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The brevity could conceivably be excused: No one was injured, and US Capitol Police announced Thursday evening they had cleared the suspect’s black pickup truck. And Fox News covered the incident as it was ongoing earlier in the day. But Ibanez’s claim about motive bears more scrutiny.

It’s true that after the bomb threat suspect — later identified as 49-year-old Floyd Ray Roseberry, of Grover, North Carolina — surrendered to law enforcement, police said “we don’t know what his motives are at this time.” (Fox News didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from Vox asking the network to explain Ibanez’s “no word on a possible motive” report.)

But Ibanez’s comment may have been intended to obscure an uncomfortable truth for America’s most-watched cable news network. In videos streamed to Facebook before and during the bomb threat while he sat in a truck, Roseberry made clear he’s immersed in right-wing conspiracy theories and grievances that receive heavy play on Fox.

“Once this dickhead Biden’s out of office and the Democrats sitting down there in the f**kin’ jailhouse, our president’s gonna be Donald Trump, and this is no limit on his pardons,” claimed Roseberry in a video posted early Tuesday morning, alluding to a lie propagated by former President Donald Trump on Fox News as recently as Wednesday about the 2020 election being stolen from him.

Remember when Fox News was trying to prevent Trump and company from lying about the 2020 election on its programming? Those days are loooooong gone. pic.twitter.com/fXIAeSuyTc

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 18, 2021

“I just got chose for the job. Unlike you,” Roseberry added. “This ain’t about politics. I don’t care if Donald Trump ever becomes president again. I think y’all Democrats need to step down. Y’all need to understand people don’t want you there.”

Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall reviewed Roseberry’s videos and concluded that “his core grievance seemed to be focused on the illegitimacy of Joe Biden and his need to resign from office,” adding:

As the day grew nearer he would speak to Joe Biden, essentially saying that if anyone were killed in Washington it would be the President’s fault since he wouldn’t fire the first shot. The videos are strewn with what we might call the ideational detritus of Trumpism: Trump’s reinstatement as President, the imprisonment of Democratic leaders, refusals to mask, claims that Hunter Biden was wealthy enough that Biden could afford to retire peacefully, etc.

Roseberry ranted about alleged Facebook shadow-banning and complained about immigrants receiving government subsidies for health care — gripes regularly stoked by Fox during segments that frame social media companies’ effort to root out hate speech and disinformation as censorship and portray immigration as an existential threat to white America. He complained about the quality of American coinage, said “Southern boys are here,” and vowed, “You can take me out. But when you do, you know what’s going to happen, Joe Biden? There’s going to be a chain reaction. And that chain reaction’s going to be on your hands.” He ultimately surrendered to police.

Facebook eventually removed Roseberry’s profile, but not before his videos were widely watched and summarized in media reports. Yet if you’d watched Fox News Thursday night, you’d have no idea those videos existed.

The bomb threat isn’t just the story of an individual conspiracy theorist — it’s about US political culture, too

It’s certainly possible to dismiss Roseberry as a disturbed individual, but notably, one of the Trumpiest members of Congress went out of his way on Thursday to do the opposite.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who’s perhaps best known for the speech he delivered before the January 6 Capitol insurrection urging Trump supporters to start “kicking ass,” released a statement condemning the suspect’s tactics — even as he expressed sympathy with Roseberry’s views.

“Although this terrorist’s motivation is not yet publicly known, and generally speaking, I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society. The way to stop Socialism’s march is for patriotic Americans to fight back in the 2022 and 2024 election,” Brooks wrote.

Brooks wasn’t alone among members of Congress in identifying Thursday’s bomb threat as a symptom of political culture. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) decried the incident as a manifestation of the “violent cult” surrounding Trump that views “violence as an extension of politics.”

There’s a right wing domestic terrorist threatening to blow up the Capitol this very moment. We must confront the violent cult that created this. This isn’t about tax rates or abortion or the EPA - this is about whether we will tolerate violence as an extension of politics.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) August 19, 2021

Meanwhile, another Democratic senator, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, tweeted in response to Brooks’s statement that “I know it seems like hyperbole when we say that Republicans have become enemies of democracy, but here is a mainstream Republican taking the side of the bomber.”

I know it seems like hyperbole when we say that Republicans have become enemies of democracy, but here is a mainstream Republican

TAKING
THE
SIDE
OF
THE
BOMBER. https://t.co/O0VGgbJANI

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) August 19, 2021

But Brooks’s remarkable statement and the backlash to it have been totally ignored by Fox, which didn’t mention the bomb threat a single time on Friday morning after barely covering it Thursday evening, even as CNN and MSNBC covered the incident and its fallout extensively.

This isn’t the first time in recent years a violent right-wing extremist has been motivated by the same sort of incendiary rhetoric that the network traffics in.

In October 2018, social media posts from the lone suspect in a shooting that killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh indicated he was motivated by conspiracy theories about migrant caravans to the southern border representing an “invasion” of the country, conspiracy theories that continued to receive play on the network even in the days immediately following the shooting.

That same month, Fox News strained to avoid acknowledging the right-wing fanaticism that inspired a man to send explosive devices to CNN and other perceived enemies of then-President Trump.

Hammering people with lies about Democrats stealing elections and overseeing an immigrant invasion of the country can have deadly consequences. It’s notable but not surprising that Fox News is unwilling to reckon with those consequences — especially in comparison to the wall-to-wall coverage that would likely ensue if an adherent of antifa or Black Lives Matter shut down the Capitol area with a bomb threat.

What do we owe animals suffering under climate-fueled drought?

This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

The 20-plus-year drought in the American West hit a new extreme this week as the US government declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time in history.

The flow of the river, which shaped the Grand Canyon and cuts through seven western states, has fallen by 20 percent over the past century. It feeds the nation’s largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead, which has also sunk to a record low.

The announcement of the shortage isn’t just symbolic. It also triggers mandatory water consumption cuts, which mostly impact Arizona, that take effect early next year. Some 40 million people rely on the river for water, contributing to its decline — to say nothing of the nearly 5.5 million acres of farmland that it irrigates.

What those figures miss are the countless plants and animals that also depend on water to survive in the harsh terrain of the western US. The megadrought is threatening wildlife, and state agencies are pouring in resources to keep important species alive — in some cases, by flying water in helicopters to remote, artificial watering holes where bears, sheep, and other thirsty animals seek relief.

Courtesy of George Andrejko/Arizona Game and Fish Department
A female elk drinks from a water catchment site in Arizona in the summer of 2021.

These measures are quickly becoming the new normal, and they aren’t cheap. Flying a helicopter that air-drops hundreds of gallons of water, for example, can cost as much as $1,800 an hour, according to a biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

Scientists involved in wildlife conservation are concerned that as climate change makes droughts more frequent and severe, they’ll have to work harder to conserve plants and animals. And as more areas are forced to ration the scarce resource of water, they have to answer a difficult question: What do humans owe animals that are perishing from a problem of our own making?

How drought hurts animals

Wild animals can die of dehydration, but many of the major impacts of drought are far less obvious.

As the water level in lakes or streams falls, for example, it can heat up, causing the metabolism of cold-water fish to increase, according to Blair Wolf, a biology professor at the University of New Mexico. To sustain a faster metabolism, fish need more oxygen, yet warm water tends to hold less oxygen, he said. “The fish basically have a higher metabolism and there’s less oxygen available for them to breathe,” Wolf said.

What’s more, warmer water in the Colorado River basin tends to favor invasive species like smallmouth bass, research has found. “In the absence of effective management interventions, future warming is likely to disproportionately benefit nonnative species to the detriment of native species,” authors of a recent study wrote.

Drought also affects birds’ ability to tolerate extreme heat, according to Steven Beissinger, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Birds perspire through their mouth and skin to stay cool on hot days, which requires water. Plus, many species get all of their water from the food they eat. “So if it’s hotter and drier, they will need to eat more food,” Beissinger said. “This requires more energy or effort to obtain more food, which increases water needs further.”

At the same time, drought — and especially drought combined with rising temperatures — can make it harder for baby birds to survive and lead to population declines in at least some species, in part by making it tougher to find food, Wolf’s research has found. Water is incredibly important to desert plants, Wolf said, which feed rodents and other animals that birds eat.

“We found a rapid decline in burrowing owl population size strongly linked to extreme drought conditions,” he and his co-author wrote in a 2016 study about a population of owls in the Southwest that fell by more than 98 percent in 16 years.

Vegetation shortages can even make it harder for bucks to grow full-size antlers, which they use to compete with each other for mates and territory, according to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.

Not every species suffers when water levels fall. Some native fish, for example, actually seem to benefit from rising water temperatures in parts of the Colorado River basin, said Charles Yackulic, a researcher at the United States Geological Survey.

When reservoirs like Lake Mead are full, the water flowing out of dams tends to be cold and therefore uninhabitable for certain fish, including the humpback chub, an endangered species that prefers warmer waters. When the reservoirs shrink and release warmer water, certain downstream species may benefit: The humpback chub is doing so well these days that the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed downlisting the species last year from endangered to threatened.

But even those benefits likely have a limit, Yackulic says. Humpback chub can only tolerate warming water up to a point, and other parts of the river — where dams haven’t historically cooled the water as much — could soon become intolerably hot for native species, Yackulic said.

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Lake Mead on July 20, 2021, from Boulder City, Nevada.

It’s getting harder and harder to keep animals alive

The US is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but it also has some of the world’s strongest environmental protections and institutions. They’re helping offset some of climate change’s worst symptoms, including severe drought.

A handful of states resort to dumping water in outdoor tanks where animals can reach them, creating a liquid lifeline that wild animals depend on. Last year, the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AGFD) hauled a record 2.4 million gallons of water to these catchments, and this year the state’s on track to haul 3 million gallons, according to Larisa Harding, the AGFD small game program manager. There are roughly 3,000 catchments in the state that hold anywhere from 2,500 to 10,000 gallons of water each, Cronkite News’s Nick Serpa reported in 2018.

“When we don’t get rain, we can make up that difference at least enough to keep those animals persisting,” Harding said. While it may sound far-out to build a whole separate network of water infrastructure for animals, the catchments are essential “if we want wildlife on the landscape when we have these extreme conditions,” Harding said. Providing water also means animals won’t have to walk far in pursuit of a drink, which can lower the likelihood of road collisions, she said.

Courtesy of Nevada Department of Wildlife
A helicopter picks up water to fill artificial catchment sites in Arizona.
Courtesy of Nevada Department of Wildlife
Nevada’s wildife agency carries water to artificial watering holes that benefit bighorn sheep.

Wildlife agencies have a number of other tools at their disposal, some of which require more work than others. Earlier this year, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife trucked millions of juvenile salmon from rivers that were drying up in the Central Valley to the Pacific Ocean. Some states have also limited hunting permits owing to “reduced productivity of critical wildlife ranges.”

There are also a number of other government-run conservation programs across the Colorado River basin. The Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program, for example, was set up to offset damages to wildlife — especially animals listed under the Endangered Species Act — caused by all kinds of river operations, including diverting water and generating hydroelectric power, according to John Swett, who manages the program.

But experts say many of these projects are only temporary solutions, and it’s not clear to what extent they help. Catchments, for example, have a pretty isolated effect and aren’t typically used by migratory birds, Wolf said. Plus, flying helicopters, hauling salmon, and limiting permits are expensive and already hard to sustain. A lot of effort is going into just keeping populations stable.

So what happens as climate change makes these problems worse?

“I talk to a lot of management agency folks, and that is a concern: How much longer can we maintain efforts as water becomes just rare in general?” Yackulic said. “Sometimes it’s about the financial costs, but sometimes it’s just about the water itself.”

AFP via Getty Images

The Lake Mead Marina, where trash is visible due to the low water level, on July 19, 2021.

What humans owe animals

Government agencies in the US are required by law to protect endangered and threatened species, and we conserve some animals because they provide valuable services, like pollination. But aside from that, what do humans owe animals that are in decline thanks to problems — like severe drought — that people helped create?

“You would hope humans would have some sense of responsibility,” Wolf said. But “humans are selfish,” he added. “Allocating water for a minnow or a trout or a fish or a frog is hard to justify in people’s minds.”

Other scientists Vox spoke to were also at a loss for how to balance rising human demands with the needs of wildlife in a rapidly warming world, though they all felt a personal sense of responsibility. “I try to be a good steward of the land,” Harding said. “I try to look for the best ways to promote wildlife health and habitat health.”

Wolf, meanwhile, finds fulfillment in educating the next generation “on what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what can be done about it,” he said.

Of course, it’s that last part — what we can do — that really matters. And ultimately, it will have to be much more than airlifting water and, perhaps, require us to put the needs of ecosystems and the animals that inhabit them above our own.

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A post shared by #INFLUENCERPAYGAP (@influencerpaygap)

Ajayi hopes the page injects transparency into the creator economy and enables influencers to make fair comparisons between themselves and others in their market who are often working with similar brands and agencies.

“A big thing for me was really identifying how much of a gap in knowledge there was,” she says. “A lot of people tend to feel like the higher up you are, the more you know, and it’s not always the case. There’s talent with significant influence who are still learning what they are worth in terms of pay and how to navigate contracts and the business side of things.”

Keith Dorsey is the CEO of Young Guns Entertainment, an Atlanta-based creative marketing agency that manages a suite of emerging Black social media talent. He runs Collab Crib, TikTok’s first Black content house and the subject of a New York Times documentary, and soon, a Facebook Watch reality series. The collective — which includes stars like Kaelyn Kastle, Theo Wissseh, and Khmayra Sikes — has a joint reach of upward of 30 million total followers and juggles brand partnerships and an upcoming skin care line alongside their daily stream of content that mixes performance, comedy, and riffs on TikTok trends.

For Collab Crib, a sponsored content deal that involves all nine members of the house creating a unique post on their TikTok accounts can start at $50,000, which works out to about $5,000 per creator once Keith takes his cut. By comparison, Addison Rae is said to earn over $69,000 per sponsored Instagram post, while the Clubhouse Beverly Hills (an L.A-based content house that features a rotating cast of pretty people) can rake in about $1.3 million for group content.

“I’ll overhear managers say they charged $40,000 for one person. Meanwhile, we’re splitting $40,000. That doesn’t make any sense,” says Dorsey, who is now furnishing Collab Crib’s 9,000-square- foot house out of pocket after a home furnishing company declined to work with them, citing contrasting demographics. “As I’m learning, there’s a lot more money that has to be made, and a lot of that stems from untapped knowledge.”

On their face, the big pay disparities between marquee mainstream TikTok content houses and Collab Crib make sense. The Hype House is inarguably more famous, with a brand that’s approachable and aspirational, so of course they’d make more money.

However, their fame stems from an algorithm that may favor white creators, with TikTok facing consistent charges of racial bias in its algorithm and content moderation. For every Shawn Mendes and Dixie D’Amelio, there are hundreds of other creators who get stuck on the path to mainstream success, in some cases bogged down by predatory managers and a lack of mental health resources as fame ebbs and flows. And just like with every other job title that promises a shot at overnight wealth — entrepreneur, actor, consultant — those who have to overcome institutional barriers will still be playing catch up.

“If the most popular creators on a platform are white, and the app keeps recommending other white creators, it makes it hard for creators of color to gain a following,” writes BuzzFeed’s Lauren Strapagiel of TikTok’s filtering practices, which recommends new accounts based on the accounts someone you follow follows. This leaves BIPOC creators working around an algorithm that doesn’t seem to prioritize them to mainstream audiences. Case in point: In the New York Times documentary, Collab Crib’s Kaelyn Castle said she dyed her hair bright pink after hearing the algorithm favored bright colors, and saw engagement numbers increase.

“All these new adversities keep piling up [on TikTok] against Black women, so there’s certain things that need to be done in order to be seen,” she tells me before mentioning that she plans to go blonde after seeing a dip in traction. “It sucks.” Kastle says her content is often shadowbanned or removed for violating community guidelines, even if it follows the same anodyne diet of dance trends and tasteful thirst traps that turned content houses like Clubhouse Beverly Hills into household names.

Ultimately, the systemic biases built into the structure of social media create a feedback loop that deepens the gap between white and BIPOC creators. The majority of @influencerpaygap posts detail the experiences of minority creators who worked with big brands for free because of the exposure it offered, hoping that a shot at a larger audience could catapult them into a new stratosphere.

“Even for a 30-minute Instagram Live, I have to go through 15 emails of back and forth trying to convince you to pay either myself or Elyse to have this conversation with you. That is time and energy,” says Brianne Patrice, the executive director of Sad Girls Club, a mental health nonprofit serving Black youth that saw an uptick in social media attention following the murder of George Floyd. “Because I’m a Black woman specifically, you want to say, ‘Well, I’m gonna pay you in exposure.’ Exposure is not putting food on my table and keeping the lights on.”

The Covid-19 pandemic is setting the stage for greater wealth inequality in the future. Per a recent report from the Center for American Progress, the average Black household held only 14.5 percent of the wealth of the average white household in 2019 — and we can expect that share to decrease as Black homeworkers were over four times more likely to fall behind on their mortgages and 12.1 percent more likely to borrow money to deal with emergency expenses than their white counterparts.

These conditions replicate in seemingly small ways, too. Prior to the pandemic, Black people were unbanked at a rate five times higher than that of white people, and the average Black household has only $1,300 in liquid savings compared with $7,850 for white households. To put it plainly: the majority of Black households in the United States exist in an environment of scarcity, of always saving and yearning, and of dreaming for solutions to systems built to fail them.

Set against this backdrop, the stakes are high for many young Black creators. “I really just want to create generational wealth for my family because I don’t want to see my mom working no more. I really just want to be that person that my family looks up to,” said Tray Bills, a 25-year-old social media creator and inaugural Collab Crib member with 1.1 million TikTok followers in the Times’s “Who Gets to Be an Influencer” documentary.

“A lot of Black creators use [social media] as a survival mechanism to eat. They don’t have anything else,” says Dorsey. “A lot of them don’t come from families where they have financial accounts set up for them or financial backing or money sitting in the bank. They use this as a way out.”

Influencer burnout, the all-encompassing pressure to strike viral gold or fade into obscurity, permeates creator circles of all sizes. In the 2010s, colossal YouTubers from PewDiePie to Alissa Marie took breaks from the platform after feeling drained from keeping up with an algorithm they didn’t understand. On TikTok, proximity breeds paranoia, as mid-sized personalities juggle the need for enough attention to pay the bills and the fear of cancellation. Hell, even Charli D’Amelio has bad days.

“I have to take everything I do way more seriously now because I’m actually a celebrity who’s constantly looked at and judged. … Everything I do needs to contribute towards me in a positive way, and not hold me back or risk my reputation,” says Noah Webster, a Collab Crib member.

Pursuing social media full-time is anxiety-inducing for even the most mythic creators. But for Black creators chasing financial freedom in an industry that rewards privilege, that anxiety can mutate into something deeper: a self-limiting fear.

“When you’re focused on freedom, there’s a pressure placed on creativity that goes beyond simply a matter of ‘I just want to create.’ So when you’re then dealing with situations around pay, it then becomes really tricky to respond to opportunities that aren’t right for you,” says Ajayi. “You’re thinking of other things than others who are solely focused clout aren’t thinking about. You’re thinking, ‘This is something that I really want to become my bread and butter. And if I say no to this, what else will come my way?’ There comes a point where, even though it’s not easy, we need to be okay saying no to opportunities that don’t respect the time and effort we put into our crafts.”

For her, the key to reaching that involves transparency, something the creator economy lacks as it spawns a cottage industry of marketing courses, managers, and accountants.

Though YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok all have built-in monetization plans where creators are paid based on views, engagement, and advertising revenue, the formulas behind these programs are deliberately opaque. The Creator Fund, TikTok’s billion-dollar initiative to compensate creators for driving engagement on the platform, calculates payouts based on a mix of metrics ranging from views to geography. This means each creator’s rate is different, with some earning between 2 and 4 cents per thousand views.

Sponsored content isn’t any more straightforward. As Ajayi and @influencerpaygap demonstrate, brand deals aren’t consistent among each company, and there’s no clear formula for how to actually determine what clout is worth. Webster, the creator managed by Dorsey, tells me every 10,000 views equates to $1,000, while Neal Schafer, the founder of digital marketing consultancy PDCA and a professor at Rutgers, recommends using rate calculators that adjust for platform and engagement variables.

That said, the expanse of the internet won’t be a black box forever. Two subscription- based startups for creators to hawk premium content — Fanhouse and Fanbase — are baking in feedback mechanisms as they move into the mainstream. Fanhouse, which operates as an OnlyFans-finsta hybrid that pays 90 percent of earnings out to creators, invites all users who’ve made $30 on the platform to a group chat where creators can talk shop.

As for Fanbase, the company announced the formation of a creator advisory board. A council of 25 social media creators that includes both Dorsey and Webster, as well as Renegade choreographer Jaliah Harmon, the group will advise the platform as it builds its short-form video editor and continues to improve its monetization strategy. Fanbase is unique in the sense that financial freedom is explicitly tied to its mission. The company crowdsourced small-dollar investments from over 5,200 people in exchange for equity in the platform, and hopes to continue finding ways to explore long-term monetization strategies for creators beyond their content.

“Addison and Charli don’t mind giving their content away for two reasons. One, they primarily don’t create the choreography they use in their videos. Two, they don’t make the records they dance to,” says Isaac Hayes III, Fanbase’s founder. “That’s why I tell every user — especially Black creators — to start monetizing their content immediately.”

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