turns out mass citizenship stripping is harder than screaming 'criminal aliens'
Artist’s rendering of the Trump DOJ trying to erase naturalized citizens with a very determined Sharpie and repeatedly losing in court.
The Trump administration promised a big, beautiful new era where naturalized Americans could lose their citizenship if Fox & Friends got bored. Reality, annoyingly, has laws. Despite months of chest‑thumping about "rooting out criminal aliens" and "warp speed" denaturalizations, NPR finds that DOJ has managed just 34 publicly announced cases, with 11 actual revocations. That’s less a mass purge and more a very angry HOA letter.
Officials like acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and America First Legal’s Gene Hamilton are out here solemnly insisting they’re just trying to "protect the integrity" and "value" of citizenship, as they aggressively market the idea that naturalized citizens are a different, more revocable species of American. Legal scholars point out the obvious problem: unlike the administration’s usual deportation dragnet, citizens—especially the naturalized ones Trumpworld keeps targeting—come with constitutional protections and due process, which really slows down the whole "strip their rights and toss them out" fantasy.
So instead of the promised conveyor belt of revoked passports, what we actually have is a smaller, legally constrained set of fraud-focused cases that nonetheless send a very loud message: if you weren’t born here, this White House wants you to know your status is conditional, your rights are negotiable, and your citizenship is a tool in their campaign talking points. The mass denaturalization machine isn’t fully operational yet, but the precedent—that some Americans are more American than others—is the real product they’re selling.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#lawlessness
trump doj to louisville: good luck with your unconstitutional policing, you’re on your own now
Nothing says ‘reimagining public safety’ like pointing a gun at a woman in crisis and calling it a mental health response.
Trump’s Justice Department, having decided that civil rights enforcement is for losers and people who read, quietly walked away from police reform lawsuits and consent decrees across the country. Louisville, which the feds had already found guilty of a pattern of unconstitutional policing — discriminating against Black residents, abusing police dogs, botching mental health calls — was told: congrats, you’re now in charge of fixing the department that’s been violating your residents’ rights for years.
City leaders responded by announcing they’d basically DIY the Biden-era consent decree and even hire an independent monitor. On paper, it’s reform-palooza. In practice, ProPublica’s records show officers still using force without serious review two years after the DOJ’s findings, mental health reforms moving at the speed of a police union contract, and a “review panel” that took nearly a year just to have its first meeting. Meanwhile, 28-year-old Katelyn Hall is shot to death in her own apartment during a mental health crisis — exactly the kind of scenario the DOJ flagged three years ago.
Now, after the killing, the mayor’s office is bravely considering pairing cops with mental health professionals — a thing the Justice Department explicitly recommended in 2023, back when the federal government still pretended it cared. City officials insist the Louisville Metro Police Department is in a “much better place” than three years ago, which is a bold way of describing a department still under fire for the same abuses, just without the inconvenience of federal oversight. Trump gets his ideological win against consent decrees, Louisville gets a body count and a stack of task force agendas, and the Constitution gets yet another thoughts-and-prayers email.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
trump’s anti-weaponization slush fund gets weapon-locked
The DOJ, carefully placing Trump’s ‘anti-weaponization’ fund on a high shelf labeled ‘temporarily illegal, check back after appeals.’
The Department of Justice has informed the world that it will, for the moment, pretend to follow a court order and pause President Trump’s so‑called “anti-weaponization” fund — a pot of money designed to protect Americans from the terrifying menace of prosecutors doing their jobs. NPR’s Leila Fadel asks Rep. Tom Suozzi to play the role of Responsible Adult and explain why the executive branch can’t just conjure up a political defense fund and call it constitutional.
This magical fund was pitched as a shield against the ‘weaponization’ of government, which is a very polite way of saying: money to sabotage investigations that might inconvenience Donald Trump and friends. Now a court has temporarily blocked it, and DOJ is publicly promising to obey, as though respecting judicial rulings is some bold new innovation rather than the bare minimum for a functioning democracy.
So we’re left with a White House trying to launder its personal legal paranoia through federal coffers, a Justice Department awkwardly caught between law and loyalty, and Congress members like Suozzi pointing out that if you need an ‘anti-weaponization’ fund to stop investigations, maybe the problem isn’t the weapons. It’s what you’re trying so hard to keep them from finding.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
ukraine under fire, trump still workshopping his putin fan club merch
Kyiv’s skyline lights up with Russian missiles while the free world debates whether defending democracy is still on-brand.
Russia just launched one of its trademark "we swear we only hit military targets, please ignore the burning apartments" attacks across Ukraine, killing at least 16 people and injuring more than a hundred. Dnipro lost entire chunks of a four‑story apartment building, a rescuer died in what looked like a classic double‑tap strike, and a children’s playground was turned into scrap metal — which the Kremlin will no doubt insist was a very menacing swing set.
While Kyiv residents hauled mattresses into subway stations to sleep underground like it’s a World War II reenactment no one volunteered for, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was left begging the United States for more Patriot missiles. Unfortunately for him, U.S. diplomacy is busy being "stalled" as Washington’s attention wanders off to other wars and whatever grievance is currently trending in Trump’s brain. Russia, sensing the vacuum, fired more than 650 drones and 70 missiles in one night and then claimed, with a straight face, that it doesn’t target civilians — they just keep spontaneously combusting near apartment blocks.
The punchline: Ukraine is now openly pleading for help from Donald Trump, the same guy who once tried to extort them for dirt and has spent years treating Vladimir Putin like a lifestyle brand. As Ukraine runs out of air defense missiles and the lights literally go out, the message from MAGA foreign policy is clear: authoritarian buddies get weapons and cover stories, democracies get thoughts, prayers, and maybe a Truth Social post if they’re lucky.
#imperialism#national-security
pentagon turns press office into classified panic room
Pentagon press room, now available only to loyal stenographers and classified adjectives.
The Pentagon has solved the pesky problem of reporters asking questions by literally classifying the press office. Acting press secretary Jose Valdez proudly announced that the "most transparent war department in history" has redesignated its own press office as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) because speechwriters allegedly handle classified material there. Conveniently, this means journalists are now banned from entering the space where they’re supposed to, you know, talk to the government.
This isn’t a one-off tantrum; it’s the latest step in a systematic effort to turn the Pentagon into a black box with nukes. Since last September, the Trump-designated "war department" has tried to force reporters to sign pledges not to gather any unauthorized information — even unclassified documents — under threat of losing their press passes. When real outlets refused to play along, the Pentagon rolled out its "next generation of the Pentagon press corps": about 60 friendly faces from far-right media, ready to ask the hard-hitting questions like, "Mr. Secretary, how do you stay so strong and handsome while waging eternal war?"
Federal courts keep pointing out that this is wildly unconstitutional, which the department has treated as more of a suggestion than a ruling. After a judge smacked down its sweeping restrictions, the Pentagon responded with an "interim" policy requiring journalists to be escorted at all times, then kept it in place while appealing. The New York Times has now had to sue twice just to be allowed to independently report on the most powerful military on Earth. So yes, the press office is now a SCIF. Not to protect secrets from foreign adversaries, but to protect Trump’s war department from American journalists armed with notebooks.
#killing-democracy#fascism
maga beach accidentally orders one (1) gay immigrant trump critic
The Maga-nificent Seven stare at a congressional district map, slowly realizing they gerrymandered themselves into a Pride parade.
Huntington Beach, the self-branded "Maga-nificent" coastal enclave that banned the Pride flag and treats state housing mandates like Sharia law, may soon be represented by Robert Garcia: gay, immigrant, Democrat, and professional Trump aggravation device. Thanks to a new California redistricting measure, the city that proudly flies exactly zero rainbows could end up sending one to Congress.
The irony is doing cartwheels. Trump spent 2024 screaming at Texas to mid-decade gerrymander itself into a deeper shade of red, which helped normalize the whole "just redraw the maps whenever you feel like losing" strategy. California voters then said, "Fine, we can play that game too," passed Prop 50, and now Huntington Beach gets folded into a district where the leading contender is a Trump-critic House oversight Democrat whose job is literally to investigate the executive branch. Outstanding work, everyone.
Local officials are, of course, furious. City councilman Pat Burns denounces this as "California ugly-ass politics"—which is rich coming from a city council that calls itself the Maga-nificent Seven while banning non-government flags to make sure no one accidentally experiences visible tolerance. They fought masks, they fought housing, they fought Pride flags, and now their big reward might be a congressman who talks about infrastructure, healthcare, and rooting out corruption instead of owning the libs at city council meetings.
Garcia, for his part, is out here saying extremely radical things like, "People basically want decent services and less corruption." Meanwhile, the MAGA establishment in Huntington Beach is discovering the downside of normalizing partisan map-rigging: sometimes the gerrymander boomerang comes back and hits you right in the culture war.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
court to trump: you can’t purge trans troops, but you can still lock the door behind them
Pentagon officials bravely defending national security from the terrifying threat of qualified, patriotic transgender Americans with better fitness scores than half of Congress.
The DC circuit just told Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that their grand plan to purge hundreds of transgender troops from the military is illegal, "arbitrary," and based on plain old animus. So yes, the administration’s official position was basically: we hate them, your honor, and they still thought that would fly. Judge Robert Wilkins, in the majority opinion, pointed out that the government didn’t even bother to offer a factual basis for its smears of trans Americans, because when you’re running an anti-diversity crusade as policy, evidence is for suckers.
The court mostly upheld a prior injunction blocking Trump’s January 2025 order from booting currently serving trans troops, narrowing it to about 1,000 openly trans service members who can now keep doing the jobs they were already doing better than most of their political overlords. But in a very on-brand compromise with bigotry, the ruling still lets the Pentagon keep blocking new enlistments under Hegseth’s policy that treats gender dysphoria as a presumptive disqualifier. You can serve your country if you’re already in uniform; if you’re trying to join, the door is politely slammed in your face.
Trump’s order claimed that being trans somehow "conflicts" with an honorable, disciplined lifestyle and harms readiness — a bold claim from a man whose idea of discipline is rage-posting at 3am and whose concept of readiness is "did Fox & Friends talk about it yet?" Meanwhile, Trump-appointed Judge Justin Walker dissented, insisting courts shouldn’t second-guess the executive on who gets excluded from the military, effectively arguing that discrimination is a commander-in-chief perk. The ruling is on hold while appeals continue, but the message is clear: the administration’s culture war is still marching forward — it’s just being forced to salute the constitution on the way.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#full-stupid
trump springs an election saboteur
Tina Peters leaves prison, presumably checking her phone to see which election system she’s supposed to "secure" next.
Colorado’s most famous ex-clerk and part-time password-leaker Tina Peters just walked out of prison after serving less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence, thanks to a presidential intervention that would make any autocrat nod in professional respect. Convicted for helping a MyPillow-adjacent "expert" copy Dominion server data, leak passwords, and fuel Trump’s 2020 election lies, Peters was supposed to be the cautionary tale for local officials who treat voting systems like open mic night at Mike Lindell’s conspiracy symposium.
Instead, she’s the latest recipient of the Trump Loyalty Rewards Program. Because federal law wouldn’t let him pardon her state conviction, Trump simply leaned on Democratic governor Jared Polis until something snapped: public shaming on social media, yanking Polis from a White House governors’ meeting, and dangling federal revenge like a mob boss with nukes – including plans to dismantle Colorado’s National Center for Atmospheric Research and yank US Space Command to Alabama. Polis obliged with a commutation, calling the original sentence "extremely unusual and lengthy", while his own secretary of state, Jena Griswold, accurately described the whole spectacle as selling out Colorado’s justice system for Trump.
So the message from the Trump era’s sequel is now crystal clear: if you sabotage election infrastructure to help the guy in the Oval Office, the full weight of the presidency will be used – not to protect democracy, but to protect you. Commit the crime, undermine the vote, and if you’re sufficiently loyal and loudly delusional, the president will personally make sure consequences are someone else’s problem. American rule of law, meet your new boss: presidential tantrums and interstate extortion.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump discovers the fed comes with an off switch (or so he thinks)
Jerome Powell accepts an award for "courage" while politely explaining that the president is trying to turn the Federal Reserve into Mar-a-Lago’s in-house ATM.
Jerome Powell just accepted the JFK Profile in Courage award and used the occasion to politely scream that if a president can fire Fed officials for not juicing the economy on command, the United States no longer has an independent central bank – it has a monetary policy fan club for whoever lives in the White House. He didn’t say “Trump” or “Lisa Cook” out loud, presumably because the committee did not provide a defibrillator for the donors in the room, but the context was not exactly subtle.
While Powell was talking about how legal protections for the Fed "have served the public well," the Supreme Court is busy deciding whether Trump can fire Fed governor Lisa Cook based on alleged mortgage misdeeds from before she took office – a first in the Fed’s 113-year history. A lower court already blocked the firing, noting that you can’t just retroactively invent "cause" because the president wants lower interest rates before an election. Even the conservative justices have looked at Trump’s arguments and basically said: you’ve got to be kidding.
Powell, who spent years being publicly harangued by Trump for not slashing rates fast enough, warned that if one administration figures out how to purge Fed officials over policy disagreements, every administration will do it. Translation: say goodbye to decisions based on economic analysis and hello to presidents treating the Fed like their personal ATM. But sure, let’s call it "taking on the deep state" instead of what it actually is: another swing at dismantling one of the last semi-functional guardrails between the presidency and full-blown economic strongman cosplay.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump quietly invents the forced-birth deportation program
ICE’s latest innovation: the maternity ward where no one can find the mothers or the babies, but the press releases say everything is fine.
Representative Maxine Dexter, an actual doctor in a Congress full of Fox News medical experts, went to a Texas facility in San Benito to check on pregnant, unaccompanied migrant girls. She was allowed to see the walls, the furniture, the staff – pretty much everything except the actual children. The Office of Refugee Resettlement and HHS responded to basic questions like "Where are the kids?" and "Are they alive and getting medical care?" with the standard Trump-era policy answer: bureaucratic static and a hard stare at the floor.
The numbers don’t add up. Local attorneys say 11 girls, the facility tells Dexter seven, and when Joaquin Castro visited weeks earlier there were 17. ORR’s own system could answer exactly where they went, but mysteriously no one will. A former ORR official calmly notes the obvious: the most likely scenario is that the girls have been shipped out of the country, along with their newborns who – awkward detail – are US citizens. So while Trump’s birthright-citizenship executive order is still being litigated in the real world, it’s apparently already being enforced off the books on terrified pregnant kids.
All of this is happening in Texas, where abortion is effectively banned and reproductive care is so scarce that even adults struggle to find an OB-GYN, let alone raped 13-year-olds in federal custody. The same facility had its detentions halted in 2024 for inadequate healthcare, and the big fix now appears to be: "We went from 15 days between appointments to five" – which is not how you describe a high-risk obstetrics program, but very much how you describe pretending to care while you shuffle minors onto planes in the dark. Meanwhile, hunger strikes, pepper-ball attacks on Senator Andy Kim, and blocked inspections at other ICE sites round out the picture: a government that treats migrants as disposable lab rats in a sadism experiment.
So to recap: the Trump administration concentrates pregnant migrant children in a medically inadequate state that bans abortion, blocks elected officials from seeing them, can’t keep its story straight on how many there are, and then quietly makes them – and their US-citizen infants – disappear across a border. It’s family separation 2.0: now with extra forced birth, less transparency, and the same signature Trump touch – cruelty first, law later, paperwork never.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#lawlessness
trump’s ‘jobs boom’ is happening, just not in america
Brenda Davis and UAW workers bravely attempt to locate a U.S. manufacturing job somewhere between the union hall and a Buick VIN number that says ‘Made in China’.
Autoworkers in Ohio and Michigan are wandering dealership lots playing a fun new game called “spot the American job in this American car that was built in China.” Brenda Davis spent 20 years at Ford in Ohio, bought a shiny new Buick from GM, and then got the delightful news that her "American" car was 100% made in China. Meanwhile, union lots still shame foreign-made vehicles, which must be awkward now that the foreign-made vehicles are the Big Three.
Democrats are schlepping through union halls in the Midwest trying to win back the workers who handed Donald Trump two presidential victories on the promise that he, a man whose name is on more Chinese-made merch than AliExpress, would revive American manufacturing. They’re holding town halls to explain that decades of NAFTA-style trade deals—kickstarted by George HW Bush, lovingly signed by Bill Clinton, and "fixed" by Trump’s USMCA cosplay—helped vaporize millions of manufacturing jobs. The US peaked at about 19.6 million manufacturing jobs in 1979; now we’re at around 12.6 million and a lot of those are hanging by a tariff-thread.
Trump loudly branded NAFTA the “worst trade deal ever made,” then swapped it for USMCA, which did approximately as much for Midwest workers as his university did for students. Plants like GM’s Springfield, Ohio facility are still watching workloads shrink and ownership change while workers wait for the next closure rumor to become a press release. Progressive Democrats like Rashida Tlaib now show up to explain that the real bipartisan consensus was a decades-long race to the bottom where CEOs got stock options, workers got pink slips, and Trump got two election wins off the ruins.
So here we are in Trump’s America: Midwestern workers asking, “Where are the jobs?” while both parties sift through the rubble of their own trade policies, and the only truly booming industry is politicians promising that this time the next deal, the next tariff, the next slogan will totally bring the factories back. Any day now. Right after the next campaign fundraiser.
#trade-war#forever-grifting
texas democrats bet they can outclass paxton’s corruption with a harvard degree
Ken Paxton, freshly laundered from his latest scandal cycle, practicing his "persecuted populist" face while consultants measure just how many Bitcoin slogans it takes to distract from an impeachment record.
Texas is allegedly on the brink of becoming a "hot battleground state" because Democrats have discovered a magical creature: James Talarico, a progressive Presbyterian seminarian with a Harvard degree and $27m to spend explaining to working-class Texans why they should absolutely trust the guy who sounds like he’s auditioning for Obama: The Sequel. His opponent? Trump’s favorite swamp ornament, Ken Paxton, a man so thoroughly marinated in corruption charges, impeachment hearings, and marital fallout that even Republicans whisper he’s "the worst possible" top-of-ticket. Naturally, that makes him the perfect standard-bearer for the party of law and order.
The polls say Talarico is ahead, but only if you pretend Texas is a state populated almost entirely by college grads who listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed. Among voters without degrees — you know, the majority of the electorate — he’s flailing, while Paxton waddles around posing as a wounded populist hero of the little guy, backed by billionaires and an economic plan that boils down to turning America into a deregulated crypto casino. Because nothing says "I care about your mortgage" like "empowering crypto innovators".
Talarico, meanwhile, is doing the Democratic classic: talking about inequality and cost of living in a dialect that sounds like it was workshopped at a foundation retreat in Aspen. He’s getting hammered for saying "God is nonbinary" — a quote that may or may not be out of context, but is absolutely in the sweet spot for GOP attack ads against a party already struggling with working-class voters who don’t spend their evenings reading Substack essays about gender theology. The article politely notes that this is less Talarico’s personal failing than a symptom of a party leadership pipeline that runs exclusively through white-collar law firms and grant-making foundations, then acts surprised when voters don’t swoon for manicured Ivy professionals.
So the 2026 Texas Senate race is shaping up like this: on one side, a scandal-drenched, Trump-aligned AG whose idea of economic policy is "let’s go full FTX" and whose campaign is still yelling about Joe Biden as if Trump didn’t already reclaim the Oval Office; on the other, a polished liberal preacher trying to convince a blue-collar state that the guy with the Harvard credential and the ed-tech background is actually the tribune of the working class. One of these men is openly corrupt and cosplaying as a martyr of the establishment; the other is trying to beat him with PowerPoint populism. What could possibly go wrong?
#corruption#crypto
two private clubs and a democracy walk into iowa
Rob Sand campaigns in Iowa, bravely attempting to fix a democracy currently leased out to Super PACs and two very exclusive private clubs.
Rob Sand, Iowa’s last surviving statewide Democrat, is running for governor by telling voters an awkward truth: American democracy is basically run by two private clubs that make you hate your uncle for $10 a pop. Naturally, this has made him the exciting new face of a party that absolutely depends on those same clubs and their billionaire bartenders. Sand opens rallies with "America the Beautiful" and talks about hunting, because nothing says "please don’t freak out, rural white voters" like a shotgun and a patriotic singalong.
Across the state, Republicans are suddenly shoveling $29m in Super PAC money into a place Trump won by 13 points, insisting there's nothing unusual about this at all, please ignore the panic in their eyes. Meanwhile, Democrats are fighting among themselves over who can appeal more to right-leaning voters while simultaneously accusing each other of being propped up by "millions of anonymous dark money dollars" and Chuck Schumer, who appears to be sponsoring more intraparty resentment than legislation these days.
So Iowa, once the launchpad for Barack Obama, is now a showcase for how thoroughly national politics has been captured by donors and outside money: Super PACs write the ads, party leaders pick the favorites, and voters are the extras in someone else’s very expensive drama. Sand calls the parties "private clubs"; the rest of the article is just 1,500 words of proof.
#corruption#oligarchy
trump eeoc discovers best way to fight discrimination is to stop looking for it
The EEOC, once using data to spot discrimination, now bravely averts its eyes so nobody has to feel bad about systemic racism on a spreadsheet.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created in 1964 to fight entrenched workplace discrimination. Under Trump, it's now trying a bold new strategy: abolish the evidence. The agency is moving to kill its long-standing EEO‑1 data collection — the boring-but-crucial demographic reports that let the government see where women and people of color mysteriously never seem to get hired or promoted. If you don't count the bodies, there was never a crime. Inspirational.
As a bonus, Trump-appointed chair Andrea Lucas is also pushing to scrap a 1979 regulation that gave employers a legally sound roadmap for voluntary affirmative action — mentoring, hiring targets, and other race- and gender-conscious steps that the Supreme Court itself blessed in United Steelworkers v. Weber. For nearly half a century, that guidance told companies how to fix discrimination without breaking the law. The new plan is simpler: pretend Title VII requires total colorblindness while also making sure no one collects the data that proves systemic bias exists.
Lucas has been out on the conference circuit insisting that "the way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race. The end. Full stop." Meanwhile, the agency she runs is busy yanking away both the x‑ray machine (the data) and the treatment plan (the affirmative-action guidance). It's a "more beautiful vision" of the country, sure — as long as you’re the one doing the discriminating and you’d like the federal civil rights cops to show up unarmed and blindfolded.
#killing-democracy#fascism
nonpartisan maga rally now accepting secret donations
Doug Burgum carefully explaining that a MAGA rally with secret donors is actually just a completely neutral birthday party for America, please stop asking questions.
Doug Burgum went on CNN to explain that the Trump administration’s big, totally nonpartisan Freedom 250 concert is absolutely not political — except for the part where Donald Trump keeps publicly calling it a MAGA rally and threatening to replace the musicians with a campaign speech about how he’s bigger than Elvis. Apparently the real problem isn’t that the White House tried to turn a national 250th birthday celebration into a taxpayer-adjacent campaign event; it’s that some musicians “segmented their audiences” by not wanting to be props in a cult rally.
Pressed on who’s actually funding this patriotic karaoke night, Burgum bravely took a stand against transparency, saying donor disclosure isn’t important and we should focus on “celebrating the 250th anniversary.” Translation: the public gets the flag bunting, the undisclosed donors get the access, and everyone pretends this is just a neutral love-fest for America while the president screams MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN in all caps on Truth Social.
As artists flee the lineup after realizing they were misled about the event being apolitical, Trump has responded by calling them “third rate” and suggesting he’ll grace the stage himself, because nothing honors the founding more than a self-described “Number One Attraction” ranting about crowd sizes and how only “Happy, Smart, Successful People” are invited. Meanwhile, Burgum also defended the no-bid, high-profit contracts for sprucing up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — because if you’re going to wrap a partisan rally in the American flag, you might as well overpay your friends to polish the scenery.
Just to round out the civic vandalism, Burgum floated appealing a judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. So the administration is: hiding donors, funneling money through no-bid contracts, converting a national celebration into a campaign rally, and trying to slap Trump’s name back on a major cultural institution. Truly a fitting tribute to 250 years of a republic that was absolutely not founded to worship a single guy in a red hat.
#corruption#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
dems try to beat trumpcare architect by running… against each other
Local voter watches as yet another Democrat plants a sign promising to stop the guy who already stopped their healthcare three elections ago.
California’s 22nd district is one of the poorest in the country, which made it the perfect testing ground for Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a legislative piñata that exploded Medicaid cuts all over the Central Valley. Republican David Valadao proudly cast a deciding vote to strip healthcare from hundreds of thousands of his own constituents, then went back to pretending he’s a moderate while kids lose coverage and clinics drown in unpaid bills.
Instead of uniting to fire the guy who helped set their district on fire, Democrats have chosen the time‑honored strategy of knife fight in a burning room. On one side, Jasmeet Bains: doctor, daughter of Sikh refugees, first Asian American in the California assembly, and frequent wearer of scrubs and a white coat to remind everyone she actually knows what healthcare is. On the other, Randy Villegas: young Latino professor, no corporate money, and the radical belief that maybe Democrats in a 75% Latino district should stop running as diet Republicans funded by oil, ag, and pharma.
Party brass loves Bains as the safe, donor‑friendly Valleycrat who already outperformed the ticket in 2024. Progressives rally to Villegas, who thinks the way to beat a Trumpcare foot soldier is not by offering a slightly kinder version of the same corporate mush. Hovering over all of this is the GOP’s gerrymandering arms race and a national Democratic Party that still thinks the winning message in 2026 is "we’re not Trump" while Trump’s legacy is literally ripping inhalers and chemo out of people’s hands. Healthcare is on the ballot, but first Democrats have to decide whether they want a real fight with Valadao — or just another round of shadowboxing with themselves.
#killing-democracy#healthcare
mike pence bravely opposes not turning doj into trump’s personal goon squad
Mike Pence explains that protecting DOJ from political abuse is “deeply offensive,” unlike, say, a president demanding you help overturn an election while a mob hunts you through the Capitol.
Mike Pence went on TV to denounce a proposed DOJ "anti-weaponization" fund as “deeply offensive” and a “bad idea,” because nothing horrifies today’s Republican establishment more than the prospect of the Justice Department not being used as a partisan hit squad. The fund is meant to insulate DOJ from political pressure and MAGA revenge fantasies; Pence’s big stand is that trying to keep prosecutions independent is somehow the real threat to America.
While Trump and his allies openly promise to purge civil servants and prosecute enemies, Pence is out here clutching his pearls at the idea of giving DOJ resources to resist that pressure. He’s essentially arguing that guarding against weaponization is itself weaponization — a logical pretzel that would make Bill Barr proud and John Eastman start drafting a memo.
So the guy who hid from a lynch mob Trump sicced on him is now offended by efforts to stop presidents from turning the justice system into a loyalty test. The message from the respectable, softly lit wing of the Trump Party: actual rule-of-law safeguards are a bridge too far; we prefer our authoritarianism with a side of pious frowning.
#killing-democracy#retribution
silicon valley builds a new religion, forgets to include humans
Artist’s impression of what happens when guys who can’t run a social network decide to redesign the species and the cosmos, no public comment period required.
Silicon Valley has looked at the crumbling state of American democracy and concluded the real problem is that regular humans are still involved. Sam Altman is out here calmly workshopping a future where homo sapiens "design our own descendants" and then hand the planet (and the galaxy) over to our machine betters, while Elon Musk – the guy Trump literally let take a buzzsaw to the federal bureaucracy – helpfully explains that humanity is just a "biological bootloader" for digital superintelligence. You thought you were a citizen; turns out you're BIOS.
The piece lays out how this isn't just some nerdy late-night Reddit thread, it's a full-blown civil religion for billionaires: a techno-mystical faith where consciousness gets uploaded, meat bodies are for peasants, and AI overlords spread across the cosmos while the rest of us apparently get to enjoy being structurally unemployed in a gig economy run by venture-backed HAL 9000s. The "God-shaped hole" in Silicon Valley gets filled with a religion that conveniently declares its high priests – Musk, Altman, Page & friends – the rightful architects of the next species, answerable to no one, least of all voters.
Rather than build tools that serve actual human needs, this worldview justifies pouring billions into "transhuman" fantasies while treating labor, social stability, and basic rights as quaint legacy systems to be deprecated in the next software update. Ford tried to re-engineer society with a rubber plantation; these guys want to re-engineer the definition of human, aided by a government happily outsourcing power to tech oligarchs. Democracy is struggling to regulate broadband, and the people effectively writing policy now think our constitutional role is to be compost for their cosmic data center.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
crime is down, so trump cuts the programs that helped
Trump officials carefully studying crime data to determine which successful programs to defund first.
Homicides have fallen sharply from the pandemic spike, and researchers point to boring, unsexy things like community intervention, streetlights, and actually funding neighborhoods instead of just throwing people in cages. Naturally, the Trump administration responded by taking a chainsaw to more than $800m in Department of Justice grants for violence prevention and then bragging that their "no-nonsense" toughness is what saved America.
While experts note that the crime drop started under Biden and continued regardless of where Trump sent the National Guard cosplay brigade, the White House is busy releasing statements about "savage criminal illegals" and "Democrat-run war zones" like it’s still 2016 on Fox & Friends. At the same time, Pam Bondi’s DOJ labeled successful, data-backed programs in places like Baltimore and Los Angeles as "wasteful" and yanked their funding after those cities posted some of the biggest homicide declines in the country.
So the recipe is: take a nationwide crime drop you didn’t start, attribute it to your photo-op troop deployments, defund the community programs that might actually be working, and then use isolated problems and alleged fraud in Minneapolis—paired with constitution-shredding ICE raids on Somali communities—as political stage dressing. Public safety, but make it culture war.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
state department turned into trump fan club, experts gently escorted to the trash
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, bravely leading America’s diplomatic corps through its transition into a fully branded Trump lifestyle accessory.
America finally solved the problem of having too many people who know what they’re doing. The Trump–Rubio State Department has "reformed" its evaluation system so that diplomats are graded on a bell curve and, more importantly, on "fidelity"—not to the Constitution, but to the "duly elected president’s objectives." Career officers describe colleagues as despondent while Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau goes on The Daily Wire to praise the new accountability regime, where accountability means "say what the boss wants or enjoy your early retirement."
Actual expertise, naturally, has been moved off-site. High‑stakes talks on Ukraine and Iran are being handled by Jared Kushner and Trump’s real estate pal Steve Witkoff, because when you’re dealing with nuclear brinkmanship and great‑power conflict, what you really need is a guy whose main negotiation experience is lease terms for luxury condos. Former Ambassador John Bass politely explains that there’s an "organized effort" to strip out experienced leaders; translated from diplomat to English, that means the administration is intentionally gutting the professional foreign service and calling it draining the deep state.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists he values "candid insights" from patriotic Americans, shortly after an internal purge that forced nearly 250 foreign service officers out of their jobs and rewrote promotion rules to reward loyalty over judgment. The Foreign Service oath is to the Constitution, but the new message is clear: the only acceptable foreign policy is whatever pops into Trump’s head between rallies, and anyone who brings inconvenient facts to the table is one performance review away from the exit. Diplomacy is dead; long live the cult.
#killing-democracy#fascism
