This is a web version of
The Lever’s daily email newsletter.🔥 Today’s Lever story: Years of multimillion-dollar investments by conservative advocacy groups delivered Trump and congressional Republicans’ Big Beautiful Betrayal.
👇 Spend three minutes reading this 949-word newsletter to learn about:
- A proposed once-in-a-generation merger between two oil giants.
- Lawmakers’ well-timed defense investments.
- New fronts in the war against pharma price gouging.
- The dark money-backed neocons working to topple the Iranian government.
American Scare is a vital exposé of how a state’s government destroyed the lives of its Black and queer citizens in the 20th century. Author Robert W. Fieseler, an investigative journalist focused on forgotten histories, used a secret trove of primary source documents that have been decoded and de-censored for the first time to describe how marginalized residents were targeted, and the devastating aftermath. It is a must-read.
TODAY'S NUGGETS
⛽ Just what we need: Bigger Oil. Oil giant Shell is reportedly in early talks to acquire its competitor BP in what would be the largest oil deal in a generation, according to The Wall Street Journal. Combining two of the world’s “supermajor” fossil fuel companies would rattle the gas and oil industry, currently led by ExxonMobil and Chevron. The proposed Shell and BP deal, valued at a minimum of $80 billion, rivals the $83 billion merger between Exxon and Mobil in 1999 that made the resulting oil giant the second-largest publicly traded company on the planet.
