hipaa is for losers, says guy with nuclear codes
Trump explains a congressman’s private medical file on live TV while the Speaker of the House remembers, too late, that indoor voices exist.
Trump held a White House press conference that was allegedly about the Kennedy Center and Iran, but quickly devolved into a live-action HIPAA violation. Sitting next to Speaker Mike Johnson, he prodded him into discussing Rep. Neal Dunn’s serious health issues and then just blurted out that Dunn had a "terminal" diagnosis and "would be dead by June"—prompting Johnson to mutter the quiet part out loud: "That wasn’t public."
Because nothing says "functioning democracy" like the president using a congressman’s near-death experience as content, Trump went on to specify it was a heart problem and brag that he personally got Dunn in with White House doctors for a "long operation" and "more stents". The subtext wasn’t subtle: your heart may be failing, but your real job is propping up a one-seat Republican majority. Human being with a family becomes expendable vote count with stents installed by the executive branch.
Johnson dutifully cleaned up the mess by assuring everyone that Dunn now has "more energy than a man half his age", like a refurbished congressman fresh off the factory line. Meanwhile Dunn, who has decided not to seek re-election, is offstage while the president casually narrates his medical chart to the nation for political effect. Privacy, dignity, boundaries—quaint concepts from before the era when your personal health status is just another prop in Trump’s ongoing reality show about clinging to power.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump closes the kennedy center to renovate his own ego
Contractors delicately chisel 'John F. Kennedy' off the facade and wedge 'Donald Trump' in, proving that in this administration even the performing arts are getting a tacky rebrand.
The Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center has unanimously decided that what America’s premier performing arts venue really needed was a two-year shutdown so it can fully blossom into the Trump Kennedy Center — because of course his name is now on it. President Donald Trump announced that the closure will allow for "high quality, really high quality construction," which is reassuring coming from the guy whose brand is unpaid contractors and collapsing casinos.
Roma Daravi, the center’s VP of PR, dutifully declared that this $250 million project will create a "world-class destination" and a "landmark where every American is welcome" — assuming those Americans are cool with their national arts center becoming a federally subsidized Trump-branded monument with better acoustics. The board also installed Matt Floca as COO and executive director, replacing interim head Richard Grenell, because why have one Trump loyalist when you can rotate the whole casting call?
Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty had to sue just to attend the board meeting of this supposedly national institution. A judge kindly allowed her to sit in the room, but not necessarily vote, turning her into an ex-officio potted plant while the Trump board unanimously rubber-stamped the two-year blackout. So the nation’s flagship performing arts center is now closed for business, open for branding, and run like a family property development deal — artistic excellence, meet authoritarian HOA board.
#corruption#killing-democracy
white house turns cancer diagnosis into deep state fanfic
Susie Wiles at the White House, flanked by officials who see every human event as another exhibit in the Case of Trump v. Reality.
Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff and long-time architect of his political career, has been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and says she’ll keep running the chaos factory while undergoing treatment. On the human level: that’s serious, it’s scary, and like everyone else in that situation, she deserves competent medical care and a full recovery.
Then the Trump White House did what the Trump White House does: turned a private health crisis into branded content for the persecution-industrial complex. Trump hopped onto Truth Social to declare her prognosis “excellent” and assure everyone she’ll be putting in “virtually full time” at the White House, because this administration treats cancer like a minor scheduling inconvenience but climate change like a suggestion.
While most officials managed a basic level of humanity, deputy chief of staff James Blair decided the moment called for some fanfic about the Deep State Cinematic Universe. In a single post, he claimed Wiles had bravely battled through “illegitimate indictments, domestic spying by the former administration, rigged federal prosecutions, illegal law enforcement raids, general lawfare, assassination attempts, & more” — an impressive list of things that are either under criminal investigation, made up, or both. Apparently the message is: your boss is the victim of a vast criminal conspiracy, but also definitely in charge of the country, don’t think too hard about it.
So while Wiles faces a disease that affects one in eight women, the people around her are still laser-focused on the truly important thing: using literally anything — including a cancer diagnosis — to fuel Trump’s narrative that the justice system, the media, and basic reality are all part of an illegitimate plot against him. The prognosis for American democracy remains somewhat less “excellent.”
#killing-democracy#fascism
tear gas greg rides off into the taxpayer-funded sunset
Gregory Bovino, seen here treating a gas station like a forward operating base, contemplates which constitutional right to ignore next.
Gregory Bovino, the Hollywood-poster-boy of Trump’s immigration crackdown, is finally retiring, presumably to spend more time not testifying under oath. This is the guy who turned Chicago, L.A., Minneapolis, New Orleans, Charlotte and random Home Depot parking lots into his personal cosplay of a junta, then got demoted after two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ended up dead at the hands of federal officers during his Minneapolis fun run known as Operation Metro Surge.
While serving as CBP commander at large and reporting directly to Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski (a sentence that already screams "constitutional crisis"), Bovino got famous for throwing gas canisters into crowds of protesters and using chemical agents in residential neighborhoods, even after a federal judge told him to knock it off. The same judge later dragged him back into court for repeatedly lying about supposed threats from immigrants and protesters, including a rock-throwing story that collapsed the second video evidence showed up. Shockingly, the rule of law did not thrive under the guy who treated perjury like a management style.
Before Minneapolis, Bovino was busy in Los Angeles staging workplace and residential raids, popping agents out of a rental truck in a Home Depot parking lot to grab day laborers, and sparking five days of protests so intense that Trump sent in the National Guard and Marines like he was rebooting "Fallujah: The Prequel." He’d already been sued in Kern County for tactics including pulling people from cars, slashing tires, racially profiling, and using trickery to push people out of the country — conduct that DHS blandly described as "highly targeted" enforcement while insisting any misconduct is immediately investigated. Apparently the investigation process ends with a retirement party and a full pension.
So now Bovino quietly exits one year before mandatory retirement, after years of gas, lies, lawsuits, dead citizens, and open contempt for court orders. No accountability, no admissions, just a gentle glide into the federal retirement system. The Trump administration keeps insisting it’s all about law and order; they just forgot to mention that the law is optional and the order is enforced with tear gas and fiction.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
trump’s ‘chinese virus’ presidency comes back for a sequel
Community volunteers patrolling Chinatown because the federal government outsourced public safety to vigilante grandkids while the president workshopped new racial slurs on Twitter.
Trump spent 2020 workshopping racial slurs on live TV, calling Covid the “Chinese virus” and turning Asian Americans into walking bullseyes. Shockingly, when the president of the United States spends months doing open-mic racism at the podium, people start getting spat on, beaten in the street, and, in Atlanta, murdered. Out of that carnage came Stop Asian Hate, which documented nearly 13,000 incidents, pushed real money into victim support and education, and even got Asian American history into public school curricula — a radical move in a country where any non-white history is now treated as Marxist witchcraft.
The movement managed to “galvanize political power” just long enough for the media to get bored and for the usual centrist brains to decide racism was a 2021 fad. Inside the AAPI community, younger organizers pushed for community-based safety while older elites reached for the classic American solution: more cops, more task forces, more carceral theater. NYPD rolled out an Asian hate crimes task force, celebrities offered cash rewards, and progressive organizers pointed out that putting bounties on Black and Brown men wasn’t exactly the solidarity arc they had in mind.
Now we’re in Trump’s second, even more aggressively anti-immigrant administration, where the guy who helped supercharge anti-Asian hate is back in charge and doubling down on xenophobic rhetoric while pretending he’s the real victim. The Stop Asian Hate “moment” has faded, but the policies and the backlash he spawned are still here, colliding with a government that treats immigrants as a problem to be punished, not people to be protected. The movement is at a crossroads; Trumpism is not. It’s marching confidently forward, screaming slurs into a megaphone and calling it border security.
#racism#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
oakland refuses to die for trump’s campaign ad
Scene from Oakland, the city Trump swore was beyond saving, stubbornly refusing to collapse for his next law-and-order press conference.
Donald Trump spent the summer of 2025 fantasizing about sending the National Guard into Democratic cities like it was his own personal cosplay of martial law, declaring places like Oakland "so far gone" they were basically write-offs. Minor plot twist: while he was on camera doing his best dystopian voiceover, Oakland was quietly recording its lowest homicide total in 25 years, cutting murders in half from their 2021 peak without needing tanks, tear gas, or a presidential tantrum.
Instead of federal stormtroopers, the city relied on boring, un-televised things: community groups like Urban Peace Movement, investment in neglected neighborhoods, coordination between local departments, and actual relationships with the people most at risk of violence. So naturally, the Trump administration is now lunging for credit, pointing to its immigration crackdowns and "tough on crime" theatrics while Oakland leaders politely note that federal meddling has mostly made things worse. Reality: local organizers, residents, and some cops doing the slow, grinding work of prevention. Narrative from DC: "We scared everybody straight with fascist vibes, you're welcome."
None of this means Oakland is a utopia – East and West Oakland still bear the brunt of shootings, and one mass shooting can erase a year’s worth of feel-good graphs for the families living through it. But the city’s experience blows up Trump’s favorite campaign B‑roll of "Democrat-run hellholes" and replaces it with something far less useful to him: a story about communities reducing violence with resources, not crackdowns; cooperation, not occupation. No wonder he keeps pretending it’s a war zone. Peace is terrible for the brand.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s forever war fan club takes aim at iran’s oil jugular
Nothing says “stability in the Middle East” like pointing expensive flying gas tanks at someone else’s oil infrastructure.
The U.S. has reportedly sent jet fighters to hit Iran’s Kharg Island oil facilities, because if there’s one thing Washington can’t resist, it’s rolling the dice on global energy markets while reassuring everyone this is totally “limited” and “proportional.” As Iran ramps up strikes across the Middle East, the administration’s answer is to start poking the part of Iran’s economy labeled DO NOT TOUCH UNLESS YOU’RE TRYING TO START SOMETHING BIG.
Officials will no doubt insist this is a “clear message” and not, say, an undeclared escalation that could drag the region into another disastrous conflict. Congress, naturally, will continue its longstanding tradition of watching presidents play real-time Risk with U.S. forces and foreign civilians while bravely issuing sternly worded press releases. Call it the War Powers Act, but make it decorative.
So now we’re in the fun phase where Iran hits targets across the region, the U.S. hits Iran’s oil lifeline, and everyone pretends this isn’t edging closer to a direct war that nobody voted on and nobody can afford. American troops and Middle Eastern civilians get to be the chips on the table, while the White House and its forever-hawk cheering section congratulate themselves on their "strength" and then act stunned when the blowback arrives right on schedule.
#imperialism#national-security#killing-democracy
aipac discovers its money is radioactive, keeps spending anyway
Aipac’s latest innovation: influence-peddling so unpopular it has to show up wearing a fake mustache and calling itself “Affordable Chicago Now.”
Aipac, the lobby that spent decades insisting it was just the voice of bipartisan common sense, is now shoveling at least $13.7 million through Super PACs with names like "Elect Chicago Women" and "Affordable Chicago Now"—which is a bold rebrand for "We Definitely Don’t Want You to Know This Is About Israel." The ads never mention Israel, Gaza, or even foreign policy, because nothing says "confident in our cause" like hiding behind generic civic virtue and a P.O. box.
The donor patterns look like they were generated by a bored intern with an Excel macro: the same Aipac-aligned donors cutting identical checks to three different House candidates, sometimes on the same day, while the Super PACs conveniently won’t reveal their funders until on or around election day. Meanwhile, Democratic voters have moved sharply toward sympathy with Palestinians and against endless war, so the Aipac brand has become so toxic that even its own beneficiaries are now denouncing Trump’s Iran strikes as "dangerous," "unconstitutional," and evidence he has "lost his mind"—while still quietly courting the same money they claim to find appalling.
The result is a farce where Aipac praises Trump’s bombing of Iran, but its chosen Democrats in Illinois sprint away from the war like it’s on fire, and some of them publicly beg their shadowy backers to reveal their donors and "hit a wall." In one heavily Jewish district, the Aipac-aligned hit jobs on a mildly critical, pro-Israel mayor may well boost a Palestinian American progressive to Congress instead. It’s a masterclass in how to spend tens of millions of dollars to prove that your influence is still enormous, your judgment is terrible, and your political touch is about as subtle as Trump’s foreign policy.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
retiring senator discovers spine, limited-time offer only
Thom Tillis and Adam Schiff pretend this is a normal oversight hearing and not an annual review for an administration that keeps accidentally killing its own citizens.
Thom Tillis has entered his ‘say the quiet part out loud’ phase of retirement, and the target list is getting interesting. He torched Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem over her little "immigration agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis" problem and called her tenure a "disaster" before Trump finally fired her. You know things are going great when the internal performance review for DHS is: "Your deportation death squad is creating bad optics, ma’am."
Freed from the terror of a Trump-backed primary, Tillis is suddenly auditioning for the role of conscience of the Senate GOP – while still insisting he wants Trump to go down as the most successful Republican president in history. So he’s blasting Stephen Miller, blocking Kevin Warsh’s nomination to the Fed over a sketchy justice department investigation into Jerome Powell, and generally running around the Capitol like a middle manager who just realized the company is committing crimes on the conference call.
Democrats, naturally, are thrilled to have a Republican who occasionally acknowledges reality, because they need his North Carolina seat to flip the Senate. Tillis, naturally, insists he’s doing all this to help Trump by steering him away from the worst advice. The plan, apparently, is to salvage American democracy by politely fact-checking the guy who built a cult of personality, unleashed a mass deportation regime, and keeps firing people after their policies get citizens killed. Bold strategy.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
democrats discover voters exist between elections
A Swing Left volunteer attempts the most radical experiment in modern U.S. politics: asking a voter what they actually think before demanding their soul and their Tuesday.
New NBC polling confirms a stunning development: in the grand American trust Olympics, Donald Trump, ICE, and a late medieval pope all beat the Democratic party. When you’re losing to a 13th-century pontiff and the deportation police, it might be time to admit the vibes are off.
Swing Left, a grassroots group born from the 2016 “oh God what have we done” moment, has decided that maybe the way to fix a system everyone thinks is rigged is to talk to people before they’re standing in a voting booth. Instead of the usual last-minute, data-bro drive‑by texts and app scripts that boil human beings down to a 1–5 scale, they’re doing “deep canvassing” — actual conversations, at actual doors, with actual humans. Then they feed those messy, real-world feelings into AI, which is now apparently the only thing in American politics expected to listen.
The Federal Election Commission helpfully joined the fun in 2024 by blessing direct coordination between federal candidates and outside groups on paid canvassing, allowing outfits like Swing Left to build full-blown campaigns-in-waiting for when candidates finally show up with a slogan and a merch store. So now we have a system where the parties are distrusted, the voters think the system is broken, and the solution is to outsource listening to a nonprofit that outsources comprehension to a large language model. Democracy: now with extra middleware.
From Kingston, New York, the message coming back is painfully consistent: people feel the country is too divided, they’re choosing between the “lesser of two evils,” and the whole thing is rigged against working people who are just trying to wake up, go to work, and pay bills that keep getting bigger. Or, put more simply: after Trump, Biden, and a decade of institutional face‑plants, voters are finally saying out loud what the political class has spent years pretending not to hear — the system is broken. The question is whether talking to them a few months earlier and transcribing their despair into an app will fix it, or just give us much higher‑resolution data on the collapse.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
trump dusts off 1909 spy law to own the border crossers
Behold the cutting edge of U.S. national defense: a rusting fence, a warning sign, and a DOJ pretending desperate migrants are 1909-era saboteurs casing an arsenal.
The second Trump administration has decided that if you can’t run an immigration system, you can at least cosplay a military junta. Trump declared a border “national defense area,” handed it to the Pentagon, and his DOJ promptly started charging migrants not just with illegal entry, but with trespassing on military property under a law originally meant to keep spies away from ammo depots. Jose Omar Flores-Penaloza admitted he crossed illegally and was ready to be deported, but prosecutors insisted on branding him a quasi–national security threat for walking through a patch of desert he didn’t even know had been magically converted into Fort MAGA.
Courts, inconveniently for the strongman aesthetic, keep pointing out that you generally need mens rea — a guilty mind — to convict someone of trespassing, and that 4,700 migrants do not become enemy agents just because Donald Trump signed a paper and slapped "national defense" on some scrubland. At least nine judges in West Texas and New Mexico have found the cases legally deficient, and about 60% of the trespass charges have been dropped or dismissed. Yet DOJ keeps filing them anyway and appealing the losses, because the point isn’t law enforcement, it’s punishment and deterrence by process: keep people in jail, flood the courts, and dare the judiciary to stop them.
Meanwhile, habeas petitions from immigration detainees are at record highs, and even government attorneys are melting down in court — one literally telling a Minnesota judge, “The system sucks. This job sucks.” That’s the sound of a legal system being repurposed from administering justice to running a glorified intimidation campaign at the border. National emergency apparently now means “we’ll resurrect a century-old anti-spy statute, ignore basic criminal law principles, and see how much authoritarian theater the courts will tolerate.”
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump’s save act: saving america from voting
Senate Republicans prepare to defend democracy by making sure fewer people can participate in it.
Senate Republicans are gearing up to rubber-stamp the so-called SAVE America Act, a voting "overhaul" that just happens to be Donald Trump’s top priority. When a twice-impeached, coup-curious ex-president obsessed with imaginary voter fraud wants to "fix" elections, you don’t need a law degree to guess who’s getting saved and who’s getting quietly thrown off the voter rolls.
NPR politely calls it a "controversial" bill, which is one way to describe a Trump-backed scheme to reengineer how Americans vote after he spent years insisting any election he doesn’t win is illegitimate. Republicans in the Senate, having learned precisely nothing from January 6 except that accountability is optional, are lining up to help him rewire the system so future defeats can be prevented at the application stage. Why persuade voters when you can just redesign the electorate?
The details aren’t in this snippet, but we all know the franchise-by-a-thousand-papers routine: more hurdles, more red tape, more hoops, all carefully branded as "security" and "integrity" while functioning as a loyalty test to Trumpism. The SAVE America Act isn’t about saving America; it’s about saving Trump from the terrifying prospect of a fair vote count.
#killing-democracy#fascism
british tories audition for role of trump’s favorite vassal state
British conservatives lining up outside Mar-a-Lago, clutching Union Jacks and CVs, hoping to be promoted from "special relationship" to "loyal satellite" in the Trump–Musk empire.
Once upon a time, British conservatives saw themselves as the wise "Greeks" guiding the big, dumb American "Romans" through the empire business. Now, post–second Trump term, the UK right has traded the toga for a red hat and is begging to be ideologically colonized by MAGA. The people who used to sneer at McDonald’s and baseball caps are now importing US culture-war scripts wholesale, yelling about "woke" – a Black American term – as if it came standard with the Magna Carta.
The new fantasy on the British right isn’t empire; it’s vassal status. Far-right figures like Tommy Robinson are openly musing about Trump militarily intervening in Britain to remove Keir Starmer, because nothing says "sovereignty" like inviting a foreign strongman to send the tanks. Nigel Farage, Enoch Powell cosplayer and part-time Fox News furniture, sprints to US TV to trash his own prime minister and pledge fealty to Trump’s Iran adventures. Meanwhile, Trump’s former "co-president" Elon Musk is busy treating Britain like a cut‑rate Delaware with castles, fixated on its banks, offshore havens, and pliable elites as the next node in his global billionaire protection network.
What’s left of British conservatism is now a franchise operation: US oligarchs provide the platforms, money, and algorithmic rage; UK populists supply the accents and the anti-immigrant bile. From Rupert Lowe to Katie Hopkins fantasizing about Trump himself, the message is clear: if you’re willing to trash your own democracy, undermine your own government, and swear loyalty to the MAGA project, there might just be a place for you on Musk’s timeline and Trump’s next coup-adjacent group chat. Empire may be dead, but client-state fascism is having a moment.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
europe suddenly notices the nuclear football is a mood ring
Ed Davey bravely announcing that maybe, just maybe, the world’s oldest democracy shouldn’t outsource its apocalypse button to Donald Trump’s emotional stability.
British Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has arrived at the same conclusion every NATO planner has been screaming into a pillow since 2017: if your nuclear deterrent depends on whatever Donald Trump had for breakfast, you do not, in fact, have a deterrent. The UK’s Trident missiles are leased from the US, maintained by the US, and effectively operated at the pleasure of whichever reality‑TV landlord is currently rage‑tweeting from the Oval Office. So Davey’s big idea is that maybe, just maybe, Britain shouldn’t tie its national survival to Trump’s blood sugar levels.
Davey points out that American support for European security is now openly "conditional" on doing whatever Trump wants on trade, China, or basic ego maintenance, rather than on those boring old "values and alliances" that held for 80 years. Translation: NATO’s Article 5 has been replaced with Article Like and Subscribe. He cites Trump’s Greenland annexation cosplay and his refusal to seriously confront Putin over Ukraine as Exhibit A and B in the "this ally might actually be a saboteur" file.
So the Lib Dems are now arguing for a fully sovereign British nuclear capability, built and maintained at home, at the cost of billions over two decades. The pitch: instead of funneling taxpayer cash into the American defense industry so Trump can hold Europe hostage for compliments, Britain should at least develop the ability to blow up the world without asking Washington’s permission first. They still claim to support multilateral disarmament, of course—just not the version where your arsenal only works if the US president isn’t currently throwing a tantrum on Fox News.
#killing-democracy#national-security
texas gop senate primary becomes audition to wreck democracy
John Cornyn and Ken Paxton compete to see who can light the filibuster on fire faster while Trump judges from offstage like an authoritarian Simon Cowell.
Donald Trump is sitting on his Texas Senate endorsement like a game show host deciding which contestant is most willing to smash the democracy button. Sen. John Cornyn and indicted state Attorney General Ken Paxton are in a runoff, and both have figured out that the secret password is "destroy the filibuster to pass my national voter suppression bill." Cornyn, who spent his career hymning the sacred 60-vote rule, has now announced he’ll support "whatever changes" are necessary to pass Trump’s so-called SAVE America Act — which is like calling a bank robbery the SAVE Banking Initiative.
The bill, already through the House, would impose a federal MAGA wish list on all 50 states: proof-of-citizenship to register, photo ID to vote everywhere, and a federalized voter-fraud panic dressed up as "election integrity." Trump then helpfully lies about what’s in it, adding his own fantasy provisions — "no men in women’s sports" and "no mail-in voting" — because why not turn voting rights into a Fox News chyron buffet. Asked which candidate he’ll back, Trump shrugs that he "likes both" and that "a lot" depends on who will help him bulldoze the rules to jam this through. So the Republican primary isn’t about policy, experience, or competence; it’s about who will more eagerly help rewrite the rules of elections to keep one guy and his movement in power.
Republicans in the Senate almost certainly don’t have the votes to kill the filibuster, which is the only reason this isn’t an immediate five-alarm fire. But the party that once treated the filibuster as a constitutional sacrament is now happy to dynamite it — not for health care, not for gun reform, not for anything that might actually help people — but to make it harder for the wrong citizens to vote. Democracy is now a loyalty test: pledge fealty to Trump’s election-rigging project, and maybe he’ll bless your campaign. Refuse, and enjoy being labeled a RINO who hates "secure elections."
#killing-democracy#fascism#anti-immigration
fcc cosplay: brendan carr auditions as trump’s media censor
Brendan Carr, thoughtfully explaining that the First Amendment is still totally intact, it just doesn’t apply to coverage that makes Dear Leader look bad.
Brendan Carr, the FCC chair and newly self-appointed Minister of Truth, hopped on social media to remind broadcasters that their licenses are apparently contingent on flattering coverage of Donald Trump’s Iran adventure. Carr warned that outlets spreading what he calls "hoaxes and news distortions" about the war could see their spectrum permits revoked — because nothing says "public interest" like a government official threatening to shut down news organizations that annoy the president.
Trump, naturally, is thrilled. He raged on Truth Social that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other "Lowlife 'Papers'" supposedly want the U.S. to lose the war, accusing them of publishing headlines that are "the exact opposite" of reality. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth chimed in from the war room-slash-green-room, scolding coverage of a "Mideast war" and suggesting more upbeat options like "Iran increasingly desperate" — a bold programming note from a guy who talks about bombing countries like he’s pitching a Fox & Friends segment.
While new CNN owner David Ellison publicly promises editorial independence, Hegseth helpfully hints that the network will be better once the billionaire finishes redecorating the newsroom. Carr, for his part, cites plummeting trust in "legacy media" as justification for using federal control of the airwaves — a public asset — as a political cattle prod. He even dredges up 2024 election coverage to complain that the press predicted a Democratic win before Trump’s "landslide" plurality, as if bad polling entitles the government to start yanking broadcast licenses.
So the Trump administration’s position is now crystal clear: the media is "sick and demented," coverage that isn’t sufficiently triumphalist is a "hoax," and the guy in charge of regulating the airwaves is openly musing about shutting down noncompliant outlets. Freedom of the press, reimagined as a conditional privilege you keep only if you cheer loudly enough for the war.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump pardon whisperer allegedly upgrades to full mob movie
Artist’s impression of the modern Trump-era clemency process: a briefcase of cash, a pardon application, and someone being encouraged to get into a car with masked men.
The MAGA legal ecosystem has really gone prestige TV. New York lobbyist and attorney Joshua Nass — who proudly cashed $100,000 to lobby Donald Trump for a presidential pardon and “executive clemency” for nursing-home tax scofflaw Joseph Schwartz — has now been charged with attempted Hobbs Act extortion of a former client and the client’s son over an alleged $500,000 debt. Prosecutors say Nass handed over phone numbers and home addresses to an enforcer and told him to “do anything and everything” to force payment, including physically assaulting the client’s son or stuffing him into a car with masked men to terrify the family into coughing up cash. You know, the classic "client relations" module from law school.
Prosecutors allege Nass agreed to pay his would‑be legbreaker at least $15,000 for the intimidation services, because if you’re going to shake down your own client, you might as well itemize it. This is the same guy who, in public filings, boasted of being paid $100,000 in late 2025 “for advocacy concerning executive clemency and post-conviction relief, including federal presidential pardon advocacy” — work that coincided nicely with Trump’s November 14, 2025 pardon of Schwartz, whose nursing-home empire somehow forgot to pay nearly $40m in taxes and faced Medicaid fraud charges. Truly the poster child for “deserving individuals” in need of a second chance.
Nass recently told the New York Times that clemency “reflects the belief that people are capable of redemption” and that Trump “should be commended” for his generosity with pardons during his second term. Meanwhile, the justice department is accusing this apostle of redemption of running a low-rent extortion plot against his own client. All of this unfolds as reports pile up that Trump’s clemency system is shaped by lobbyists and moneyed fixers, a claim the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismisses with a straight face, insisting that anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is just wasting it and that Trump doesn’t even know who these lobbyists are. Sure — the checks clear themselves, the pardons sign themselves, and the lawyers allegedly threaten to kidnap people out of pure constitutional passion.
So on one side, you have a president whose pardon pen mysteriously tracks six‑figure payments and evangelical connections; on the other, a pardon middleman now facing up to 20 years in prison for allegedly trying to collect his fees like a discount movie mobster. What an inspiring model of justice: redemption for the well-connected, prosecution for the hired help that says the quiet part out loud.
#forever-grifting#corruption
trump bans palestinian actor from oscars, really taking that 'no politics in movies' thing literally
Scene missing: Palestinian actor barred by Trump’s travel ban, bravely protected America by staying thousands of miles away from the Dolby Theatre.
The Trump White House has discovered a bold new frontier in culture war: blocking a Palestinian actor from walking a red carpet. Motaz Malhees, star of Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab – about a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza – says he can’t attend the Academy Awards because Trump’s latest travel ban bars people whose documents are issued or endorsed by the Palestinian Authority. Nothing says "land of the free" like telling an actor he’s too dangerous to sit in a room with Ryan Gosling and a bunch of agents.
Trump’s December proclamation, which "fully restricts and limits" entry for Palestinians on alleged security grounds, kicked in on 1 January, just in time to make sure the US remains safe from the terrifying menace of foreign film nominees. Malhees’s fellow Palestinian cast members can attend because they have other citizenships, but he only holds a Palestinian passport – so he gets to watch the ceremony from afar while America bravely defends itself from… an actor who plays a call center worker.
And because the administration never stops at one rights violation when it can stack them, Trump has also been trying to deport pro-Palestinian voices already in the US. Leqaa Kordia, who lost more than 170 family members in Gaza, has been detained for a year despite multiple orders for her release; an immigration judge has now ordered her freed again, and the government is apparently treating those rulings like spam emails. This isn’t "security"; it’s a political loyalty test wrapped in immigration law, with Hollywood as collateral damage and Palestinians as the designated villains of Trump’s ongoing authoritarian fan fiction.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
trump tries to outlaw the first amendment, loses to a guy with a lighter
A veteran torches a piece of cloth while the president torches the Constitution, and only one of them gets charged for it.
The Justice Department has quietly backed away from one of Trump’s more openly authoritarian fantasies: jailing people for engaging in speech the Supreme Court has explicitly said is protected. Prosecutors dropped charges against Jan “Jay” Carey, a 55-year-old combat veteran who burned an American flag in Lafayette Square the same day Trump signed his "crackdown" executive order on flag burning. Carey’s crime? Saying out loud that he was protesting an "illegal fascist president" and then exercising exactly the First Amendment rights Trump was trying to stomp on.
Rather than explain why they spent months trying to make an example of a veteran who served in Iraq, Bosnia, and Afghanistan, DOJ just slunk away before a deadline to answer his lawyers’ argument that the whole case was an unconstitutional hit job. Carey’s attorney, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, called it a "very significant victory" for free speech, which is a polite way of saying the administration got caught using federal prosecutors as Trump’s personal feelings police.
Flag burning has been protected since a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, but Trump, ever the constitutional scholar, ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to "vigorously prosecute" it anyway because it’s supposedly a statement of "contempt, hostility, and violence against our nation" that might "incite violence and riot." Unlike a president calling journalists enemies of the people, trying to overturn elections, or encouraging mobs to storm the Capitol, which apparently fall under the robust new doctrine of "patriotic expression." In the end, one veteran with a match did more for the First Amendment than the entire Justice Department was willing to do until a court deadline forced them to stop pretending this wasn’t blatantly political persecution.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
the jolene doctrine: bomb them just because you can
Trump’s foreign policy team workshopping new lyrics to “Jolene” between airstrikes and Greenland invasion plans.
Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal has helpfully given Trump’s second-term foreign policy a name: the “Jolene doctrine” — as in, the Dolly Parton lyric, “don’t take him just because you can.” Except in this version, it’s: “don’t abduct foreign leaders, assassinate supreme leaders, and level schools full of girls just because you can,” and Trump replies, politically speaking, “challenge accepted.” Since Christmas, Trump has ordered murky airstrikes in Nigeria, a snatch-and-grab of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro for narco-terrorism charges, and a joint US-Israel strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, while his administration flails around trying to define what “victory” even means.
While historians politely describe the Trump team as acting like an “unbridled Jolene,” the real-world translation is closer to: unhinged superpower with cruise missiles. The Iran conflict now includes Trump trying to dodge responsibility for the bombing of a girls’ school that killed at least 175 people, mostly children, because nothing says “leader of the free world” like mass civilian casualties and a press strategy. In the middle of all this, Trump briefly threatens military action to seize Greenland — again — managing to alienate NATO allies who are already watching this administration treat alliances like expired coupons.
The White House, naturally, insists Trump has restored America’s “place as leader of the free world,” which is one way to describe a country other nations now view as a heavily armed Jolene, wandering the globe, doing whatever it wants simply because nobody can wrestle the launch codes out of its hands. McChrystal, who spent a career inside the machine, gently suggests that maybe, just maybe, blowing things up on a whim and trashing alliances isn’t a long-term strategy. The Trump team, however, appears fully committed to the Jolene doctrine: if we can do it, we must. Consequences are for lesser countries.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
