The day after a teenager opened fire in a Nashville high school cafeteria early this year, officials in the district scrambled to investigate potential threats across their schools. Rumors flew that the shooter, who killed a student before turning the gun on himself, had accomplices at large.

At DuPont Tyler Middle School, the assistant principal’s most urgent concern was a 12-year-old boy. James, a seventh grader with a small voice and mop of brown hair, had posted a concerning screenshot on Instagram that morning, Jan. 23. He was arrested at school hours later and charged with making a threat of mass violence.

The assistant principal had to complete a detailed investigation called a threat assessment, as required by Tennessee law. First, she and other school employees had to figure out whether James’ threat was valid. Then, they had to determine what actions to take to help a potentially troubled child and protect other students.

Threat assessments are not public, but the district gave ProPublica a copy of James’ with his father’s permission. School officials did not carry out the threat assessment properly, according to experts who reviewed it at ProPublica’s request. Instead, the school expelled James without investigating further and skipped crucial steps that would help him or protect others. (We are using the child’s middle name to protect his privacy.)

The way school officials handled James’ case also exposes glaring contradictions in two recent Tennessee laws that aim to criminalize school threats and require schools to expel students who make them — with minimal recourse, transparency or accountability.

One obvious issue in the threat assessment, according to the experts, appeared on Page 20. That page features a checklist of options for how the school could address its concerns about James, including advising his parents to secure guns in their home and ensuring he has access to counseling.

Schools should take steps like these even when a student is expelled, according to John Van Dreal, a former school administrator who has spent decades helping schools improve their violence prevention strategies. Officials at James’ school opted for none of the options they could have taken. Instead, the assistant principal wrote under the list in blue pen, “student was expelled.”

“That’s actually about the most dangerous thing you can do for the student,” Van Dreal said, “and honestly for the community.”

Van Dreal’s name appears in tiny print at the bottom of each page of James’ threat assessment, because he helped the school district set up its current process. After ProPublica shared details about James’ case, Van Dreal said, “What I’m hearing is probably more training and more examples are needed.”

Nashville’s school district does not collect data on how many threat assessments it does or how many result in expulsions, according to spokesperson Sean Braisted. “The goal is always to ensure the safety and well-being of all students while addressing incidents appropriately,” Braisted wrote. He later declined to answer questions ProPublica asked about James’ case, although James’ father signed a privacy waiver allowing the school to do so.

Tennessee schools must submit data to the state on how effective their threat assessments are — but the state does not release that information to the public. School districts are required to get training on threat assessments, but lawyers and parents say they often carry them out inconsistently and use varying definitions for what makes a threat valid.

Two recent contradictory Tennessee laws make it even harder to handle student threats. One mandates a felony charge for anyone who makes a “threat of mass violence” at school, without requiring police to investigate intent or credibility. The other requires schools to determine that a threat of mass violence is “valid” before expelling a student for at least a year.

James’ alleged threat was a screenshot of a text exchange. One person said they would “shoot up” a Nashville school and asked if the other would attack a different school. “Yea,” the other person replied. “I got some other people for other schools.” The FBI flagged the post for school officials and police. James told school officials that he reposted the screenshot from the Instagram page of a Spanish-language news site.

The Tennessean published a story in April detailing James’ arrest and overnight stay in juvenile detention. The story, and the ones ProPublica and WPLN published last year on other arrests, shows how quickly police move to take youth into custody.

Schools in Tennessee are supposed to follow a higher standard than police when it comes to investigating threats of mass violence: They’re supposed to determine whether a threat is valid. For instance, in Hamilton County, a few hours southeast of Nashville, school officials chose not to expel two students even after police arrested them for threats of mass violence, ProPublica and WPLN previously reported.

Yet when James’ father appealed his son’s expulsion at a March school district hearing, the assistant principal said repeatedly that James had to be expelled simply because he’d been arrested. “We did not investigate further,” she said. James’ father shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica.

James, who turned 13 in February, is small for his age, still awaiting the teenage growth spurt of his three older brothers. At the hearing, his voice was soft but assured as he explained what happened. He said he understands why he shouldn’t have posted the screenshot. But he said he wanted to warn others and feel “heroic.”

Melissa Nelson, a national school safety consultant based in Pennsylvania who trains school employees on managing threats, reviewed James’ threat assessment at ProPublica’s request and concluded that “this is gross mismanagement of a case.”

“This tool has not been used as intended,” she said. “They didn’t do a behavior threat assessment. They filled out some paperwork.”

After the police took James away, assistant principal Angela Post convened a team of school employees to decide whether to expel him. They used a threat assessment form that Van Dreal had developed, one of the most commonly used across the country, to guide them on how to respond.

According to Van Dreal, Metro Nashville Public Schools is in an early phase of using the form, and its staff have flown to Oregon at least once to learn from his consulting group.

Van Dreal tells school officials to use the threat assessment to collect information about a student in trouble and address behavior that could signal future violence. If school officials worried that James was planning an act of violence, they should have pursued some of the many options outlined in the threat assessment to get him help and protect the school from harm.

Instead, they chose none of those options.

Experts said that is one of the biggest mistakes school officials make. “Even if a child is expelled, what I always train is: Out of sight, out of mind doesn’t help,” Nelson said. “Expelling a child doesn’t deescalate the situation or move them off the pathway of violence. A lot of times, it makes it worse.”

School officials also failed to seek out more information that could have helped them figure out whether the threat was valid. Post checked a box acknowledging that she hadn’t notified James’ parents of the threat assessment. She wrote beside it, as an explanation, “student was arrested and expelled.” On a line asking whether James had access to weapons, Post wrote that the threat assessment team did not know.

Interviewing parents is a crucial part of the process, said Rob Moore, a Tennessee psychologist who has helped schools conduct threat assessments for more than two decades. “When you sit in that room with those parents and you collect data from them, you really get a sense of things that teachers would never know, that the administrators would never know.”

Although school officials did not opt to investigate further or to monitor James, the threat assessment indicated they had concerns he may pose a threat. In response to a question about whether James’ caregivers, peers or staff were concerned about his potential for acting out aggressively, Post checked yes and wrote, “He has little to no supervision in discipline structures at home but might think he could get away with it.”

And although James told school administrators he was not a participant in the text thread he shared on Instagram, Post wrote that he had indicated a plan and intention to harm others. “See attached image. Shows location, intent to harm, targets and date,” she wrote, referencing a screenshot of James’ Instagram post. She also wrote that he had a motive: “The post indicated that he was being made fun of. See attached image.”

The threat assessment included questionnaires from James’ teachers; three out of four said they did not have concerns about potential aggression. One teacher, who taught James social studies, cited his disciplinary history: using racial slurs, fighting another student and “researching racially motivated things” on the school computer. “Dad seemed disengaged in conference & somewhat unaware of the child’s school or social or personal issues,” she wrote.

James’ dad and stepmom did not know that the threat assessment accused them of lax supervision at home. That’s because they didn’t even know the threat assessment existed until ProPublica told them about it, more than a week after it took place.

Upon reading the document, their first emotion, after shock, was anger. They said they hadn’t known about the incident with the racial slur, and it was not directly referenced in a copy of James’ disciplinary history. But they felt upset at the insinuation that they had not been involved in James’ life. “We’ve been asking for help, for grades, tutoring,” his dad, Kyle Caldwell, said. “And we really didn’t get any.”

James said that in early September, his social studies teacher taught the class about World War II. He said the teacher didn’t answer enough of his questions, so he started searching online. The school flagged that he had looked up swastikas. “I didn’t know much about it,” he said. “That’s why I searched it.”

As part of his discipline, the school prohibited him from using its computers. His stepmother, Breanne Metz, shared emails she sent to James’ teachers explaining she and Caldwell were worried about his grades and wanted to help him catch up.

James had been struggling with his parents’ contentious divorce; after his mom lost custody of him, he hadn’t been able to see her in months. Worried, his dad and stepmom arranged for him to see a school counselor. James said the counselor tried to connect with him through their mutual love of video games over about five sessions, which was nice, though “it didn’t really help.” Post wrote in the threat assessment that James had “disclosed confidential information to the school counselor that would support a feeling of being overwhelmed or distraught.”

Then James lost his best friend: Lieutenant Dan, a three-legged pitbull-lab mix named after a character from the movie “Forrest Gump.” Dan joined the family when he and James were both 1, and he died of cancer last November. As James describes it, he was at capacity with the emotions he was dealing with, and his dog’s death was the tipping point. “When someone you love or something you love for your whole life passes away, you can’t hold it,” he said. He sat in class feeling sad and exhausted.

Records show school staff talked with James’ parents about his attendance at school and he was disciplined for not complying with an unspecified request. Then in mid-December, he began a fight with another student, who had been “horseplaying” with him “off and on” and went too far, according to the school report. The following month, he was arrested and expelled.

In the days after the arrest, Caldwell considered hiring a lawyer. Reading the threat assessment “added the urgency” for him to finally make the call. “The puzzle pieces weren’t coming together in their story,” he said. “It really looked like they were going to try to be sweeping their stuff under the rug.”

In mid-March, James sat at the oval table in the district conference room next to his father and across from assistant principal Post. He wore a gray vest over his T-shirt in preparation for an appeal hearing that would determine whether he would be allowed back in school. It had been nearly two months since he had set foot on district property.

Caldwell brought his private lawyer, a rare resource for a school hearing. He showed up that morning nervous but eager to make his case directly to school administrators. The public rarely gets insight into what happens at a school appeal hearing, but Caldwell shared an audio recording with ProPublica.

Post started by reading aloud the social media post that landed James in trouble, stumbling over the shorthand and unfamiliar internet slang. Then, it was James’ turn to speak for himself.

Lisa Currie, the school district’s director of discipline, asked him to explain why he had reposted the screenshot of the texts. “You do understand that once you reposted them from somewhere else, it gave the appearance that this was a conversation that you were having?” she said.

“I just wanted to let people know, feel heroic,” James said. “I didn’t want more people to get hurt.”

Over the next 40 minutes, Caldwell’s lawyer questioned Post about the process the school used to determine whether James should be expelled. When he pressed her for direct responses, Post repeatedly said that law enforcement and not the school held the primary responsibility for investigating the threat. Although the law requires schools to use a threat assessment to determine if the threat is “valid,” Post and her team based the expulsion entirely on the police’s arrest.

Once local police take over a case, she said, “then it’s not really our investigation anymore.”

“Was it your assessment at the time that he wrote this statement, like physically typed it out on a computer and posted it?” the lawyer asked.

“We did not make that determination,” Post said.

She said school staff did not look deeply through James’ disciplinary history as part of the threat assessment. “That’s not necessarily the purpose of the threat assessment,” she told the lawyer. Because James had been expelled and arrested, “there would not be a reason to be concerned about the return of a student.”

Currie indicated that Post’s approach was supported by district leaders. “The purpose of the threat assessment is to determine appropriate supports and interventions around the students while they’re in the building,” she said. Post and Currie did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to written questions.

Post told the lawyer she couldn’t remember whether school staff investigated the origin of the original threat.

“So if there was an actual threat made and somebody else authored this threat, then we don’t know who that is. Would that be a fair statement?” the lawyer asked.

“That is possible,” Post responded. She said James didn’t initially say that he had shared the post to warn others and it wasn’t her place to decide whether he intended to make a threat. “I don’t want to think, ‘Oh, he’s not going to do that.’ And then something just like the previous day happened,” she said, referring to the Antioch High School shooting. Once James was arrested, “it’s in MNPD’s hands,” Post said, referring to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.

The lawyer asked Post to explain whether the threat assessment could ever have changed school officials’ decision to expel James: What if school officials found out that the threat was not valid? “Had y’all come on information that he had not written these texts,” he asked, “would it have changed the punishment?”

“We would have had to let our [school resource officer] know and they would have had to go through the MNPD channels,” she said.

“You did not at that time know whether he wrote those text messages or not?” the lawyer asked again.

“Correct,” Post said.

Then, it was Caldwell’s turn to speak. He criticized the school’s decision to leave him out of the initial disciplinary process. He would have explained to James why he should go through “appropriate channels” to report a threat instead of posting it on Instagram. “As a dad,” he said, “there was a teachable parent moment that I didn’t get to have.”

As the hearing came to a close, Currie told Caldwell to expect a decision soon.

The arrest and expulsion cleaved James’ life in two. He now begins many sentences with the phrase “before everything happened.” Before everything happened, he would ride his bike with his brothers and friends to explore the forested land and abandoned houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. They found all sorts of strange garbage: a fire engine’s license plate, wooden pictures of “demonic rituals,” a dentist chair adorned with rusty handcuffs.

He was able to come home from his night in detention in exchange for agreeing to pretrial diversion with six months of court supervision, a common outcome for students charged with threats of mass violence. While under supervision, he wasn’t allowed to use the computer or phone unsupervised by an adult and was mostly restricted to the streets around his house. “It’s a big neighborhood, but once you get used to it, it’s small,” he said.

The court recently lifted his supervision, earlier than expected. Because he had completed the terms of pretrial diversion, his case was dismissed.

His parents declined Metro Nashville Public Schools’ offer to enroll him in the local alternative school, which primarily serves kids with disciplinary issues who were suspended or expelled from their original schools. Instead, they enrolled him at an online public charter school; he starts in the fall.

As James waited to hear the result of the expulsion hearing, he followed the schedule his dad and stepmom created for him — less a rigorous academic curriculum than a routine to keep him occupied while his stepmom takes calls in her home office. He gets most excited about the hands-on activities, like building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him online.

One night in early April, tornadoes touched down just outside Nashville. James, his five siblings, and two dogs huddled with Caldwell and Metz in the windowless laundry room; the kids wore helmets in case of falling debris. When they got up the next morning, groggy but unharmed, Caldwell checked the mailbox: A letter from the school district was inside.

District officials had reviewed the information from the hearing and determined that “there was not a due process violation of MNPS’ expulsion process.” James was still expelled. Caldwell had prepared his son for this outcome so that he wouldn’t be devastated. James would later joke that the storm had delivered the bad news.

The letter gave the family the option to escalate the appeal through the district process. But the odds of winning and the costs of retaining the lawyer made the effort feel futile. The more the family fought back, the more anxious the 13-year-old felt about his future. Would he feel even worse if they lost again? Would people start to think of him as a bad kid?

That afternoon, talking with his dad about the letter, James quietly considered these questions. Then he went outside to watch the storm clouds.

For Sheena Scarbrough, being a mother to two daughters was her greatest pride. 

She envisioned watching them grow into adulthood — side by side, thriving, and supported. But those dreams were shattered in April 2024, when her 19-year-old daughter, Sade Robinson, went on a first date with an older man and never came home.

“This is the worst type of pain and hurt. I just miss her being present. I miss her — her life, her spirit, her calls. Just her. Her laughter, her character, her loving nature. She was just so loved,” Scarbrough told Capital B. “I just miss her being there with us every day.”

The grieving mother decided against publicly celebrating Robinson’s second heavenly birthday on Mother’s Day weekend this year. She would have been 21.

Last year, Scarbrough organized a balloon release in her honor at a park near their home. But this year, her oldest daughter’s birthday came just weeks before her accused killer’s trial. Maxwell Anderson, 34, is charged with first-degree intentional homicide, mutilating a corpse, and arson of property other than a building. He has been held in jail on $5 million cash bail. If convicted, he faces life in prison. Jury selection begins May 27.

Capital B has reached out to Anderson’s attorneys Anthony Cotton and Jason Findling for comment. Beyond Anderson’s not-guilty plea to the criminal charges, they declined to comment via email.

Robinson’s death underscores the dangers for Black women living in Wisconsin, where, a 2024 Columbia University report found, they’re 20 times more likely to be murdered than their white peers. The state’s Justice Department says there are 175 missing people from the state, but advocates say those numbers aren’t complete, especially as violence against Black women is on the rise.   

In the weeks leading up to the trial, Scarbrough referred to Anderson as a “demonic entity, an entity or the demon” throughout her interview with Capital B. 

“That demonic entity,” she said with conviction. “A normal person would not move in that…level of behavior.”

A mother waits for answers

Robinson’s case also highlights disparities in police investigations in Wisconsin and across the country when it comes to missing Black people. When Robinson did not show up for work at Pizza Shuttle on April 2, 2024, she was reported missing by co-workers, but Scarbrough wasn’t notified for two days of her disappearance. This is an example of the disconnect law enforcement has with Black families when investigating missing loved ones, said state Rep. Shelia Stubbs, who — along with other lawmakers, including Republican state Rep. Jesse James — has been advocating for an investigative task force to address these disparities.

Once contacted, Scarbrough was able to assist detectives in their investigation by providing Robinson’s last known phone location — the mother and daughter had been tracking each other’s phones for safety. 

“I never imagined this would be my, where I would be placed in life,” Scarbrough said, adding, “This is something I never expected to walk through — being a crime victim.

“My daughter [was] taken from me in the most brutal way.”

“I just miss her being present. I miss her — her life, her spirit, her calls. Just her.”

Sheena Scarbrough, mother of Sade Robinson

According to multiple news outlets, Anderson has prior convictions for domestic violence, disorderly conduct, and drunk driving. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also reported that court records highlight concerns about his mental health and substance abuse.

“I will be at court every day. This is, you know, a long wait,” Scarbrough said. “Definitely, I will be at court every day to get justice for my daughter, most definitely.” 

Scarbrough said there are “a lot of different layers” in connection to her daughter’s death that she cannot get into publicly but that will come out at the criminal trial or through civil litigation she has pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court. 

“We have definitely stopped this demonic entity in their tracks,” she said.

She filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Anderson in June 2024, and this April she filed another suit against two bars, accusing them of contributing to her daughter’s death by allegedly over-serving alcohol to Robinson, who was underage, while she was on a date with Anderson. There’s video surveillance of Robinson’s last moments alive in those bars, according to television station WISN.

Anderson’s attorneys argued in court earlier this year that there’s a potential alibi through Anderson’s phone records. He may have allegedly been in his home using the internet at the time when someone was driving Robinson’s car.

Scarbrough couldn’t quite put into words what justice would look like at the end of the criminal trial. She still has a 17-year-old daughter, Adriana, who she says is grieving the loss of her big sister.

“Not having my baby present, like nothing’s going to replace that. There will never be justice. I want my daughter back,” she said. “But definitely making sure those types of demonic entities are not on the streets to harm or hurt anyone else.”

Nonetheless, she said: “The truth will be told. My daughter’s voice will be heard.”

Feminist language is being twisted into a weapon against feminism itself.

This post was originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, with the headline “‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.’ — 1984 in 2025.”

As someone who has taught and fought for women’s rights for close to four decades, I find it intensely frustrating how the Trump administration is weaponizing feminist rhetoric and law to attack women’s rights. Claiming to defend gender equality, they are eliminating hard-fought gains for women and twisting laws meant to protect women’s rights into tools to destroy them. We are plunging into a world eerily similar to George Orwell’s novel 1984.

This gaslighting strategy has been used for years by the antiabortion movement, which claims that abortion restrictions protect women’s health, when in fact they harm women’s health. Antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers call themselves “Choices” or “All Options” as they work to eliminate both women’s choices and options. These centers claim to care about women but use disinformation and scare tactics to coerce them into carrying unwanted pregnancies to term.

Antiabortion advocates have coopted the language of anti-racism to attack Black women for having abortions. These largely white activists have held “freedom rides” across the South and coopted the Black Lives Matter movement by proclaiming “Baby Lives Matter.” Their feigned concern for Black children is belied by their attempts to cut social programs that support these children once they are born.

Extending their manipulation beyond language and into history, the antiabortion movement coopts feminist and anti-racist heroes to attack the rights of women and Black people. One of the leading antiabortion organizations is called Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Ironically, abortion opponents introduced legislation in Congress to restrict abortion, titled the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.

Using a different tactic, they push to eliminate programs that help mothers by arguing that these programs are discriminatory because they help some but not all women. The Trump administration is considering doing away with federal tax credits for daycare—claiming that it’s “discriminatory” towards “stay-at-home parents.” Don’t be fooled by their gender-neutral language—they are talking about mothers.

In higher education, the Trump administration justifies its attacks on gender and ethnic studies by arguing that these fields are discriminatory because they study discrimination. Despite his Nazi affiliations, Trump uses claims of anti-Semitism to destroy higher education. Trump deletes history from government websites and bans words, such as women, gender and sexuality. Meanwhile, they are eliminating Title IX protections against sexual harassment and assault in schools—all while insisting they are the ones who are fighting discrimination.

Conservatives then invoke women’s rights to attack other historically marginalized communities. Last summer, the conservative Independent Women’s Forum operated a cross-country bus campaign called, “Save Our Sports: Take Back Title IX.” IWF has never done anything to promote women’s sports or enforce Title IX, but they urged Trump to weaponize the law to block a handful of trans women across the country from participating in women’s sports. Schools have been violating Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination in education for years, yet never has the federal government withdrawn federal funding from a school until now—not for discriminating against women, but for allowing trans women to participate in women’s sports. Trump doesn’t care that the lost funding is likely to hurt women’s sports because, of course, it was never about supporting female athletes.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda that Trump has closely followed, is full of this kind of hypocrisy. They claim to support freedom, equality and the “inalienable right of self-direction,” yet recommend policies that roll back women’s right to control their bodies by banning abortion, restricting contraception and eliminating funding for domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.

For generations, feminist philosophers have analyzed how patriarchy inverts the truth to serve its interests. Mary Daly, in her book Beyond God the Father, called this phenomenon “reversal,” illustrated by the patriarchal myth of Adam giving birth to Eve. Daly explained: “It’s ridiculous. Who could believe that? It’s contrary to all biology. But with that myth in mind, people can justify somehow the idea that God is male. And therefore that male is God.”

George Orwell called it “Doublethink” in 1984’s totalitarian society where, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In the novel, The Ministry of Truth made up the lies, and the Ministry of Love tortured people. In an essay on political language, Orwell argued that tyrants use propaganda “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Republicans today are using the 1984 reversal playbook, flooding people with lies to confuse them and corrupting our thought with their language. Many have fallen for Trump’s lies—or don’t care about the truth. They hope to acclimatize us, like a frog in warming water, to the atrocities of Trump’s authoritarian regime. If we continue down our current trajectory, I fear we are destined to become the controlled and manipulated society of Orwell’s 1984.

But Orwell had advice: “To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”

To think clearly, we must challenge their lies and relentlessly, loudly and clearly speak the truth. And we must invest in science, higher education, open debate and critical thinking without fear of penalty.

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One morning in January, Byju Raveendran sat in the back seat of his shiny black Cadillac as it sped through Dubai. Just three years prior, the schoolteachers’ son had appeared on the Forbes list of richest Indians as founder and CEO of Byju’s, then one of the world’s most valuable education technology companies. He was dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, while his driver, Hashim, was more formally attired in a collared shirt. Raveendran, square-jawed and muscular at 45, told me he typically rides beside Hashim in the passenger seat, seeming intent on underscoring his down-to-earthness. “I always sit there, no, Hashim?” he asked, with a boyish laugh. Hashim nodded.

Former Byju’s employees had told me about Raveendran’s love for staying at the world’s finest hotels, and the upscale properties and luxury cars his family owned when he was based in Bengaluru. I’d heard his wife and co-founder, Divya Gokulnath, described as a jet-setter who networked with Silicon Valley elites.

But beyond the Cadillac, Raveendran didn’t seem keen for me to get a glimpse of his wealth. He was facing accusations of defrauding U.S. lenders for hundreds of millions of dollars, while tens of thousands of his employees had been laid off. I’d hoped to be invited to his home — one source told me it was a mansion in a gated community of Dubai. Instead, he showed up at my hotel on short notice to take me to a South Indian restaurant for a simple breakfast of idli, vada, and sambar — his staple meal during a modest upbringing in a village in Kerala.

Raveendran wanted to show he hadn’t let success get to his head, and wouldn’t let his company’s staggering problems, either. He was defiant that his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t over yet. “Why I am confident of a comeback is that the most valuable thing I had is still with me,” he said, referring to himself.

Byju’s, launched in 2011, developed into a learning app that quickly became one of the best known brands across India. It made Raveendran a pioneer in the rapidly expanding sector of educational technology, in a country with a massive appetite for education solutions. By 2017, marquee investors like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had vaulted Byju’s into the upper echelons of global edtech companies, sparking a worldwide acquisitions spree. In 2022, the company was valued at about $22 billion, with roughly 60,000 employees and millions of paying users.

But things unraveled — slowly at first, and then all of a sudden. In September 2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India took Byju’s to court for defaulting on a $19 million sponsorship payment. BCCI’s complaint came just months after news that Byju’s had allegedly defaulted on a $1.2 billion loan from U.S. lenders. They sued Byju’s parent company, Think and Learn, in a bankruptcy court in Delaware. The details included in that suit were shocking: The plaintiffs alleged that $533 million of the loan had been siphoned to a sham hedge fund once registered at the address of an International House of Pancakes restaurant in Miami. The fund was run by a 23-year-old with seemingly no relevant educational or professional experience, who’d purportedly spent part of the funds on a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, and a Rolls-Royce.

Three of Byju’s biggest investors, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, had subsequently resigned from the company’s board. At a press briefing in October 2024, Raveendran lamented that the legal troubles and investor exits had all but destroyed the company. “It’s worth zero,” he declared. 

The Delaware case was nearing conclusion when I visited Raveendran in Dubai, where he’d moved, he has said, for his father’s medical treatment. Even though Think and Learn and various educational companies in the Byju’s empire were still operating, Raveendran no longer had control over them, pending the U.S. and Indian court proceedings. As we raced toward the restaurant, he insisted the allegations of theft were baseless — echoing a statement he’d made when I’d first called him. His company’s troubles, he said, had simply resulted from “trying to grow too soon, too fast.”

Through nearly five hours of interviews over two days, he refused to take responsibility for the company’s legal and financial woes, painting himself as a victim of a conspiracy by U.S. lenders. And while all the court documents I’d read seemed starkly damning, listening to Raveendran argue his case in person made me occasionally wonder if he had indeed been wronged. He is persuasive because his earnestness doesn’t feel like a put-on. 

Sitting across from me at a table for two, he sketched a diagram of little arrows on a paper napkin to provide an alternative explanation for the missing funds. I didn’t fully understand the accounting he was relaying, but the presentation evoked his past as a tutor who’d once filled stadiums by simplifying difficult math problems with slides of diagrams and equations. I could just as easily imagine his talent at pitching to investors, where a self-confidence that seemed to edge on delusion might come off as visionary.

As the waiter cleared our plates, Raveendran told me he expected to regain control of his company. “Worst-case scenario, if we don’t get control back, we’ll launch everything through a new platform.”

Raveendran grew up in Azhikode, a small village in Kerala. He watched his grandfather toil on the family farm to grow paddy even at the age of 90, he told me when we sat down to talk inside a plush conference room in a Dubai high-rise where he rents a coworking space. Kerala has the highest literacy rate among Indian states, and Raveendran’s parents, both college-educated, were teachers at the school he attended: His father taught physics and his mother taught math. 

As a kid, Raveendran told me, he loved math — and his seventh-grade math teacher once even asked him to lead the class while she was away. “Otherwise I was an introvert,” Raveendran said. “But the moment I started teaching math, I saw the value that I was giving.” 

Raveendran often skipped class to play sports, which meant he had to catch up on schoolwork on his own at home. This, he said, showed him the power of self-education — the basis for his app years later. “Learning on your own is so much more efficient” than being taught in school, he said.

Raveendran studied mechanical engineering at a nearby college, then spent a few years servicing mechanical systems on ships. During a visit to Bengaluru in 2003, some friends who were there working IT jobs asked if he’d coach them for an entrance test for the elite Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), whose MBAs are highly prized in the international job market. Eventually, the lessons moved to a classroom at a local college, Raveendran said. “Once I started doing that — and it was free, this is not business, I was doing it for fun — they started bringing their friends.” 

Raveendran built a reputation as an extraordinary teacher, breaking down complicated material into simple, digestible morsels. In addition to drilling on fundamentals, he provided novel shortcuts for solving problems and techniques for smarter test-taking. He would teach students how to identify patterns so they could solve problems faster. “He made me visualize the whole problem and taught me tips and hacks to find answers quickly by reverse engineering,” a former student, Ankit Uttam, wrote on LinkedIn in 2023. “It was a novel way of learning for me.”

When I looked up some of Raveendran’s lectures on YouTube, I could see what he meant. In one video, he shows how to compute the area of two regions marked on a diagram of a square nested within a circle nested within another square. The typical way to solve the problem requires several computation steps, including the use of pi. But Raveendran simplifies it by reorienting the inner square so the area to be computed suddenly becomes a triangle.

Eventually, Raveendran told me, he rented an auditorium with a seating capacity of 1,200 and began charging 1,000 rupees per ticket — around $20 at the time — to cover rentals. When the auditorium started to fill to capacity, it generated more than 10 times the rent. “Which is huge, right?” he remarked, smiling. 

As word spread — both of Raveendran’s instructional prowess, and the success of some of his pupils — demand rose. The competition to enroll in engineering and medical colleges in India is fierce: Vast numbers of students in the country view becoming an engineer or a doctor as a guarantee of a comfortable life. The competition to secure a slot in an MBA program is just as tough. A group of students in Chennai wanted Raveendran in their city, so he began flying there weekly. By 2006, he told me, he was traveling to nine cities across India per week, rushing from airports to college auditoriums where hundreds of eager students waited, pencils at the ready. 

When the auditoriums proved too small, Raveendran rented sports stadiums that could seat up to 25,000 students. His slides were projected on big screens surrounding the stage. Nobody had seen anything like this, one former student told me. “People would be glued to the screens [while he taught],” this person said. Raveendran referred to them as “math shows.”

The former student eventually joined the company, was close to Raveendran’s inner circle, and became one of the company’s most senior executives before leaving in 2024. He recalled being awestruck by Raveendran when he first saw him teach. (Like several other former employees I spoke to, this individual would speak about Raveendran and Byju’s only on condition of anonymity. He agreed to be identified by one of his initials, S.) Raveendran was very confident, S told me. “It was easy to get wowed by his persona. … When you’re sitting in his class, the guy is teaching you math in a way that it has never been brought to you. You’ll be amazed. You’ll be floored.”

Aside from the logistical challenge of accommodating so many students in a single class, Raveendran told me teaching dozens or hundreds of students at once was straightforward. “There is no difference the moment you have more than 50 students in a class,” he said. “See, if class is happening through group discussions and case study, that’s different. … But if there are 1,000 students, they wouldn’t even see me properly.” The communication had to be one-way. His instruction had to anticipate every possible question students might think to ask — a skill that would later help him shape his learning app. The other advantage he took from these stadium-sized classes was building a larger-than-life image for himself as a pioneer in education.

In 2009, distance learning was taking off around the world, powered by the rise of broadband internet and the advent of smartphones. Raveendran began recording his lectures on video and broadcasting them on screens at some 40 learning centers across India. He told me students were willing to pay the same fee to attend video lectures as they were for in-person instruction.

A few of his former best students had joined him by now to become part of the company. They began to expand the business, adding a new market of high-school students looking to improve their math skills for all manner of competitive college entrance tests. This also meant raising the bar for the video content: Simple recordings of his lectures, Raveendran realized, wouldn’t be enough to keep younger students engaged. “We needed to create movie-like videos and game-like interactions,” he told me. In 2011, he founded Think and Learn, whose goal was to create instructional content that would appeal to students from kindergarten to high school.  

S, the former student-turned-executive, told me Raveendran’s presence in the classroom transferred easily into the entrepreneurial context. “If you met him for half an hour, you would feel that you could conquer the world, that there was nothing that was impossible,” he said. Like the 50 or so employees Raveendran had gathered around himself in the early years of the company, S became a believer in the mission Raveendran said he was pursuing: revolutionizing education.

In 2013, Aarin Capital, led by Indian business tycoons Ranjan Pai and Mohandas Pai, was the first investor in Byju’s, with about $8 million. “Once we got access to capital, we were able to accelerate product development and content development,” Raveendran told me. That was followed by $25 million from the Indian arm of the U.S. venture capital giant Sequoia Capital. In August 2015, Think and Learn launched the Byju’s learning app, offering recorded lectures integrated with virtual demonstrations, animations, and games. Subscribers could access the content with plans that cost 2,500–50,000 rupees, or about $40–$780 back then. Within months, millions of Indians had downloaded the app. Within a year, Byju’s had acquired some 300,000 paying subscribers. More funding poured in: $75 million from Sequoia and Sofina, followed by another $50 million in a funding round that included the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The money helped Byju’s expand its sales teams and establish studios that churned out ever more sophisticated content, created by a growing team of instructors. “They had a very, very aggressive sales model that was incentives-based,” Ranjan Goyal, an education technology consultant in Mumbai, told me. The sales team would be paid a commission for every new subscriber they brought in. “They had feet on the street who would go to people’s homes and convince them. … Many parents chose Byju’s, and Byju’s started growing rapidly.”

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan stands on stage before an audience of awestruck moms and dads in an ad that first aired in November 2017. “When people fall in love,” he tells them in Hindi, holding a heart-shaped balloon, “you can hear violins playing in the background.” But he isn’t the hero of this love story, he says, before segueing into a dance sequence that features the Pythagorean theorem. “Let our children fall in love — with learning,” he exhorts, to cheering applause. “Download Byju’s — the learning app.”

Byju’s was becoming one of the most visible startups in India. “They are masters at brand-building,” a top executive who left the company in 2023 told me. He noted how effectively the company used digital marketing methods, including search engine optimization. “Even today, you look up random stuff [in education], Byju’s will come up as your first result.”

As investors lined up, Raveendran began to dream bigger. He wanted Byju’s to be a global edtech giant, and “it was like, ‘I’m on top of the world. You tell me what you want. I’ll get that done,’” S told me. Raveendran would say to his executives, S recalled, “This is how we create content. If you see someone else doing it better, we’ll buy them.”  

Investors from around the world scrambled to get an audience with Raveendran, a former marketing executive said, remembering him traveling frequently to meet venture capitalists and fund managers from Hong Kong to London. Starting in July of 2017, the company began a string of acquisitions with TutorVista, an online company used mainly by students in the United States. By the end of 2018, Think and Learn was valued at over $1 billion. The big purchases continued: a digital game-based learning company, a digital reading platform for kids, a provider of online professional and higher education courses to learners in at least 170 countries.

Byju’s put significant investment into producing quality content, Apurva Mathur, a consultant for the company from 2020 until 2024, told me. Mathur helped develop videos on physics. “If we could think it, they would finance it,” he said. Five months into his job, he wanted to demonstrate that a steel bearing and a feather would take the same amount of time to fall to the ground in a perfect vacuum. “I casually said I wish I had a simulation of vacuum,” he recalled. “I said the word, and the simulation of vacuum was done and the video is there on the web.”

But the phenomenal expansion of the Byju’s corporate empire — which Mathur described as “an acquisition overdrive on steroids” — masked some troubling realities. Starting in 2018, under intense pressure to acquire new subscribers, the company’s sales teams were reportedly pressuring low-income families such as autorickshaw drivers, vegetable sellers, and construction workers. This was essential for continuing to increase the company’s subscriber base, and promoting the narrative of its ceaseless growth.

Former Byju’s employees revealed to Rest of World in 2021 that sales associates were instructed to ask children deliberately tricky questions during sales visits, to make them appear academically weak in front of their parents and pressure families into purchasing the company’s products. At the time, Byju’s told Rest of World it had “a stringent zero-tolerance policy towards any form of unprofessional dialogue or abuse” and that “in cases where such behavior comes to light, we immediately evaluate the situation and take corrective action.”

Jeevan Jena, the father of a teenage girl in Delhi, told me recently about such an experience. The sales staff had given him verbal assurances of all the support that Byju’s would provide to his daughter once she subscribed. “I asked them to give me everything in writing,” he told me. What they gave him in writing, however, didn’t include any of the verbal commitments. When he backed out of buying a subscription, he said, Byju’s staff in Bengaluru called him and threatened to take legal action. Jena wasn’t intimidated.   

Even many of the low-income households who did want to sign up, meanwhile, couldn’t afford the fee required for a three-year subscription. So Byju’s came up with a workaround: The company helped aspiring subscribers secure loans from banks and other financial institutions, with Byju’s as the guarantor. The company offered refunds to those who weren’t satisfied with the progress their child was making during a 15-day trial period of the product. 

“Of the 100 users who came in [a month], as many as 20 would ask for a refund,” S, the former senior executive, who had direct experience with sales, told me. In addition, he said, another 30% of subscribers would eventually stop paying the bank, which meant they were no longer bringing in revenue. But the refund process and the systems keeping track of subscribers’ monthly installments weren’t interlinked, S said, so it was hard to know how many paid subscribers there actually were. (Raveendran didn’t respond to questions about the company’s sales tactics or history of retaining and tracking subscriptions.)

Some of these problems were overshadowed by the sudden demand for online education when the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, kicking off a period of forced lockdowns and social distancing. A surge in cheap capital and rapid adoption of digital services fueled a tech investment bubble, with startups receiving high valuations despite unproven business models. Edtech was one of the sectors that reaped the biggest rewards, as demand for online education soared. Byju’s made its educational content accessible for free in the early weeks of the pandemic, which led to a huge volume of people downloading the app. 

“The narrative was, ‘Okay, this is the company that is supporting people during this pandemic. They have a great digital product,’” a senior executive in the Byju’s ecosystem told me. There wasn’t enough scrutiny, he added, when Raveendran put out numbers about the business or its valuation. While the growth in subscribers and revenue in the first couple of years of the company’s existence had been real, he said, expecting that growth to continue at the same pace wasn’t realistic: “You cannot multiply everything in India by 1.4 billion [India’s population] and expect it to work.”

By the time Byju’s submitted its earnings report for the fiscal year ending 2021 to India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs — more than a year late — it was evident the business had not been profitable for some time. The company had lost a staggering amount of roughly $550 million in that time period — at least 15 times as much as it had lost the previous fiscal year. The company said at the time that the dip was due to deferring its revenue to subsequent years. 

It’s unclear if investors didn’t receive timely information about these losses or if they didn’t care much since new investors were eager to jump on board. The senior executive in the Byju’s ecosystem saw the frenzy from up close. “I think investors really were hearing what they wanted to hear, because at that point, the valuation was going up every quarter,” he told me. “I literally saw that in board meetings. The new investor would come and ask a bunch of difficult questions. By the next quarter, there would be another investor at a higher valuation, and it was their problem now because [the earlier investors] had already marked up [their] investment 20%.”

In the absence of real growth in profits, the juggernaut became dependent on new rounds of fundraising, enabled by massive spending on brand-building. In 2019, Byju’s had purchased the rights to sponsor the jersey of the Indian cricket team, a contract that was extended until 2023. Then, in March 2022, Byju’s became an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar — a move aimed at getting global recognition for the brand. That same month, Byju’s announced it had raised a total of $800 million via a personal contribution from Raveendran and new funding from three investment companies, bringing the company to a reported valuation of $22 billion. One of them was an obscure entity named Sumeru Ventures.

There initially seemed nothing remarkable about Byju’s raising yet more capital. But three months after Sumeru’s investment, The Morning Context, a financial news website published from India, received an anonymous tip. Pradip Saha, a 40-year-old journalist at the publication who had been covering the company, told me the tip was vague — but suggested there was something fishy about Byju’s recent funding round. 

Saha, who is short and stocky with a soothingly calm demeanor, began digging into Sumeru. The company’s website claimed it was a global technology fund, Saha recounted, but he could find only a handful of investments by the firm on the business information site Crunchbase, all into Indian startups. He looked through dozens of documents filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, which showed none of those companies had actually received money from the fund. Sumeru appeared to Saha to be a phantom: a name with no money attached, creating the impression of an investment that never came. Saha broke the story in The Morning Context in July 2022. He kept at the investigation for the next several months, eventually publishing the results in his 2023 book, The Learning Trap. (Sumeru Ventures could not be reached for comment.)

When I met Saha at a coffee shop in Delhi in January, he was still animated by the saga. “Byju’s had said the money from the fundraise had come, and the markets believed it,” he said. Riding in part on this supposed investment, “the company raised the next round of funding on a higher valuation.” The promised money from Sumeru never arrived. In his book, Saha recounts Raveendran defending himself by saying he’d heard from his investors that Sumeru would be a good backer. “I was like, I can’t believe you are [painting yourself as] the victim,” Saha told me. “If I can find out with a Google search that this company [Sumeru] has no history of investment, how can you not find it?” (Raveendran didn’t respond to a request for comment about Sumeru or his interactions with Saha.)

But it was the alleged fraud that led to the lawsuit in Delaware that would eventually draw the most scrutiny to Byju’s. In November 2021, the company had raised $1.2 billion in a “term loan B” from lenders in the United States. Such loans allow companies to focus on growth instead of making debt repayments until the end of the loan term, when a large repayment becomes due. 

Byju’s defaulted on the loan. In March 2023, the lenders removed the leader of the company’s U.S. subsidiary, Alpha Inc, and appointed a new director. In February 2024, Alpha filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The U.S. lenders made a shocking allegation that Byju’s had transferred about $533 million to a hedge fund called Camshaft Capital Fund. When the lenders investigated Camshaft’s background, they found it was run by William Morton, a man in his mid-20s with very little financial investment experience. Camshaft’s business address had once been listed as being inside an IHOP in Miami. (Camshaft’s lawyers told the Financial Times last year that the company “vigorously denies” the allegations against it. A lawyer for Camshaft did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)

Things were starting to unravel at home as well. On July 16, 2024, insolvency proceedings were initiated against Byju’s in India after the country’s National Company Law Tribunal admitted a lawsuit by the BCCI over unpaid dues from its sponsorship of the Indian cricket team. An attempted settlement of the suit between the two parties was quashed by India’s Supreme Court in October. The Byju’s empire was already in a tailspin at this point: Even though the companies under the Byju’s umbrella were still functioning, tens of thousands of employees were let go in successive rounds of layoffs. According to media reports, the company’s workforce went down from about 60,000 employees in 2022 to about 14,000 by early 2024.

In February, a month after my meetings with Raveendran, the judge in the Delaware court issued an opinion. It validated the allegation that Alpha Inc had fraudulently transferred funds from the $1.2 billion loan to Camshaft, essentially engaging in theft. “[The plaintiffs’] investigator concluded that the hedge fund was a sham, and I agree,” Judge John T. Dorsey observed in the opinion. The defendants have appealed, and the case is ongoing.

Then, in April, a lawsuit filed on behalf of the lenders in the same Delaware court accused Raveendran, Gokulnath, and another key executive at Byju’s of stealing and hiding the missing $533 million.

Raveendran didn’t reply to a request for comment about the April lawsuit and Judge Dorsey’s opinion.

The unraveling of the Byju’s empire has come as a shock to many employees. One former employee who led a team for several years until 2024 told me he was proud of the work he and his colleagues had been doing. “I’ve never seen a team that was more dedicated to making sure that teaching was done right,” he said. He’d been surprised, he added, when he first heard the company needed to downsize because some expected investments hadn’t materialized. “Why do we need new investors for us to keep our businesses running?” he remembered wondering. “Have we just been burning investor money to keep up?” 

S, meanwhile, lamented that he’d used the best years of his life to help build Byju’s, only to see it come apart. “A lot of us couldn’t believe it was happening,” he told me. “Like, okay, this can’t happen. It can’t be this bad. Till the end.”

In a podcast interview last year, Arjun Mohan, who was CEO for the company’s international and India divisions between July 2023 and April 2024, reflected on what he saw as its biggest flaw. “There was absolutely no control on cost,” he said. “Investments were done without any understanding of what could be the potential revenue, what could be the potential cash flow. A lot of things were always done in optimism and exuberance rather than deep business insights and research.” 

Some investors, however, have managed to win big in the Byju’s saga. Several of the company’s early backers divested or sold off a significant part of their stake when the company was still riding high — such as Sequoia India (now Peak XV Partners), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Aarin Capital. Others, like Prosus, which ended up writing off its stake in Byju’s at a $493 million loss, were left holding the bag.

Anand Lunia, a founding partner in the VC firm India Quotient, told me the Byju’s debacle follows a familiar storyline in the tech industry: A startup gathers too much momentum too quickly — all on the promise of future growth, regardless of the fundamentals of the business — only to eventually come crashing down. “This is an indictment of the Silicon Valley money-pumping system,” Lunia said, likening the collapse of Byju’s to that of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now in prison. “You are in a rush to deploy money, and you deploy money without any firsthand diligence. Somebody praises Byju’s, and so you think, oh, yeah, we should invest in Byju’s.” In Lunia’s view, investors can’t be absolved of the blame.

Raveendran himself, though, has remained defiant. When we spoke in Dubai in January, the Delaware decision still hadn’t landed. He seemed to think the case would resolve in his favor. He attempted multiple times to convince me the accusation by the U.S. lenders — that he had, in effect, siphoned $533 million from the $1.2 billion loan — was baseless. The money, he claimed, was routed through Camshaft to a U.K.-based intermediary so it could eventually finance new acquisition and expansion plans that Byju’s was in the process of implementing.

When I asked why Camshaft — which had no experience managing funds — had been chosen for this task, Raveendran said he’d merely gone along with a recommendation made by his bankers. “I didn’t know Camshaft,” he said, adding that he’d only learned who William Morton was after reading press reports.

This echoed how Pradip Saha of The Morning Context had recalled Raveendran defending himself about the investment from Sumeru Ventures. Raveendran promised to send me documents to support his argument, but he never did.

Sitting in the Dubai restaurant, Raveendran didn’t show any signs of impatience about my repeated questions about the alleged fraud, but I could tell he was dismayed at not being able to persuade me to accept his narrative. We sipped our coffee in silence for a couple of minutes as he gathered his thoughts.

Then he turned his attention to the future. Given the Delaware court proceedings and other ongoing cases, the possibility that Raveendran would regain control of Byju’s seemed remote. He projected optimism, nonetheless. And if he couldn’t recapture Byju’s, he vowed, he would simply build a new empire. He hinted again that he might launch an entirely new online platform, reiterating what he’d told me in an earlier conversation: “The moment I start teaching, I’m sure I will fill stadiums again.” Only this time, they would be virtual stadiums, infinitely large. “We have done trials,” he claimed. “What was [once] attended by 25,000 — a million students will attend.”

Since my time with him in Dubai, Raveendran has continued telling audiences his version of his company’s demise. In May, during a podcast interview about the fate of Byju’s, he used the word “narrative” 20 times — and vowed that his would prevail. He pushed back against the Delaware court opinion and allegations of theft, saying he’d been subject to “a very dirty game” by U.S. investors. He said he felt for his former employees and apologized to paying students whose service was disrupted. His main mistakes, though, had only been “growing a little too soon too fast” — and taking the U.S. loan, which he said the company hadn’t really needed anyway. His mansion in Dubai was rented, he claimed, adding that he’d put his own funds into paying salaries and trying to save the company. “I never started this for money,” he said, insisting he has no regrets. “What were the odds of me doing even a fraction of what I did?”

Sam Stein and Will Sommer react to Elon Musk dissing the GOP’s big spending bill.

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Andrew Egger and Mona discuss the corruption of the pardon power and the DOJ, Trump’s memecoin haul, and the vaccine insanity.

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Tim Miller gets another update from Caolan Roberston. Kyiv faces relentless Russian bombardments, leaving civilians vulnerable and air defenses overwhelmed. Despite Ukraine’s urgent need for Patriot missile replenishments, the U.S. hesitates, intensifying fears that without immediate support, the capital will remain dangerously exposed to deadly attacks…

Sam Stein and Lauren Egan look at a rare moment when a veteran journalist like Scott Pelley publicly defends the press. They discuss Pelley’s warning about the rising threats to journalism and free speech, and why this moment feels different.

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We’re starting to get a fuller picture of just how much stock trading took place around when President Donald Trump suddenly reversed his market-ravaging “Liberation Day” tariffs. Members are required to disclose stock sales and purchases within a 45-day window. April 9, when Trump announced his reversal, was 48 days ago.

Initially, the markets soared upon hearing the news that there would be a 90-day pause in tariff hikes (with the exception of China). But in the days that followed, they slumped once more. In that period, many members of Congress bought up investments at lower prices, a prudent move that could result in considerable long-term gains after things rebound. Large purchases can be lucrative in the short term, as well, if the shares were bought quite low, and the rebound happens fast.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who is running for governor to replace the soon-to-be termed-out Ron DeSantis, made four purchases and four sales on April 10, just one day after Trump’s pause announcement. Each transaction was in the $1,001–$15,000 range.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) sold as much as $715,000 in stocks on April 15.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whom Democrats believe may have engaged in insider trading prior to Trump’s market-bouncing tariff adjustments, made even more purchases this month. On May 5, Greene made 61 purchases in the $1,001–$15,000 range for an overall total that could be as much as $915,000. She then made twenty more stock purchases less than two weeks later. The upper limit for the combined value of her stock purchases between these two batches of disclosures comes to $1,285,000.

Among Democrats, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) bought 23 shares during the market low period three days prior to Trump’s April 9 announcement of the tariff “pause,” totalling as much as $345,000. In April overall, he made 35 transactions. Ten were after April 9, while the rest came before. In addition, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Julie Johnson (D-Texas) each made dozens of purchases and sales in early April as the market tumbled. Eleven of Gottheimer’s 118 trades occurred before April 9 and 79 took place on the “pause” day itself. Of Johnson’s 144 trades disclosed, 81 occurred the day before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, while just six came after the pause announcement on April 9.

A common stock that members of Congress traded since April was UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest health insurers. They did this as members began considering major legislation that would have potentially dramatic impacts on the health industry, including the prospect of pushing millions of people off of Medicaid and into the private market.

Greene made two purchases of $UNH, one in the $1,001–$15,000 range and the other in the $15,001–$50,000 range. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) sold between $1,001 and $15,000 on April 11. Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) bought $1,001–$15,000 in UnitedHealth on April 16; freshman Rep. John McGuire (R-Va.) purchased $UNH in the same range on April 10. Boozman’s purchase was accompanied by several others that took place both before and after Trump’s tariff “pause,” while McGuire’s was a lone trade.

Ultimately, the stock market has still not fully recovered from the shock Trump applied to it when he initially announced Liberation Day tariffs on April 2. The Dow Jones Industrial average closed that day at 42,225. The Friday before Memorial Day weekend, it stood at 41,603.

Still, having access to inside information that can crater or catapult markets appears to be extremely lucrative for members of Congress, some of whom outperform the world’s leading hedge funds. While both parties’ leaders in the House have endorsed a ban on stock trading by lawmakers and a handful of bills have been introduced to that effect, there seems to be little appetite for taking real action on the issue. I have no idea why.

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David Sacks, the White House crypto czar, made something of a gaffe during an appearance on the “All In” podcast on Saturday, when he seemed to directly undermine the central messaging around the recently passed House Republican budget that aims to slash Medicaid rolls by imposing work requirements. Advocates for the bill insist it is not a “cut.” Sacks embraced the term.

“This bill cuts $880 billion for Medicaid over a decade, which is something that already is politically tough and controversial, and imposes work requirements for able-bodied adults,” Sacks said. “This is similar to what Bill Clinton did back in 1996 with welfare reform, basically saying that you cant be a layabout and get welfare. So these are relatively tough things to do, politically. It’s like, do I want to see even more cuts? Yeah, absolutely.”

Sacks’s comments are similar to those made by Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Before Republicans passed the bill last week, Smith appeared on Fox News to make the case for the bill, which at the time had yet to be finalized.

“I would say that SALT is one of those items we have to thread,” Smith said. “And then you can look at Medicaid cuts—Medicaid reforms, I should say—these are all things that were right in the middle. And what we passed out of the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday, I believe, is a good balance.”

At least Smith was able to quickly correct himself. Sacks wasn’t as self-aware. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

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For Thrasher Magazine’s 540th issue, they attempted to teach a handful of professional skaters the 540 McTwist, which is spinning 540 degrees in vert. The trick used to be required learning if you wanted to go pro, but has since become a specialty for only certain kinds of skaters.

Mike McGill, the inventor of the trick, led the instruction along with some other pro skaters. The entire video is simultaneously excruciating and fun to watch.

Lance Mountain, one of the best skaters of the 1980s, quipped that if you can do a backflip on a trampoline, then you can do a 540. McGill immediately disagreed, noting he recently received stitches in his head while attempting a backflip on a diving board.

Either way, it’s very entertaining. Watch the whole video here. And if you can do a 540, let me know in the comments.