removed restrictions on political speech by religious and nonprofit organizations. That same senator has backed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which will likely require platforms to implement age verification and give regulators the power to pressure companies into removing content. He called for Section 230 to be “ripped up” and backed a national strategy against antisemitism that includes government coordination on speech. When Edward Snowden revealed the scope of NSA surveillance, Lankford branded him a traitor for telling the public what their government was doing. Most revealing: when the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act of 2020 came up for a vote, Lankford voted no. That bill would have amended the Patriot Act to require warrants before the government collects Americans’ internet browsing and search history. The senator pushing VPNs for Iranians voted against requiring warrants before surveilling Americans. Rosen voted to confirm Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, a position whose occupant has advocated for online censorship. She co-founded a Senate Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism that pushes legislative responses to speech. She also helped introduce the TAKE IT DOWN Act, targeting AI-generated and real non-consensual intimate imagery. Digital rights organizations have flagged the bill’s lack of safeguards. Without proper checks, its broad provisions could force platforms into aggressive content removal, the same kind of takedown infrastructure that authoritarian governments use against dissidents. Privacy and anti-censorship tools work the same way everywhere. VPNs hide your traffic from surveillance. Encryption keeps your communications private. Anonymity tools prevent governments from identifying who you are and what you’re reading. The senators backing these tools for Iranians have systematically attacked them for Americans. They’ve voted for bulk collection programs, pushed for encryption backdoors, and supported bills that would require platforms to verify user identities. The infrastructure they want to help Iranians bypass looks remarkably similar to the infrastructure they’re building at home. The records are public. The same senators who believe Iranians deserve privacy protection from their government believe Americans deserve no such protection from theirs. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Senators Talk Digital Freedom for Iran While Expanding Surveillance at Home appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Fight Over the California Wealth Tax Shapes Up

The ex-President's quick-fire-round answer has led to a flurry of comments.

New York Times climate-policy reporter Lisa Friedman explains her beat as covering “how our warming planet affects vulnerable communities and to understand the economic and political challenges involved in curbing greenhouse gases.” In other words, her beat is all about forcing politicians to respond to an alleged "crisis." So there was outrage when President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency eliminated the dubious Obama-era Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, which “served as a prerequisite for regulating emissions from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines.” Friedman embellished the whole affair to make it make Trump out to be the enemy of Mother Earth in a February 12 screed: “Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change.” Friedman began: President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet. The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather. Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be. Science vs. Trump. It wouldn't be the first time they drew this cartoon. On Wednesday, the anti-Trump headline of choice was "As Trump Obliterates Climate Efforts, States Try to Fill the Gap." Friedman's rant, of course, was completely false in presenting Science as unanimous, as American Compass managing editor Drew Holden pointed out on X: “This is it. The worst legacy media headline I’ve ever seen. A blatant lie. A deeply political issue. Entirely lacking context (‘bedrock’ for something passed in 2009!). World-is-ending alarmism. Trump derangement. Nails everything wrong w/ the press.” The “endangerment finding” effectively gave the EPA carte blanche authority to impose sweeping restrictions on the economy based on arbitrary assessments of dangers to public health, regardless of harms to economic stability. As former Heritage Foundation Scholars Kevin Dayaratna and Diana Furchtgott-Roth summarized in a July 30, 2025 report, the EPA’s "endangerment finding” was “based largely on studies compiled by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), rather than on its own scientific assessments.” As Holden concluded, all repealing the "endangerment finding" will do is "stop unelected bureaucrats from using climate change as a catchall to shape policy in harmful ways." Somehow lost on the Times is that overturning this regulation will absolutely not “erase the governments power to fight climate change.” All it will do is stop unelected bureaucrats from using climate change as a catchall to shape policy in harmful ways. pic.twitter.com/b6NfxnttOF — Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) February 17, 2026 But Friedman, true to the Times brand, falsely stated that “For nearly 17 years, the E.P.A. had relied on the bedrock finding to justify regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution from oil and gas wells, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources that burn fossil fuels?” Whose “bedrock finding” was it, Friedman? She doesn’t clearly say.  The assertion that "the vast majority of scientists" support drastic government action is a lie, as EPA administrator Lee Zeldin argued in an X-post targeting another Times piece battering the Trump administration along Friedman’s logic. “EPA’s vehicle standards for criteria pollutants and hazardous air pollutants remain. The objective here is to dumb down the Times’ readers as much as possible with absolute lies,” Zeldin rebuked.  As Dayaratna and Furchtgott-Roth reported, there is “No Scientific Consensus on CO₂ Harm.” Friedman’s reasoning is likely based on the phony notion that 97 percent of scientists have reached consensus on man-made climate change. But Dayaratna and Furchtgott-Roth obliterated that claim: The misleading figure stems from a 2013 study in Environmental Research Letters that examines the abstracts of nearly 12,000 academic papers on climate change and global warming between 1991 and 2011. Of those papers, 66.4 percent did not express an opinion on anthropogenic warming, 32.6 percent endorsed it, 0.7 percent rejected it, and 0.3 percent were uncertain about the cause. Among the 33.6 percent expressing an opinion on man-made global warming, ‘97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming’ without commenting on danger or urgency. That is about a third of the total polled, not 97 percent. And that's certainly not a “majority,” as Friedman insinuated. In fact, Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett suggested that the finding was itself potentially illegal under the Clean Air Act. “Concerning the scientific basis of the endangerment finding, from the outset it was clear carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) did not qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act (CAA) as written or intended by Congress,” Burnett argued on September 23, 2025.  And of course, Friedman and her Times climate-activist caucus don't want to focus on the economic benefits of eliminating the endangerment finding, as the New York Post outlined February 12. “An economic impact analysis released Thursday night said the $1.3 trillion in savings [from eliminating the ‘endangerment finding’] included $1.1 trillion in reduced vehicle costs and $200 billion in avoided electric vehicle expenses, including chargers and other equipment.” But Friedman simply dismissed the overarching number by kvetching that the Trump administration “has declined to explain how it arrived at that estimate.”  Perhaps Friedman should have waited to read the EPA’s economic impact analysis to be released the same day of her report, er, agitprop? Oh well.