ai needs juice, utah has 'like 70 people': trump nukes nuclear safety
Pictured: the new nuclear safety review process, where a 31-year-old DOGE lawyer asks if anyone important lives downwind and then signs off on the reactor.
The Trump White House has discovered a bold new frontier in deregulation: turning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — once the global gold standard — into a glorified help desk for Silicon Valley reactor startups and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cosplay team. At a meeting in Idaho, 31-year-old non-expert and DOGE import Seth Cohen reassured everyone that radiation exposure in Utah isn’t a big deal because, and this is a real quote, “I don’t know, like 70 people live there.” When staff reminded him there are babies, the response was basically: they’ve been downwind before, what’s another round of glow-in-the-dark childhood cancer?
The administration has fired an NRC commissioner for insisting on independence — a first in history — and then proceeded to bleed the agency of more than 400 staff, overwhelmingly the people who actually know how not to have a meltdown. Those positions are not being refilled, because why would you want experienced safety experts when you can have a "move fast and break things" ethos applied to nuclear reactors so AI can have more compute? Cohen reportedly told colleagues to just “assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” which is a neat way of saying the regulator is now an industry subsidiary with federal letterhead.
Meanwhile, DOE spokespeople swear this is all about "the highest standards of safety" as they chainsaw through thousands of pages of safeguards that kept the U.S. from having a Fukushima or Chernobyl of its own. Veterans of the field are openly warning that the safety culture is collapsing and that the U.S. is replaying the exact regulatory capture that led to past nuclear disasters. But on the upside, if this goes wrong, those AI models will be able to very efficiently generate evacuation maps for the glowing new exurbs of downwind America.
#killing-democracy#corruption
when idaho is your civil liberties champion, things are going extremely well
Idaho’s Republican secretary of state Phil McGrane, bravely committing the unforgivable MAGA sin of reading the law and not handing Trump everyone’s partial Social Security number on a silver platter.
The Trump Justice Department has decided that what America really needs before the 2026 midterms is a giant, national database of voter info, complete with partial Social Security and driver’s license numbers, because nothing says "free and fair elections" like the federal government hoovering up everyone’s personal data in the name of chasing the mythical noncitizen voter.
Idaho — yes, that Idaho, the deep-red Trump landslide Idaho — has suddenly remembered it kind of hates federal power when it’s not aimed at immigrants or trans kids. Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, handed over the usual public voter file but drew the line at turning his office into a data farm for Trump’s DOJ, citing both state law and the administration’s own recent admissions that it can’t be trusted to secure sensitive data. When the people who run Idaho elections are like, "yeah, we’ve seen how you handle secrets, absolutely not," you may have a problem.
The Justice Department responded with a halting, vaguely threatening voicemail straight out of an amateur mob movie: nice little voter roll you’ve got there, shame if it got sued. Idaho is one of several states exempt from the 1990s motor voter law, a status it earned by adopting same-day registration to avoid Clinton-era "federal intrusion" — and that old anti-feds reflex is now being used to tell Trump’s DOJ to pound sand. When lifelong Idaho Republicans are publicly saying "going against Trump here is dangerous, but he’s right to do it," you’re not watching principled conservatism; you’re watching a red state realize that the authoritarian machine it helped build also wants their data.
#killing-democracy#fascism
america speedruns autocracy
Trump passionately makes out with the flag to apologize for what he’s doing to the Constitution off-camera.
Global democracy experts have looked at the United States under Trump 2.0 and collectively gone, "Ah, so you're trying Hungary on fast‑forward." Sweden’s V‑Dem just dropped America from 20th to 51st in the world, nestling us comfortably between Slovakia and Greece, which is not generally where the whole "leader of the free world" brand aspires to live. Their director says the U.S. is now experiencing one of the fastest democratic collapses on earth, which is certainly one way to be a world leader.
Bright Line Watch, a group of U.S. scholars who apparently hate sleeping at night, now rates the American system as halfway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. Freedom House agrees and pegs the U.S. alongside Bulgaria and Italy for the steepest drop in rights and liberties among supposedly "free" countries. The common threads: Trump concentrating executive power, blowing past laws, sidelining a Republican-led Congress that’s too busy polishing his shoes to notice, and nonstop attacks on the press and free speech.
The White House response, via spokeswoman Olivia Wales, is that this is all a "ridiculous" smear by "irrelevant" biased nerds, and that Trump is actually a "champion for freedom and democracy" and the "most transparent and accessible president ever." Which is true if your definition of transparency is loudly announcing your authoritarian plans on live TV while your party claps like trained seals. Trump himself helpfully clarified the situation by telling reporters, "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator," a sentence that has never once been uttered by a person who is totally not aspiring to dictatorship.
Meanwhile, scholars note that Trump has rolled back U.S. democracy in a single year at a pace that took Modi a decade, Erdoğan a decade, and Orbán four years. Naturally, Trump loves Orbán and praises him as a "strongman" and "tough person," because of course he does. The founders worried about a would‑be king; they did not anticipate a guy who hugs the flag for the cameras while methodically gutting the republic behind it. Mission very much not accomplished, but rapidly getting there.
#killing-democracy#fascism
pentagon turns gold star parents into unpaid war spokespeople, forgets to ask them first
Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons, whose service and death are now being retrofitted into a Pentagon-approved slogan he never signed off on.
Pete Hegseth, who is somehow in charge of the Pentagon now and not just yelling at a camera on Fox, emerged from meetings with Gold Star families at Dover and triumphantly announced that through tears and hugs they all told him the same thing: "Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver." Very cinematic. Very made-for-cable. Very "didn't actually happen," according to at least one of the fathers he used as a moral human shield.
Charles Simmons, whose only son, Tech. Sgt. Tyler Simmons, died when a refueling plane crashed in Iraq during Trump’s Iran war, remembers it slightly differently: they talked about Tyler’s life, his service, and Simmons quietly hoping the decisions being made were actually necessary. Asked if he told Hegseth or Trump to keep fighting the war? "No, I didn’t say anything along those lines." Turns out the grieving dad was trying to process his loss, not audition to be the Pentagon’s new "Finish the Job" slogan writer.
Trump, never one to be outdone in the "imaginary support" department, previously claimed that "every single" Gold Star family at another Dover transfer told him the exact same thing: "Finish the job, sir." A public official who was actually standing there says they didn’t hear that from anyone. The Pentagon’s response to being caught using dead troops’ parents as a marketing focus group for endless war? A vague statement about privacy and respect, which is Washingtonese for "we’re not walking it back, and you can’t prove we made it up."
Meanwhile, Simmons—who is doing the actual hard work of grieving—comes away saying he saw genuine emotion from Trump and Hegseth and a different side of them than their public persona. That’s the bleak magic trick of this administration: show just enough basic human decency in private to win over the people whose kids you sent into a dubious war, then march to a podium and convert their pain into a talking point about why you have to keep it going. Democracy dies in darkness; reality dies in dignified transfer soundbites.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
trump’s ice adds ‘teen deaths’ to its accomplishments
ICE detention in the Trump era: now with fewer rights than a houseplant and worse air than a chemical warehouse.
ICE has managed to hit a new milestone in cruelty: 19-year-old Royer Perez-Jimenez has become the youngest person to die in ICE detention since Trump returned to office. He was found “unconscious and unresponsive” in his room at Florida’s Glades county detention center, a place so notorious that advocacy groups have already documented it as a toxic, unbreathable hellscape. Officially, ICE is calling it a presumed suicide while also assuring everyone that he answered “no” on their suicide screening checklist, so clearly the system works perfectly.
This one death joins at least 10 others in ICE custody this year alone, a body count that somehow still doesn’t trigger anything more than another bland press release. Glades, for its part, has been accused of spraying detained people with toxic chemicals, gassing them with carbon monoxide, and pepper-spraying them for the radical act of asking for water and toilet paper. So yes, we’ve essentially recreated the worst parts of a 19th-century prison ship and stapled a DHS logo on it.
Trump’s second-term immigration machine continues to insist this is all just “enforcement,” as if teenagers ending up dead in detention facilities with poisoned air and chemical sprays are an unfortunate rounding error. The message is clear: cross the border without the right papers, and you’re not entering a legal system—you’re entering a punishment maze where basic breathable air is optional and making it out alive is increasingly not guaranteed.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump’s doj is still trying to jail the russia investigation
James Comey, once FBI director, now recurring guest star in Trump’s ongoing legal revenge cosplay.
The Trump legal revenge tour has reached its inevitable "subpoena James Comey again" chapter, this time courtesy of Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He’s running a sprawling probe into the original Russia interference investigation and other prosecutions that annoyed Donald Trump, which Trump allies are proudly calling a "grand conspiracy" investigation. Subtlety remains banned at Mar-a-Lago.
Attorney General Pam Bondi already ordered prosecutors to go dig through the 2016 election like it’s a cold case instead of a decade-old political tantrum. There’s a small problem called the statute of limitations, but Trump world has a workaround: just claim the imaginary conspiracy is ongoing so it magically fits inside the five-year window. When the law says "stop," they hear "be more creative."
This is the sequel to the last failed attempt to nail Comey, when the administration tried to prosecute him over congressional testimony, only to have the case tossed because lead prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was — and this is from the judge, not The Onion — "a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience" who was unlawfully appointed. Rather than treat that as a warning sign, the Trump DOJ appealed and doubled down on defending her appointment, because why wouldn’t you hand prosecutorial power to a loyalist intern with a LinkedIn account and a dream?
So here we are: the Justice Department under Trump still burning time and resources to criminalize the investigation into his own campaign, stretching conspiracy law like taffy to keep the fantasy alive. Call it what it is: not law enforcement, but a state-sponsored fanfic project to rewrite 2016 and punish anyone who ever suggested Russia might be a problem.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump fans discover new hobby: menacing judges
Trump explains checks and balances: judges check him, his followers balance threats in their voicemail queue.
Federal judges are now holding Zoom panels to discuss the fun new workplace hazard of violent threats, because nothing says "healthy democracy" like needing the U.S. Marshals Service every time you sign an order Trump doesn’t like. Since October, there have been 314 threat investigations involving 202 judges — which is less a statistic and more a flashing siren that the rule of law is currently being held together with duct tape and denial.
Judge Ana Reyes, who blocked Trump’s attempt to strip Haitian immigrants of protected status and briefly told the military it couldn’t discriminate against transgender people, reports she gets a steady stream of death threats for the crime of reading the Constitution. Other judges describe the "extraordinary" becoming routine: every high-profile ruling now comes bundled with doxxing, threats, and, because why not, an odd campaign of anonymous pizza deliveries that may be tied to foreign actors. Judicial independence, brought to you by Domino’s.
Meanwhile, Trump and his allies have been busy teaching the base that judges who rule against him should be impeached, harassed, or both, while the Supreme Court spent last year quietly rubber-stamping Trump’s agenda in unsigned orders — then suddenly rediscovered the concept of limits by striking down his tariffs and earning his public tantrum. Chief Justice John Roberts has now emerged to gravely announce that personal attacks on judges "have got to stop," which is adorable coming from a court that helped supercharge this mess and only got concerned once the mob turned its attention upward.
#killing-democracy#fascism
senate fast-tracks bar-fight guy to run homeland security
Markwayne Mullin, freshly promoted from Senate slap-fights to running the nation’s largest security apparatus, rehearses his "have you tried punching your problems?" management philosophy.
The Senate homeland security committee has decided that what America really needs in charge of the largest domestic security apparatus on Earth is Markwayne Mullin, the senator best known for trying to square up with a witness in a hearing and romanticizing the neighbor who beat up Rand Paul. Almost every Republican on the panel voted yes, except Rand himself, apparently drawing the line at personally endorsing his own assault as official DHS conflict-resolution policy. John Fetterman crossed over to vote for Mullin, presumably on the theory that if we’re going to run the country like a WWE undercard, we might as well be honest about it.
Democrats pointed out some minor issues, like a Senate ethics report finding Mullin had "advocated physical violence as a means to resolve political disagreement" and his long, loving support for Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mullin, suddenly discovering his "diplomatic tone" setting, expressed regret over his remarks about Alex Pretti, one of two U.S. citizens killed by immigration agents during this year’s chaotic Minneapolis surge, and gently suggested DHS might want a lower public profile than Kristi Noem’s live-action Border Patrol cosplay.
On anything that actually matters, though, he stayed firmly on-brand. Asked whether he’d keep immigration agents away from polling stations during upcoming elections, Mullin refused to commit, because nothing says "free and fair democracy" like armed federal agents hanging around the ballot box. Questioned about specific immigration arrests, he claimed unfamiliarity, which is a neat trick for the guy interviewing to be the boss of the people doing the arresting. He did, however, bravely promise to require judicial warrants before agents enter homes or businesses, a standard that already exists, while ICE quietly plays with the idea that supervisor-signed paperwork is just as good as a judge.
So the Senate is on the verge of handing DHS to a first-term senator who treats political disagreement like a cage match, backs Trump’s immigration agenda, and won’t rule out turning the polling place into a soft-opening for the security state. The department is supposed to protect "homeland security"; instead, it’s looking more like the world’s largest experiment in how far you can stretch "law enforcement" before you snap democracy.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#lawlessness
ask a reporter about america’s friendly neighborhood occupation force
ICE agents helpfully demonstrating what “land of the free” looks like when you swap out liberty for tactical vests and qualified immunity.
America’s newest urban planning experiment—letting a bulked-up ICE occupy US cities like they’re Fallujah with strip malls—has gone so well it’s produced exactly what you’d expect: federal agents killing civilians like Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, and a high school student, Dylan Lopez Contreras, vanishing into a detention facility for ten months because nothing says "land of opportunity" like disappearing teenagers into federal cages.
While the government plays dress-up as an occupying army, actual communities are doing the job of grown-ups, banding together to protect their neighbors from the people in tactical gear who allegedly work for them. Maanvi Singh has been on the ground chronicling this little authoritarian field test, including a week on the block where Pretti was killed and the surreal process of watching a kid finally walk out of ICE detention as if he’s just completed a semester abroad in solitary.
The Guardian is now inviting readers to ask Singh questions about what it’s like to cover an agency that treats US cities as hunting grounds and residents as targets of opportunity. Because when federal power is this casually lethal and unaccountable, the least we can do is document the train wreck while it’s still barreling through the neighborhood.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
senator who tried to fight a witness now wants to run dhs, what could go wrong
Markwayne Mullin, auditioning to run DHS by demonstrating his core qualification: a deep commitment to televised tantrums.
President Trump has apparently decided that the ideal person to run the Department of Homeland Security is Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a man best known for trying to turn Senate hearings into UFC prelims. NPR notes that Sen. Richard Blumenthal got a crack at questioning Trump’s latest DHS cosplay nominee, which is Washington-speak for: "So, about your long public record of being a walking security risk with anger issues..."
Because nothing screams "steady hand on the nation’s security apparatus" like giving the keys to a guy whose brand is performative rage in committee rooms. Under Trump, DHS was already a catch‑all for border cruelty, protest crackdowns, and political theater; now we’re auditioning a MAGA senator to formalize the chaos. If confirmed, Mullin would inherit an agency Trump has repeatedly tried to bend into his personal domestic strike force — and judging by his past behavior, he seems less likely to resist that impulse than to ask for a folding chair and theme music.
#killing-democracy#awful-nominations
climate denier put in charge of disaster agency he keeps voting to starve
Markwayne Mullin, preparing to manage climate disasters by squinting at a hurricane map and voting against it.
Donald Trump’s latest fun experiment in disaster management is nominating Oklahoma senator and part-time climate skeptic Markwayne Mullin to run DHS, which oversees FEMA. Mullin reassured senators he won’t literally abolish FEMA like Kristi Noem wanted, he’ll just "restructure" it and keep talking about how federal workforces are "bloated" while refusing to say whether FEMA is actually overstaffed. This, while a GAO report says FEMA’s "limited workforce capacity" is already undermining national safety and the agency has hemorrhaged 10% of its staff, including irreplaceable senior experts. Perfect time to tighten the belt as the planet catches fire.
On paper, Mullin promises to stop Noem’s deranged policy of personally reviewing every FEMA expenditure over $100,000, and to maybe, someday, find a qualified FEMA administrator — a position Trump has left vacant for his entire second term. In practice, he’s a guy who questioned whether climate change exists, never served on a homeland security committee, and has publicly mused about whether FEMA should have any role in disaster preparedness at all. His big insight at the hearing was to confidently restate FEMA’s mission in a way that made actual FEMA officials wonder if he has ever read… anything.
Then there’s his voting record: Mullin opposed a 2024 bill to provide $20 billion to FEMA’s disaster relief fund and repeatedly voted against aid packages for Hurricane Sandy survivors, while now claiming FEMA "had a lot of problems" after Sandy like he’s the reformer we’ve all been waiting for. Longtime FEMA staff describe his hearing performance as a lot of vibes, zero vision. So Trump is handing control of America’s main disaster response agency to a man who doesn’t believe in the primary driver of modern disasters, doesn’t like funding disaster relief, and thinks states should mostly fend for themselves. Bold choice when the national emergency plan is already "hope the levees hold and pray Mar-a-Lago is uphill."
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
trump taps senate cage fighter to run protest‑shooting agency
Markwayne Mullin, seen here cosplaying as a serious lawmaker instead of a guy who challenges witnesses to cage matches, prepares to take over the agency that just shot protesters and called them terrorists.
The Department of Homeland Security, fresh off killing two US citizens at protests in Minnesota and branding them "domestic terrorists," is getting a new boss: Senator Markwayne Mullin, a former MMA fighter whose most famous Hill moment is challenging the Teamsters president to a brawl. So yes, the agency currently under fire for shooting protesters is being handed to a guy whose core competency is literally punching people for money. Truly a natural progression for Trump’s vision of “law and order.”
Kristi Noem, who oversaw the charmingly named Operation Metro Surge before it spiraled into lethal federal violence, was "sacked" and then immediately rewarded with a made‑up job as "Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas"—which sounds less like a diplomatic role and more like a Marvel knockoff you’d find in the bargain bin at Dollar Tree. In her place, Trump is nominating a first‑term senator whose main qualification is unwavering loyalty and a deep enthusiasm for locking up undocumented immigrants.
While DHS struggles with a funding impasse that’s leaving TSA understaffed and airports backed up for miles, the White House is laser‑focused on what really matters: installing a hyper‑partisan loyalist to run a sprawling internal security apparatus that includes CBP, ICE, TSA, the Secret Service, and FEMA. Protesters are being killed, dissenters are branded terrorists, and the guy who tried to start a fistfight in a Senate hearing is about to be in charge of the people with guns and badges. America’s longest‑running reality show, “Killing Democracy,” has clearly been renewed for another season.
#killing-democracy#fascism
illinois democrat runs on 'absolutely not, mr. trump'
Juliana Stratton, apparently the rare politician whose hiring policy for Trump appointees is a simple, elegant "absolutely not."
In Illinois, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton just won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate by making what now counts as a bold, radical promise in American politics: she will not help Donald Trump staff his authoritarian fan club. Among a crowded field of Democrats, Stratton basically said, "If it's a Trump appointee, the answer is no," which, in this timeline, passes for a comprehensive pro-democracy platform.
While Republicans are out here treating the Senate like LinkedIn Premium for extremists, grifters, and aspiring theocrats, Stratton is openly campaigning on the idea that maybe we don’t need to rubber-stamp every judge, saboteur, and lobbyist Trump digs out of a Heritage Foundation spreadsheet. Strongly opposing the Trump administration is now the minimum job requirement for anyone pretending to care about the Constitution, so congratulations to Illinois voters for at least reading the fine print before handing over the nuclear codes’ HR department.
#killing-democracy#losses
kari lake tries state tv cosplay, judge says 'absolutely not'
Kari Lake proudly displaying a photo of the newsroom she tried to turn into Trump TV before a federal judge reminded her that ‘media freedom’ isn’t just a chyron graphic.
Turns out you actually can’t just waltz into the U.S. Agency for Global Media, crown yourself Dear Leader, and put 1,042 Voice of America employees on ice because you’d prefer a more Trump-flavored propaganda channel. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered all those staffers back to work, calling Kari Lake’s attempt to gut VOA “arbitrary and capricious” — which is lawyer-speak for “you don’t get to smash a 1940s anti-Nazi institution just because you’re mad about fact-checking.”
Lamberth had already ruled last month that Lake unlawfully grabbed almost all the powers of the agency’s CEO and played musical titles with herself — senior adviser, “acting CEO” (a job she’s not legally eligible for), then deputy CEO — like a kid trying on Halloween costumes, except the costume was “unaccountable state media boss.” Now he’s added that she also blew off Congress’ intent for the agency’s funding and never bothered to consider what shutting down one of the world’s largest independent news broadcasters might do. Minor detail.
Under Lake’s guidance, the agency tried to ship VOA Director Michael Abramowitz off to a tiny shortwave facility in North Carolina and then fire him when he didn’t salute the exile order. Meanwhile, a network that used to reach 361 million people a week in 49 languages was hacked down to just six language services — an impressive achievement if your goal is to help authoritarian regimes by taking one of their few remaining irritants off the air. Lake, naturally, calls the rulings “judicial activism,” because nothing screams limited government like unilaterally dismantling a congressionally funded news outlet founded to counter Nazi propaganda.
Voice of America once modeled what journalism in a pluralistic democracy looks like: reporting both Allied victories and defeats to build credibility. The Trump-Lake version of that model appears to be: fire everyone, hollow out the newsroom, cancel Reuters and AP, and see how close you can get to a taxpayer-funded campaign channel before a federal judge yanks the plug. For now, the courts have reminded the White House that “state media” is a fantasy, not a job description.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
‘apparently i’m an idiot’ is the new trump 2024 bumper sticker
A Pennsylvania Trump voter stares into the camera, realizing too late that bombing Iran and cheap gas don’t usually come in the same package.
NBC finds a three-time Trump voter in Pennsylvania who has finally connected the galaxy-brain dots between "tough on Iran" chest-thumping and paying more to fill up his F-150. After backing Trump through three election cycles, the man looks at the Iran war, looks at gas prices, and concludes: “Apparently I’m an idiot.” The good news is he’s right. The bad news is the rest of us are stuck living in the foreign policy demolition derby he helped buy.
This is the MAGA hangover tour: voters who cheered on "maximum pressure" and "America First" are now discovering that when a president treats war like a Fox News segment break, it has consequences beyond the rally merch table. While Trump is reportedly being handed off-ramps from the Iran war like it’s a Costco sample aisle, people back home are just now realizing that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t put a chronically unserious reality TV landlord in charge of nuclear-adjacent geopolitics.
So now we get the confessionals. "Apparently I’m an idiot" is less a personal reflection and more a national epitaph for the era where voters believed a guy who went bankrupt selling steaks would magically lower gas prices while lobbing missiles in the Middle East. The Iran war is grinding on, the costs are piling up, and the only real lesson learned is that there’s no refund policy on electing a chaos goblin as commander in chief.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid#imperialism
trump’s save america act tries to save america from voters
Senate Republicans bravely defending democracy from the terrifying threat of… people voting without their birth certificates on them.
Senate Republicans have kicked off debate on Trump’s beloved SAVE America Act, a bill that promises to "secure" elections by making it a lot harder for the wrong people — i.e., non-Republicans — to vote. The plan: force every American to cough up a passport or birth certificate just to register, demand photo ID even to vote by mail, and hand the Department of Homeland Security a handy new tool to flag "suspected non-citizens" for states to purge from the rolls. Nothing says small government like turning DHS into a national voter-screening squad.
The bill needs 60 votes, doesn’t have them, and everyone knows it. John Thune is promising an "extended debate" on Trump’s "No. 1 priority" that has approximately the same chance of passing as Trump has of reading it. Even the fantasy add-ons Trump wants — gutting mail voting and tossing in culture-war bonuses like bans on transgender athletes and gender-affirming care for minors — are doomed, because those amendments also need 60 votes. It’s less a legislative strategy and more a Fox News programming block accidentally printed as a bill.
Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, are calling it "a naked attempt to rig our elections" and say they’ll block it, while Republicans desperately wave around the one popular piece — photo ID — like it magically justifies the rest of the suppression machinery. Mike Lee, never one to miss an authoritarian cosplay opportunity, is already threatening primary challengers for any Republican who won’t burn down the Senate rules with a talking filibuster to push this thing. Thune, in a rare moment of lucidity, notes that maybe nuking your own incumbents to pass a dead-on-arrival bill could, tiny detail, cost them their majority.
So the Senate is now spending days pretending this has a future, so Trump can brag that his top priority is "on the floor" while everyone involved quietly admits it’s going nowhere. It’s not governance; it’s a live-action voter suppression infomercial, subsidized by your tax dollars, with DHS auditioning for the role of National Voter Purge Hotline.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump tells unpaid tsa to keep working, promises thoughts and prayers on back pay
Passengers snake through a two-hour TSA line while Congress experiments with a new governance model called "what if we just don’t pay anyone?"
Congress is now treating airport security like a subscription service they forgot to renew. DHS is in its second month of a shutdown because Democrats are refusing to fund the department without reforms after federal immigration agents shot and killed two US citizens in Minneapolis. Republicans, naturally, have responded to this tiny request to stop killing Americans in the street by blocking any attempt to fund the non-immigration parts of DHS, including TSA. So TSA officers are "essential" enough to grope your shampoo but not essential enough to get a paycheck.
Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, is now hosting two-hour security lines, Houston is clocking in at 90–100 minutes, and more than 300 TSA agents have quit because it turns out you can’t pay rent with patriotic vibes. The average TSA salary is about $35,000, fuel costs are spiking thanks to the US–Israel war in Iran, and officers are being told to keep showing up indefinitely for the low, low wage of zero dollars. As AFGE president Everett Kelley politely explains, workers are being treated as expendable meat shields so Congress can cosplay as tough on immigration.
Democrats tried the radical move of funding TSA and other non-immigration DHS agencies separately; Republicans said no, because if you can’t use people’s safety as leverage to preserve a brutal enforcement machine that just killed two citizens, what even is the point of power? Airline CEOs are now begging Congress to stop turning air travel into a live-action shutdown drill. And Donald Trump, broadcasting from Truth Social, has chimed in to urge TSA agents to "go to work" and promises he will never forget them. Which is convenient, since forgetting to pay them appears to be official policy.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump discovers deepfakes, declares reality fake
Trump, moments before explaining that every video of him ever made was actually rendered on a Hillary-owned supercomputer in Ukraine.
Donald Trump has accused the BBC of using "AI-generated" clips of him, because when you’ve spent years on camera confessing things, threatening people, and blurting out crimes like a malfunctioning Roomba, eventually you need a new excuse. The new plan: whenever an unflattering clip appears, just scream "deepfake" and hope your followers treat it like the 11th Commandment.
This isn’t about tech literacy; it’s about building a permission structure for permanent denial. If every real video can be waved away as "AI," then no incriminating tape, no damning admission, no on-camera authoritarian rant can ever be used to hold him accountable. It’s the perfect arrangement for a guy whose greatest enemy is playback. Who needs state media when you can just declare all non-state media digitally forged?
So while normal people are worrying about AI cheating on tests and stealing artwork, Trump is pioneering the strongman use case: turn a real, serious technological threat into a universal alibi. Conveniently, the only footage that will remain unquestionably authentic is whatever comes from his own propaganda outlets—just a total coincidence, of course.
#killing-democracy#fascism#full-stupid
trump’s doj discovers grand juries have a spine, judge installs warning light
Jeanine Pirro at DOJ, moments before explaining that she’s “willing to take a no true bill” as long as she can keep shoveling Trump’s enemies into the grand jury furnace.
The Trump administration’s crusade to criminalize disobedience to illegal orders hit a small snag: a federal grand jury in D.C. refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers for the grave offense of posting a video reminding the military they don’t have to follow unlawful commands. Chief Judge James Boasberg responded by creating a new policy requiring that the court be notified whenever a grand jury refuses to play along with the administration’s prosecution fantasies, so there’s an official record every time Jeanine Pirro’s office tries to turn the Justice Department into Trump’s personal firing squad and gets laughed out of the room.
Boasberg’s order forces grand jury forepersons to report failed indictments under seal, ensuring the judiciary can track how often prosecutors are swinging wildly at political enemies and missing. This follows Pirro’s team failing to convince a single grand juror that telling soldiers not to follow illegal orders is “seditious behavior” worthy of death, despite Trump loudly demanding those lawmakers be arrested and tried for a capital crime because they hurt his feelings on social media.
Not satisfied with just criminalizing basic constitutional literacy, Pirro also went after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with subpoenas so nakedly political that Boasberg torched them as an effort to “harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the president or to resign.” Pirro called him an “activist judge,” because in Trumpworld, a judge who stops you from abusing state power for Dear Leader is obviously the radical one. Meanwhile, her office quietly dropped a case against a man who burned an American flag after Boasberg raised the awkward question of whether the prosecution was about alleged park violations or that pesky First Amendment. The grand jury system was designed as a shield against exactly this kind of government overreach, and Trump and Pirro are furious to discover that sometimes the shield still works.
#killing-democracy#fascism
john roberts begs the arsonist to stop yelling at the fire department
Trump, moments after discovering that even a handpicked 6–3 Supreme Court occasionally reads the Constitution.
Chief Justice John Roberts went to Rice University and politely asked America’s most famous aspiring strongman to please, if it’s not too much trouble, stop personally targeting judges. He didn’t say Trump’s name, of course — just gently observed that "personally directed hostility" toward judges is "dangerous" and "has got to stop," as though the problem here is a minor vibes issue and not the sitting president screaming at the judiciary like it’s The Apprentice finale.
Trump, for his part, spent the weekend on Truth Social calling the Supreme Court a "weaponized and unjust Political Organization" that "RANSACKED" the country by striking down his sweeping tariffs. This, from the guy who got a 6-3 conservative court, then lost a 6-3 ruling where two of his own appointees — Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — joined Roberts in telling him that, shockingly, the president does not get to run trade policy like a yard sale.
Not content with trashing the Supreme Court, Trump also went after Judge James Boasberg, calling him "Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control" for rulings the administration doesn’t like, including blocking a DOJ probe into Jerome Powell. Some Republicans are already floating impeachment, because why merely disagree with a judge’s ruling when you can try to remove him for insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader?
Roberts has issued careful statements defending Boasberg and warning everyone to "dial down the temperature," while lower court judges quietly note that maybe, just maybe, a coordinated campaign to delegitimize the judiciary and threaten judges requires more than a strongly worded press release and a sigh. The American experiment is being stress-tested by a president calling judges enemies of the country, and the chief justice’s big counter-move is: asking nicely.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
