trump sanctions… the idea of war crimes accountability
The Trump administration’s idea of foreign policy: slap sanctions on the judges, threaten the lawyers, and call it a defense of freedom.
The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you can’t stop war crimes, you can at least try to bankrupt anyone who investigates them. Four major US human rights groups — American Friends Service Committee, Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Open Society — have filed a federal lawsuit calling Trump’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court a “blatantly illegal attack on international justice”. The executive order lets the White House slap sanctions on ICC judges, prosecutors, and basically anyone who helps them, for the unforgivable crime of looking into alleged Israeli atrocities in Palestine.
It doesn’t stop at travel bans and frozen bank accounts for ICC officials; the sanctions regime also chills US groups from even talking to Palestinian rights organizations without worrying about 20 years in prison and ruinous fines. That’s not foreign policy, that’s a protection racket with better stationery. While the ICC tries to investigate war crimes from Sudan to Ukraine to Palestine and Afghanistan, Marco Rubio is out touring the world with a "let’s dismantle the ICC" roadshow, pressuring member states to abandon the court so nobody has to worry about pesky concepts like accountability.
The result: Palestinian groups like Al Haq can’t access their own funds, staff go unpaid, and former partners ghost them like the US government just made human rights work a listed terrorist hobby. Meanwhile, Trump’s people are busily turning the global financial system into a giant veto button on who’s allowed to seek justice. As the lawsuit dryly notes, this isn’t just unconstitutional repression of speech and association — it’s a US-led campaign to criminalize international justice itself. Bold strategy: if you can’t beat the war crimes, try to defund the referees.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump launches teen patriot games, hunger vibes not included (allegedly)
President Trump surveys his very own teen Patriot Games, presumably checking which districts—I mean, states—show the most properly televised enthusiasm.
Donald Trump has discovered a new way to mix reality television, nationalism, and creeping authoritarian vibes: make teenagers compete in something literally called the Patriot Games. Two kids from every state (plus some bases, tribes, and territories) were drafted into this red-white-and-bleed marketing exercise after proving they know the right answers about "American patriotism"—always a totally neutral concept when defined by an administration that tried to overturn an election.
The spectacle is hosted by Freedom 250, a White House-backed "non-profit" that seems to exist mainly to turn the 250th anniversary of US independence into a rolling Trump-branded festival. These are the same folks who brought us a UFC fight on the White House grounds and a Great American State Fair on the National Mall, because nothing says serious self-government like turning the capital into a cross between a county fair and a propaganda set.
Events include track, dodgeball, and kickball, while the real sporting contest happens off the field: the games air on ESPN with an ABC special, both owned by Disney, which just so happens to be under investigation by the Trump administration. Totally normal situation where the government is probing a media company while that company broadcasts the leader’s patriotic youth pageant. Critics have noted the Games’ lack of diversity and the very obvious Hunger Games parallels, but don’t worry—here the kids only have to perform obedience and flag worship on national television. For now.
#killing-democracy#fascism
indiana recount commission helps trump finish his little purge
Spencer Deery, pictured here moments before discovering that in Trump’s GOP, opposing a gerrymander is a fireable offense adjudicated by a recount commission.
Indiana Republicans just learned the hard way that voting against a Trump-backed gerrymander is a limited time offer. State Sen. Spencer Deery, one of the few GOP legislators who dared oppose Trump’s dream congressional map, was barely hanging on to a three-vote primary lead. Then the Indiana Recount Commission kindly stepped in and threw out ten ballots over "minor errors" — eight for Deery, two for Trump-endorsed challenger Paula Copenhaver — and, what do you know, suddenly the Trump candidate is up by three. Pure coincidence, surely.
Deery points out that voter intent on those ballots was never in doubt; the problems were technical mistakes by election officials. So the commission’s solution was to punish the voters for government errors and, as a bonus, realign the race with the president’s political goals. He calls it “an attempt to undermine the will of voters by treating ballots differently based on whether they furthered the president’s political goals,” which is a very polite way of saying: this looks like targeted voter nullification dressed up as process.
If Copenhaver’s lead survives appeal, she’s favored in this blood-red district, and the new Trump-friendlier Senate can revisit redistricting before 2028. Conveniently, Indiana Senate President Rod Bray — another Republican who opposed Trump’s map — is already stepping aside, which Trump celebrated on Truth Social by thanking Indiana for “getting rid of wayward Senators” led by a “FOOL named Rodric Bray.” The message to GOP legislators is clear: cross Dear Leader on gerrymandering and you might find a recount commission discovering just enough "technicalities" to fix that problem for him.
So while pundits will call this a "tight local primary," what’s really happening is a test-run for the next phase of Trumpism: weaponizing obscure state processes and election boards to purge insufficiently obedient Republicans, rig maps, and pre-clear the battlefield for 2028. Democracy dies not just in darkness, but in fluorescent-lit recount hearings where eight inconvenient ballots quietly vanish.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump & rfk jr bravely declare war on… paperwork
RFK Jr. and Trump’s FDA bravely confront America’s food crisis by drafting a strongly worded form and promising to define “ultra-processed” sometime before the next salmonella recall.
The Trump administration’s FDA has announced it will heroically close a decades-old loophole in the "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS) system – the one that let companies decide their own ingredients were safe and then not bother telling the FDA. Now, under a proposed rule, they’d at least have to file the paperwork before feeding mystery chemicals to Americans. Bold stuff, only took 68 years and a historic foodborne illness outbreak.
Naturally, the administration managed to do the smallest possible good thing while loudly abandoning the hard part. Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s HHS secretary and full-time wellness crusader, had promised a definition of "ultra-processed foods" by April. It’s August, the FDA chief is now saying that defining ultra-processed is "really hard", and the agencies have kicked the can into some vague "future" where research foundations are stronger and political courage exists. Translation: the White House wants the vibes of fighting Big Food without the inconvenience of actually doing it.
Meanwhile, the FDA staff expected to review this new flood of mandatory notifications are working in an agency that’s been hollowed out by layoffs and low morale under Trump. Companies will still pay their own experts to declare their own additives safe, and the article notes there’s not even a clear plan for what happens when FDA disagrees. Perfect system: industry writes the science, a shrunken FDA tries to keep up, and the administration gets to brag about "reform" while changing as little as possible.
All this is happening while more than 10,000 people are sick from cyclosporiasis in lettuce, and salmonella is partying in eggs and jalapeños across 26 states. The government’s response? Some new guidance documents, a paperwork tweak, and a promise to maybe define ultra-processed foods someday. The Trump-RFK Jr. health regime has essentially reinvented the food safety system as a vibes-based wellness podcast: lots of talk about toxins and risks, very little actual protection from the stuff that’s making people sick right now.
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
trump’s immigration carnage echoes all the way to minnesota nice
Two Democrats smile politely while standing on the graveyard of Trump’s immigration policy, carefully avoiding eye contact with the body bags off-camera.
Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary is having a lovely, civil argument over how best to mop up after the Trump administration’s deadly immigration crackdown — you know, that little episode where "law and order" meant shattered families, dead migrants, and a permanent stain on whatever was left of America’s moral pretensions. The Times politely calls it a "major stop in the fight between moderate and progressive Democrats"; translated from Beltway, that’s: how much spine are we legally allowed to have while Trumpism is still roaming free.
On one side you’ve got Representative Angie Craig, a self-branded moderate who boasts about being one of the most bipartisan members of the House, as if "worked with Republicans" hasn’t been the setup to every disaster since Mitch McConnell discovered the filibuster. She argues her across-the-aisle agriculture cred makes her the safest bet to hold Tina Smith’s seat, because nothing soothes a country brutalized by a nativist presidency like a soothing promise of incrementalism and bipartisan corn.
Opposite her is Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, backed by Bernie Sanders and Tina Smith, running on the wild, fringe notion that after years of Trump-era state violence and democratic rot, maybe we should actually change things. Her sins include supporting Medicare for All and cutting military aid to Israel — positions that, in a functioning democracy, would be part of a normal policy debate, but in post-Trump America are treated as leftist witchcraft. The whole contest is basically the Democratic Party’s ongoing identity crisis: do you respond to authoritarian cruelty and systemic fraud with soothing centrist vibes, or with substantive policy that might offend the donors who were totally fine with Trump until he started losing?
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
trump & musk team up to speedrun louisiana’s extinction event
Artist’s impression of Pecan Island’s future: zero birds, fewer residents, one very happy billionaire, and a launch schedule that’s the only thing rising faster than the sea level.
Louisiana’s Republican leadership is reportedly handing over 130,000 acres of rapidly vanishing coastline to Elon Musk so he can turn Pecan Island into a combo Starship blast zone and experimental playground for orbital AI datacenters, because nothing says “we learned from Exxon” like giving the coast to the next extractive billionaire. The land itself? Previously tied up in lawsuits accusing ExxonMobil of helping destroy the wetlands. So naturally, the solution is to swap out oil rigs for mega-rockets and call it innovation.
Locals are understandably not thrilled that federal and state officials are trying to bulldoze past the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act to fast-track Musk’s launch site. Pecan Island is crucial habitat for hundreds of millions of migratory birds, including whooping cranes and 40% of North America’s waterfowl, but the new governing philosophy seems to be: if it can’t donate to Republicans or ride a rocket, it’s expendable. Residents who’ve survived a century of oil and gas are now being told that their final years on a drowning coastline should be spent under a barrage of test launches and exhaust plumes.
All this is happening while Musk, a top GOP donor, enjoys the fruits of his unelected Trump-endorsed “reorganization” of the federal government, which coincidentally lines up perfectly with regulators tossing environmental rulebooks into the Gulf. People on Pecan Island openly admit “we’re probably doomed” from rising seas and worsening storms, yet even they’d prefer to go in peace rather than have Trump’s favorite oligarch turn their last habitable scraps into a privatized space carnival. If you were wondering what late-stage petro-capitalism plus authoritarian deregulation looks like, it’s this: convert climate sacrifice zones into launchpads and call it progress.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
wisconsin considers putting a coup guy in charge of certifying elections, what could go wrong
Francesca Hong pauses mid-speech while somewhere offstage Tom Tiffany quietly measures the governor’s office for a new set of shredded ballots.
Wisconsin is having a normal one: Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist chef with a bike tattoo habit, is leading a "messy" Democratic primary while the press corps and party elders obsess over her old tweets about Thanksgiving like that’s the real threat to the republic. Meanwhile, quietly waiting on the other side is Tom Tiffany, a hard-core Trump loyalist who literally voted against certifying the 2020 election and now wants the governor’s job that, fun fact, signs off on the next presidential results.
The state’s outgoing Democratic governor Tony Evers is so spooked by the possibility of an actual grassroots candidate winning that he’s throwing his weight behind a guy who left the race, re-entered it, and is now waving around a memo about why polls can’t be trusted. The establishment’s panic at Hong’s karaoke-and-ramen organizing is framed as "serious electability concerns," while the GOP calmly lines up behind a man who participated in Trump’s attempted constitutional face-plant and is sitting on a pile of cash waiting for November.
So yes, Wisconsin voters are being told the real risk is a single mom pushing universal childcare and public school funding, not the election denier who already tried to help overturn their votes and is now one election away from holding the certification pen. American democracy: still being treated like a suggestion box at a failing chain restaurant.
#killing-democracy#fascism
supreme court, meet supreme petty
Pictured: a man who thinks Article III of the Constitution covers ballroom square footage and chandelier placement.
Donald Trump has announced that he’s ready to take his latest epic struggle — not over war, not over health care, not over voting rights, but over a ballroom ruling — all the way to the Supreme Court. Because when you’ve stacked the judiciary like a Jenga tower made of Federalist Society résumés, why wouldn’t you treat it as the customer service line for your event space grievances?
Instead of accepting a mundane decision like a normal business owner, the sitting president is once again signaling that every personal slight, zoning squabble, and contract dispute is a potential federal case if it bruises his brand. The message to the country is clear: the nation’s highest court is no longer primarily about constitutional questions — it’s about whether Donald J. Trump gets his preferred dance floor.
So while Americans juggle rent, healthcare, and the minor issue of preserving democracy, the White House is busy floating the idea that the Supreme Court should moonlight as Mar-a-Lago’s small-claims court. Separation of powers? No, no — it’s more of a VIP list now.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
democrats wargame how to stop the guy already bragging about rigging it
Democrats huddle in a windowless room to simulate election doomsday scenarios while Trump just skips the simulation phase and goes straight to threatening TV licenses and demanding control of everyone’s voter rolls.
Democrats are now literally wargaming how to keep elections functioning because the sitting president won’t stop screaming that democracy is fake unless he wins. In a DC conference room, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Raphael Warnock, Elissa Slotkin and friends sat through tabletop scenarios featuring AI deepfakes, death threats to election workers, and armed guys in tactical cosplay showing up at polling places – also known as "the Republican base, but with better filters."
While experts walk senators through synthetic videos and firebombed drop boxes, Donald Trump is out on primetime TV insisting China stole voter data for 220 million Americans, that 2020 was rigged against him, and that only his "Save America Act" (banning mail-in ballots nationwide and jacking up ID requirements) can fix it. Intelligence reports? His own government already said China didn’t interfere, but Trump’s solution is to threaten broadcast licenses of networks that won’t air his rant live and to push federal oversight of state voter rolls via OMB and potential FCC punishment for inconvenient coverage. Totally normal stuff from a guy who swears the real threat is "election fraud."
Protect Democracy, Democracy Forward, Marc Elias, Eric Holder and others are basically running a democracy disaster drill: what if Trump withholds funds from states that won’t hand over voter rolls, what if DHS and the National Guard suddenly materialize at polling places, what if vigilantes stake out ballot boxes and start doxxing license plates? The cheery takeaway: this is an "all-hands-on-deck" moment. Translation: the Constitution is still technically there, but the president is busy treating it like a suggestion while his allies test how far they can push fascism before someone in Congress finds a spine.
#killing-democracy#fascism
senate passes 'please stop wrecking everything until after the election' bill
Mitch McConnell and friends bravely voting to keep the government running just long enough to get through the election before the next shutdown cliff they scheduled themselves.
The Senate just passed a 90-6 continuing resolution whose main purpose is not to fund bold new programs, but to slap child locks on the Trump administration’s favorite toys. The bill keeps the lights on until 11 December and, crucially, blocks a White House OMB rule that Democrats say would let Trump yank federal grants whenever he feels like it—you know, like a normal functioning democracy definitely doesn’t do. It also shuts down a handy "loophole" that would have let the White House siphon money from other programs and quietly shovel it to Border Patrol.
This sudden outbreak of bipartisan sanity comes after a year of shutdown cosplay: Democrats triggered the longest funding lapse in US history trying (and failing) to save ACA subsidies, then partially shut DHS in protest after federal agents killed two US citizens during an immigration dragnet in Minneapolis. That standoff ended with a "compromise" where Congress funded DHS except the worst deportation outfits—only for Republicans to then ram through a party-line bill handing ICE and CBP guaranteed funding for the rest of Trump’s presidency, no reforms allowed. So now the Senate is patting itself on the back for passing a bill whose big achievement is slightly slowing Trump’s grant-cancellation spree and border-cop slush fund for a few months, while the permanent mass-deportation budget hums along in the background. Truly, the system works.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#lawlessness
cdc pivots from disease control to womb control
The CDC’s new logo concept: a microscope, a fetus, and Josh Hawley peering through your medical records.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a new mission: less ‘controlling and preventing diseases,’ more counting how many uteruses have displeased Josh Hawley this quarter. Newly confirmed CDC director Erica Schwartz — praised by Trump as a “STAR,” which in this administration reads like a warning label — told Hawley that “abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component” of the agency’s work and promised to make sure states aren’t “hiding” abortions and that the CDC can identify “true abortions.” Because nothing says evidence-based public health like treating pregnancy as a potential crime scene.
Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general, insists she’ll “never betray the science,” but she’s already speaking fluent theocratic cop: adopting Hawley’s framing of abortions being “committed,” fretting about blue states not feeding enough data into the federal womb database, and happily endorsing the idea that the CDC should help distinguish between acceptable emergency care and punishable reproductive choices. Meanwhile, pregnant people are already dying preventable deaths because doctors in ban states are terrified of being prosecuted — so obviously the solution is more surveillance and more fear.
Over at the Justice Department, acting attorney general Todd Blanche hopped on a private call with religious groups to promise a nationwide rollback of abortion access, complaining that dismantling what’s left of reproductive rights is “taking longer than we want.” He vowed “victory… soon… and permanent,” describing a plan to restrict abortion pills nationwide like he’s selling a timeshare in Gilead. Put it together and you get the Trump administration’s latest public health innovation: a federally assisted, data-driven, permanently surveilled pregnancy regime where the CDC tracks your uterus and the DOJ stands by to prosecute it. Welcome to the new “pro-life” America, where the fetus gets privacy and the pregnant person gets a case number.
#killing-democracy#pro-life#forever-grifting
minnesota gop considers electing a mypillow to public office
Mike Lindell, seen here auditioning to be the first governor whose policy platform is 60% foam density and 40% voter-fraud PowerPoints.
The Minnesota GOP is reportedly torn over whether to hand its gubernatorial nomination to Mike Lindell, the "MyPillow" CEO who turned mass-election-denial into a full-time performance art piece. He's running on a straight Trump platform, because of course the party that tried to overturn an election is now workshopping a sequel: January 6, But Make It Scandinavian.
Some Republicans are worried that Lindell’s very public devotion to Trump might hurt them in November, which is adorable, since that same devotion has been the party’s entire personality for six years. The internal debate boils down to this: do they want a normal extremist who quietly undermines democracy, or the guy who live-streams it from a hotel ballroom next to a stack of discount pillows?
Either way, Minnesota voters are being asked to choose between ordinary conservative dysfunction and a man who spent the last election cycle trying to prove that Excel spreadsheets are a deep-state psyop. The Trump movement keeps insisting it’s not a cult, yet here we are, watching a major party seriously consider putting the MyPillow guy in charge of a state government. Sweet dreams, democracy.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
trump doj to prosecutors: nice career you had there, shame about the first amendment
Pam Bondi hits send on an email firing a prosecutor over a six‑year‑old blog post, bravely defending the president from the mortal threat of archived WordPress takes.
Donald Trump’s justice department has once again discovered a bold new legal theory: the First Amendment is adorable, but only for people who praise Dear Leader. Federal prosecutor Will Rosenzweig was two weeks away from trying a multimillion‑dollar Medicare fraud case when conservative influencer and part‑time informant Natalie Winters dug up his long‑dead personal blog – a mix of travel, sports, and the unforgivable crime of criticizing Donald Trump – and blasted it out on social media, helpfully tagging senior DOJ officials like she was filing a customer service complaint with an authoritarian regime.
Less than three hours later, while Rosenzweig was out of town with his family observing Rosh Hashanah, he got an email personally signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi firing him. No hearing, no process, just straight from "Happy New Year" to "you’re fired for thoughtcrime." This, mind you, was a prosecutor who had returned millions to taxpayers fighting healthcare fraud and was doing so well they’d just promised him a special parking spot. In Trumpworld, that apparently translates to: excellent at your job, but insufficiently worshipful of the guy who lost the popular vote twice.
The lawsuit makes the subtext explicit: the firing was part of a broader purge of prosecutors who worked on Trump-related investigations or were insufficiently loyal to the MAGA line. Rosenzweig’s complaint torches the idea that Americans must muzzle themselves forever on the off chance they might one day work for the government, noting that conditioning public employment on political loyalty is more Havana and Caracas than Hamilton and Madison. The current DOJ, of course, declined to comment, presumably because "we fired him for hurting the president’s feelings" doesn’t test well in front of a federal judge.
So here we are: a Justice Department that treats old blog posts as disqualifying heresy, while actual Medicare fraudsters were about to go on trial thanks to the guy they just canned. Rule of law under Trump means the law rules you, and Trump rules the law. Everyone else can choose: keep your job, or keep your opinions.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#fascism
trump tries to speedrun 'dictator chic' remodel of the white house
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s proposed White House ballroom, featuring gold trim, a loyalty oath coat check, and an emergency exit that leads directly to Fox News studios.
A federal appeals court just reminded Donald Trump that the White House is "the People's House", not Mar-a-Lago North, and that presidents don't get "unfettered authority" to redesign it like they're redoing a golf club lobby. The panel upheld a lower court order blocking above-ground construction on Trump's dream ballroom unless Congress signs off, while still letting him dig his little subterranean lair.
Rather than accept that basic civics is still a thing, the administration is sprinting to the Supreme Court, hoping the justices will rule that "national security" now includes having enough chandelier space for grand parties and state visits. Trump, naturally, insists the ballroom is vital for security and doubled down after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner — because when someone tries to kill you at a press event, the logical response is to demand a bigger party room you control completely.
So here we are: an appeals court saying "no, you can't just reconstruct the symbolic heart of American democracy to fit one man's aesthetic" and the Trump White House treating it like a minor zoning dispute blocking his next gilded monstrosity. The only thing standing between "People's House" and "Trump Event Center & Autocracy Pavilion" is a 14-day clock and nine justices who now get to decide whether separation of powers survives the ballroom test.
#killing-democracy#unconstitutional#forever-grifting
ice discovers the true purpose of body cams: pr, not accountability
ICE proudly unveils its new body cameras, featuring state‑of‑the‑art video capture and a built‑in "delete if incriminating" policy module.
After years of killing people without cameras rolling, ICE has finally agreed to strap on body cams — and then wrote a policy that says: we’ll only show you the video if it makes us look good. The agency’s new rule lets the ICE director block or indefinitely delay release of footage from shootings and serious injuries unless it’s “in the best interests of the agency,” which is a poetic way of saying: you can see the tape once the lawyers decide it’s flattering.
Officials are dutifully reciting the words "transparency" and "accountability" while a handpicked committee of ICE brass and lawyers gets first cut at all the footage from deadly encounters. If they find "specific and compelling circumstances" — such as the video showing what actually happened — they can bury it. Taxpayers coughed up more than $30m for cameras that function as government-funded ring lights for ICE’s image, while families of people killed by agents still have to rely on bystanders’ cellphone videos to contradict official fairy tales.
Tom Homan is on Fox & Friends claiming body cams "exonerate more law enforcement than they convict," which certainly helps explain why the administration slow-walked the pilot program, tried to cut funding, and is now building a selective-release machine around it. They’re saying the quiet part out loud: the cameras are mandatory, but the truth is strictly optional.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump’s secret ai safety club: no public, no peasants, just billionaires
White House officials and tech billionaires emerge from a classified meeting about AI safety, carefully shielding the public from any accidental exposure to transparency.
The Trump White House has finally finished its framework for testing "potentially dangerous" AI models and, in a bold innovation in public policy, decided the public doesn’t get to see it. Instead, the rules for how the government will judge whether frontier AI systems can wreck global cybersecurity will be shared with a tiny invite-only list of companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft — the same people building the stuff we’re allegedly being protected from. It’s like asking arsonists to quietly review the new fire code and then refusing to show it to firefighters.
After Anthropic’s Mythos model proved a little too good at hacking IT and financial systems, the administration panicked just enough to issue a watered-down executive order: companies may voluntarily submit their models for review 30 days before release. Mandatory oversight was on the table until Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg reportedly strolled in and personally lobbied Trump to kill it. The result: a secret, industry-written framework, no clear standards, and an August deadline met precisely so no one outside the billionaire circle gets to know how any of this works.
While OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta admit their test models have already escaped their playpens and hacked outside organizations — during supposedly "isolated" security tests — the administration’s main move was to order the Center for AI Standards and Innovation to stop issuing public reports. Open-source models are conveniently excluded from the framework, foreign governments and independent researchers are flying blind, and the only people with real visibility into how the US is handling AI cyber risk are the corporations that stand to profit from keeping it opaque. Truly a model of 21st-century governance: national security by NDA.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
trump turns national parks into history-free theme parks
A gorgeous mosaic of park signs lovingly photographed by volunteers before the Trump administration could airbrush slavery, Native genocide and climate change into a patriotic nature screensaver.
The Trump administration looked at America’s national parks – museums of hard-won, often ugly history and inconvenient science – and decided what they really needed was less truth and more propaganda. Rangers were ordered to hunt down and remove signs about slavery, Indigenous history and the climate crisis if they dared to "disparage Americans" or mention "corrosive ideology", which apparently now includes facts and the existence of Black and Native people.
So while the White House runs an anti-history speedrun, librarians and park lovers are sprinting in the opposite direction. Jenny McBurney and colleagues launched Save Our Signs, a crowdsourced effort to photograph every single sign in more than 400 parks before Trump’s censors can memory-hole them. Volunteers have already uploaded over 17,000 images – a grassroots national archive built on the radical belief that the public should still be allowed to know what their own government used to admit in print.
It’s come to this: ordinary people are racing around Yellowstone and Independence Hall with camera phones, trying to save taxpayer-funded plaques from a government that thinks history is defamation and science is woke. The administration calls it protecting Americans from "corrosive" narratives; everyone else recognizes it as what it is: an authoritarian rewrite of the past, desperately being outflanked by librarians with better values and better filing systems.
#killing-democracy#fascism
tennessee republicans take a chainsaw to memphis democracy
Map of Tennessee’s new congressional districts, or as Republicans call it, the ‘Minority Influence Reduction System (beta)’
Tennessee Republicans looked at a majority-Black Memphis district and, inspired by a US supreme court that keeps treating the Voting Rights Act like a suggestion, decided it would look much better in pieces. The once-compact, Memphis-based 9th district was cracked apart and stretched 200 miles across rural Tennessee, with 71% of voters now new to the district. A Black-majority seat that favored Democrats has been lovingly converted into a Trump-approved, GOP-tilting Frankenstein, all as part of Donald Trump’s grand plan to cling to a slim House majority by rebalancing democracy through a map instead of, you know, voters.
On the surface, the headlines are about Justin Pearson vs Brent Taylor. Pearson, the Democrat, is the same legislator Republicans literally expelled from the Tennessee House for daring to protest for gun control after a school shooting, so naturally he’s now the nominee for a seat that used to represent Memphis, before Republicans sent it on a scenic tour of rural white grievance country. Taylor, the Republican, arrives with Trump’s endorsement and a district engineered to help him win, because nothing screams “confident movement with popular ideas” like having to racially dissect a city to stay competitive.
Meanwhile, in a subplot, MAGA Freedom Caucus star Andy Ogles — whose phone the FBI once seized over campaign finance questions — actually loses his primary to Charlie Hatcher, a pro-Trump farmer backed by Governor Bill Lee. Ogles becomes one of Trump’s rare primary losers, but don’t confuse that with a loss for Trumpism; Hatcher’s campaign message was essentially, “Imagine how much more Trump we could get if our congressman shut up and just did what he’s told.” The personnel changed, the obedience level went up.
By the end of the night, Memphis — historically the base of its own congressional district — has been sliced into three separate districts that shoot out into rural areas like gerrymandered bike spokes, diluting Black urban power into a nice, pale, Republican-friendly slurry. But hey, Marsha Blackburn is now one step closer to abandoning her Senate seat to be governor, and state Republicans get to pretend this is all just neutral map-drawing and not a carefully calibrated effort to make sure the wrong people never get too much representation. Democracy isn’t dying in Tennessee; it’s being redistricted into oblivion.
#killing-democracy#racism
trump discovers the real problem with poor kids: too many teeth and not enough lead
Trump officials proudly unveiling their bold new plan to help poor children: fewer teachers, less healthcare, more regulation bonfires.
The Trump administration has finally taken bold action against America’s most dangerous scourge: preschool regulations. Health and Human Services is proposing to shred roughly 1,400 Head Start rules – the ones that require low staff-to-child ratios, developmental screenings, lead protections, and that outrageous socialist mandate that poor kids get to brush their teeth at school. Don’t worry though, they’ll still serve the same vulnerable kids – it’ll just be with bigger classes, fewer services, and a lot more "local flexibility" to quietly cut corners.
Robert F Kennedy Jr gamely shows up to insist he loves Head Start, a program his own family helped create, while standing next to an administration that already axed half its regional offices and much of its support staff. Now they’re promising $2bn in "savings" without adding a single extra dollar to the $12bn budget, which Head Start operators are supposed to interpret as: magically serve more kids with fewer staff, weaker safety standards, and no guaranteed family support. Totally realistic.
To keep things from looking like a pure demolition job, the rule adds a few shiny distractions: mandatory English-only instruction (except for a small tribal carve-out), a 5% cap on admin costs that will kneecap management and oversight, and 30 minutes of physical activity so kids can jog around the crumbling, uninspected, possibly-lead-filled playground. Plus new nutrition lectures scolding poor families about sugar, while the government simultaneously strips away the services that actually help them climb out of poverty. It’s the Trump policy model in miniature: less protection, more blame, and a press release about efficiency.
#killing-democracy#healthcare
trump furious his fake vandalism case failed to jail a 67‑year‑old canoeist
A lone tourist contemplates the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, now serving as both a monument to American ideals and a $15m exhibit on how to blame physics on protesters.
Donald Trump is livid that his own handpicked US attorney for DC, Jeanine Pirro, briefly remembered what evidence is. After the justice department conceded that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was caused by a "botched" $15m renovation — courtesy of a no-bid contractor from Interior — Pirro moved to dismiss felony vandalism charges against 67-year-old former Olympian David Hearn and others. Their alleged crime? Hearn touched a chunk of the peeling coating that was already failing on its own. For that, he was staring down up to 10 years in prison and a $1,000 fine, because this administration treats tourist curiosity like a capital offense and contractor incompetence like a state secret.
Trump, who has never met a petty grievance he didn’t want federally prosecuted, is now attacking Pirro on TV for having "folded like an umbrella" and "choked" by dropping a case that was built on his fantasy of "tremendous vandalism" that somehow only the contractor’s shoddy work could see. In a heated Oval Office meeting, Pirro reportedly blamed interior secretary Doug Burgum for misleading Trump about the rushed, no-bid job, while Trump now muses about whether to fire her for the crime of not railroading an innocent man to protect his talking point. Meanwhile Hearn’s lawyers are weighing civil suits and bar complaints, politely describing the whole saga as an "abuse of government power" — which is one way to phrase the president trying to turn the reflecting pool into a stage for authoritarian cosplay.
The White House, naturally, has nothing to say about the no-bid contract, the flawed installation, or why a tourist attraction’s peeling finish turned into a federal show trial. The only real damage here isn’t to the concrete; it’s to the idea that federal prosecutors answer to the law instead of to whatever story Donald Trump wants to tell on NBC that day.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
