The Environmental Protection Agency no longer wants to protect the environment.

That’s the message Tuesday when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s intent to rescind the 2009 “endangerment finding”—the legal backbone of every federal climate regulation passed in the last 15 years.

Speaking at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, Zeldin unveiled the proposal as if unveiling a new Ford F-350, calling it “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. If finalized, the proposal would effectively erase the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases that fuel climate change.

Gone would be vehicle emissions standards. Gone would be rules capping methane leaks from oil and gas operations. Gone would be regulations limiting how much carbon power plants can dump into the sky.

And gone would be any illusion that the federal government is serious about addressing climate change.

Zeldin’s rationale? That the EPA “does not have the power” to make such regulations under the Clean Air Act. “We do not have that power on our own to decide as an agency that we are going to combat global climate change because we give ourselves that power,” he said.

Never mind that the Supreme Court already affirmed the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act in the landmark 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA. Never mind that the endangerment finding was rooted in mountains of peer-reviewed science, affirmed by scientists across political lines, and upheld in multiple legal challenges. The Trump-era EPA doesn’t want to regulate climate pollution—not because it can’t, but because it won’t.

Zealan Hoover, who advised the agency under President Biden, said the quiet part out loud: “This is not just an attack on science but on common sense.”

Let’s be clear about the stakes. The 2009 finding didn’t invent climate regulation—it enabled it. Without it, the EPA is a shell, stripped of one of its only tools to address the rising planetary fever. And this isn’t just a war on carbon. It’s a war on precedent. On data. On the very idea that public agencies should protect the public.

If the endangerment finding goes, so does the entire federal framework for confronting climate change. And while lawsuits are certain to follow, the damage may already be done. Corporations, lobbyists, and fossil fuel interests have their headline. Investors have their signal. The planet has its warning.

The irony is that most major U.S. energy companies have already begun planning around carbon constraints. Utilities are phasing out coal. Car companies are going electric. Even ExxonMobil claims to support methane rules. But the EPA’s move isn’t about policy—it’s about politics. It’s about torching the rulebook on the way out the door.

Zeldin and his allies call it energy freedom. But what they’re really offering is atmospheric anarchy, gift-wrapped in bureaucratic doublespeak. If the EPA no longer believes greenhouse gases are dangerous, it ceases to be an environmental agency at all. It becomes a PR shop for polluters.

The public comment period opens Friday. Speak now or breathe it in later.

Because the endangerment finding may be erased—but the consequences will hang in the air forever.

Trump doesn’t need a wall. He has a crow.

Not a metaphorical one, either. A real bird of prey, circling above a country dazed by déjà vu. We’ve seen this crow before — in the cotton fields and the chain gangs, at the lunch counters and bus stops. Its name then was Jim. Or Jane. Now it’s Juan.

Juan Crow, the term coined by journalist Roberto Lovato, describes the network of laws, customs, and power structures designed to isolate and punish undocumented immigrants. Under Trump’s second term, that crow has grown meaner, hungrier.

And it’s not just circling immigrants anymore. It’s eyeing citizens. It’s eyeing anyone not white enough, quiet enough, grateful enough.

This isn’t just policy. It’s ideology. A full-throated return to white rule, dressed in executive orders and wrapped in the flag. And it’s working.

Start with ICE. The border agency has become a domestic army, empowered to detain without probable cause. Agents don’t need warrants. They don’t need to explain. They just need to point, grab, and vanish people into a detention system described by Human Rights Watch as a mash-up of Guantánamo and Jim Crow prisons: concrete floors, rotten food, denied medicine, shackled hands.

Trump’s team has brought back quotas for arrests. Imagine that: a daily number of bodies to round up. Not criminals — people. Most of those detained have no violent record. Many have no record at all. But they’re brown. Or Muslim. Or loud. So the crow swoops.

The cruelty is the point, of course. It’s spectacle. Look at the photos shared by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — shots from a Salvadoran mega-prison meant to stir fear, to signal what “law and order” looks like in the MAGA state. The implication is clear: if you’re not on the right side of the line, we have cages waiting.

It’s not just immigrants, either. Birthright citizenship is under attack. The 14th Amendment — once used to grant rights to formerly enslaved people — is being reinterpreted to deny rights to the children of immigrants. “It was meant for the babies of slaves,” Trump said recently, brushing aside the Equal Protection Clause like it was a typo.

Even citizens aren’t safe. Trump now openly muses about denaturalizing Americans. He laughed along with Fox’s Peter Doocy when asked if he’d deport Zohran Mamdani, a New York politician born in Uganda but raised here. “We have bad people who’ve been here a long time,” Trump said. “Many of them were born here.”

That’s not dog-whistle racism. That’s bullhorn fascism.

And we’ve seen it before. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson hosted a screening of The Birth of a Nation at the White House — a film that mythologized the Ku Klux Klan and cast Black men as monsters. Today, we have executive orders instead of film reels, ICE instead of white hoods. But the effect is the same: rewrite the rules of belonging.

Trump’s second term has one goal — to finish what the first started. Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation, outlines exactly how: purge the civil service, gut constitutional rights, and restore “order.” It’s Confederacy 2.0, with better branding.

The question isn’t whether Juan Crow is back. It’s how far he’ll fly.

Because once you normalize this — once you accept masked agents, detention quotas, and deportation threats for U.S. citizens — it’s already too late.

The crow’s not circling anymore.

It’s perched.

And it’s watching.