doj argues illegal appointment was just a vibes-based typo
Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, seen here arguing that if you sign the wrong law on the form, it still counts as long as the target is on Trump’s enemies list.
Pam Bondi’s Justice Department is once again in court arguing that, actually, it’s totally fine that she installed former Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan as an interim U.S. attorney past the 120-day legal limit, blew past the Senate, and used her to indict James Comey and Letitia James. Judge Cameron Currie had the audacity to read the statute, notice that Bondi’s authority expired, and rule that, no, you don’t get to keep swapping in loyalists like toner cartridges when the law says the judges pick the replacement.
Rather than accept that basic separation-of-powers thing we allegedly still have, DOJ lawyer Henry Whitaker fired off 67 pages insisting the judge is "ousting" Bondi’s appointment power and "aggrandizing" the court. Bondi’s reliance on the wrong statute? Just a "paperwork mistake," he says. You know, the kind of clerical oopsie where your illegally installed Trumpworld attorney is the only one to present the case and sign the indictments against the president’s enemies. No big deal, just a minor typo with a side of unconstitutional prosecution.
Whitaker’s pitch boils down to: who cares who was lawfully appointed, the grand jury did it, and anyway Bondi has since "ratified" everything Halligan did, like a mob boss retroactively blessing a botched hit. Meanwhile, this is all happening while Trump publicly pressures Bondi to go after his political opponents and DOJ flails through multiple failed attempts to re-indict Letitia James. The message from this Justice Department is clear: laws are suggestions, confirmation limits are decorative, and as long as you’re targeting the right enemies, the Constitution can be fixed later with a fresh memo and a shrug.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
america so peaceful monks have to walk 2,300 miles asking for it
Monks attempt the radical, dangerous act of promoting kindness in Trump’s America while everyone else copes by buying $20 T‑shirts and doomscrolling.
Under the benevolent glow of Trump Term Two, things are going so well that Americans are now emotionally supported by a traveling caravan of Buddhist monks slowly marching across nine states because the government sure isn’t doing peace, stability, or basic mental health.
These monks are walking 20 miles a day, in orange robes, in snow, eating one meal, practicing loving‑kindness, and trying not to get literally run over — which already happened, costing one monk his leg — while the rest of us stare at our phones and buy monk merch like it’s a Taylor Swift tour instead of a rolling spiritual triage unit for a democracy in a nervous breakdown.
Their whole deal is non‑violent resistance by radiating calm, asking for unity, compassion, healing, and even a federal holiday for Buddha’s birthday, because nothing says ‘functioning republic’ like needing a 2,300‑mile emergency mindfulness intervention just to make it through your president’s second term.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
gavin newsom, strong and wrong and very, very trump-curious
Gavin Newsom, seen here practicing his ‘strong and wrong’ face, moments before shelving another bold moral stance for later review by the polls.
Gavin Newsom is apparently workshopping his 2028 presidential slogan as “Strong and Wrong,” which is refreshingly honest for a guy whose governing record is mostly bold promises followed by quiet retreats. He ran as Mr. Single-Payer, mocked anyone who called it a pipe dream, then promptly chucked his signature healthcare pledge in the trash once in office. The 3.5 million homes he vowed to build? Retroactively downgraded to a “stretch goal” after California managed to permit about 13% of them. The promised "homeless czar" to tackle the crisis? That also evaporated, until Newsom just declared himself the czar and then blamed local officials when the numbers got worse.
His greatest hits in moral courage are equally inspiring. As a death penalty opponent, he announced a moratorium but carefully avoided commuting sentences, leaving the door wide open for the next governor to flip the switch back on. During COVID, he initially took decisive action—right up until Elon Musk illegally reopened Tesla’s factory and the right started howling. Then Newsom shoved responsibility down to counties, rushed to reopen, and watched infections spike. On racial justice, he loudly embraced reparations after George Floyd, set up a task force, basked in the national headlines, and then vetoed many of the actual reparations bills once they became politically inconvenient for a guy eyeing the White House.
And through it all, this supposed Trump-slayer has a long history of, well, polishing the ring. In early 2020, while Trump was calling the pandemic a hoax, Newsom praised his COVID response, gushing that Trump had done "everything" he’d hoped for—even as California still lacked critical federal equipment he’d been requesting for weeks. Trump openly said governors needed to be "appreciative" if they wanted help, and Newsom responded by donning the metaphorical knee pads, earning himself a presidential pat on the head. Now he’s on TV calling other world leaders “pathetic” for not standing up to Trump, which is an interesting line from a man whose entire brand appears to be loudly promising the moral high ground and then abandoning it the moment it becomes even slightly inconvenient.
#killing-democracy#healthcare
president snowflake vs the ski team
Amber Glenn, moments after winning gold and moments before discovering that in Trump’s America, landing a quad is easier than surviving the comment section.
Donald Trump has discovered a bold new national security threat: a freestyle skier with feelings. After Hunter Hess said he had “mixed emotions” about competing under an administration doing tariffs cosplay with allies, bombing Venezuela, and fantasizing about buying Greenland like it’s a Zillow listing, Trump hopped on Truth Social to declare Hess a “real loser” who shouldn’t be on the team if he won’t pledge full emotional fealty to Dear Leader. Nuance, of course, did not make the trip from Milan to Mar-a-Lago.
Meanwhile, US athletes are trying to do flips on ice and snow while being told that wearing the flag now means endorsing every last immigration raid and foreign adventure the White House dreams up at 3am. Freeskiers like Hess and Chris Lillis are carefully saying the quiet part out loud: they’ll represent their country, not its cruelty. Figure skater Amber Glenn, after speaking about the very real danger facing LGBTQ+ Americans, reports a “scary amount” of online hate – because nothing says “land of the free” like unleashing a digital mob on a gold medalist for not being straight enough for MAGA.
Off to the side, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are using the Olympics as a campaign soft-launch, getting loudly booed in the stadium and then mysteriously un-booed in the US broadcast, as if NBC hired a sound editor from Russian state TV. The message from the Trump-Vance-Rubio axis is clear: athletes are welcome to represent America, so long as they represent their America – the one where patriotism is compulsory, dissent is unpatriotic, and even the Olympic Games have to be run through the authoritarian vibes filter before Americans are allowed to watch.
#killing-democracy#fascism
house gop suspends calendar, gravity to protect trump tariffs
,%20Rep.%20Elise%20Stefanik%20(R-N.Y.),%20Majority%20Leader%20Steve%20Scalise%20(R-La.)%20and%20Speaker%20Mike%20Johnson%20(R-La.)%20arrive%20for%20a%20press%20conference%20on%20Thursday,%20May%2016,%202024%20to%20discuss%20the%20Israel%20Security%20Assistance%20Support%20Act%20prior%20to%20the%20vote.)
House GOP leaders bravely defending America from the grave threat of Congress doing its job.
House GOP leaders have discovered a bold new tool of governance: if the law says Congress can overturn Trump's fake "national emergency" tariffs after a certain number of calendar days, just turn the calendar off. The Rules Committee, which answers to the Speaker, quietly approved language that says those days simply don't count until July 31, 2026 — because nothing screams "constitutional conservatism" like rewriting time to protect Trump's trade war.
This little time-heist is aimed at blocking Democrats from forcing a vote to end Trump's "emergency" tariffs on Canada, a country best known for maple syrup, healthcare, and somehow being a national security threat to the United States. GOP leaders had previously let this anti-vote ban expire after a mini-rebellion from their own members who still pretend to care about free markets. Now they're trying to slam the door again, hoping the Supreme Court will eventually bail them out by ruling on whether Trump can keep abusing emergency powers to LARP as a tariff god.
So instead of Congress debating whether Trump's global tariff cosplay is legal or sane, House Republicans are using arcane rule changes to make sure no one can even force the conversation. The National Emergencies Act says Congress gets expedited procedures to check executive abuse; the GOP answer is to quietly unplug the clock and dare anyone to notice. Small government, limited executive power, and respect for process — but only until Trump wants another emergency.
#killing-democracy#trade-war#lawlessness
trump admin tries campus speech police, loses to basic due process
DHS agents bravely defending America from the existential menace of a grad student with a campus op-ed.
The Trump administration decided that the real threat to national security wasn’t, say, violent extremists or foreign hackers, but a Tufts PhD student who wrote a campus op-ed criticizing her university’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza. So DHS yanked Rümeysa Öztürk’s student visa, grabbed her off a Massachusetts street, and tried to deport her for the crime of having an opinion. Very bold experiment in turning the student newspaper into a deportation trigger.
Unfortunately for the White House thought-police project, an immigration judge in Boston looked at this First-Amendment-speedrun-to-fascism and concluded DHS had failed to prove she was even removable, terminating the case. This follows a federal judge already finding that her 45-day detention in Louisiana likely amounted to unlawful retaliation for her speech. So yes, the government held a child development researcher in a Southern detention facility because she wrote words on a college campus, and the courts had to explain that "criticizing a war" is not a deportable offense. The administration can still appeal, because nothing says "respect for free speech" like the Department of Justice doubling down on punishing a student editorial.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump’s ‘weaponization’ unit can’t seem to weaponize correctly
The Justice Department, now available in Trump-brand: same building, fewer laws.
The Trump Justice Department’s "Weaponization Working Group"—yes, they really called it that—is under intense pressure to finally produce something that looks like evidence that Trump was the real victim all along. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s special task force was supposed to uncover "abuses" by the people who investigated Trump for classified documents and trying to overturn an election. Instead, months later, they’ve mostly produced missed deadlines, internal screaming, and a leadership change, after Ed Martin was quietly shoved out with all the fanfare of a failed reality show contestant.
Trump, naturally, is furious that his bespoke revenge committee hasn’t managed to criminalize his enemies on command. According to aides, he’s been calling Bondi weak, while publicly issuing a North Korea–style statement of undying trust, backed up by a chorus of regime flattery from JD Vance, Susie Wiles, Marco Rubio, and Karoline Leavitt. Meanwhile, judges keep tossing the group’s marquee efforts—like cases against Letitia James and James Comey—because the administration couldn’t even be bothered to appoint a U.S. attorney legally. They’re trying to run a purge state with the competence of a failed HOA board.
Trump is also posting open demands that Bondi go after a list of political foes, while going on TV to remind everyone he’s the "chief law enforcement officer" who could get directly involved in prosecutions, but heroically isn’t. Career DOJ staff, watching this circus, note that the only real "weaponization" happening is the administration turning the department into a press-release factory for half-baked, election-related vendettas. The working group now meets daily, scrambling to assemble a report that can retroactively justify this mess. Call it what it is: a loyalty project dressed up as law enforcement, frantically trying to manufacture proof that the boss’s grievances are federal crimes.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump doj discovers new legal doctrine: contempt of congress is fine actually
Steve Bannon, briefly interrupted from podcasting about fascism to be informed that the law no longer applies to him.
Steve Bannon, the human cigar ash that gained sentience, just got a love letter from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. Despite Bannon’s 2022 conviction on two counts of contempt of Congress for blowing off the January 6 committee, the Trump-run DOJ has now decided that tossing his criminal case is somehow "in the interests of justice". Apparently "justice" now means: if you help incite an insurrection and stonewall investigators, you get retroactive VIP treatment.
The motion to dismiss was signed by none other than US attorney Jeanine Pirro, because this timeline is written by drunk fan fiction authors. Pirro is asking a Trump-appointed judge, Carl Nichols, to dismiss the case with prejudice, which would permanently shield Bannon from being re-prosecuted for telling Congress to go pound sand after going on air and promising that "all hell is going to break loose" on January 6. In a functioning democracy, that gets you more scrutiny; in Trump’s America, it gets you a get-out-of-contempt-free card.
This is all part of the administration’s ongoing project to launder January 6 into a kind of patriotic cosplay. Trump has already pardoned over 1,000 rioters, and now his DOJ is busy erasing what little accountability was left for the people who helped plan, cheerlead, and then obstruct the investigation. The message is crystal clear: if you’re loyal to Trump, the law is optional; if you’re loyal to the Constitution, you’re the sucker.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
57 minutes of presidential word salad
President Trump explains complex global issues using the same tone he reserves for rating golf courses and cable news hosts.
NBC hands Donald Trump nearly an hour of primetime oxygen so he can ramble through Minneapolis, Joe Rogan, the Fed, AI, Iran, and 2028 like a man trying to speedrun the demise of institutional credibility. Tom Llamas gamely plays tour guide while the president treats monetary policy as a vibe, foreign policy as a threat reel, and the future of democracy as a personal brand extension.
The network packages it as a "wide-ranging" interview, which is a polite way of saying "no coherent governing theory detected." Between teasing lower interest rates like a Black Friday sale, dangling 2028 as if term limits are just a suggestion, and talking tough on Iran for the camera, the whole thing functions as a campaign rally disguised as journalism. The White House gets a free infomercial; the public gets more gaslighting about how all of this is totally normal.
Hovering around the video player are Trump-world greatest hits: a racist video of the Obamas on his Truth Social page, a discount prescription drug website that sounds like it was brainstormed between indictments, and yet another round of "be very worried" threats to a foreign leader. America’s civic life is now a content carousel where the president toggles between race-baiting, grifting, and saber-rattling, and the press dutifully slaps on a chyron and calls it an exclusive.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump admin discovers new medical specialty: prosecutorial pediatrics
Parishioners at the Church of Please Stop Hurting Kids hold signs reminding the government that trans humanity is not up for debate; unfortunately, the Trump administration RSVP’d "will persecute" instead of "will attend."
The Trump administration is thrilled that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has issued a carefully hedged, non-binding statement suggesting gender-related surgery wait until 19 — so naturally Jim O'Neill and HHS are treating it like the Ten Commandments carved directly into a breast implant. A professional group says, "given the current state of the evidence and laws, maybe be cautious," and the White House hears, "praise be, our crusade is scientifically ordained."
The context, of course, is a country where 27 states have already banned gender-affirming care for minors and President Trump kicked off Term Two by signing an executive order declaring the federal government will not "fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support" any transition care for kids. Since then, HHS has pumped out a hit piece masquerading as a "report" on the research, CMS has warned state Medicaid directors to watch their backs, and the Department of Justice has decided its top priority is subpoenaing children’s hospitals like they’re running a cartel instead of a clinic.
Just to make sure the message lands, federal health officials have proposed a rule to yank all Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals that dare provide gender-affirming care to minors — a financial kill shot that would shut down entire institutions over what care they offer a tiny fraction of patients. Even before it’s finalized, the combo of that threat and a flood of HHS Inspector General investigations has been enough to start shuttering gender clinics nationwide. The administration calls this "protecting children." Everyone on the receiving end of the state’s coercive power recognizes it as what it is: using the federal purse and prosecutorial muscle to enforce ideology over medicine.
#killing-democracy#fascism#anti-science
trump turns the kennedy center into mar-a-logo for culture
Trump raises his fist at the Kennedy Center premiere of a Melania documentary, celebrating the successful conversion of a national arts institution into a personal fan club with better lighting.
Once upon a time, the Kennedy Center was a "living memorial" to John F. Kennedy and a home for Bernstein, Sondheim, August Wilson, ballet, jazz, and, worst of all in Trumpworld, drag queens and anti-racism programs. Fast forward to 2025 and Trump wakes up one morning, rage-posts on Truth Social that he's firing "multiple individuals" from the board, declares himself the "amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!", and announces that the nation's flagship arts center will now serve the sacred cause of ending youth drag exposure and hurt feelings on the right.
Staff found out about their new overlord from his social network tantrum, because of course they did. The long-time president, Deborah Rutter, is dumped and replaced with Ric Grenell, a professional Trump flack whose arts administration experience begins and ends with knowing how to clap at a camera. The social impact initiative created to do anti-racism and community outreach? Dissolved. Programs branded "too woke" are quietly buried, and the building sinks into a fog of depression while Trump insists he's rescuing the Kennedy Center from financial ruin that its own management says doesn’t exist.
Now artists like the Brentano String Quartet are refusing to play there at all, because walking on stage at the "Golden Age of Arts and Culture" feels less like honoring Kennedy’s legacy and more like performing at a campaign rally with better acoustics. The Kennedy Center, once a bipartisan cultural jewel on the Potomac, has been seized, purged, and repurposed as a taxpayer-subsidized shrine to grievance politics and presidential ego. The best is yet to come, he promises, as the national arts center gets slowly converted into a branded content studio for whatever culture-war stunt Trump dreams up next.
#killing-democracy#fascism
maga turns a 1967 war crime mystery into a 2026 purity test
U.S.S. Liberty, now serving as a floating Rorschach test for whichever right-wing grifter needs content this week.
The American right has discovered the U.S.S. Liberty, a 1967 Israeli attack that killed 34 U.S. service members, and decided it’s not a tragedy or a historical dispute but a personality test for authoritarian fanboys. On one side, you’ve got Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, and Rich Lowry loudly insisting it was all a tragic mix-up, generously aligning their historical analysis with the official positions of both governments and their own donor base.
On the other side, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Paul Gosar have decided the Liberty is proof that Israel is an enemy of America, helpfully packaging legitimate questions about a murky incident with openly antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy sludge. The result: a six-decade-old naval disaster has been repurposed as a secret handshake inside Trump’s movement, where your take on a 1967 attack is really just a proxy for whether you’re a Christian Zionist hawk, a nationalist isolationist, or just deeply committed to hating Jews in new and exciting ways. Policy, strategy, actual alliances? Those are for democracies that still pretend to govern.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
trump wants to nationalize elections, what could possibly go wrong
Trump dreams of running every election in America, surrounded by a lineup of secretary of state candidates auditioning to be assistant regional manager of voter suppression.
Trump is back in office, still lying about 2020, and now wants to "nationalize" elections — because if there’s one man you want in charge of every ballot in America, it’s the guy who tried to strong-arm Georgia into "finding" votes like they were lost car keys. While the Constitution says states run elections, the president is out here fantasizing about a federal takeover, and his administration is helpfully underscoring the point with FBI raids on local election hubs and federal lawsuits over voter rolls.
In Arizona, the GOP’s leading candidate for secretary of state is Alexander Kolodin — a proud member of Trump’s fake elector scheme and a walking conflict-of-interest case study who tried to sue Arizona out of recognizing Biden’s win. Trump hasn’t formally endorsed him, but Kolodin’s website features a glowing presidential review calling him “one hell of an attorney,” which is certainly one way to describe someone who worked to overturn an election. Democrats, meanwhile, are reduced to running on the radical notion that elections should be real and count the actual votes.
Georgia, the site of Trump’s famous "find 11,780 votes" audition tape, is now hosting a secretary of state race shaped by an FBI search of a Fulton County election hub. Brad Raffensperger — who once mildly resisted a coup and is now treated as a hero for doing the bare minimum of not committing felonies — is running for governor, and his would-be successors are a mix of "please don’t federalize this" Republicans like Gabriel Sterling and Trump-pilled loyalists like Vernon Jones, who calls himself “the Black Donald Trump” and then acts accordingly by refusing to say whether he supports Trump’s nationalization fantasy while hinting that something must be wrong if the FBI has questions.
Democrats in multiple battleground states are campaigning on the quaint idea that elections should be free, fair, and not centrally managed by the guy who keeps insisting they’re rigged when he loses. Republicans, for their part, are largely running on "concerns" about 2020 and a shared commitment to backing Trump’s lies while pretending this is all about "election integrity." The bad news: the election denial movement now has the White House, a DOJ willing to poke at local election offices, and a bench of secretary of state candidates eager to hold the keys to the ballot box. The good news: at least they’re saying the quiet part out loud now.
#killing-democracy#fascism
state terror, now with a constitution and a corporate sponsor
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, confidently demonstrating how to do state terror but with a press release and a legal memo.
Janine di Giovanni, who used to document actual dictators – Assad, Saddam, Sisi, Putin – is now looking at the US and Israel and going: yep, this is starting to rhyme. After decades of watching masked men drag people from their homes and regimes build hotels over mass graves, she’s seeing the upgraded Western version: the same terror logic, just run through a legal department and a PR firm.
Instead of midnight knocks from secret police, we get ICE raids wrapped in the language of "order" and "procedure". Instead of a state TV stooge, we get a CBS boss whose politics align beautifully with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead of openly murdering journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, we discipline reporters with "editorial policy" – and then, when that’s not enough, we start arresting them and flirting with calling them enemies of the state. Democracy, but make it plausible deniability.
Campus life, once about reading books and discovering bad beer, is now a soft launch for surveillance states. Universities photograph and catalogue pro-Palestinian students like they’re shoplifters, whisper that Wall Street and top law firms will blacklist them, and help ICE try to deport the especially inconvenient ones. Deans are threatened with funding cuts unless they install ideologically convenient “antisemitism” trainings that students say are just pro-Israel propaganda with a quiz at the end.
The genius of the modern "democratic" terror state is that everything is technically legal. Courts still exist, elections still happen, the press is "free" – while CEOs, academics, and journalists quietly pre-censor themselves, obeying in advance like Timothy Snyder’s warning label come to life. The masks may be off, but the methods are familiar: make people scared enough, compliant enough, and eventually you don’t need to announce the repression. It just seeps into the machinery and starts calling itself normal.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s ice kills, cops arrest the mourners
Minneapolis police bravely confront the terrifying threat of candles, cardboard signs, and a guy holding a pizza box.
In Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s immigration crusade has reached the "arrest people mourning the dead" phase of law and order. Protesters marking one month since ICE officer(s) shot and killed 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good outside her home gathered near the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building. Police responded to this dangerous mix of candles, grief, and constitutional rights by declaring the assembly unlawful and hauling people off the sidewalk, including a guy whose radical crime was delivering pizza.
Good was killed after ICE boxed in her SUV and an officer standing in front of her car opened fire at close range as it moved forward. The Trump administration immediately branded her a "domestic terrorist" who tried to run over an officer, a story state and local officials politely filed under "absolutely not." Weeks later, Alex Pretti was shot dead by immigration officers during a street scuffle after they noticed a gun he was legally licensed to carry. Two dead, both caught on bystander video, both now symbols of Trump’s "public safety" campaign that keeps killing the public.
Border czar Tom Homan, apparently confusing Minnesota for a hostile foreign province, announced he’d graciously pull 700 immigration officers out of the state—only a quarter of the federal occupation force—after local officials agreed to help turn over arrested immigrants. No timeline on when the crackdown ends, because why let a crisis go to waste when you can squeeze more compliance out of terrified communities. Meanwhile, hundreds gathered in a park for a ceremony led by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, honoring Good and Pretti while Becca Good reminded the country that there are many more victims whose names we don’t know yet, quietly ground up in Trump’s deportation machine.
So to recap: ICE kills two people, the White House smears one as a terrorist, local cops arrest the people protesting the killings, and the feds negotiate how much cooperation they can extract in exchange for dialing back the siege. Truly a shining example of how to run an immigration system if your policy goals are fear, silence, and a body count.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy#lawlessness
dni tulsi gabbard personally walks intel about trump call into the political spin cycle
Tulsi Gabbard, hard at work transforming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence into the Office of Protecting the President From Inconvenient Phone Calls.
The NSA reportedly picks up an "unusual" phone call between a foreign intelligence figure and someone close to Donald Trump, flags it up the chain, and then watches in horror as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard treats it like a hot gossip item for the West Wing. Instead of letting the NSA distribute the intel through normal channels, Gabbard allegedly prints it out and hand-delivers it to Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, then orders the agency not to publish the report and to send everything straight to her office. National security process, meet Office Politics: Executive Edition.
A whistleblower, apparently under the impression that laws still apply, files an "urgent concern" complaint in April and a formal one in May. By June, the acting IG Tamara A Johnson shrugs and declares she "could not determine" if the allegations are credible, but magnanimously notes the whistleblower can go to Congress… after getting guidance from the very DNI they’re accusing. Conveniently, Gabbard then parks one of her top advisers, Dennis Kirk, inside the supposedly independent watchdog’s office. Totally normal oversight structure, nothing capture-y about it at all.
For eight months, the complaint and the underlying intel are locked down, redacted to oblivion, and smothered under claims of executive privilege, because nothing says "this is fine" like invoking presidential secrecy over a mystery call involving foreign intel and a Trump-world insider. The "gang of eight" finally gets a heavily blacked-out version in February, well past the 21-day statutory deadline that Senator Mark Warner helpfully reminds everyone still exists on paper. Republicans like Tom Cotton rush to declare that Gabbard handled everything "appropriately", while Democrats point out that burying a whistleblower complaint for most of a year is not actually in the job description.
Now Congress is trying to pry the original NSA intel directly from the agency, the whistleblower’s lawyer Andrew Bakaj is publicly begging ODNI to follow the law, and the DNI’s office is ghosting his letters like a bad Tinder date. The administration’s message is clear: if intelligence suggests uncomfortable questions about Trump’s orbit and foreign services, the real national security priority is protecting the president’s political flank, not the country. America’s intelligence system has been repurposed into a personal damage-control shop, and they’re not even subtle about it.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
bezos spends $70m on melania fanfic, calls it cinema
Melania takes a call, presumably to confirm the check from Bezos cleared before she continues pretending this is a documentary and not a $70m campaign ad.
Amazon drops $70m on a Melania Trump documentary covering the 20 days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration and, shockingly, it’s not a hard-hitting exploration of fascism so much as a glossy brochure for life in the gilded bunker. The box office haul? $7m – which in Trumpworld apparently counts as a roaring success, making it the top documentary of the decade and also a spectacular way for Jeff Bezos to light piles of money on fire in exchange for the faint hope of regime goodwill.
Republican women, meanwhile, are treating this like Barbie for people who think Stephen Miller is a serious policy mind. In Austin, they show up to the AMC in “what would Melania wear?” power suits and leather pants, turning state propaganda into girls’ night while Cecilia Abbott, wife of Greg Abbott, slips in with a security detail like she’s attending the Met Gala instead of a 2-hour soft-focus ad for authoritarian chic. Former Trump press secretary turned Fox fog machine Kayleigh McEnany brags her mom’s screening was “standing room only”, helpfully confirming she has no idea how movie theaters or basic counting work.
The audience is, predictably, older, white, and very into the idea that watching a carefully curated, context-free portrait of Melania’s outfits and “vulnerability” is the same thing as engaging with history. Influencers from the conservative “womanosphere” push it as must-see content for tradwives, while Katie Miller somehow blames South Africa for pulling the film because they’re “biased against white people” – a bold take from the spouse of the guy who built family separation as a lifestyle brand. It’s all pitched as a story of grace under pressure, with the minor omission that the pressure largely comes from the administration dismantling democracy in the background.
So yes, while the rest of us remember child separation, coups, and open contempt for the rule of law, Amazon is out here funding a Jackie Kennedy cosplay reel for a first lady who spent four years decorating the White House like a Slavic horror maze. State-aligned billionaires pumping out prestige propaganda for an aging base desperate to feel persecuted and glamorous at the same time – what could possibly go wrong?
#killing-democracy#oligarchy#forever-grifting
state department to america: please submit a foia request for reality
The State Department, where even the sign out front may soon require a FOIA request to verify it ever existed.
The State Department has decided that history is need-to-know, and the public does not need to know. All posts on its official X accounts from before Trump’s glorious second coming on Jan. 20, 2025 — including from Obama, Biden, and Trump’s own first term — are being wiped from public view and shoved into an internal archive. If you want to see what your government said in the recent past, you can now enjoy the uniquely American experience of filing a FOIA request and waiting months to maybe learn what was once a public tweet.
This is not an isolated clerical tidy-up; it’s part of the administration’s larger "Delete Anything That Makes Us Look Bad Or Real" program. Environmental and health data? Scrubbed. Mentions of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities? Vanished. National park signs that admit slavery happened? Gone. References to Trump’s impeachments at the National Portrait Gallery? Erased. In their place: a White House "revisionist history" of Jan. 6 and a COVID page titled "Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19", because why have science when you can have fan fiction?
A State Department spokesperson swears this is all about avoiding "confusion" and "speaking with one voice" to advance the President’s "America First" goals. Translation: if it didn’t serve the current cult narrative, it goes behind the curtain. Public-facing records are out; curated propaganda feeds are in. The history is technically "preserved," they insist — just not where the public, journalists, or foreign audiences can see it without legal gymnastics. You know, the kind of transparent, accountable diplomacy you expect from a government that keeps needing to reassure everyone it’s definitely not sliding into authoritarianism.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s export-grade fascism hits the european market
Le Pen, Orbán, and friends waiting for the next tranche of moral support from Washington’s Department of Export-Grade Authoritarianism.
European leaders are apparently worried Trump might invade a NATO ally or hand the continent to Putin, which is adorable, because the actual plan is much cheaper: just help elect a bunch of homegrown mini-Trumps and call it a "second American revolution." The new U.S. National Security Strategy literally name-checks far-right parties like Reform UK, AfD, Le Pen’s RN, Fidesz, and Vox as "patriotic" partners, because nothing says safeguarding freedom like using state power to boost movements with ex–neo-Nazi intellectuals on the payroll.
This "new right" isn’t pretending to be nostalgic anymore; it’s proudly hyper-modern, exploiting every crisis from 2008 to Covid to Ukraine as proof that liberal democracy is a failed product and only ethnonational border fetishism can save us. The formula is simple: turn borders into moral sorting hats, tariffs into culture-war cosplay, foreign policy into "what’s in it for us," and any institutional oversight into a sinister "deep state" conspiracy. Then have Elon Musk and friends launder it all through an algorithmic funhouse where "free speech" means infinite disinfo, and obscure activists become martyrs in a parallel reality most normal people don’t even see.
Mainstream parties, being extremely good at losing, either ignore the threat or try to copy the rhetoric on migration and identity, which naturally just makes the originals look more authentic. Meanwhile, Trump and JD Vance are busy turning the U.S. government into an international far-right venture capital fund, underwriting parties that exist to dismantle the very liberal order NATO was built to protect. So no, Europe doesn’t need to fear an American tank division rolling through Berlin; it needs to worry about Washington sending memes, money, and moral support to the people who want to shut democracy down from the inside.
#killing-democracy#fascism#oligarchy
pentagon declares war on harvard, recruits only from trump university of vibes
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth heroically protects America from the grave national security threat of people who read books at Harvard.
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend host currently LARPing as defense secretary, has announced that the Pentagon will cut off all military training, fellowships and certificate programs with Harvard because it’s too "woke" and allegedly full of "Hate America activism". A proud Harvard graduate himself, Hegseth bravely omitted the part where he cashed in on a Kennedy School master’s degree before deciding that higher education is treason.
This isn’t just a tantrum about campus politics; it’s the Trump administration turning the Defense Department into an ideological enforcement arm. Hegseth says the Pentagon’s focus on "building lethality" means no more "millions of dollars" for "expensive universities" that don’t sufficiently worship the troops or the Dear Leader, and he’s ordering all branches to review every Ivy League and civilian grad program for active-duty service members. Translation: if your university teaches anything beyond flag worship and culture-war talking points, the pipeline of military students and funding is on the chopping block.
The same guy who once theatrically defaced his Harvard diploma on Fox & Friends – then immediately admitted it was just a stunt and that, yes, he’s still keeping the degree – is now using the Pentagon to make that stunt national policy. The message to the officer corps is clear: loyalty to Trumpist ideology outranks professional education. "We train warriors, not wokesters," Hegseth sneers, as the world’s most powerful military is methodically rewired to fear critical thinking more than actual enemies.
#killing-democracy#fascism
