West Point Professor Fired for Refusing to Lie About Climate Change

A science professor says he was fired from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, for refusing to ignore the human causes of climate change, and is now suing the institution in federal court.

Dr. Adam Kalkstein, a professor of geography, told The New York Times that the dean of West Point’s academic board, Brigadier General Shane Reeves, in a meeting last year ordered him to remove everything about human contributions to climate change, as President Trump sets the agenda as commander in chief. Kalkstein told Reeves that such a change would be immoral, and possibly illegal. When Reeves suggested Kalkstein resign, Kalkstein declined, after which the dean stormed out of the room.

“We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” Kalkstein reportedly said during the meeting, according to Stars and Stripes.

Six months later, Kalkstein, a tenured professor, was told his contract wouldn’t be renewed, and on Monday, he sued the institution in the Southern District of New York, alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated. The lawsuit states that the institution’s order would require Kalkstein “to omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the court and to defy science.”

According to the Times, Kalkstein is a conservative Republican who believes military cadets need to know the truth about climate change for national security reasons rather than social justice. He wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arguing that knowing the causes of climate change was important for competing over resources in the Arctic and understanding why sea ice was melting.

Hegseth, along with the rest of the Trump administration, is trying to purge “wokeness” from government and military institutions, including any acknowledgment of climate change. Early in his tenure last year, Hegseth boasted on X that “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

That’s a major departure from previous administrations. In 2021, the Pentagon concluded in a report that “increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks.”

Those risks still exist, but the Trump administration is flat-out ignoring the science for financial and culture-war reasons. Professors like Kalkstein, and the knowledge of America’s future military officers, are among the casualties.

The Iran war has gravely exacerbated the U.S. military’s advanced missile interceptor shortage in Europe.

The shortage is “beyond critical,” as supplies have been quickly and unexpectedly drained by the Iran war, according to a Europe-based U.S. defense official, as well as a NATO official who spoke with the Associated Press Thursday.

The deficit is most serious for the country’s Patriot missile interceptors, which are capable of shooting down ballistic missiles and aircraft but have been heavily relied upon during the war to stave off Iran’s Shahed swarming attack drones.

The deficit boils down to a supply chain problem. Iran’s drones are small, simple to manufacture, and cost roughly $20,000 to produce. They can be launched from almost anywhere, and use GPS to find their target. They’re typically launched en masse to overwhelm opposing defense systems.

Patriot missiles, meanwhile, cost between $3 million and $4 million per unit. An entire Patriot battery system can cost as much as $1.1 billion, including the launcher, radar, and missiles. As a result of the missiles’ enormous price tag, production of America’s highly sought-after Patriot system is relatively slow compared to its demand. In 2025, Lockheed Martin created 620 units of the Patriot missile. Iran, in comparison, is capable of producing about 10,000 drones per month, reported Reuters.

U.S. missile stockpiles were transferred from Europe to the Middle East to aid the war effort, but that has left NATO and American forces based in Europe empty-handed in the face of a potential Russian attack on the continent. The U.S. defense official told the AP that the situation could force America or its European allies “to take punch after punch in the mouth” should the Kremlin decide to launch an assault on a regional military base or nuclear facility.

European and NATO officials have warned that Russia could be in a strategic position to attack the alliance by 2030—though defense contractors have projected that America’s Patriot missile stockpiles should rebound by that point.

Russia has been involved all along: Just over one week into the conflict in March, The Washington Post reported that Russia had funneled military intelligence to Iran to assist the country in targeting U.S. forces. Afterward, Iran systematically destroyed U.S. missile defense systems across the Middle East, including radars and command infrastructure. In the early days of the war, an Iranian drone attack on a Kuwait operations center killed six U.S. soldiers and seriously wounded dozens more.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has rejected opportunities to buy tech that could have given U.S. forces a dramatic advantage in the war. Kyiv offered its expertise, as Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”). But the Trump administration passed.

However, the White House has expressed little public concern over the rising tensions. Speaking with reporters Thursday, Donald Trump said that he recently had “good talks” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that he believed Putin’s “not going to be attacking.”

While Americans pay the price for President Trump’s war in Iran, he appears to be cashing in on it.

Trump made more than 1,000 dubiously timed stock trades in June, including thousands of dollars in exchanges with companies directly impacted by the Iran war, according to a CNN analysis of a filing with the Office of Government Ethics. As the war drags on, Trump’s portfolio seems to be thriving.

The filing reveals that Trump got involved with U.S. defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and RTX. Although the exact amounts the president traded are not disclosed in the filing, the dates conspicuously coincide with Iran negotiations between June 12 and 24. According to the filing, Trump purchased Lockheed Martin stock on June 15 and sold on June 16, one day before signing the now-defunct memorandum of understanding with Iran. He purchased Lockheed Martin stock again on June 23, less than a week after signing the deal.

Alongside those eyebrow-raising investments, the president bought and sold energy stocks with ExxonMobil and Chevron, each to the tune of somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500, as oil and gas prices skyrocketed for consumers.

Those investments join others in Palantir, Meta, Boeing, SpaceX, Broadcom, and Nvidia, all of which are currently in business with his administration. It’s no secret that Trump has used the presidency for profit—according to his 2025 financial disclosure, he made over $2 billion in his first year back in the White House alone. His personal gains, boosted by cryptocurrency ventures, foreign real estate, and his many, many stock trades, eclipse what any of his predecessors made during their time in office.

Still, the White House claims that Trump is not personally involved in his own investment portfolio. According to spokesman Davis Ingle, there are “no conflicts of interest,” and Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.

The Iran war has made life more expensive for Americans. Gas prices are higher, groceries are more expensive, and inflation has crept back up. For Trump, it’s another investment opportunity.

Six percent of Texas’s voters—over 1.2 million people—have had their voter registrations suspended, and many might not even know about it.

The designation, which means that the voter’s county doesn’t know their address or thinks they’ve moved, doesn’t stop people from voting in November’s midterm elections, but it does make the process more difficult. If a voter shows up on Election Day and their registration is suspended, they have to fill out a “statement of residence” form, and if they’ve moved to a new county, they’ll either be required to vote in their old one or be given a provisional ballot, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The suspended registrations span the whole state, but also some of Texas’s largest counties, including Dallas County, where more than 129,000 voters are suspended; 56,000 voters in both Collin and Denton counties; and over 73,000 voters in Tarrant County.

Voters have until October 5 to update their registrations and can check their status on the Texas secretary of state’s website, at a county election office, or by mail. But with a number as high as 1.2 million people, the message may not reach many voters in time—especially if they haven’t moved and it’s the fault of a clerical error.

That margin could also be pivotal in a state where polls are close in multiple races, especially the Senate, where Democratic state Senator James Talarico has a narrow edge over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Texas is also cooperating with the Trump administration’s attempts to take control of elections by handing over its voter rolls. If a significant number of Texans are blocked from voting on Election Day, that could make all the difference in what the Senate looks like the next four years.

Need any more proof that Donald Trump’s pettiness knows no bounds? The president signed an executive order Thursday to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”

After sparking a trade war with Canada last week, Trump turned his attention to the incredibly important issue: changing the name of a lake.

The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the geographic names to reflect the new name of the Great Lake that shares a border with Canada.

The move is reminiscent of his first act as president, which was to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” This is what happens when a president can’t actually govern: he’s forced to revert to trolling.

“So, if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or Pacific,” Trump said at the signing.

Trump admitted Wednesday that he’d been behind the detonated trade negotiations last week.

American negotiators reportedly revealed at the last minute that they planned to exclude medium- and heavy-duty trucks from their promise to drop tariffs on Canadian automobiles, and tried to restrict Canada’s ability to strike trade deals with other countries. Another reason that Canadian negotiators walked away was reportedly because the U.S. made what were, in their view, unreasonable demands restricting French-language product documentation.

Since then, Trump has threatened to double tariffs to 50 percent on roughly $28 billion worth of products starting on January 1. In response, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a slate of retaliatory tariffs on about 700 products of up to 50 percent that will go into effect on September 8.

Earlier this week, Trump joked that he’d change the name of Lake Ontario, observing that “we don’t expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.” That’s one of the many problems with this administration: they take their jokes way too far.

But if Trump’s latest approval numbers are any indication, Americans just aren’t impressed by rage bait—not as prices continue to rise thanks to Trump’s months-long war in the Middle East.

This story has been updated.